Ocotlan Special Edition – Part Five

…But where is home?

OCOTLAN, Mexico – Yolanda and Luis Galvez lived in California more than two decades before they decided to return to their Mexican hometown.

However, their quest for a better life came with a price they couldn’t predict.

Not long after they came back here in 1989, one of their three daughters secretly started putting little stickers over some of the family photographs.

“100% Made In America,” the stickers said. The Galvez parents took the gesture as a sad statement about how their girls were fitting into Mexican life.

“When we lived in California, we’d come to visit every year,” Yolanda Galvez said. “They used to see it like going to Disneyland. They didn’t know they’d get stuck here.”

The Galvez family was part of the immigrant wave that washed over Southern California in the 1950s and 1960s. In places like Ventura County, they worked the farms, started families and struggled into the middle class. Along the way many have decided to settle back in Mexico, lured by cheaper living and rich cultural ties.

“Maybe we feel we don’t belong anywhere or fit anywhere. We try to squeeze ourselves where we are for now”

After several decades in Southern California, Yolanda Galvez has moved back to her native Ocotlan and has started a beauty shop called Miami. At another salon just around the corner, her daughter Dolores is trying to change the traditional image of Ocotlan one head of hair at a time.

But the road back can be unexpectedly rough, trapping people in doubt about just where they belong.

Douglas Massey, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist, has interviewed hundreds of people who have made the transition.

“The American experience changes you and you become accustomed to the conditions – political, economic and social – north of the border,” he said. “You don’t realize how much you’ve changed. The kids can be the most resistant.”

Yolanda Galvez was the second-oldest of seven children. She was 11 years old in 1961, when her parents moved the family from Ocotlan to Ventura County.

They had a tough time. Strawberry picking didn’t bring in enough to rent a home big enough for a family of nine. They ended up in a one-bedroom house in El Rio.

Education wasn’t a priority, especially for the girls, so the children soon started working fields alongside their father. “We were so fast,” Yolanda remembers. “We used to play races to see who could get the most.”

The family still visited Ocotlan often and on one such trip Yolanda met Luis. The teen-agers decided to get married and live in Ocotlan. But when she was pregnant, Yolanda got a frightening glimpse of Mexican hospitals and persuaded Luis to move back to Oxnard with her.

Luis took any job he could get. He picked strawberries, worked in a bakery, drove a truck and later a limousine. The family spent several years in Ventura County, where a lot of their relatives still live. Then they moved to Santa Ana.

Yolanda took what started as a temporary office job and, although she never finished high school, eventually was offered the post of office manager. “I said, ‘Who do I need to kill?’ ” By then, Luis was in construction.

Things were going well. The family bought a house and the girls were doing well in school. Then one day, Luis was on a job in Laguna Niguel. He fell from a second-story perch and ruined his back.

“You know how it is back there,” Yolanda said of the United States. “If you work, you have enough, but if you get sick or hurt, you have to lose everything before anyone will help you.”

Luis could not work. They had to fight three years for a worker’s compensation settlement. Until then, America had treated them decently. But now they saw tinges of racism.

The lawyers took Luis as just another immigrant faking an injury, Luis said. “If you’re Mexican, there’s always that look.”

Rather than take a bigger cash settlement, Luis wanted a guarantee that his medical bills would be covered as he got older. An opposing lawyer told him, “You’re not thinking like a Mexican.”

Their savings were dwindling. They were in danger of losing the house. Even with the settlement, they needed to go where their money would last longer.

After planning it for a couple of years, they loaded everything into two rental trucks and hit the road back to Ocotlan.

By the time they moved, daughter Dolores was 18, Laura was 13 and Cynthia was 9. Even with all the planning, the move was still a severe culture shock.

Sometimes, when the family would walk together on the streets, they’d get dirty looks from some Ocotlan residents. That’s because they often spoke in English – a more forceful status symbol than even a fancy American car.

“People would say, ‘Oh, yeah, show us up,’ ” Yolanda said. “They look at you like, ‘You went away. You don’t belong here.’ “

“Maybe we feel we don’t belong anywhere or fit anywhere,” she said. “We try to squeeze ourselves where we are for now.”

Cynthia, now 16, says she has made a lot of great friends in Ocotlan, but the closest ones have all lived in the United States.

“I feel closer to them because they know what it’s like to live there and they understand me more,” she said. “I think more liberally.”

For example, the parents of American-raised children appear to trust their children more and aren’t as strict about curfews and other restrictions, she said.

Cynthia would like to go back to California one day, but only for a visit. “I’d like to see how it is, but I think I’d come back,” she said. “Ocotlan is a really comfortable place.”

There was a lot of excitement in the family in the months leading to Dolores’ wedding in January to an Ocotlan man.

Her parents built the couple an apartment above “Zevlag” (“Galvez” spelled backward), the artsy beauty salon where Dolores is trying to change the town’s traditional image one head of hair at a time: Wearing black lipstick, Dolores gives bold haircuts that stand out from conservative Mexican styles.

Dolores filled the apartment with new furnishings – unblemished beige tiles in the kitchen, art-deco wall hangings in the bedroom – so it would be ready for them to start their new life together.

She’ll keep giving haircuts for 10 pesos apiece, about $1.50. She’ll keep sending overflow crowds to “Miami,” her mom’s purple-painted shop around the corner.

To her father, Luis, it doesn’t matter whether they all stay in Ocotlan or one day move back to the United States; a hometown is where you find it.

“When you’ve got luck, you’ve got work and your family is all together,” he said. “Nothing else matters.”

[Part 1]