July 5, 2009
Georgetown workers funnel cash home, but remittances drop during recession
By SUMMER HARLOW
Special to The News Journal
TACANA, GUATEMALA -- Surrounded by Easter-egg colored multiple-story homes and businesses, Rolando Santizo's lime-green, three-story hotel is nestled on a relatively quiet block, just off the main street into this small city in western Guatemala.
Ten years ago, none of those buildings were there. Ten years ago, three- or four-floored houses would have been unheard-of; shacks made of adobe and bamboo walls and sheet metal roofs were the norm. Back then, there were few businesses, and even fewer paved roads.
Because 10 years ago, immigration from this mountain city to Georgetown, Del., was just beginning to hit its stride and remittances, the money migrants living abroad send home, were just starting to trickle back to Tacaná.
"Tacaná is so different now than it was when I left," said Santizo, 31, who lived in Delaware from 1999 to 2004, earning $8.50 an hour working at Perdue. "My life is so much better now. I have a house, a car, possibilities. If I hadn't gone to the United States, I never would have been able to own my own business. I'd be working in a corn or bean field, maybe earning enough to eat, but nothing else, with no way to better myself or my children."
Like so many other towns and cities throughout Guatemala, as the U.S. housing market flourished, Tacaná experienced its own construction boom, paid for with remittances sent mostly from Delaware.
Nationwide in 2008, remittances amounted to $4.3 billion, roughly 12 percent of Guatemala's gross domestic product. By comparison, coffee, the country's leading agriculture export, was valued at $646 million.
Santizo spent his years in Georgetown saving almost everything he earned, sending $500 to $1,000 home to Guatemala each month. It's with that money he was able to open Hotel Las Vegas after he returned with his family -- he and his wife met at Perdue -- to Tacaná in 2004.
"I'm grateful for the opportunities Delaware gave me," Santizo said. "My life is what it is now because I was there. Not just me. This whole town is better because of Delaware."
Not only have remittances helped reduce poverty in Latin America, said Dilip Ratha, lead economist of the Migration and Remittances Team for the World Bank, "but after basic consumption needs are met, remittances are also used to finance education, health, housing and small-business investment."
Tacaná Vice Mayor Otilio Robledo Roblero estimated that as much as 90 percent of the municipality's residents have gone to the United States. The municipality includes about 80,000 people living in 150 towns and villages, with about 89 percent living in rural areas.
"Remittances have lifted our country, our cities, our people," said Robledo, who has children living in Delaware. "It would be practically impossible for us to live without remittances."
The town's transformation has been obvious, residents say, as the earthen huts have given way to larger homes made of concrete blocks. There are more schools, more stores, more roads. Families with money coming in from the United States mean more people can afford water and electricity.
For a municipality where 84.4 percent of the population lives in poverty, remittances have changed everything.
"Thanks to the United States, it's easier to live here now," Robledo said. "This progress, it's possible because of the United States."
But now, with the U.S. economy tanking, and the persistent crackdown on unauthorized immigration, progress in Tacaná has come to a visible halt, with homes half built and piles of concrete blocks sitting ignored.
It's only a matter of time, residents say, until businesses begin to shutter.
According to the Guatemalan Central Bank, May remittances were $332.6 million in 2009, down from nearly $398 million in 2008. According to the World Bank, remittances to Central America from the U.S. are expected to fall 10 percent to 15 percent this year -- a significant drop considering the double-digit growth to which countries have grown accustomed.
There are even stories about Guatemalans living in the United States asking relatives in Guatemala to send them money.
Residents in Tacaná have heard of the crisis in San Jose Calderas, seven hours away, where hundreds of migrants deported from a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, have returned to find no jobs, no way to feed their families.
Santizo worries what will become of Tacaná as more migrants are deported, and more leave voluntarily because they can't find work in the States.
"There aren't jobs for all the people who are returning," he said. "What are they going to do? How will they survive? Even if they do find a job, it won't be enough for them to support a family."
Emiliano Ortiz Perez, 52, lived in Georgetown from 1994 to 1999. He worked 16-hour days at Mountaire in Salisbury, Md., and then Perdue, making $800 a week. He sent most of his money home, he said, because the only reason he migrated in the first place was to be able to afford to send his eight children to school. "I knew I had to do something drastic, because I wanted them to have a better life," he said.
Eventually, the exhaustion and fear of living illegally in a foreign country caught up to him. Ortiz decided to go home.
Only now, the home he was returning to was a new six-room, concrete house in the city of Tacaná, rather than the two-room mud hut in a nearby village. The house cost him 200,000 quetzales, or roughly $26,666 -- an unfeasible amount had he not first gone to Delaware, he said.
"At first, I was worried about coming home, because I'd grown accustomed to the way of living there," Ortiz said. "But things have changed here for the better now. It's so different now than when I left. Now there are more jobs and things to buy. The town is thriving."
Ortiz, who used to be a subsistence farmer, now owns an import business and employs four workers.
His employees, he said, like his children, are able to stay in Guatemala and provide for their families because he made the sacrifice to emigrate.
"In a country like this, people have to migrate if they want to improve their future," Ortiz said. "In Tacaná, everyone's goal is to leave, so they can come back and be someone."
Despite the economy and record deportations, Tacaná residents leave for Delaware every day, he said.
"The risks are worth it, and by now, just about everyone here has family in Delaware," he said.
Even Ortiz is thinking about returning to Delaware.
"I figure I'll go for another five years," he said. "When I come back I'll be old, so hopefully, I'll have earned enough money not to worry when I come home."
Marina Santizo Masariegos, 44, said goodbye to her husband and oldest daughter four years ago. They're both working at a chicken plant in Georgetown. Combined, her husband and daughter send home about $300 a month.
She laughed when asked where she got the money to start her clothes-selling business.
"It came from the United States, of course," she said. "There's no other way to get money here."
Her business brings in only about 200 quetzales, or $25, a week, she said, but at least the remittances allowed her family to move into a new home, and to pay for her other daughters to attend school.
"It's hard being separated, but it would be even harder if he were deported and had to come home," she said. "I don't know what would happen to us, because we need that money. Our dreams for our children would be over."
Her second-oldest daughter, Alba Sanchez Santizo, 16, spends her weeks at school in San Marcos, the equivalent of the state capital, and comes home on weekends to help her mom sell clothes on street corners.
While so many other people her age are emigrating, Alba said she has no such plans.
"I don't need to go," she said. "My dad and sister left so I could stay here and study, so that my other sisters and I wouldn't have to leave."
Santizo said the day the doors opened at Hotel Las Vegas was one of the best days of his life.
"I was so happy to have my own business, without a boss to yell at me or tell me what to do," said Santizo, one of eight children, four of whom emigrated to Delaware. "I can't describe what a great feeling it is to know that because I worked hard, I made my dream come true. All I did in Georgetown was work, all day, every day. But this business, my family, is why I did it."
http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20090705/BUSINESS/907050361/1003
