The Houses that Milk Built

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The Latest

From the little town of San Juan Texhuacán, high in the mountains of Veracruz, in Southern Mexico, hundreds of people have migrated illegally to the dairy farms of Wisconsin and Minnesota, to earn a living milking cows.

Locals estimate that as many as 500 of the town’s 2,000 residents currently live on farms near the Wisconsin/Minnesota border.

The deep relationship between the people of this remote village and the dairy farmers of the Midwest goes back about two decades.

But both Texhuacán, which depends on U.S. dollars, and the Midwestern dairy industry, which depend on Mexican labor, are being buffeted by the anti-immigrant politics of the Trump Administration.

The fruits of the farmworkers’ labor are visible all over Texhuacán, in the form of brand new cement houses, some painted bright colors, others with decorative stars stamped into their facades. Some stand half-built, their owners working up North and sending back money to finish construction.

“I went to the United States, to the dairy farms, to buy my car, my house,” says Blanca Hernández, a wiry, athletic woman who drives me around town, showing me all the houses that milk built.

Blanca has done three stints in the United States, working for two to four years each time. The first time she went, she walked through the desert for four days, and nearly asphyxiated in the trunk of a car while crossing the border. She labored at a car wash and at an airplane-parts factory in North Carolina before returning home. She went back to the United States when some friends she played soccer with convinced her to go work on dairy farms in Wisconsin. The rent was free, and the cost of living much lower than in North Carolina. It was a good opportunity, which is why, despite the risks, she went back a third time. She poses for a photo with her collection of cow figurines in her livingroom. “You just can’t make enough money here,” Blanca says of her hometown.

Farmers in Wisconsin, where about 80 percent of the dairy workforce is Mexican, say they can’t find better workers than the immigrants who milk their cows.

Farmers in Wisconsin say they can’t find better workers than the Mexican immigrants who milk their cows.

Now both the workers and the farmers worry that escalating anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, and beefed-up border enforcement, are disrupting their symbiotic relationship.

A year ago, a story picked up by several Wisconsin newspapers gave an account of one Mexican family’s departure from a local dairy farm. Reporter Alexandra Hall described how an increasingly hostile environment led the Hernández family, after years of working on the farm, to pack their belongings into a Honda pickup truck and drive 2,300 miles back to Veracruz.

“It looks like a scene from The Grapes of Wrath, farm owner Doug Knoepke commented as he watched his twenty-year employee, Miguel Hernández, and Hernandez’s wife, Luisa Tepole, pack the truck.

The family is now back in Texhuacán.

I found that same Honda pickup truck parked on the street when I visited Texhuacán in May.

Miguel Hernández was at his new job, driving a taxi. Luisa Tepole showed me the house they have nearly finished building since they arrived here almost a year ago. Standing in the garden, we were surrounded by a breathtaking view of lush, green mountains. Clouds sailed by at eye-level, crossing in front of a crazy-quilt of corn fields, pitched at impossible angles on the steep slopes. From the garden, you could see the bright yellow colonial church in the village below.

Luisa showed me the chickens she is raising to sell, using the incubator she brought back from the States. She is growing herbs and vegetables. Pots of roses bloomed by the kitchen door.

The Hernández family left the ugliness of Donald Trump’s America, returning to this beautiful place with enough money to build themselves a new home.

Both of them grew up in Texhuacán, but they met, married, and had their children, six-year-old Thomas and four-year-old Liam, in Wisconsin.

“My older son wants to go back,” Luisa says. It was hard on him when he started school here in the fall. He had lived in Wisconsin all his life, and the other kids made fun of the way he spoke Spanish.

But the teacher was kind, and said she would help Thomas learn Spanish and he could teach her English. As the school year draws to a close, his Spanish has improved.

And there are other benefits of being back home in Veracruz.

There are lots of cousins and friends who stop by and yell to the kids to come out and play.

Back in Wisconsin, they weren’t allowed to go outside alone. The farm was ten minutes from town, and they only saw their friends at school. “There, they spent a lot of time on TV, the tablet, the computer,” Luisa says. “Here they can go out with their friends and run. . . . It’s healthier.”

The food here is healthier, too, she adds. They eat the eggs her chickens lay and more fresh vegetables and fruits.

But most of all, she says, “We are free here.”

In Wisconsin, the pressure was becoming unbearable.

After Trump won, people in town seemed to feel emboldened to shout insults and make nasty remarks, Luisa says. Some men yelled ugly things at her husband in the street, telling him to go back to his own country.

There was an immigration raid at the gas station in the little town of Durand, ten minutes from the farm where they lived. “We were living in fear that they would grab us and the boys would be left behind,” she says.

“My son was the only Mexican boy in his Catholic school. One of the parents there was the local sheriff. He never looked at us in a bad way,” Luisa says. But at parent meetings, there was one mother who always stared at Luisa and Miguel, making them feel uncomfortable, “like she wanted them to throw us out.”

“We didn’t want the boys to live like that.”

After Miguel was pulled over while driving (the police said he threw a cigarette out the window, the family says he doesn’t smoke), their older son got very nervous. “Every time we’d see the police my son would say, ‘Papa! The police! Stop! Hide!’ ”

For their children’s peace of mind, Luisa and Miguel decided to move back to Veracruz. Although, Luisa says, they don’t rule out going back some day, “It’s better to be here until things calm down.”

The Hernández family is unusual among the people I spoke with in Texhuacán because they stayed in the United States so long. Luisa was there for eleven years, and Miguel for twenty.

Mostly, their friends and family members cross the border to work for three to five years, save up money, and return. They go with the idea of coming back and making a better life in Mexico.

It might surprise Americans to hear that the people here don’t go to the United States to pursue the American Dream. They go to finance their dreams back home.

Everyone I spoke with in Texhuacán prefers life in Mexico, but said they would go back to the States to make money.

Blanca used some of the money she earned in Wisconsin to set herself up as a school teacher. She bought a friend’s place in the school system when the friend decided to retire—a common practice in Mexico—and is taking university courses in bilingual instruction, while teaching at a bilingual preschool in Nahuatl and Spanish.

“Now I have my house, my car, and my job, with the money I earned on the farm,” Blanca said. “I’ve achieved my goals.”

Blanca’s friend Fatima Anastaseo Ptepole, who crossed with her the last time, used the money she saved from milking cows in Minnesota to open a papeleria. She sells school supplies across the street from the little local high school in Texhuacán.

Life in Mexico is happier, both women say. Back with family, living in the house she built right next to her siblings’ houses, Blanca reels off all the parties they’ve celebrated just during the month of May: May Day, Cinco de Mayo, May 15 (teacher’s day), birthdays, the town’s saint’s day. “We are big partiers. Over there [in Wisconsin] we barely even celebrated Christmas. It’s a big difference. We like to get together and celebrate everything.”

Working twelve- to sixteen-hour days, seven days a week on the farm, there wasn’t much time for fun.

Blanca’s brother Mariano Hernández tells me he spent five years on a dairy farm in Wisconsin in order to pay for his children’s studies. It was hard, he says. “I could only talk to them on the phone.” Two of his children have graduated from the Autonomous University of Puebla. His son is now a mechanical engineer and works at an energy plant, and his daughter is a teacher. “I was very grateful to my boss because they finished their studies,” he says. “You can earn more there. Here you only earn enough to survive.”

I ask if he would want his kids to go, and he hesitates. But his daughter jumps in: “It’s a good opportunity for us,” she says.

If Mexican workers’ relationship with the United States is a relationship of dependency, the dependents are not immigrants coming illegally to the United States to live off hard-working American taxpayers, as lawyer Aaron Schlossberg asserted in a recent racist rant. The real dependents are U.S. employers, as well as Mexican communities like Texhuacán that survive on migrant labor. Undocumented workers are carrying the economies of both places on their backs.

“I don’t want to offend you, but why do Americans say ugly things about Mexicans?” my taxi driver asked as he drove up the mountain to Texhuacán. Americans don’t seem to want to work like Mexicans do, he added.

Fatima’s employer in Minnesota agrees. Fatima dials him up in Caledonia, Minnesota, from inside her papeleria.

“A lot of Americans don’t want to do these jobs,” he tells me. “And I need people to do them, because I can’t do everything myself.”

“They’re some of the best workers I’ve ever worked with,” the farmer says of Fatima and her brother, who also worked for him. “They’re willing to put in a hard day’s work with a smile on their face. They’re just humble people, fun to work with.”

Toward the end of the call, he gets nervous about having his name used in an article about undocumented immigrants.

He has visited Texhuacán through a program called Puentes/Bridges, a cultural exchange program created by Shaun Duvall, a Spanish teacher from rural Alma, Wisconsin, that brings farmers to see their workers’ homes in Mexico. “It was an eye-opener,” he says. “It kinda helped me understand why they do what they do.” They had a party, with lots of Mexican food and dancing, and the farmers had a great time.

Fatima shows me the landscape painting of cows the farmer’s family gave her when she came back to Mexico. It’s hanging in her new house, near the breakfast bar and shiny new refrigerator, with an inscription on the back, in broken Spanish, on the back thanking her warmly for her hard work and friendship.

Farmers and workers alike tell me they wish there were a visa program that would make it easier for workers to travel back and forth across the border.

Mostly, what I hear from workers in Texhuacán is how much they appreciate the chance they had to work in the United States, even at jobs that lasted from 4 am to 8 pm, seven days a week.

The most striking thing about the people I interviewed is how much they embody the very qualities people in the United States are raised to see as particularly American-- an indomitable, can-do attitude, a daunting work ethic, and a genius for getting ahead by sheer tenaciousness. And, of course, strong family values.

“You get homesick,” Fatima said. Her mother and 102-year-old grandmother come into the family kitchen to greet me, and sit by the wood-burning stove. Her little nephew runs by and gives her a hug.

Despite the comfort of home, Fatima, like everyone I talk to, would seriously consider going back to work in the States.

“Who wouldn’t want to go back?” says Fatima. “Are you going to take me? Let’s go!”

Despite the danger, the long work hours, the years away from family, people are still willing to go. Those U.S. dollars are a powerful draw, and until economic conditions change, people in Texhuacán will keep making the risky journey north. And the dairy farmers of Wisconsin and Minnesota will continue to welcome them back.

Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large of The Progressive.