Cross purpose

On a windy Sunday morning, I got off the subway in Queens, new york, and joined a group of Mexicans who walked into the manicured shady grove in Flushing Grassland Park. Many flags covered with Mexican red, white and green; There are also some shawls with the image of the Virgin Mary printed on them. To celebrate Mexico's National Day (May 5th), 1862, the invading French army was defeated and they held a celebration with hundreds of thousands of people. in the park

It is a steel globe and a concrete exhibition hall. The water was left by the World Expo 1964, implying the ruins of past civilization. On the stage behind these buildings, dancers and drummers dressed in costumes evoke another lost civilization, the Aztec Empire. After their performances, more contemporary performances dominated: Mariacci musicians, cowboy folk singers, tropical torch singers, rock bands and Eden people.

Between performances, the radio talk show host paid tribute to the states that make up Mexico. At the mention of Puebla, the cheers of the crowd reached a deafening decibel. Puebla is a small state with an area of 65,438+0,365,438+0.87 square miles (about the size of Maryland), located to the east of Mexico City. No wonder the aborigines of Puebla are called Bobula, accounting for at least 80% of the approximately 600,000 Mexicans in the New York metropolitan area. In a sense, this is their day; 1862 The French invaders were defeated in Puebla.

Of course, Mexicans are often portrayed as invaders now, and illegal immigrants have poured into the 195 1 mile-long American border. In fact, the existence of undocumented Mexicans remains the most controversial issue between the United States and its southern neighbors. Among the120,000 foreigners living illegally in the United States, undocumented Mexicans account for about 60%, and among the 2 10/0,000 Latin Americans in new york, undocumented Mexicans account for about 15%. For decades, undocumented Mexicans have been doing jobs that no one else seems to want to do, but they have resisted the accusation that they have not only deprived Americans of paid jobs, but also reduced the wages of some blue-collar jobs. Are they Mexican immigrants? Take about 500,000 Bo Blano people living in new york as an example, and the other 500,000 people are mainly concentrated in Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago, which provide impetus for the complex economic development here and at home. Mexicans engaged in manual labor in this country not only improved their living standards and family standards, but also created funds to flow back to villages all over Mexico, especially Puebla town. Last year, wealth transfer was about $654.38+07 billion, twice that of four years ago. It has changed cross-border life, and new houses, medical clinics and schools are under construction. "Many officials in the United States and Mexico will argue that these remittances make up for the lack of foreign aid and local public investment," said Oscar Chacón, director of the Chicago-based Latin American immigrant advocacy organization Enlaces América. With this change, many assumptions and even prejudices about Mexican immigrants in this country have been challenged. "When I first came to America,

"It's much easier and safer to enter the United States," said Jamie Lucero, 48, one of the organizers of the May Day celebrations. Lucero is from Puebla community in Piakstra. 1975, 17 years old, he crossed the Rio Grande into Texas, jumped on a bus, and went to a restaurant in Queens, new york to wash dishes with his brother. It became legal according to President Reagan's Amnesty plan 1986, which allowed illegal immigrants who lived in the United States before 1982 to live and imposed sanctions on employers who hired undocumented workers. 1988 became a citizen. Today, he is a millionaire in a women's clothing company in New Jersey and a factory in Puebla. "I'm from Izz. That was after listening to tulcingo's live webcast. I decided to fly to Mexico to personally assess the impact of this relationship.

The Misteka Mountains straddle the southern state of Puebla. For most of the year, the area is hot and dry, yellow grass covers farmland, and giant organ cactus is scattered on the hillside. But I arrived in June, during the rainy season. In the morning fog, the mountains look almost tropical, and their cliffs are covered with green coats. The dry river bed has come back to life. Jacquard chrysanthemums with purple flowers and colored trees with red flowers are dotted on both sides of the road, and mature bananas and mangoes are planted in the orchard in the backyard. Fat sheep and cows suddenly appeared on the highway, forcing the driver to brake and lean against the horn. Turkish vultures hover overhead, looking for road hounds, armadillos and especially iguanas.

However, the Mishka Mountains have also experienced great changes unrelated to rain. In Piakstra, most of the 65,438+0,600 residents are either children or elderly people. Mayor Manuel Aquino Carrera said, "Maybe three quarters of my voters live in new york. The cash they send home every month can be seen in the new brick house with satellite TV antenna on the roof. Aquino, 40, said: "As a child, I can rely on my hands to index houses built of bricks and concrete. "."The others are adobe of palm turf. "Many new houses are empty, and people live in summer or Christmas.

Efforts to create jobs may keep young people in the Misteka mountains here, but they have basically failed. 200 1 Jaime Lucero, the most outstanding son of Piacostra, a New Jersey clothing tycoon, opened a factory in Else, Puebla. This factory employs more than 2500 workers. He planned to open five more factories, but he said he hadn't finished them yet. He said: "so many young people have emigrated and there is not enough labor to build another factory."

Immigrants have also dealt a blow to Puebla's long tradition of ceramics, carpentry and textiles. With the mass production of more and more folk art works, craftsmen are desperately teaching skills. César Torres Ramírez, 52, one of the leading ceramists in Puebla, said: "Most young people don't want to work alone for a long time, and they don't want to work in low-paying jobs." . Although Torres' exquisite glazed plates and vases are decorated with blue feather patterns and animal patterns that won national awards, in order to make a living, Torres has to work in a small family studio for six days a week, from dawn to sunset every day.

"These master craftsmen are endangered species," said Marta Turok Wallace, an anthropologist in Mexico City who runs a cooperative called Amacup, which connects Mexican craftsmen with collectors, interior designers and retailers. Turok and her colleagues tried to find and encourage young artists, such as 20-year-old Raphael Lopez Jimenez, a mask maker in Alcatraz de Osorio, which is located 45 minutes east of Pietro.

Lopez is self-taught, and this profession is often passed down from generation to generation through a long apprenticeship. His grandfather Evren Jimenez Ariza carved a wooden jaguar mask, but his children were not interested in this craft. Lopez's grandfather was only 6 years old when he died, but when he was a teenager, he was attracted by his works. "Fortunately, some of his masks and most of his tools survived," said Lopez, who, like his grandfather, used the soft and durable wood of colored trees.

As in other parts of Mexico, the mask-making process survived, thanks to Spanish missionaries who adapted it into a portrait of Roman Catholicism. Turuk, an anthropologist, said that the jaguar mask was "related to the ritual of praying to God for rain when planting corn in ancient India". Puebla is one of the earliest corn planting areas. 1960, the late American archaeologist Richard McNaish excavated in the arid Tevakan Valley in Puebla and found the ancient corncob. Kent flannery, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, is a graduate student of the macneice expedition. He said it was about 1800 BC, in Twakanwali.

Agriculture began to take off, when the yield of corn per mu reached 100 kg. The development of compound irrigation system based on underground mineral water pipeline is the key to realize this progress. James Neely, an anthropologist at the University of Texas and an alumnus of the macneice expedition, proved that the ancients used gravity to pump out springs. Located at the northern end of Tevakanvale, the spring is very small, winding from the valley to the lower end of the valley. "KDSP" and "KDSP", but if Bo Gu frans can master corn planting and take it as the basis of life, their modern descendants must struggle with the price control that * * * began to implement in the early 1980s to keep corn tortillas cheap. In addition, since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect in 1994, farmers in Blano have been unable to accept the import of new corn hybrids produced by American high-tech and low-cost farms. Driving 30 miles south along the highway connecting Piaxtla and Tulcingo, the corn fields are fallow, even at the peak of the growing season. The gradual demise of small-scale agriculture has also promoted immigration to the United States.

Herminio García said that he saw this collapse more than 30 years ago. 197 1 year, he left his failed farm in Piaxtla and crossed the American border. After working in a series of factories, Garcia did "what I know best"-he entered the tortilla industry. Today, he has dual American and Mexican citizenship. He employs 27 Poblanos employees in Tortilleria La Poblanita factory in yonkers, a sandy suburb in northern new york, including 6 from Piaxtla. Piles of corn dough are sent to a machine, which turns them into flat pies; They enter the oven through the conveyor belt and then enter the cooler. At the end of each working day, 648,000 tortillas are delivered to supermarkets, delicatessens and restaurants in the northeast.

Garcia, 62, lives with his family in suburban New Jersey. But as the retirement date approaches, his thoughts turn more and more to Piakstra and the house he built there, which is his ancestral property, and he will visit it six times a year. "I'm still a farm boy," he said. "I know how to use Niu Gengdi to repair fences and weave palm leaves into hats." What he remembers most is herding sheep. When I was a child, he would take these animals to the mountains to eat grass a few hours before dawn and read his school homework aloud with a kerosene lamp: "The neighbors will hear me say,' He is as crazy as a goat'." "

The town of Tulsingo Valley is located 40 minutes south of Piakstra. So far, new york's attraction to its 8,000 residents has been slightly more successful than Piaxtla's, although the immigrants returned the money to Tursingo's vault, helped to repair the city church damaged in the 1999 earthquake, and prompted Hongkong and the global financial giant Shanghai Bank Co., Ltd. to open branches here. Remittances have been invested in restaurants and Internet cafes, which have replaced pulkías, and old pubs use swinging doors.

Signs of new wealth can be seen everywhere. Although it takes less than 20 minutes to walk through this town, there are dozens of taxis here, and various repair shops for cars, bicycles, televisions and stereos have sprung up like cacti. Video games are so popular that parents say that their children have given up sports and become too inactive. The streets and alleys are paved with asphalt.

On the night of my arrival, 53-year-old David Bravo Sierra, the owner of MacD, a spacious pizza and hamburger shop on the street, hosted a dinner party attended by more than a dozen friends. In the 1950s, Bravo's father picked asparagus in California. Son 1972 moved to new york, shared a single room with several other Turkic immigrants and worked with them. Quino said that he felt it necessary to go to new york City to meet voters. Two years ago, he applied for a tourist visa and explained the reasons to American consulate officials. "And," Aquino said with a slow smile, "they turned me down."