Peto, a municipality of approximately 25,000 inhabitants, located right in the southern cone of the state of Yucatán, Mexico, which occupies the northern part of the homonymous peninsula that projects to the Caribbean, where a third of the population is of Mayan origin. It is known to be one of the towns from which most workers migrate to the USA. Already in 2009, the Migration Survey with a Gender Perspective, the most recent government effort to locate migrants from the entity, revealed that 5,200 people -a fifth of the population of the municipality- had migrated to the American Union.

Sitting in the living room of her house in the Benito Juarez neighborhood, on the Petuleña outskirts, —where weeds abound, public lighting is nonexistent, and the streets are made of a dirt road that floods as soon as rains begin to fall— María del Socorro says that Saúl, along with some town friends, went through the Mexican desert and faced its dangers to cross the border to the north, without documents, as 90% of Yucatecan migrants do. He wanted to save for a kidney surgery and get over a congenital malformation, which he was born with. He also looked for an opportunity to get out of the poverty, which, according to her, "he was condemned to". If almost half (41.9%) of the two million Yucatecans are poor, in Peto the proportion grows to 73.9% of its inhabitants, as indicated in the 2010 report of the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval).

Saúl ended up living in the San Francisco Bay area, the Californian metropolis, with another 70,000 Yucatecans. Several times, he expressed his desire to return to his hometown. María del Socorro, 70, and her husband Bartolo Naal, 80, stare at the altar in front, with a photo of Saúl, a printed selfie, plus two vases made of jars of mayonnaise and an image of Guadalupe's Virgin. The son was dark and had short hair. In the photo, he wears a Major League Baseball cap and shows a necklace with the image of the Virgin.

This was on May 8, 2017, two days before Mother's Day in Mexico, when María del Socorro received the news that her son had died at 33 years of a pulmonary complication.

Twenty days after carrying out procedures with the government of Yucatan and the City of Peto, Saúl's body left the airport in San Francisco to Mexico City. It was then transferred to Mérida, from where a funeral carriage moved him to town. It is a well-known route. So far in 2017, the Institute for the Development of the Mayan Culture (Indemaya) has repatriated 13 bodies, including that of Saúl.

María del Socorro cannot talk about it without drowning in tears. And when she can, she realizes that she really knew very little about his son's life. Until today, it is not clear to her where he lived. In fact, she never knew that. Just over three weeks before he died, Saúl was arrested in San Rafael, the suburb north of San Francisco, for offering cocaine to an undercover policeman, as evident in a file published on the website of the city authorities. Before crying again, she explained that the young man had gone "far away" and was assembling built-in kitchens, a work that allowed him to send US$ 250 a month (about 4,600 Mexican pesos). That was enough to buy food and pay for utilities, like power, and the heart medicines for his sick father.

The parents of Saúl tell that the vandals of the colony take advantage of their solitude and the little police surveillance to steal the backyard animals (chickens, turkeys) they count on as a financial and food support. When their immigrant son died in the USA, the income their received from him was also gone. The salaries of their other two children in Cancún, a tourist resort in the neighboring state of Quintana Roo, are not enough to send a fixed remittance to their parents. Like many elderly people in Peto and Yucatán, without pensions or fixed incomes, they grow fruits and vegetables for self-consumption.

Rocío Quintal and Iván Franco, doctors in social and political sciences, respectively, and authors of the book El fenómeno migratorio en Yucatán, contextos e impactos (The Migration Phenomenon in Yucatán, Contexts and Impacts), confirm that poverty is the "backdrop" of migration in this state, the fifth with the lowest entry of remittances in the country (0.5% of the 26,993 million US dollars that Mexico received that year). However, the collateral effects of this diaspora, such as abandonment, loneliness and disintegration of families, go unnoticed by governments.

It is precisely because of the lack of updated censuses or statistics of migrants in the USA
-mostly illegal- that it becomes almost impossible for the authorities of Yucatán to locate, support or guide the remaining relatives, if they were to do it. This means that migration does not have a real impact on the improvement of communities. The most common contact of families with the government is reduced to procedures such as locating or repatriating the bodies of their loved ones, as in the case of Saúl.

The Migration and Remittances Yearbook 2017 of the National Population Council (Conapo) indicates that Yucatán is the fifth state with the lowest migration intensity in Mexico. The 180,000 Yucatecans living in the USA (Indemaya data) are a small number among the more than 12 million Mexicans who have moved to that country. But the proportion is significant when you look inside the entity itself, so far from the capital,
1,300 kilometers at the easternmost point of the country. The number of people who reside "on the other side" represents almost 9% of the total population of Yucatán, 68% of which choose the state of California - the richest in the United States - to work, according to Conapo. Thousands of relatives in Yucatán end up suffering the absence of the father, mother, brother or son and must adapt to new lifestyles where the common denominator is loneliness and fear for the safety of the migrant living without papers in that country to the north.

***

María del Socorro shows the rest of the house, where only she and her husband live. One part is concrete and consists of two nine sq-meter (97 sq-feet) rooms impeccably painted white, owned by their other two migrant children in Cancun (the couple had another son who died 16 years ago for pulmonary fibrosis). Due to its proximity, the state of Quintana Roo, which houses Cancun and the so-called Riviera Maya, is the second favorite destination of the Yucatecans to migrate, only after the United States of America. In this case, families get together more frequently because it is about four hours away by road.

That part of the house is the most expensive of the entire structure. A few meters away, is a traditional Mayan hut of about 20 sq meters, which the elderly couple calls home. As it is common in the landscape of Yucatán, the roof is made of huano, the dried leaves of a kind of an endemic palm that together with the adobe walls —the traditional material of Mayan houses— keep the interior cool, although the humid heat outside exceeds 40 °C (104 °F).

As in the Naal’s house, the Yucatecan migration has left this new landscape in the municipalities with more emigrants in the United States of America, where two opposing architectural styles coexist: the mud and huano Mayan style hut and the American house of concrete, Californian style. On the one hand, big two-story houses, with tub, fine finishes and built-in kitchen with stove. In the other, homes where water is still taken by hand from the well, and food is prepared on a log fire in a comal (ceramic or metal flat griddle) with which 159,000 families of indigenous communities of the state still cook.

"It is known as remittance architecture," says Carlos Ojeda Cerón, an anthropologist from Peto and doctor in Regional Development. When migrants are deported, they run out of money or their remittances are invested in more immediate needs, the houses are left half-built.

A large house in Kimbilá, a town of approximately 3,000 inhabitants in the central region of Yucatán, speaks clearly of this mixed landscape of the Yucatecan peoples.

Instead of albarradas —the walls of almost 1.5 m (4.92 ft) high of large stones stacked without cement or any other material that stick them together—, the house has a cast iron fence in red with delicate details reproduced from a photograph of a house in California. It has two stories and measures about 40 m high by 25 m wide (131 ft H x 82 ft W). It is visible from several streets back. Seeing two-level properties in the area is rare, due to its high cost. Those that exist belong to politicians who have become mayors, or to few prosperous entrepreneurs.

Kimbilá is one of the small towns called townships - among the 106 municipalities of Yucatán, where no more than 5,000 people live and where the municipal government exercises direct authority. In these townships there are no economic activities that allow their inhabitants to be self-sufficient. Therefore, many have to be blue-collar workers in Mérida, the capital of Yucatán, or in neighboring Quintana Roo. Or, obviously, to the United States of America, like the three children of Sebastián May Llanes and Ligia Arjona -the inhabitants of this mansion-, José, Abel and Sebastián, who 18, 15 and 13 years ago, respectively, migrated without documents to the city from Fort Bragg, California, four hours north of San Francisco. With Abel's last seven years remittances (2 million pesos or 120,000 US dollars, about 17,000 US dollars a year), Ligia and Sebastián, who do not have pensions, have been able to build this house with large windows emulating the typical vacation homes of American families. The second of the children, an independent gardener, photographer and social event cameraman at Fort Bragg, personally designed the house. The terrace is under construction. But there is an outdoor kitchen roofed with metal sheets that reminds us that we are still in Yucatán.

Ligia is sitting in her hammock, where she sleeps; most Yucatecans are reluctant to use a bed. Sebastián is fumigating the doorway. The two speak Mayan and a Spanish that is difficult to them, especially when conjugating verbs. Forty years ago, in their old huano home, they had to divide an apple into seven pieces to give their children something to eat. It is a very present family memory with which they illustrate the poverty of the past. Now they have a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi —once some children from the village slipped into the house to take a bath—, and the apples have multiplied in their refrigerator inside the kitchen decorated with stone details, a handmade exclusive design.

Since their children left, the couple has not seen them again. They act as caretakers of the goods acquired with the remittances. They buy the designs of stone and blacksmithing, watch the construction and take care of the house in which they dream to see their grandchildren running someday. They show José's framed studio photos, which are stacked on a wooden table protected with plastic bags. This is how they keep all the other furniture that Abel has bought. On the second floor, they have a double bed with flower a comforter, which has been made for several years, waiting.

At the end of the work, they built an independent room where they hope to spend their last years of life. That big house is foreign to them. Ligia is still cooking in the back, in the old stove next to the wooden table covered with a plastic tablecloth, where she can see her backyard birds, chickens and turkeys, as well as her orange, lemons and ramón trees, an endemic plant used as fodder for the consumption of farmyard animals.

To Yucatecans, working in the USA is an alternative to get out of backwardness and poverty. For a local, reaching the standard of living of the May family, for example, is a rarity. A worker here earns an average of 46,680 pesos per year (around US$ 2,593)
—nearly 15% of what the May family receives for remittances in a year. Migration has not had a real impact on the economy of the state and its communities. Annual remittances of 142 million US dollars are left in the houses and do not translate into more local sources of employment.

There are still 900,000 people in Yucatán - almost half of its population - who do not have access to appropriate food, social security or health services, according to figures from the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval). In Kimbilá, the May’s village, where the sale of typical embroidered clothing offers some work opportunities, this is visible in the lack of access to drinking water, dirt roads, lack of public lighting, and absence of ambulances.

***

Anthropologist Pedro Lewin Fischer, one of the few researchers in Yucatán who studies migration from the perspective of those who remain, assures that when the families of the state become fragmented, everything becomes "a drama". Children grow up without a father figure and women practically face alone most of their adult lives.

And when talking about migration, economic and gender biases still persist; i.e. you only think about the people who left, mostly men, and the money they send. The author of the book Las que se quedan (Those Who Stay), for which he interviewed over 200 women from Yucatan, found in this research that migrant couples are on average between 20 and 40 years old, suffer from loneliness and feel unprotected, and they renounce to their sexual, emotional and creative lives when their husbands go to the United States of America.

In Yucatecan society, as in other societies, it is well regarded that the migrant has a partner outside of marriage; but it is the opposite for the wives who stay. The mother or the husband's family usually controls them through mobile phones or even social networks. Leticia Paredes Guerrero, a specialist in gender studies of the Regional Research Center "Dr. Hideyo Noguchi "of the Autonomous University of Yucatán (UADY), affirms in her work La violencia de género contra las mujeres en Yucatán (Gender Violence against Women in Yucatán), that the ethnic condition is a component that makes them live more discriminated at a social, economic, educational and political level. In 2011, Yucatán registered the highest percentage of women speaking an indigenous language who have been victims of violence by family members (16.6%), and occupied one of the first places among the states with the highest percentage of indigenous women who declared any kind of aggression in public places (18.6%), according to the Survey on the Dynamics of Household Relationships prepared by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

These women also have limited access to education or work. The last census, conducted in the country in 2010, revealed that in Yucatán, 9% of the population is illiterate. Of every 100 women, 10.62 do not know how to read or write, while men are 7.78 for every 100. In Mayan society women have more limited access to education because they are destined to marry so their husbands can be providers. The census also showed inequality in income from paid work: while women earned an annual average of US$ 4,521 per capita, men received US$ 10,065, more than double.

There are other examples. Mayan women need to consult their husbands before getting medical tests. In rural communities of the state, it is still not accepted that women perform preventive exams for breast or cervical cancer, because it is understood that doctors will touch them. It is a society in which the roles of men as providers and chiefs and that of women as housewives, in charge of caring for the house and children, with little to say, are stressed. In the women who remain, a double burden falls on them that is rarely discussed in public and that is not tangible like the economic one: that of assuming the role of mother and father, and that of not being able to claim the absence of the husband. Among the Mayas of Yucatan it is not acceptable for a woman to complain about this. If she receives enough money from the husband to cover the basic needs (food, education) of the children, the man will have fulfilled.

***

"I felt like a widow when he left," says Lidia Tuz about Sebastián, one of the May’s three children who migrated to Fort Bragg. Lidia has waited for him in Kimbilá for over 13 years, when Sebastián crossed over to the USA as an illegal immigrant to achieve the greatest aspirations of his life: the concrete house and money to open a business the turn of which he will decide when he returns. Lidia has lived with the fear that her husband will find another woman in California, have another family and forget his own.

Lidia was 22 years old when Sebastián left, and her two children were eight and three. She needed four years to adapt to the new situation. The eldest son of the couple, Emanuel, suffered depression when his father emigrated because he thought he had abandoned him. Johnny, the youngest, substituted his father with toys, video games, smart phones and electronic tablets, unattainable for the vast majority of the children of the village, who play ball on the dirt roads or in the only park in Kimbilá that has one basketball court only. Now, they are 21 and 17 years old and drive sport motorcycles of about US$ 3,000 (60,000 Mexican pesos) bought with the remittances their father sent from Fort Bragg.

But they have claimed Lidia for the absence of Sebastián, who does not travel to visit Kimbilá because he does not have identification documents. He would have to cross the border again and, to return to Fort Bragg, rehire a coyote or pollero, as they call those who guide them from Mexico. Thirteen years ago, Sebastián paid one of them 25,000 pesos (about US$ 1,300) with the money his brother Abel sent him, who was already living in the USA. Currently, the cost of crossing ranges between 12,000 and 15,000 US dollars —figures collated in Indemaya reports and the testimony of an illegal migrant from Oxkutzcab with whom we spoke, who planned his trip back to San Francisco, after fifteen years—. Stratospheric amounts that those who leave can only have by selling their land or pawning their houses. At best, they should work at least a year or two in the USA just to pay back what they spent on arrival.

The family's assets grew from two concrete rooms next to the house of Sebastián's parents to a house with living room, kitchen, bathrooms and three bedrooms. In just two years, they got what they would not have reached in many more years of work in the maquila of Lee brand jeans in Izamal, when they barely had 207 US dollars a month (4,000 pesos) just enough to eat. In addition to a larger property, they now have enough money for meals, clothes and shoes for Lidia and her children. Sebastián's two jobs at Fort Bragg - as a waiter at a coffee shop and cashier at a supermarket - have allowed him to raise enough money to buy two more lots where he built the houses he will hand out to his children.

Lidia says her husband expects to be up to two more years in California, which is the time in which he would complete the process to regularize his immigration status, which he started a few months ago. She is aware that his income will fall when Sebastián returns, but until now, he has not made concrete plans for when the time comes. Maybe open a traditional embroidered clothing store and cover the rest of the expenses with the income from their houses.

For the time being, they recently celebrated in Kimbilá the four years of their granddaughter Melani, the daughter of Emanuel, with a theme party of Disney’s Sofia the First. Lydia recreated a fairy tale castle. Melani wore the princess’ dress. Instead of tamales and panuchos, there was pasta, caramel apples and cupcakes.

***

From Tekax, a town of 39,000 inhabitants in the foothills of the small mountain chain of southern Yucatán, 1,400 people have left to the United States of America. Here lives Yamily Novelo, waiting for her husband, who left two years ago to Pennsylvania, 2,500 kilometers (1,553 mi) away, in the northeastern of the USA, for ten of the twelve months of the year. He emigrated with a working visa to work in a plant nursery. He is among the 10% of Yucatecan migrants who cross the border with identification papers, which allows him to return to visit without major problems.

Although her husband (whose name Yamily refrains from giving due to fear of a migratory problem) did not expose his life crossing the desert, she spends most of the time with her daughter, a year and a half old baby, waiting for news. It's Saturday afternoon. She is looking out the door of her mother's house, where she lives to have company and to save the money her husband sends her to build her own home. She will spend the weekend at home waiting to make a video call. She considers herself lucky because her husband earns money impossible to earn in Tekax. His university studies barely allowed him to obtain an average profit of 4,800 pesos per month -about 260 US dollars-, a figure that is multiplied eight or nine times in Pennsylvania.

Both got a degree in Tourism Business Administration and worked for three years in Playa del Carmen, a tourist resort near Cancun, but they returned to their native Tekax in the wake of Yamily's pregnancy. The husband decided to migrate because the salary of both, anyway, was not going to be able to cover the cost of caring for their baby. It was very difficult not having her husband around. "I did not know what I was going to do without him," she says.

Yamily is the daughter of migration. Her father also went to the USA to send remittances to her, her brother and her mother. He lives in Colorado. They have not seen him in 15 years. They already resigned themselves. Yamily's husband plans to stay five more years in Pennsylvania. With what they save, in addition to the house, they want to open a store in the town, but they still do not decide if it will be a clothing or grocery store. She is calm because she knows that her husband has a secure job and will return. "If he were illegal, I would not support it. It is not worth the risk."

Carlos Ojeda Cerón, an anthropologist from Peto and a long-time scholar of migration from southern Yucatán, warns that the lack of advice and ignorance for business management leads to the failure of most of the projects that migrants undertake when they return to their communities. "They invest the money they saved [in the USA], but few prosper." In a short time, they return to the condition of poverty they had before leaving.

***

Angelica Moo's husband, Nicasio, left a decade ago to San Rafael, in northern California, but she still lives in Peto in a straw house with no basic services and dirt floors. In Yucatán, the emigration of one family member does not always represent the economic redemption of the family. Sometimes it does not even enough for the redemption of emigrants themselves.

The average age to marry in rural indigenous communities in Yucatán is, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, between 16 and 19 years old. Angelica Moo married Nicasio Tec at fifteen. He was 25. He was a bricklayer since his adolescence, but because of the general poverty and his personal alcoholism he never built a concrete house for his family. His three children grew up in a house of huano, in which they still live, with an enabled latrine at the back of the patio, in one of the most remote areas of the center of Peto because the land to build houses is cheaper there.

Angelica, 37, talks in a broken Spanish, because her main language is Mayan, and remembers that her husband has always worked as a mason. "He only worked as a mason. Since he was poor, he worked since he was 14 years old. He did not study. He did not even finish his sixth [grade of primary school], that's why he went far away with the Chiapanecans he worked with in Cancun", she says while sitting at the door of her house, where you can smell the wood with which she cooks and the handmade tortillas.

Their children Laura, 22 years old, already married, Santos, 20, a mason and a temporary migrant to the city of Mérida to work, and Reina, 19 years old, a student of Information and Communication Technologies, never had phones, electronic tablets, no American clothes or sport shoes.

During the first eight years he was in California, Nicasio assured Angélica that he had no job and that he never wanted to work in restaurants like most Yucatecans of Mayan origin, "because he was a mason and he only wanted to do that." During that time, she did not receive regular remittances, so she began to work to support her children. She bought a tricycle that drives for several kilometers to the woods to cut firewood that she sells for approximately 100 pesos (around four US dollars) per day, which is barely enough to buy beans, eggs and tortilla dough, and also to buy fuel for cooking and heating water for bathing in the winter.

He also does piecework in Perez chicken farms, where he kills, plucks and gutted birds for sale. The salary paid there is symbolic because it barely exceeds 80 pesos (about three US dollars), or exchanges work for the meat of the animals to feed his family. He also cleans seasonally the land of the Southern Valley agricultural company, a subsidiary of the Southern Valley company based in Georgia, USA, which has been operating in the south of Yucatán since 2003. These trades require him to have a lot of physical strength and tolerate, many times under the sun, common temperatures of over 40 °C (104 °F), with the risk of death from heat stroke.

Angelica's assets are reduced to two 4x4 meter (13x13 ft) rooms of concrete, independent of each other, in addition to her huano hut. The three structures are in the same land. The first was obtained through a housing program for families in extreme poverty, promoted by the government of Yucatán, and the other was completed a few months ago with money sent by her husband, whose remittances has been more consistent for the last two years.

At Nicasio’s insistence, with the last remittance she installed a wooden door with carved details valued at 7,000 pesos (almost 400 US dollars), like those of the houses he builds in California with prefabricated material and luxurious finishes. Nicasio, says Angélica, does not want to return without having fulfilled that goal that indicates that the Mayan migration "to the other side" has been successful: the concrete house. For now, there is only the wooden door, which looks out from behind the one meter (3 ft) high wall and is visible from the street. There is an empty room behind it. Angélica and her two youngest children continue, however, sleeping in their old straw house. She compares herself to the wives of other migrants from her village that receive more remittances, do not work and are dedicated to take care of their children. "I do not know how they manage to spend even the money of their husbands."

Nicasio calls Angélica by phone once in a while and she does not have enough money to pay for an internet plan for her cell phone. And even if she had it, she cannot read or write. When the husband calls her, she identifies the number because she learnt it by heart. She has spent up to two months without a call from her husband, because he says that when it rains, he cannot work or pay for the telephone service, as "everything is expensive there."

Last May, a woman called her by phone to tell her that Nicasio had died at the general hospital in Marin, seven kilometers (4 mi) from San Rafael. Angélica tried to communicate, but since Nicasio never answered the calls and she did not know his friends or anyone else in California, she started the inquiries to transfer the body. Almost two weeks passed. The husband called her. He had blood pressure problems, he said, and that was why he was in the clinic. There a group of Christians offered him a place to live while he recovered. He lost contact with his acquaintances and they thought he was dead.

The case was mentioned in many newspapers such as Diario de Yucatán, the most important newspaper in the state. Reporter Pedro Cauich, a correspondent in the southern part of the state, found out that Nicasio had suffered an accident while he was drunk, and he was taken to the hospital due to his injuries. The Yucatecans in San Rafael with whom we speak remember having read the news that one of their countrymen had passed away, but they do not recognize him by name. They believe they identify him as an alcoholic they saw on the streets, along with other compatriots without regular work.

Alcoholism is one of the most severe problems affecting Yucatecan migrants in the United States. They tend to drink to entertain themselves, and thus the patterns that place Yucatan in the first national spot in intoxications for alcohol abuse in the country reproduce —7,057 registered in 2016, according to figures from the Ministry of Health of Mexico—, almost double of Jalisco, which ranks second in this measurement and which reported 3,761 fewer cases, even though it triples the population of Yucatán.

There is a community of approximately 10,000 Yucatecans in San Rafael. Canal Street has been known for many years as the favorite destination of Mayan migrants who arrived in the city. Hidden in the bushes were bottles of empty alcoholic beverages. Several people pointed out that until a few months ago, Nicasio frequented this area, but it was not possible to find him, which coincides with the version of Angélica that after the accident, he left the place and went to build houses in other places in northern California.

Angélica does not know when she will see her husband again. Just like when he left, she thinks Nicasio will make that decision without consulting her.

According to Indemaya, migrants from Yucatán are spread across 43 cities in the USA, like Portland-Oregon, Denver-Colorado, Seattle-Washington, Las Vegas-Nevada, and Dallas-Texas. But without a doubt, the state of California is their preferred destination, particularly in the San Francisco Bay: 68% of Yucatecans is the reported figure from the Migration and Remittances Yearbook 2017 of the National Population Council (CONAPO) of Mexico.

The only authority that can carry out deportations from the United States is ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), but with the arrival of Donald Trump to the presidency, the pressure among Yucatán migrants for not attracting the attention of law enforcement authorities has been increasing.

Hence, they die of fear, insists Sara Mijares, as many do not even go to the hospital for fear of losing what little or much they have achieved in the USA; otherwise, they could obtain a ticket back to poverty in Yucatán, where 41.9% of the population cannot meet basic needs like food, a concrete house, and access to health, as indicated in the 2010 report of the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval) of Mexico.

Mijares was born in Muna, a municipality in the south of Yucatán very close to the archaeological area of Chichén Itzá, and came legally to the USA in 1968, when she was 15 years old, to live with his father, a farmer who participated in the Bracero program, a cooperation plan with Mexico that allowed the first Yucatán migrants to travel to Texas and California to work in the fields. The program was in force from 1942 to 1964. Historically, the areas with the most immigrants from the state have been the southern and central regions, where the Mayan population that still works in agriculture, especially the cultivation of corn and citrus fruits like lemon and orange, is concentrated. According to Indemaya, the exodus intensified in the 70's and 80's of the last century. And it was triggered by the Mexican economic crisis in late 1994, adds Pedro Lewin Fischer, a researcher and anthropologist specialized in migratory movements in Yucatán.

On January 20, 2017, when Donald Trump assumed the presidency of the United States of America, the lives of many Yucatán migrants changed as well. They are very uninformed and fearful of potential deportation, says Sara Mijares.

Eyder Ávila, 31, and Carmita Hernández, 32, born in Peto, southern Yucatán, and based in San Rafael, a city 30 kilometers (18.64 mi) north of San Francisco, —home of approximately 15,000 to 20,000 Yucatecans— live with the fear that their worst nightmare will come true, that because they are illegal, the government will snatch their two children born in the USA, Eyder and Daphne, aged 11 and 7, respectively, and never see them again.

"We were always afraid to go out, but now I am terrified. When the bell rings, I do not know if it will be the Migra (immigration agents) or the police that will take us and will keep my children," says Ávila, who came to California 13 years ago fleeing poverty in his hometown, the Yucatán municipality with the largest number of Mayan migrants, 5,000 kilometers away. There he walked free but without money or hope for a better life. Nowadays, he fears that at any moment the police will stop him and point a gun at him only for not having identity papers.

Although he left Peto, he brought the town with him. He talks in Spanish, with idioms and the characteristic pronounced Yucatán accent, which he mixes with words in English. “Dale né, quédate para la party de mi esposa, yo voy a cocinar. Vienen todas las amigas de Carmita, se pondrá muy chingón” (Babe, stay for my wife's party, I'm going to cook. All the friends of Carmita are coming. It will be really cool.)

The couple is known for their skills in jarana, the traditional Yucatán dance, characterized by its zapateado (foot stamping) and orchestral music inherited from the Spanish regions of Andalusia and Aragon. They make the mosy of any vaquería —a popular party where the jarana lasts until dawn—to show off their best steps, dressed in colorful and elaborate regional costumes received from their homeland.

After having tacos of roasted beef and carnitas with the classic Yucatán “Modelo” beer, they chat in the living room of the small apartment of two rented bedrooms (bathroom, one room and a living room) northeast of San Rafael. There is an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the main room. For several months they rented their couch to other Yucatán migrants to complete the rent of US$ 2,500 per month, twenty times more expensive than what is paid on average in Peto (1,500-2,000 Mexican pesos). Eyder says that he has worked hard since the age of 15 to survive. He tried to study, but his parents did not have money to pay for school. He began to ride a tricycle to sell bread in the streets of Peto. Months later, he went to work at a construction materials store where he earned 70 pesos a week (just under four dollars), which was barely enough to invite his-then-girlfriend Carmita to an ice cream and a ham and cheese sandwich in the Holanda ice cream shop in the center of the town. Eyder did not eat for fear of not being able to pay the bill. He told Carmita that "he had already eaten at home". She laughs as she remembers the anecdote.

Eyder and Carmita began their life as a couple at that age. They lived with his parents. Soon they opened an establishment selling Yucatán food, drinks and snacks that was called La Bendición de Dios (God’s Blessing) but, despite their great effort, the business failed. At age 19, in 2005, they agreed that Eyder would leave to the United States of America on September 1, the day of his wife's birthday, in search of money to build his house and try to start another business, the recurring dream of Yucatán migrants. Two years later, Carmita followed him and crossed the border as an illegal, after four attempts. Reunited, the couple began their adult life in a foreign country with a language they did not know, but in which they fortunately had the support of her parents and siblings, who have been living for several years in California, in the city of Santa Rosa, 50 kilometers north of San Rafael.

Eyder remembers "hell", as he describes it to refer to what he experienced when he arrived in a place so big and different from Peto. They did not speak his language and he could not express himself. He felt useless, because he could not articulate a sentence in English to ask for help, to know which bus to take and look for work, or simply to buy a soda. Like many of the Yucatán migrants, he started working as a dishwasher in an Italian restaurant in Sausalito, a coastal town near San Francisco. There, he learned English while translating the ingredients of the dishes and kitchen accessories in his free time. Then he was promoted to the grill, and to the post of assistant waiter, and so on until he became a waiter. On the other hand, Carmita works doing acrylic nails in a small space that she has assembled in her apartment to get extra money. She cannot work in a beauty shop. Although you do not need papers to do it, you do need to take a US$ 2,500 course—equal to each month rent—to get a license and be certified.

Eyder says, on the way to his children’s school, an elementary school where all the children speak English, that he misses his country and his people. That is why he tries to teach Eydercito and Daphne the love for Mexico and Yucatán, although their children know almost nothing of Spanish. "I love Mexico, but my children can have an education and a better life here," he concludes.

***

The consistent beauty of the Victorian houses and the imposing height of the skyscrapers of the financial district of San Francisco, California, are abruptly cut off when you arrive south of Mission Street. There appears a container overflowing with garbage, and a mixture of aromas with the smell of fried corn dough predominating. A man dressed in jeans, a
T-shirt and a baseball cap, the Giants, speaks in Mayan language on his cell phone outside a Yucatán restaurant.

The district of Mission, at the southeast of the city, is a neighborhood of about five square kilometers (1.93 square miles) with a high concentration of Central American and Mexican migrants, including Yucatecans, who arrived in San Francisco, mainly during the 80's and 90's of the 20th century to work mainly in the field of services, as dishwashers, waiters and cooks. Touring the neighborhood gives the feeling of being in an extension of Latin America, with ads in Spanish and several Mexican products businesses.

The Bay Area of ??San Francisco, a peninsula surrounded by nine counties, is home to just over seven million people, including around 70,000 Yucatecans, almost half of all Yucatecans registered in the USA. The metropolitan area of ??San Francisco is an attractive destination not only for migrants from Yucatán, but for people from almost all over the world due to its developed economy. According to figures from the US Bureau of the Census, attached to the US Department of Commerce, the average income of a household is US$ 63,024 a year, the highest in the country. The economic bonanza generated by the California gold rush in the mid-nineteenth century, which transformed the village of San Francisco into a large city, never disappeared, but consolidated the so-called Californian dream —the mental motivation to achieve "great wealth in little time," as described by the American historian H. W. Brands in his book The Age of Gold. No wonder California is the most prosperous state in the United States of America. If it were an independent nation it would be the sixth economy in the world.

A century and a half later, but in the service sector —although they also work in construction and in the field, Yucatecan migrants follow, in essence, the same path as gold diggers of California. They have been well received because it is also a very diverse city ethnic wise —33% of its population is of Asian origin and 14% of Hispanic origin, thus, minorities are the majority— and tolerant of different ideologies and ways of living and thinking. It is not a surprise that movements that have marked modern history have developed in its streets.

Although the Mission area has been going through a process of gentrification for a few years now, and it is being repopulated by young adults between 25 and 35 who work in large companies in San Francisco and the nearby Silicon Valley —the Mecca of world technology and headquarter of companies like Google, Apple and Adobe—, the presence of the Yucatecan Mayans in the last three decades has been so significant that in June of this year, the city government recognized them with the construction of the In Chan Kaajal Park, a space of 3,000 square meters (32291.73 ft2) whose name in Mayan language is translated as My Little Town. According to local press reports, this was the first park to be built in the city in a decade.

Mission Street, an eleven-kilometer (6.8-mi) road that crosses San Francisco from north to south, has several restaurants serving Mexican and Yucatecan food, especially from its crossroads with 16th to 24th streets, from east to west. These include Castillito Yucateco, Yucatan Yucatasia and Yucatasia. The latter, is where Isaiah Chan Cauich, 43, and Martha Peraza Carrillo, 50, work. They are originally from Tekax and Oxkutzcab, respectively, municipalities of southern Yucatan with high rates of migrants. They do not have identification papers, but since 2004, they work with the Vietnamese Sandy Duong, also a migrant who was married to a Yucatecan she met in San Francisco. They had a daughter, Effy, who helps her mother in the business by serving the orders. As if it were a popular regional food restaurant in southeastern Mexico, Yucatasia offers around 50 dishes from Yucatecan cuisine, like black stuffing, cochinita pibil (barbecued pork) and poc chuc (roasted pork), as well as Dondé crackers and Cristal sodas, also emblems of Yucatán.

Sandy, who has learned some Mayan phrases such as ma'alob (ok), bet uts (please) and mix bo'al (thanks) due to her daily contact with her employees, shows in the kitchen what they have prepared for the next day: a pot full of boiling mondongo, a typical Yucatan stew consisting of a broth made with spices, chilies and beef belly. Next to her, Isaías sets out to bake the chicken for panuchos and salbutes, appetizers made with dough, lettuce, onion and tomato, so successful that they are so much liked by the nostalgic Yucatecan community that visits the place, as well as customers like Michael, an American who lives a few blocks away and buys a couple of panuchos every day to eat at home with some beer.

Ángel Granados Ontiveros, president of the Federation of Yucatecan Clubs of Northern California, an organization that congregates numerous groups of migrants from all over the region, says: "Most of us came here dreaming of building a house and having a business in our town". The arrival of his countrymen, he tells, was intensified by the networks created by Tomás Bermejo, an immigrant from Oxkutzcab, who opened in 1965 a Yucatecan food business, Tommy's, which is still open in the district of Richmond, about four kilometers (24.85 mi) to the south of the mythical Golden Gate Bridge. Over time, Tomás Bermejo
-who died in 2011- became a “coyote.” He passed migrants across the border. Then, he employed in his own restaurant the people he brought from Yucatán (primarily from the south of the state) for them to pay the crossing, which was around 500 Mexican pesos back then (around 26 dollars today).

The Twin Towers terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, marked a milestone in migratory security. Testimonials from veteran migrants agree that twenty years ago it was enough to cross the Rio Grande, the natural division between the two countries, or jump a small fence to reach the USA. Currently they have to pay between 12,000 and 15,000 US dollars to the coyote or pollero just to try to pass, because the entry is not guaranteed.

There is an increasing array of technology, agents and movement sensors that make the border traffic as illegal aliens more complicated. But there have also been cases of coyotes that kidnap migrants and demand the families of the victims large sums of money to release them. The danger is latent on both sides of the border.

Since Tomás Bermejo institutionalized the figure of the coyote among the Mayans, most Yucatecans kept the habit of working in restaurants. When they arrive in the USA, the most common is that their friends or relatives get them jobs as dishwashers in restaurants. The Yucatecan networks work like those of any migrant community: they reinforce their bonds by the common culture, recommended each other in works, get together in their homes in the traditional festivities. But there is something that distinguishes them, according to several testimonies. They do not complain or complain less about the long and exhausting days of work in the suffocating heat of the kitchens of the restaurants. This is attributed to the fact that they used to live in a climate of over 40 °C (104 °F) and worked in the field or as masons in their villages, activities that demand great physical effort.

Ángel Granados —who left Oxkutzcab in 1985 at age 16 after graduating from high school and is now a waiter at one of San Francisco's most popular restaurants, The Stinking Rose, famous for its garlic-based cuisine— adds that today, most Yucatecan immigrants are young men from municipalities and the most remote indigenous communities, without academic training, Mayan speakers, who understand a little Spanish with difficulty and do not know any English. Indemaya confirms this profile: 45% of them are between 18 and 29 years old. For every four men migrating, only one woman migrates. The third part of the population of two million people of Yucatán is of Mayan origin and speaks Mayan. Upon arriving in the United States of America, they find in the diversity of nationalities the comfort to talk without grief in the indigenous language, unlike what happens in their native Yucatán, where 67% of the people who speak Mayan are considered discriminated, as revealed by the 2014 State Survey on Discrimination conducted by the State Human Rights Commission. The Yucatecans in the kitchens, like Martha and Isaías, prefer to communicate in Mayan, since they express their disagreements or complaints with freedom, knowing that neither their bosses nor companions, immigrants from other states of Mexico or from other countries will understand them.

That same third part had never left their village before emigrating. Arriving in San Francisco or other cities in the USA causes a strong cultural shock: the crossing of customs of people from various countries, large buildings, and hundreds of cars are diametrically opposed to what they are accustomed to see in their native communities, where almost everything indispensable, such as the main park, the market, the work and the houses of the relatives, converge in a radius no larger than one or two kilometers (0.62-1.24 mi); towns where most inhabitants are friends, acquaintances or relatives, or some mixture of the three, and in which there are no cinemas, restaurants, museums or discos. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography of Mexico, 73% of the 106 municipalities in which Yucatán is divided, do not have more than 10,000 inhabitants.

Granados observes that, to face the depression caused by this cultural shock, migrants take refuge in drugs and alcohol. "With that money that they had never had before, and away from their families, they feel free to do whatever they want," he laments. At the rate of ten dollars per hour, a Yucatecan migrant in this city can earn at least 30,000 dollars a year. In the area of ??the bay they are trying to reproduce behaviors that are socially accepted in the towns of Yucatán, such as drinking and urinating on public roads, which costs them fines that remain in their police record, and that could make a difference between being deported or not. On a tour of Canal de San Rafael Street, several bottles of empty tequila are seen behind the bushes, a space that becomes the ideal place to hide and get drunk. Back home, Yucatán is the state of Mexico with the highest number of alcohol intoxications - 7,057 cases reported in 2016 -, according to the Ministry of Health, almost the double than Jalisco, which is second in the ranking with half of the cases, although it triples the population of Yucatán.

For Angel Granados, the key to survival in the United States of America is to work hard and not get in trouble with anyone. "You just have to collect money and cross your fingers so you can regularize your documents".

Sara Mijares, the Los Angeles activist, says that the Mayans who live in this country "desperately" seek for the Yucatan government to take them into account and be more involved with them and the families they leave in their villages. They do not want the government action to be reduced to repatriating corpses from time to time, the only procedure that the Mexican authorities deal with on a regular basis.

***

José May left the town of Kimbilá, a town of 3,000 people in the center of Yucatán 18 years ago. Since then, he has lived in Fort Bragg, a tourist town of about 7,000 inhabitants located on the Pacific coast and four hours away from San Francisco, where he tries to fulfill the fundamental dream of almost any Yucatecan immigrant: building the concrete house in his town and, also, buy other land, at the cost of up to three jobs a day and being far apart from the family. He still does not have documents. A few months ago he was swindled by a person who assured him that he would complete the procedures to regularize his immigration status. For fear of being deported, he did not denounce or request assistance from the Consulate of Mexico. It was his own employers who pushed him to sue the scammer, who is now in jail. José did not know he could do it.

The oldest of three brothers, he was the first of them to cross the border. Abel, the second, arrived in California three years later, after turning 20. Two years later, in 2004, they were joined by Sebastian, who left his wife Lidia Tuz and their two children in the care of his parents. He share the land where they built the houses where they now live in Kimbilá, including a Californian style house valued at about $ 120,000 (approximately 2 million pesos), two stories, with a fully equipped kitchen and a bath tub. There used to be two concrete rooms and a house of straw where they grew up when they were children. Not even the work of a lifetime could suffice to build it.

None of the three have residence papers in order yet; hence, they cannot return to Kimbilá. They live here in Fort Bragg in a complex of eight apartments. Theirs is ten meters long by fifteen wide (32.8 in L x 49.21 in W). It has two rooms, a kitchen with barely enough area for two, and a room, where a 50-inch LED TV stands out. The additional works allow them certain comforts, send enough remittances to the family, and equip themselves with devices -mainly acquired by Abel- that they never dreamed of having in their childhood, like cable television systems and a home theater, photographic equipment and Abel’s computer with software, as well as a sports car and a work van.

The three have experienced difficulties, but it was José who made the advance. During the first months, he was afraid to go out into the streets, faced the barrier of language, worked without receiving a salary, without complaining, spent the night outdoors in the forest, one snowy night, after a whole day cutting wood, because his employers forgot to pick him up. "I thought, my God, what I am doing here?" he says. After two years, he adapted, felt more secure, more comfortable with English, with a stable work and savings. Then Abel arrived, who was more adventure than financially driven. Now José has two jobs, in one shift he works in a rest home for adults and in the other as manager of a small supermarket in Fort Bragg. "With what you earn in the USA, you can see the results there (in Yucatán), but I feel that I lost my youth," he confesses. Abel, for his part, has worked as a gardener, due to his knowledge of the field where he grew up, but he also gets by as a photographer of social events. He is the designer of the house in Kimbilá that Sebastián May Llanes and Ligia Arjona, the parents of the three children, have been building. When he left Yucatán, he wanted to know the world, other cultures, and other ways of seeing life. That is why he has traveled to several cities in the USA. But he stopped doing it because he fears getting on any plane and being deported.

The story of Sebastián, the youngest, is different because the economic need encouraged him to leave Kimbilá to improve the income of his family, his wife Lidia, their two children and now a four-year-old granddaughter. The monthly salary of 4,000 pesos (about 207 dollars) sewing in the maquila of Lee brand jeans of his hometown, where he worked with Lydia, was only enough for food and for the house expenses of two small concrete rooms. Now, he receives that income in three days of work at Fort Bragg; in the mornings, in a cafeteria and in the afternoons, at a supermarket, the same one where José works. "Sometimes I think I cannot do it anymore, but then I see what we have achieved and I think it was worth it". With the remittances, his children always had toys, video games, smart phones and, as adults, sports bikes, but Sebastián did not see them grow, although he has maintained contact with the family through technology. And now, he says, he's ready to return soon to Kimbilá and stay there for good. He already has the house and the two lands.

Today is September 5, 2017. José, Abel and Sebastián are a nervous wreck while waiting at the San Francisco International Airport. They entered the air terminal with fear. They even got confused at the entrance, but did not want to ask the guards for fear of deportation. Their parents, Ligia Arjona and Sebastián May, are about to land from Yucatan. They come to stay two months thanks to a program of the state government called Cabecitas Blancas that brings together Yucatecan migrants with more than ten years in the USA with their families. It is a "break" that will help them wait for the procedure to regularize their legal status in the USA, ordered by a judge who found that José and, by extension, his brothers were emotionally affected by that scammer. It is the first time they have seen each other since they left Kimbilá. When their parents arrive, José receives them with flowers and tears. "Dad, I'm Sebastian!" exclaims the younger brother as if he fears they would not recognize him after these years.

Already in the apartment, with the parents recovered from the nearly ten-hour airplane trip, the May Arjona brothers do not skimp on attentions. They bought an iron hanger online to install the hammocks in the room where their parents will sleep. There is a festive atmosphere. They all speak in Maya about the calls that were made at Christmas. Abel acts as a translator. They remember that when they lived in their town they wanted to stock up with electronic devices, and their father always repeated them: "Where are you going to put your TV if you do not have a house?!" Now they have the house, cars and savings. Sebastián Sr. compares their lives with that of young men from his village, poor and addicted to drinking, who even take off their clothes to sell it for 10 pesos (50 cents of US dollar) and thus be able to buy more alcohol.

Like the May Arjona brothers, despite the hardening of the border crossing and the constant threats of President Trump, there are still many Yucatecans who consider crossing the border as the only way to escape the poverty of their homelands. Data from the Migration and Remittances Yearbook 2017 of the National Population Council of Mexico indicate that every day, at least three Yucatecans continue crossing without documents. In a month, they will be at least 90. In a year, there will be around 1,100 migrants who will leave parents, wives, children and siblings in their communities, whom they will not see for 10, 15 or 20 or more years because of their immigration status. Everything is done to improve the family budget and get the longed for concrete house.