Warnings about the coronavirus now sent with money to Mexico
NEW YORK — In the weeks he spent flat on his back in his Brooklyn bunk, wracked with pain and struggling to breathe, Axayacatl Figueroa could think of nothing but the small town and the family he had left behind in Mexico.
Each month, he had sent $300 or $400 to his wife and son in San Jeronimo Xayacatlan. The money was hard-earned: For more than a decade, he cleaned pork, cut meat and boned chickens in the basement kitchen of a Vietnamese restaurant.
But now, Figueroa had COVID-19. There was no work, and there was no money to send home.
“I felt desperate. I couldn’t do anything,” he said.
For as long as Mexicans have gone north to find work, money has gone in the opposite direction. These remittances from expatriates working in the United States and other countries have been the life blood of places like San Jeronimo, a village of nearly 4,000 people in central Mexico.
But these days, fear accompanies the money that crosses the border. And it travels both ways.
Those who went to live in New York and other American cities are worried about how to keep supporting their families. They also send home warnings about the terrors of the virus.
Those who live in San Jeronimo and other towns and cities in Mexico fear for their relatives in the north, watching from afar as they lose their jobs, fall sick alone or without the documents that would allow them to move around freely — and, too often, die in a foreign land.
The World Bank and United Nations estimate that remittances to Latin American countries will fall nearly 20 percent this year, but Mexico appears to be holding on. Mexican migrants sent home a record $4 billion in March. After a dip in April, numbers were strong again in May.
Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center, says much of that money came from workers who received unemployment benefits in the U.S.
Emigrants from San Jeronimo typically work off the books and are paid in cash, so they didn’t get benefits or stimulus payments, Wood said.
As the remittance money dried up in San Jeronimo, homebuilding came to a halt and people started eating only what they could slaughter from their herds or harvest from their fields.
Family in New York told them to prepare for the coronavirus: “The people are suffering here and it will happen there, too,” Clara Lara’s son warned her from Staten Island. He sent her money with one request — buy cloth and make face masks.
Lara followed her son’s instructions. One neighbor cut the fabric. Another folded it, and two others sewed masks.
In five weeks, they made nearly 500 masks and distributed them to neighbors with clear instructions from Dona Clara: Drink hot soup and tea and, if you notice any symptoms, isolate yourself at home.
So even before Mexico began debating quarantines, emigrants from this town imposed one on their families from 2,500 miles away. San Jeronimo stopped moving. To date, no villagers have been infected; the mayor says six townspeople living in the U.S. have died.
On April 17, the church bells tolled for the first victim from the town, a young man living in New York. Four days later, another died.
“I didn’t believe it until I lived it in the flesh,” said Wilfrido Martinez, 69, who lost his 39-yearold son.
Mauricio worked in a restaurant kitchen in New York. He was diabetic and didn’t protect himself against infection, Martinez said.
On July 11, nearly three months after his death, his son’s ashes arrived from New York, destined for the town’s cemetery to be buried alongside his mother.