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NAR: Dinner tonight in the small apartment Ramon Petronilo shares with eight other men in Astoria Queens is black beans, nopal cactus and roasted chicken with a spicy chile broth. Ramon unwraps a package of warm corn tortillas in the center of the table. No spoons, forks or knives lay on this table. These men eat with tortillas cupped in their hands, as they did at home. They talk with one another in their native language, ñuhu, or Otomi, over the sound of the television in the background.
BRING UP SOUND.
NAR: An estimated 1000 Otomi immigrants from the northern hills of Veracruz, Mexico are now living in New York. All over the United States, the number of indigenous Mexican immigrants is rising. Gaspar Rivera Salgado is the co-editor of the book Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States. He says these migrants face a lot of discrimination from other Mexicans and disadvantages because many don't speak Spanish. But Rivera says they have some advantages over other immigrants, too.
RIVERA: For example, they have been very successful in adapting traditional community ways to the process of migration.///The fact that they have a very distinctive way of structuring their communities, which gives them a very strong sense of community identity, has allowed them to become very organized, despite the fact that they've been migrating.
NAR: Otomi men from Veracruz began coming to work in New York in the mid-1990's, following the routes of longtime migrants from the neighboring state of Puebla, who make up the majority of Mexicans in New York. But the Otomis have decades of experience as migrants within Mexico. When the Mexican government stopped subsidizing small farming in the 1980s, people began to migrate from the countryside to the city. Ramon Petronilo was one of them. He's now 48. He spent most of his life living outside of his town, working on urban construction sites.
RAMON: I was barely 8 when I started working. I would get paid about ten cents a day, and some people wouldn't pay me at all. I don't want my kids to have the same thing happen to them. I want my family to have something to eat tomorrow. That's why I came.
NAR: Ramon has eleven children. Eight of them live in his village, La Florida. One son works in construction in Mexico City. Two others live in New York, Emilio who is 17, and Gervasio, who is 26 and has a wife and two children in La Florida. This is Gervasio's second time in the U.S. The first time he crossed the border with 30 others. Stuffed into a truck, they drove across the Arizona desert, running from the border patrol.
GERVASIO: It was like a movie, because the truck wasn't on the ground anymore, it was like flying. It was really full of people. We were all squashed together, and some people were on top. When it crashed into some cactuses, well, all the people on top fell off and we don't know what happened, if they died or got hurt. I think so, because they fell pretty hard.
NAR: When the World Trade Center fell in 2001, Gervasio went home because he was afraid he could die if there was another terrorist attack. He thought he would never return to the U.S., but last year the lure of a good job proved too strong and Gervasio came back, this time with his father. Gervasio wants to make enough money to build his own house. His father wants to buy some cattle. Gervasio says he doesn't want to stay here permanently.
GERVASIO: I would like to have papers like a temporary permit. I'm not here to live all the time. I'm just here for a season.
NAR: That's a sentiment that's common among many new migrants. In contrast to those who have been here longer, have families in the U.S. and hope for citizenship, the Otomis are mostly men in their early twenties with wives and children at home. They come for a year or two to pay off the debt to the smugglers who brought them across the border, known as coyotes, and then make some money to go back home. Many are here for the second or third time. All of them work 11 and 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, at carwashes, restaurants, and other service jobs. Ramon works at a live poultry shop in Astoria. It advertises halal chicken and "pollos vivos." (SOUND OF CHIRPING.) Cages of guinea hens, doves, and rabbits fill the room. The smell of wet feathers permeates the air. In the back room, spots of blood cover the floor. Ramon deftly grabs a dead chicken, cuts off its head, legs and tail, then skins it. (BRING SOUND UP AND UNDER). Around him machines whir, removing the last remnants of feathers from other birds.
NAR: Ramon makes $350 a week. His son Gervasio makes $420 in a corner market. Every month, they send around $1000 home. As a construction worker in Veracruz, Ramon actually made more money, at least $800 a week. But the work was not steady. And now that he's here, he wants to stay for at least another year. On a Wednesday, Ramon's day off, he walks down to a nearby money-wiring service. The man behind the counter offers him a free cup of coffee, then sends the money, 300 dollars, to Ramon's daughter Felicita.
(SOUND.)
NAR: Sending money is just one of the ways the Otomi migrants sustain their connections to their home villages. They can also send videos and photos back and forth to their families. The courier is a Mexican woman who lives in Queens and travels every two weeks to the region the men came from. The migrants also occasionally call in to a radio station near their hometowns. Jesuit priest Alfredo Zepeda helps run the station. He says it receives between 10 and 20 calls a day from migrants in the United States..
ALFREDO: All kinds of calls. To send the greetings for the family, just to say hello with a song.
NAR: Most of the migrants maintain strong links to the communal life of their hometowns, too. In Otomi villages, like those of many other indigenous groups in Mexico, decisions are made by assemblies where all the members of the community participate. All of the men in each town have to pitch in for community work, to help build the elementary school, for example, or to repair the fence around the church so the deer won't graze in the garden. Men who have migrated have to send 80 pesos a day, about 8 dollars, to help pay for soda and cookies for the workers. Father Zepeda says it is only natural that migrants are called on to share their wealth with their villages.
ALFREDO: The man who has more money has a duty to collaborate more. So it's obvious that the people who are there have more money, so they themselves feel the duty to collaborate because it's a question of prestige. If you are rich, that's not prestige for you, that's not well-seen in the community. Only if you have money, but you collaborate, that's good for the community.
The migrants work hard to maintain a strong sense of community in New York, too. On their days off they play soccer together or go to visit each other. One night, Ramon, Gervasio and Emilio head over to visit other Otomi immigrants in an apartment a few blocks away. The men who live there have a violin, a guitar and a jarana, a small stringed instrument from Veracruz. Ramon tunes each instrument by ear.
(BRING UP SOUND: TALKING, TUNING, THEN PLAYING, UP AND UNDER).
RAMON: That's how people played before. They just played and that was it. Without singing.
NAR: Back home, Ramon would play with his brother-in-law at weddings and traditional festivals in communities all over the northern Veracruz mountains. He would play for people to dance.
RAMON: Before, people danced differently. Not like now, when people dance so close together. (pause). Now people dance only cumbias, only reggaeton.
NAR: Soon Ramon and Gervasio begin to sing. (BRING UP ANOTHER SONG). Gervasio's voice is low and smooth. Ramon sings with a higher-pitched nasal harmony. The Otomi men who live in the apartment downstairs come up to listen.
(LEAVE SOUND FOR A FEW SECONDS).
NAR: Jarana player Diego Lopez says the music is a way of remembering who they are.
DIEGO LOPEZ: Right now the way we're playing, grabbing up the guitar, the jarana, the violin, it's so we don't forget the customs of our people. Just because we're here in New York, or in the United States, we're not going to think we can forget our culture, no.
NAR: The culture of the Otomis of Veracruz is now intertwined with the culture of El Otro Lado, The Other Side, or, in Otomi, nanguadi, all used to refer to the United States. Some members of the community now live among skyscrapers, but they still sing their old songs. Zaidee Stavely, Columbia Radio News.
(BRING UP MUSIC AS A BUTTON TEN SECONDS AND FADE.)