Heather Gies
A soccer game at the El Barretal shelter in Tijuana, Mexico, where migrants and asylum-seekers are figuring out a new life. The banner refers to Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, re-elected for a controversial second term in office in late 2017 amid widespread allegations of electoral fraud, and one factor in why Hondurans say corruption and violence have made their country unlivable.
Fifty-one-year old Hector Baca left Honduras with the migrant caravan eager to find work. Whether exceptionally industrious or just plain lucky to have had a decent job fall in his lap almost immediately in Tijuana, he is one of hundreds of Central Americans now working or actively seeking a job south of the U.S. border to set up a life in Mexico—at least for now.
The sun is barely up, and Baca already has a steady stream of buyers lining up at the cart where he sells coffee and bread. It is outside a former concert venue-turned-migrant shelter known as El Barretal, about fifteen kilometers from the U.S. border. Digging into his apron vest pockets, he double-checks the coins before handing change to his customers. He is still getting accustomed to the new currency.
“Finding work there is difficult at my age,” Baca says of his home in Honduras’ capital city, Tegucigalpa. Deepening poverty pushed him to join a caravan of about 150 Hondurans leaving from the Catacamas, Olancho, at the beginning of November. He left behind two children, ages seventeen and eleven. Their mother lives in Spain and doesn’t support the family, he says.
The day after migrants and refugees relocated to El Barretal, Baca was sitting outside before dawn when the owner of the coffee cart business showed up and asked if he wanted a job. He got to work immediately.
“I didn’t come to waste time. I came to work.”
“If there is an opportunity to cross the border, I would do it,” Baca says. He secured a one-year humanitarian visa in Mexico, which gives him permission to live and work legally in the country. “We’ll see how it goes. We have to have faith. But if there isn’t [an opportunity to enter the United States], there is work here.”
More than 3,000 people, mostly Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans who arrived in Tijuana with the caravans, have regularized their migration status in Mexico and sought work through a government-run job fair that was set up temporarily in the city to respond to the influx of Central Americans, according to Nayla Rangel, coordinator of the National Employment Service in Tijuana.
In the past year, unemployment in Tijuana hit a ten-year low of just 2 percent and remains below the national average of 3.2 percent.
Most jobs available through the job fair are in the industrial sector, including maquiladoras and other manufacturing. One business association, the Mesa Otay Industrial Association, has even advertised 10,000 job vacancies that Central Americans would be welcome to fill.
“There’s a significant number of job offers,” Rangel says. “It won’t be a hassle for [Central American migrants] to find a job.”
Of the more than 6,000 Central Americans who arrived in Tijuana with the caravans, about 1,100 migrants and refugees have volunteered to be deported back to their home countries and another estimated 1,100 may have attempted to cross into the United States, according to Mexican authorities.
Meanwhile, some 2,500 people are sheltered in El Barretal, at least 300 are still living in tents in the street outside the old shelter at the Benito Juarez sports complex, and another 600 are dispersed in small shelters throughout Tijuana.
Baca earns 300 Mexican pesos—nearly $15—plus meals for a lengthy work day starting at 4 a.m. and winding down at 7 p.m. The job has also allowed him to move out of the shelter into a room provided by his boss.
Back in Tegucigalpa he worked as a security guard for three decades, earning about 4,000 Honduran lempiras per month—about $160 at the current exchange rate.
Honduras is one of the most unequal countries in Latin America, according to the World Bank. The gap between rich and poor widened in the wake of the U.S.-backed 2009 military coup that helped consolidate the elite’s hold on the country’s wealth. Today, roughly two thirds of Honduras’ population lives below the poverty line.
Baca has no idea how long he will stay in Tijuana, but for now he is comfortable and in no rush to uproot himself again.
“I didn’t come to waste time,” Baca says during a quick lunch break. “I came to work.”
Near Baca’s coffee stand, people line the curb outside the shelter hoping to score a day’s work from employers driving by looking for informal laborers. Maria, thirty-four, from Santa Barbara, Honduras, is the one of the only women among dozens of men. She managed to find one day of casual work at the Sunday market beside the El Barretal shelter, but says she is likely to return home to her four children if she doesn’t quickly find more stable employment in Tijuana.
“I don’t want to risk it,” she says of trying to cross the border. Many others say they fear greater dangers back in Central America, where they face threats of violence or even death, and are set to wait to request asylum in the United States.
Heather Gies
Central Americans gather by the roadside outside the El Barretal shelter hoping to find casual work for the day.
Maria, who did not disclose her last name, had imagined that the caravan would continue as a group across the U.S. border. She became disillusioned when she realized this wasn’t going to happen.
A van pulls up to the curb near where Maria is waiting, and more than a dozen men rush to the window to ask what kind of work the driver has to offer. “They need a builder!” one of them shouts to the people scattered along the shoulder of the road. Another man runs and hops into the vehicle before it drives off, while the rest retake their posts in the waiting game.
Salvador Ortiz, fifty, from La Libertad, El Salvador, also lingers outside the shelter to see if he manages to stumble across an odd job, though he hasn’t had any luck for four days.
Ortiz has lived the majority of the past three decades in the United States between Washington, D.C., Maryland, Tennessee, and Texas. When he returned home to El Salvador earlier this year to spend time with his ailing mother, he caught the attention of gang members keen to extort U.S. earnings.
“It’s difficult because of poverty and the situation with gangs,” Ortiz says of life in El Salvador.
Getting a job in Tijuana is a decent option, Ortiz says, but he is wary of the people driving by offering casual work, fearing they could be abusive employers or criminals. He plans to hop the border fence as soon as possible.