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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | December 2007 
Entrepreneurs Build Projects to Stop Exodus of Residents
 Claudia Melendez Salinas - Monterey County Herald
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Ayoquezco de Aldama, Oaxaca On the edge of this small village not far from Oaxaca's capital, a gleaming new building greets visitors and gives hope to the locals.
Just inaugurated in May, the nopal processing plant is the proud accomplishment of dozens of families with dreams of keeping their children home. The building arose among ancient corn patches and new groves of nopal, the oblong and meaty pad of the prickly pear cactus widely used in Mexican cuisine.
Thousands of miles to the north, in a Spartan meeting room at a motel in Salinas, entrepreneur and activist Felix Cruz takes about 30 of his fellow Ayoquezco expatriates on a virtual tour of their town. On a screen behind him, dark-skinned women swirl in their colorful skirts while a dramatic voice recites a poem about Oaxaca.
My beauty is brown, like the brown clay of my land. What will we do for Oaxaca, our mother? Please tell us, my lady.
When the movie ends, Cruz brings the group back to the present: Salinas.
"I know this makes you feel nostalgic," Cruz said. "The situation over there does not allow for us to stay; there's no way to get a job."
Cruz and the 30 others in the motel room hope to make a difference in Ayoquezco by investing in the fledgling nopal processing project. If the project works, it could create hundreds of new jobs in the tiny village and might stop the migration of its residents to the United States.
Failed trade and agricultural policies in the United States and Mexico have pushed millions of people out of small communities like Ayoquezco in the last decade. Experts estimate that nearly 2 million Mexicans have left the countryside since the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994.
And while the immigration debate in the United States has focused on building a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border, towns that have seen their populations evaporate are looking for ways to keep their people from leaving.
"When we left Oaxaca, we said we're going to come back one day," Cruz tells his compatriots. "We call home with that hope, and if we reaffirm that moral commitment we made with our land, we'll transform our town into a better place to live."
The project in Ayoquezco is one of dozens sprouting in small communities across Mexico struggling to do what their government seems unwilling to do: stop the economically forced migration of their population to the United States.
Effect of farm, trade policies
Critics say that trade and farm policies in both Mexico and the United States are killing off the small farmers of Mexico and forcing a new wave of immigration north. Although they're unlikely to stem the massive movement of people provoked by international economic policies, these small, job-generating enterprises seek to spur economic development in rural areas.
In Anahuac, Chihuahua, 40 families are developing a sustainable agricultural project to grow tomatoes and raise cattle and hogs. In Jalisco, a former migrant worker started a water bottling plant. In another region of Oaxaca, reforestation projects are meant to keep residents in their villages rather than leaving for jobs in the United States.
Many of the entrepreneurial projects are financed by expatriates like those in the Salinas motel room who want to create more opportunities in their hometowns.
The Ayoquezco plant has been developed as a binational enterprise that will allow for the distribution of Ayoquezco-grown organic, pickled nopales in the United States.
After their spines are removed, the cacti are mostly sold fresh in markets and prepared in Mexican kitchens to add to eggs or soups or as taco filling. They are rich in dietary fiber and are known to lower blood sugar levels in diabetics.
Expansion of market
Until recently, its production has mostly been limited to small, indigenous growers, particularly women in rural villages who travel great distances to sell them.
But with the new processing plant, and the distribution system established among expatriates, jarred pickled nopales from Ayoquezco will soon be available in the United States. Its success could reverse the fortunes of the withering village, which lost about one-third of its population in the 10-year period ending in 2004 Felix Cruz among them.
"The mission and vision of our work is to promote economic development in our town," Cruz said. "But we're not just thinking of people over there. We're thinking about us."
A small and driven man, Cruz, 43, was 12 when he went to work at a butcher shop in the city of Oaxaca. His father had sent him to study at a middle school, but Cruz quit when he saw the financial burden his father was taking on.
"I felt sorry he was asking (for) advances so he could give me my bus fare, my lunch," said Cruz, now a warehouse worker in Southern California. "That's why I dropped out."
He came to the United States when he was 19. By 1987, he'd made his way to California's Central Coast, where he worked as a blackberry harvester for eight years. He and dozens of his compatriots dreamed about ways in which they could help their hometown: planting orchards or building a sports complex or a dance hall.
"Nobody ever really did anything," he said. "But I always carried the possibility with me."
He moved to San Diego in 1995, where he found a Oaxaque o group that was already organizing cultural events. He eventually formed his own, Migrantes por Ayoquezco, to begin helping his hometown.
A year later, his organization and representatives from Mujeres Envasadoras de Nopal de Ayoquezco (MENA) found one another by "sheer coincidence," Cruz said.
This summer, before the plant began operations, the board of directors described the history of Ayoquezco and the nopal plant.
Early planting of idea
Nearly 20 years ago, Francisca Cruz Sanchez heard that a group of Japanese investors wanted to build a nopal processing plant in Ayoquezco.
"But town leaders were not interested, so (the investors) left," said the 63-year-old woman, known affectionately as Tia Mari. "But will you believe that the idea haunted me?"
Cruz Sanchez continued with her routine even as she sought a way to build a processing plant. On Mondays and Thursdays, she harvests nopal, oranges, perejil, chayotes and other wild herbs widely used in Oaxacan cuisine. At about 3 a.m. on Tuesdays and Fridays, she loads her nearly 200 pounds of products on a bus that will take her and dozens of other vendors to Oaxaca.
Because limited transportation forces small growers to sell to nearby markets, the price they get for their goods is limited. To expand their markets, the nopal peddlers had no choice but to build a processing plant, Cruz Sanchez said.
Securing grants meant to encourage small-farm entrepreneurs, Cruz Sanchez and about 15 other village women started experimenting with methods to can their nopales in the late 1990s before forming MENA.
Along the way, they also got assistance from Mexico's Foundation for Productivity in the Countryside.
"Initially we just gave them training and technical assistance to improve their crops," said Roberto Ramirez Rojas of the foundation. "The way nopales were grown had to change to make it more productive."
Through the foundation, Ramirez Rojas also helped secure $300,000 toward the $1.1 million needed to build MENA's processing facility.
It would take four more years to see their plant completed. This summer, their 12,000-square-foot factory was opened to great fanfare, and the first shipment of pickled nopales bound for the United States left town in October.
The plant has been certified organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Mexican authorities. It can run three shifts a day, employ up to 105 workers and turn out 3,000 jars of nopales a day. The nopal producers expect the plant to be working at full capacity by next year.
Distribution of the product in the United States will be handled by a new corporation, Chapulin, established by Ayoquezco expatriates, including the Salinas residents.
U.S.-based investors
With the help of 63 U.S.-based investors, Cruz has raised more than $120,000 for Chapulin, the company in charge of distributing MENA products. Still, he estimates the company needs another $100,000 before it can start full operation.
"As we move forward, we discover more things we need," Cruz told the crowd in the Salinas conference room. "We need more capital."
He said he has had offers from larger investors, but Cruz said the company is barred by its bylaws from accepting investments larger than $10,000.
"We want everyone to be more or less on equal footing," he said.
Against the forces at work in the world market of free trade and subsidy-based policies, projects like the Ayoquezco plant may help stem immigration at a local level, said Timothy Wise, deputy director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University.
Wise said the Mexican government will need to step up its own economic initiatives to stop the exodus of an estimated 500,000 Mexicans annually.
"No local nopal processing plant is going to make a dent in those numbers," he said.
When Mexican authorities stopped financial support to the countryside, they expected the private market to step in and support private enterprises. But few private lenders will grant loans to small rural operations, where it's most needed.
"That's what economists call market failure," Wise said. "The role of government is to step in on market failures. That's what the Chinese government does, that's what India does. Countries that are growing more rapidly are doing it."
Local investor
In Salinas, where about half of the Ayoquezco expatriates live, Pedro Avenda o is among the Chapulin investors.
Avenda o is the oldest of nine children and he decided to come to the United States 16 years ago.
"I saw my dad couldn't do it on his own," he said. "He wanted me to study, but I didn't want to. He was having a hard time financially."
Avenda o said he and his wife, Dalia Santiago, took some of what they had saved to build a house in their hometown for a share of Chapulin. The home is half built on property owned by Santiago's father, who is one of the only four male members of MENA.
A few months after the meeting in Salinas, the first shipment of pickled nopales arrived in San Diego. The plant is operating every day now though still not at full capacity and some major retail chains are negotiating with plant administrators to distribute the product, Cruz said.
"We're hoping the Christmas season will help us have a good beginning."
Claudia Melιndez Salinas can be reached at cmelendez(at)montereyherald.com.
Click HERE for a slide show on this story - The Migrant Trail. |
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