WHY THEY LEAVE
April 25, 2005 

            Cobá, Mexico.  No immigrant has ever left his or her country on a whim.  There are compelling reasons for taking such a plunge, one of which is that something is drawing them elsewhere. At this very moment, there are some 200 million of the world’s population who made that very decision, to leave the countries of their birth.   Most of them are poor.  French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville aptly characterized it when in 1831 he commented that “The rich and powerful do not go into exile.”

            If one chooses to venture among the fabled Mayan ruins of Cobá in the Mexican State of Quintana Roo, the decision made by so many Mexicans to depart their shores would seem only reasonable.  It was there that I met Rodrigo, a young man of Mayan descent, just shy of his 18^th birthday, who pedals his way through each day to make a living.  I’ll tell you about him.

            Each day, astride a bicycle modified to accommodate a pair of passengers up front, Rodrigo waits expectantly for the tourists who converge on this archeological site to convey them from Cobá’s entrance all the way to the great pyramid that looms at a height of 120 steps above the lush canopy of the Yucatan.  Cycling over this two-kilometer circuit over and over again has endowed Rodrigo with legs as large and strong as tree trunks.  Although Rodrigo is physically robust, his finances are not.  

            Each round-trip nets Rodrigo the equivalent of two dollars.  But given the numbers of other cyclists vying for tourists, even on a good day none of them can expect to make more than four trips.  That means that if he’s lucky, Rodrigo will earn eight dollars a day or $48 in a 6-day work week.  And if things don’t go entirely his way, well, do the math.

            Rodrigo’s English is very limited, and his Spanish is accented with his Mayan mother tongue – to be precise, one of 30 extant languages from the days of the ancient empire of the Mayans.  But it doesn’t take a linguist or a mathematician to figure out that Rodrigo could earn for one month’s labor in the United States the same amount that would require an entire year of toiling at home.  Which is why I wouldn’t be surprised to find him working in the fields of California or Florida any day now.

            No less than a million Mexican and Guatemalan Mayans have done exactly that, and are now living in the United States.  One in six Mayans have abandoned their respective countries of birth to seek a better life to the north.  I got to know several of them while they picked tomatoes in the fields around Immokalee, Florida. Their distinctive facial features, height and uncommon strength for performing tasks no one else will do, leave no doubt as to their origins.  Tragically, the remnants of the original Mayan populations found in an area that is one of the world’s richest repositories of Pre-Columbian history—around six million of them—face a dilemma:  The decision to preserve their culture and traditions means facing starvation.

            The resounding failure on the part of both the 71-year-old PRI regime and the five-year-old Fox administration lies in their inability to come up with an economic model that generates decent jobs for all Mexicans.  Truly the greatest tragedy of all is that Mexico shows its own children the door.  In that regard, Mexico is one country that has been very unkind to millions of its own. The fact that Mexico sends its best and most motivated workers abroad constitutes nothing less than colossal stupidity and an indefensible lack of vision.  Those responsible for this travesty belong to a political class known for its small-mindedness and deep pockets, and which, even with the passage of three quarters of a century, has not succeeded in creating a system that works for everyone.

A recent poll taken in 82 countries reveals that Mexicans are second only to Puerto Ricans in terms of being the happiest people on earth.  I’m not at all sure that I see that much happiness around these parts.

Mexico’s future, sad to say, is not very promising insofar as change is concerned.  Just more of the same.

As yet, there has been no consensus on planning at the national level:  Mexico is lagging behind in development of new technologies; despite its proximity to the United States, it continues to lose markets to China; there is no educational system in place which, similar to India’s, produces students of the kind that the large multinational corporations vie for, or who have prospects of being nominated for a Nobel Prize,, and who, having been born poor, will likely end up dying poor, and for many of whom the only ray of hope –how awful!—shines from the other side of the border.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, to keep Rodrigo home. Were he to fall ill, he has no medical insurance.  He has no incentive to finish high school and go on to college.  His prospects for employment are nil, and the future that awaits him stares starkly back in his face, in the persons of coworkers who have spent 40 years of their lives ferrying numberless tourists back and forth on their bicycles. 

Mexicans like Rodrigo have absolutely nothing to gain by staying in their own country.  And that’s precisely why they leave.