Mexico’s Ghost Towns

[Polly]

Interesting article.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3693/mexicos_ghost_towns
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The other side of the immigration debate

By John Gibler (ZACATECAS, Mexico )

In Mexico's Cerrito del Agua, freshly painted concrete houses line empty streets because most of their owners are working in the United States
Cerrito del Agua, population 3,000, has no paved roads — either leading to it or within it. No restaurants, no movie theaters, no shopping malls. In fact, the small town located in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas has no middle schools, high schools or colleges; no cell phone service, no hospital. Its surrounding fields are dry and untended. The streets are empty.

The explosion of emigration to the United States over the past 15 years has emptied much of central Mexico, even reaching into southernmost states like Chiapas and Yucatan. But it has simply devastated Zacatecas, a dry, rolling agricultural region located about 400 miles northwest of Mexico City.

A little more than half of Zacatecas’ population — about 1.8 million people — now live in the United States, especially in areas surrounding Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles. Between 2000 and 2005, three out of its four municipalities registered a negative population growth. A 2004 state law created two new state legislative posts for migrants living in the United States. In 2006, depopulation cost the state one of its five congressional districts.

“Well, you’ve seen what this place is like,” says Dr. Manuel Valadez Lopez, gesturing out the door of his small private clinic when I ask him how emigration has affected the town. “There has not been even minimal development here. There is not a single yard of pavement. The few people who have sidewalks in front of their houses built them themselves. Most people defecate outdoors.”

Lopez, 40, a native of Cerrito del Agua, is one of the few to leave the town and return. All six of his brothers now live and work in the United States. All four of his sisters married men who left to work in the United States.

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[The Smoking Man]

There is another side to all of this and it too has to do with globalization.

Just before I left Canada for the first time ... prior to 1989 ... I remember watching a program on the CBC done by one of Canada's 'environmental visionaries', Dr. David Suzuki.

He went to one of the provinces in Mexico and filmed the results of Dole moving to Mexico to raise Pineapples. He stood at the intersection of four walls that marked the meeting of four farms.

Just over the hill, there was a Dole plantation which used so much water to irrigate their crops that they had actually lowered the water table in the area. The local government had made it illegal for the farmers to deepen their wells and take water from Dole.

The farms were now abandoned and the farmers had moved on ... to Mexico City or to America, nobody knew.

Now America wants to keep out the Mexicans.

There is a certain amount of justice in their moving to California to pick crops. They are merely getting reimbursed for what the Americans take and keep taking.

[The Smoking Man]

This is David Suzuki, by the way:

http://www.cbc.ca/greatest/top_ten/nominee/suzuki-david.html