Residents desert Mexico town for Seattle

LORETITO, Mexico — It's the end of the day here. Down one lonely street two young boys kick a ball between them, as an elderly woman slowly makes her way nearby.

On most days, this little town about 300 miles northwest of Mexico City feels like the set of a Hollywood movie — its narrow streets and alleyways silent, stark, deserted.

From the sidewalk outside his small liquor shop, Edmundo Cruz takes in the vast emptiness, pointing out one house after another left vacant when families headed north — to Seattle.

It is said more Loretito people now live in the Seattle area than currently live here.

"Boys, as soon as they turn 16, leave to find work up north," said Cruz, who used to do siding and construction work in Seattle. He said he came back last year to be with his wife.

"It can get pretty quiet around here."

Loretito, a town of a few hundred, is like many across Mexico, where large numbers of men — and increasingly women — journey to the border and slip illegally into the U.S. in search of work.

What they leave behind is a town of small children, a few women and older people.

"There are whole towns like these all across Mexico where kids haven't seen their parents in four, five years," said the Rev. Walter Coleman, pastor of a Chicago church and a pro-immigrant activist who's visited some of these towns.

"They are totally dependent economies, waiting for money to come from the states to finish the next wall for the new room."

Towns like these are fertile ground for smugglers — so-called coyotes who come recruiting for the journey north. For $3,000, they usually take people from here to the U.S. via the Arizona town of Nogales.

Some settle in Phoenix. Others go on to Colorado. And many end up in places like Federal Way, Tukwila and Kent, where uncles and cousins are already settled and ready to help them get work.

The Seattle area is home to about 300 people who claim Loretito roots. Some have legal status, some don't.

They all know each other and many are related. Mention the Santos name, the pioneers and by far the biggest clan, and Loretito natives in Seattle know exactly who you're talking about.

Typically, each person who comes brings two or three others — friends and family. And they in turn bring others.

And so it goes.

"People can't really find work in Loretito, that's why they come," said Eloy Sanchez, 44, who lives in Tukwila and was among the first people to arrive here from Loretito in the early 1980s. He crossed the border into New Mexico illegally but was granted amnesty in the late 1980s and is now a U.S. citizen.

And despite increased security at the borders, he said, "they are still coming. The younger generation. They are not legally here."

Poor, sad place

Loretito is the kind of town, though, that not too many who leave are proud to still call home. It's a poor place with a sad air about it, an aura that penetrates even the brightly painted low-slung concrete homes within its boundaries.

"A lot of people start building homes down there with the idea of going back, and then they forget about them," said Sanchez, who returns to Loretito for visits several times a year.

Japanese investors have bought some homes in town, which is just a few miles outside the larger city of Aguascalientes, where Nissan operates its largest manufacturing plant outside Japan.

Still, "there are lots of deserted homes there," Sanchez said. "I had a house there but it tumbled down."

He recalls that some years back, the Loretito community in Seattle got together to throw a going-away party for one of the Santoses. He had retired from the landscaping business and was planning to return here to Loretito.

"So we had this big party, and then he decided he wasn't going," Sanchez said. "Nobody is going back there to live. I'm not. I want to die in my new country."

But around the Christmas holidays, when the Seattle weather turns bleak, many who left Loretito do come back — and for a short time anyway, the empty streets come alive with the sounds of people and music. Even those living illegally in the U.S. return to Loretito, then pay thousands to smugglers to help them get back to the United States.

"People drive down in their Cadillacs to show them off and there's a party every day," Sanchez said. "There are mariachis and people in the streets. I'd say $50,000 or more is spent on parties over the holidays."

Working for landscapers

Like Sanchez, many from Loretito who come to the Seattle area seem to start out the same way: working in landscaping.

Sanchez had married at 17 and his wife, Laticha, told him the only way for them to survive was for him to go north. He borrowed 10,000 pesos (about $1,000) from his grandmother — at 7 percent interest — and paid a coyote to smuggle him across.

But the smuggler abandoned him and two others he was leading, even before they reached the border at Juarez. The three walked for weeks into New Mexico and then Colorado.

Sanchez later flew to Seattle, where he found work at a nursery in South King County and "I paid my grandmother back — with the interest," he said.

Sanchez said that for 10 years, beginning in 1997 long after he had obtained legal status, he was employed by the landscaping company that worked at the Medina home of Bill Gates — his most enduring claim to fame and something he uses to help him land jobs. He now owns his own landscaping business, Eloy Landscaping.

And although he no longer has family living in Loretito, Sanchez is so grateful for the life he has now that he regularly sends money back to the local church so it can help others. "I remember what it was like to be poor," he said.

In Loretito, Cruz depends on money from family in Seattle to supplement what little his liquor shop takes in.

For five years, he lived in South King County, where his two daughters and two sons still reside. With the money he'd earned working construction jobs there, he opened the little shop here, selling booze and cold beverages — more to keep himself sane than to make any kind of money, he said.

For that he depends on his children in Seattle. "They have pretty steady jobs there."

A few streets away from the liquor shop, Arturo Hernandez points to a family portrait on the wall of his grandparents' big, silent and mostly empty house.

Hernandez, 32, was deported from Seattle last summer and occasionally visits his grandparents here. But he finds the town, where he spent many happy childhood days, sad and depressing.

The portrait shows his grandparents, his own mother and 10 aunts and uncles — all but one currently living in the Seattle area.

"They all left when they were teens," he explained, "now they all have children there."

Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com