THE NEWS AND OBSERVER, RALEIGH, NC, SUNDAY, MARCH 8, 1998
Heart Without a Home
Part of a surge of Latino immigration to North Carolina, Julio Granados sought to help his family in Mexico. But his success has a price – a life often alone.
By Gigi Anders
© The News and Observer
Posted on this website by permission
On this Monday, as he does on alternate weeks, Julio Granados is sending $500 to his mother, Amalia, in Mexico. It’s half of what he has made in the past two weeks of 11-hour days, but it’s much more than that, too. The money – and the opportunity to earn it – is what brought Granados to Raleigh almost 20 months ago, and it’s what sustains him.
“It’s a good feeling not to have to depend on your parents,” Granados says. “Without my help, they’d have to sacrifice a lot.”
Granados and his family have been apart since he left Guadalajara on foot on a soft Friday evening, late in June 1996. He kissed and embraced his parents and stepped into the night, carrying a battered duffel bag with only a change of clothes. He had his Mexican voter ID and 600 pesos in his wallet, not even $100. But it was enough. Walking along the road, his brown leather work boots kicking up the yellow dust, Granados looked at the slowly darkening sky, trying to memorize this twilight and what it held: the long, thin cirrus clouds that turned from pale to deepest gray, a thousand white stars that shared their scattered light with the yellow moon. Mexico is yellow, he thought, and America will be green.
Granados knows that working in America without proper papers is a risk. But he's willing to take it on.
He works six-day weeks at La Bodega El Mandado, a Hispanic supermarket in North Raleigh that is one of the busiest sites of electronic money transfers in the Triangle. It sends thousands of dollars a day by wire to mothers, fathers, wives in towns and cities throughout Mexico and Central America.
This morning, Granados already has alerted Amalia that the money is coming, using a prepaid phone card he bought at the bodega. At first, he talked really fast on calls home, but now he sets the timer on his Casio digital watch and speaks naturally. Amalia will write down the receipt number, wait two hours and take a city bus to a pharmacy 15 minutes away, where she’ll get her money in a check or a money order. Then she’ll cash it at her local bank.
The call complete, Granados folds the yellow receipt and tucks it in his leather wallet. There’s a square cloth sewn on the front with stripes of green, white and red – the colors of the Mexican flag – and the word “Jalisco,” the state where Guadalajara is. On the back of his ’87 Buick Regal, he has a matching bumper sticker.
Long days at the bodega
El Mandado is where Granados works and works and works. Six days a week, from 10 a.m. until closing time at 9:30 p.m. A 21-year-old who dreamed of becoming a priest, he left his home and his family and risked his life to refill bins of rices, dried chile peppers and pinto beans, to stock refrigerators with coconut juice and strawberry-tangerine nectars and chorizo sausage, to line shelves with spices, foot-high stacks of corn tortillas and holy candles that burn for 24 hours. Granados runs the cash register, sweeps and mops, takes inventory, orders merchandise, pays vendors. With a short break for lunch and another for dinner, the long workday goes by in a flash. And so it goes, hour upon hour, day after day. At the bodega, Granados is necessary. That’s what he wants, to be busy, to be needed.
The busier he is, the better he feels. It gives him less time to be homesick for Mexico and lonesome for his mother.
“I like my job,” Granados says, scanning newly arrived crates of black-spotted green plantains and blushing mangoes. “At first it was overwhelming, with so many things to remember and keep track of. Life is a labyrinth if you’re not used to it. I tried carpentry but lasted only two days. This is better. If you’re not in school, what else can you do? You have to help your family and yourself somehow.”
How many Julios?
Julio Cesar Granados Martinez is Everyhombre. He is one of thousands of young Hispanic men in the Triangle who mow grass and blow dead leaves away, who build houses and clean office buildings, who clear restaurant tables and wash cars. These undocumented workers, part of a rapidly growing statewide Hispanic population that some estimate at 500,000, live beneath the radar screen of immigration officials, usually are paid in cash and seldom seek government services. To the world at large, they are faceless. But inside, all kinds of things are going on.
Granados’ adopted new world, the one he chose for adventure and the future, for “help,” is primarily one of fellow Spanish speakers. At the bodega and at the house he shares with four other Mexican immigrants, he can almost forget how far from home he is.
He can almost forget what hurts so much toremember: Guadalajara’s mountainous vistas, its rockiness underneath his boots; the vast, low sky that goes on forever and its yellow moon; his grandfathers’ ranches, where as a boy he rode burros and played ranchero, his lariat unfurled before him like a wild halo of rope; his sweet mother who still cries when she hears his voice, and her wonderful scrambled eggs; his four brothers and sisters and how the family would do without other necessities to splurge on bakery cakes for the children’s birthday parties; his father, Martin, whom he resembles, who took him to play baseball every Sunday afternoon and showed him the value of working with his hands; the safety and sanctity of the seminary life, where as an altar boy he learned to sing in the choir and play his favorite hymns on the guitar until dawn. Home.
But there is no forgetting, no getting past the past.
In the cramped stockroom at the bodega, Granados counts boxes of Chocolate Abuelita, Little Grandmother’s Chocolate, and remembers how Amalia used to make hot chocolate for him with this brand. He gazes at the picture on the box and makes a sound like a sigh, as if he’s holding back an emotion stronger and sadder than any words.
Granados hears feminine laughter spilling across the crates of cactus. It’s Gloria Estrada, a cook in the bodega’s adjoining cafe. Granados stays up late at night writing her poems in his lovely seminary-trained penmanship, dropping rose petals on the words before falling asleep.
On the erasable clipboard in the stockroom on which he jots numbers, vendors, quantities, he also writes to Estrada. “If seeing you meant death and life was not seeing you, I’d prefer death better to life without seeing you.”
But sooner or later, work is done. And then he says, “In the store, I’m Julio, who knows where things are, who needs to do such-and-such. But the moment I leave El Mandado, I feel alone. I’m nadie.”
No one.
Granados gets in his big black car, which he bought for $1,500 in Durham, and begins the long, unaccompanied drive home to Knightdale. Always, always in the dark, past slumbering farms and vast pastures and meadows, where not burros but horses and cows in the distance look like toys. He pulls into the unpaved driveway.
When Granados shuts off his car’s motor and the radio playing his beloved Mexican romantic music, the fuzzy dice tied to the rear-view mirror slowly stop their sway, their dance of chance. Suddenly, it is so silent and still that his beating heart deafens him.
He pays $130 a month for a room not much bigger than a broom closet and shares a bathroom with his four housemates. Like them, Granados keeps his toilet paper in his bedroom. And his Cup-A-Soup. And his toiletries. They all do this. And when they’re at work they each leave their respective bedroom doors padlocked, though the front door is always open because it’s such a safe neighborhood. Granados’ housemates are all asleep by now, nearly 11 o’clock, or they’ve locked themselves inside their bedrooms. Inside, Granados undresses and climbs into his cot, pulling the flannel blankets up to his lightly bearded chin. He curls up and gently rocks.
He sings his favorite hymn to soothe himself to sleep, softly like a lullaby, for the walls are paper thin:
Ave Maria, I feel nostalgic for those nights when I slept thinking of you, Mary mother of God … the time passes and does not come back.
Scars of the past
Back at work, Granados is wearing his signature bodega gear: baseball cap on backward (he collects them; 17 others hang on the stems of thumbtacks on a wall in his bedroom), blue denim work shirt, baggy blue jeans, pigskin belt, work boots. He still owns the boots he wore out of Mexico almost two years ago, but now he can afford a second pair.
There’s a beeper attached to his belt on one side – the telephone he shares with his housemates isn't working this week – and a box-cutter in a leather holster on the other. On a thin, golden chain around his neck dangle two trinkets. One is an amulet of La Virgen de Guadalupe, the virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico, the other a charm of two love birds perched on a tree limb. Gloria Estrada gave him the little birds and the chain for Valentine’s Day, insisting the charm was solely “a pretty thing,” not a romantic offering.
“It’s the first gold thing I’ve ever owned,” Granados says, smiling shyly. “I’m so proud to wear it.” The smile crinkles the caramel skin around his black almond eyes and accentuates his high Aztec Indian cheekbones.
There’s a small scar just under his right eye, from a fall he took in a Texas cornfield. Granados and 14 others had just slipped across the border between Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville, Texas. As the group lay down among cornstalks to rest and hide, their guide, called a coyote, cried, “Alli viene la migra!”Here come the immigration police!
The group dispersed like an opened fan, darting across the field to avoid arrest. Granados stumbled and fell, cutting his face and blistering the palms of both hands.
The backs of his hands are unscarred but rough from eight years of working, mostly in trabajos del sol, jobs of the sun. Granados left the seminary at 13 and has worked ever since. His first job was in construction with his father.
Granados says math tripped him up and made him leave school. His mother says it was really his guilt over the expense of a private school for him. With four other children to feed, clothe and educate – public schools are free, but books are not – the Granadoses were struggling enormously to support their middle son in his dream for the priesthood.
“Eso fue tan esperado,” Amalia Granados says wistfully. That was so long hoped for.
Amalia Granados, 40, is on the phone from her home in Guadalajara. Her voice is warm, her tone one of intimate resignation. She says her son made the decision to leave on his own. She means leaving Mexico, but she could be talking about the seminary just as well. She says she had to respect his decision no matter how painful it was for her. Amalia, a housewife, has many friends who have gone through the same thing with their sons who crossed by night into the United States, chasing a dream of a better life.
“Without money, without language, what will become of my son? What if he gets caught? That’s all I thought about. I said, ‘Christ, my God, please watch over my boy and keep him safe.’ ”
Amalia Granados says she didn’t weep on the night she said adios to Julio. She didn’t want him to see her cry.
“My family is close, but we try to hold our strong emotions in,” she explains. “It’s very hard. The first three months after Julio left I spent in my bed, crying, imagining how it was, asking God to make everything OK. My husband would say to let it go, but he felt the same way, only not in front of me. That’s the machismo.”
What may upend that machismo, which also stipulates that husbands are the sole providers, is the money Julio Granados wires home. At 21, he earns three times more than his construction-working father, who is 49. If not for Julio, his father would have to work at least two jobs to make ends meet.
Because American currency has such a high exchange rate in Mexico – about 7 pesos to the dollar – Julio’s money goes far. At Christmas, every member of the family receives $100. He never forgets a birthday, either. Amalia is grateful for the help with her four other children: Martin, 24; Claudia, 21; Fernando, 15; and Antonia, 9.
Of all the people in his family, Julio Granados feels closest to and identifies most strongly with Antonia. A birth defect twisted her left leg, and the family could not afford corrective surgery.
When he was 7, the same age Antonia was on the night he left Mexico, he developed strange red spots on his hands, arms, elbows, knees and feet that discolored his skin and made it look as though he’d scraped off the top layer of pigment. Amalia took him to a doctor, who prescribed pills. Granados took them, but the marks remained. He calls them “mis manchas,” my stains.
Earlier this day, for Antonia’s upcoming 10th birthday, Granados sent extra money to buy a big, pink pony piñata and to hire two clowns for the afternoon fiesta – Antonia loves pink and ponies and clowns. These are luxuries. These are acts of love.
“With many sacrifices, we could get by,” Amalia Granados says, “but not securely. Mexico has great wealth, but it is concentrated among the few. The rest of us must get by as best we can. Julio’s a blessing. What he gives provides many satisfactions for the entire family.”
Longing for love
It's 4:30 p.m. before Granados can take a lunch break at El Mandado. The dining room is full of Mexican workers on this rainy afternoon. One wears a baseball cap that says Mi Vida Loca. My Crazy Life. Los Tigres del Norte (The Tigers of the North, a popular Mexican band) are singing a love song on the jukebox. People put quarters in the machine all day long. Owner Ana Roldan says that when she retires, she never wants to hear this music again. “All I want when I’m old,” she says, “is Mozart.”
Today, Estrada has made a shrimp soup. She is standing over a simmering kettle in the kitchen, blowing a frizzy cloud of black bangs off her forehead. When she and Granados see each other, it’s like a diplomatic acknowledgment of one another’s existence, not a real greeting. Granados helps himself to a huge bowl of soup, along with a basket of warm tortillas and a glass of orange juice. He takes his lunch and sits down in a brown vinyl booth, alone.
“I realize that Gloria’s not my girlfriend,” he says, “but maybe someday. ... Sometimes I see couples on the street, and I feel envious. And then I get to thinking, thinking, thinking. And I in turn feel so sad. I long for what I lack: the affection of someone special. Sometimes you need someone to talk to and show you love.”
He hears the sound of Estrada’s laughter coming from the kitchen. He takes a tortilla, rolls it tightly like a cigar and devours it. Granados has never had a girlfriend and says it’s harder for him to find that special person because of the manchas, the stains.
“Girls ask me if I’m contagious,” he says. “Sometimes I feel normal, I don’t even remember that I have them. But then I notice someone looking, and I say, ‘Oh yes, it’s true.’ ”
Granados looks down at the shrimp in his soup and makes that sound like a sigh. It's hushed and pensive, like a melancholy whisper of “huh” and “ha” and “ho” all at the same time.
“What’s crossing my mind now is wishing to form a family,” he says, taking a sip of his hot soup, “to become the head of a family and feel what I’ve never felt: to marry, you know, Gloria, and have her need me. Maybe in time... I love her for her moda de ser [way of being]. I’m saving money for a house in Mexico. My mother is putting it away for me in a savings account. It could take years. I’d like to live near my parents with my wife and my children. I must be more patient and have more faith.”
“When Julio and I first met, I said, ‘This man is certifiablycrazy!’ ” Estrada, 25, says with a laugh. She was born in the state of Guerrero, in the Sierra Madre del Sur by the Pacific Ocean.
“ ‘Loquito’ is what I call him.” Little crazy boy.