This article was reprinted with permission from The Hartford Courant . It originally appeared in the January 28, 2007 issue of that publication.



WALLINGFORD -- Delia Guajardo wipes the infirmary walls at Choate Rosemary Hall, a prep school of America’s elite.

Guajardo was once an experienced and respected public administrator in Mexico, with a secretary assigned to bring her paperwork and coffee. She now spends her days cleaning counters and door handles, dusting air vents and mopping floors. Walking through a student’s dorm room, she spies a paper clip on the floor, bends and retrieves it.

Guajardo arrived in Wallingford 18 years ago for what was supposed to be a short visit, but she stayed for her children’s sake. The sacrifices have been worth it, with one daughter on her way to becoming a teacher and the other studying to be a doctor. Though Guajardo makes less than $10 an hour, her husband, Juan Guajardo, earns as much as $60,000 a year at the local steel mill. His work is more grueling, but it pays.

The Guajardos are part of a thriving but reclusive community of about 500 Mexican families who moved to Wallingford from Lagunillas, a small, agrarian town in the Mexican state of Michoacán. They came, like many immigrants, for opportunity and money. Most of them are legal and naturalized citizens - for all appearances the archetypical immigrants who walked off Ellis Island and into a Norman Rockwell frame.

But these are reluctant Americans.

They fled no oppression. They are not tempest-tossed, wretched refuse, yearning to breathe free. They remain exuberantly Mexican, even though many have lived in the United States for decades. They would much rather live in México lindo, beautiful Mexico, the land that blew life into their lungs and sunned their caramel skin. For them, U.S. citizenship is not a political ideal, but a convenience that makes it easier to travel home.

The American dollar allows them to flourish. Few first-generation, unskilled immigrants drive Cadillac Escalades earned by the sweat of their brow.

They keep a low profile in Wallingford and are careful not to engage the larger community, either socially or politically. They tolerate the punishing conditions at the steel plant, and the chore of vacuuming at Choate - accepting the kinds of jobs some people say American workers don’t want.

“This is the best opportunity I’ve had in the United States,” said Luís Yánez, a Mexican metallurgist who has worked at the steel plant for four years. “We don’t take anybody’s job away. We are really part of this economy,” he said.

They cling to their Mexican culture, celebrating rites of passage as they would in Lagunillas, with live bands, steaming plates of rice, beans and beef, and generosity from friends and relatives.

Each December, the steel mill shuts down, allowing dozens of families to desert Wallingford and make the trek to Lagunillas, Michoacán’s smallest town. They stay for as long as a month, visiting aging parents and celebrating Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas, with a townwide Mass. They host a rodeo and revel at the fiesta de los norteños, a blowout party organized by the Northerners for their town.

For that one month, they can forget their jobs manipulating metal or cleaning up after privileged students. But when the calendar commands them back to Connecticut, Lagunillas once again becomes sad and quiet, as do its departing norteños.

Recasting An Age-Old Narrative

The Mexican presence in Connecticut is growing rapidly - from 8,393 in 1990 to 35,800 in 2005, according to U.S. Census figures. And Connecticut, which has long been a Puerto Rican enclave, now has the largest population of Mexicans in New England.

Undocumented workers make up the largest share of recently arrived Mexican immigrants, but Wallingford’s Mexicans don’t fit the picture of day laborers waiting on a street corner. They seem to be recasting an age-old narrative that portrays immigrants as eager to exchange one nationality for another.

“Everyone comes here and fits in this linear line from migrant to American citizen,” said Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, an assistant history professor at the University of Connecticut. “That’s the story that we’ve all heard, the heroic story.” The Mexican community in Wallingford, Overmyer-Velázquez said, really complicates the story.

Several factors seem to play a role in the Lagunillans’ reluctance: They are politically disengaged and financially autonomous, relatively few learn English, and they maintain strong family networks and cultural traditions across the border.

History, though, suggests that the Lagunillans, or their children, will slowly become part of the American fabric. Their immigrant narrative is still evolving.

“Part of what’s happening in terms of the immigration debates,” said David Lindstrom, an associate sociology professor at Brown University, “is that people are looking at only the very recent immigrants - and in the case of Mexico, there’s a lot of very recent immigration from Mexico - then making the false conclusion that Mexicans don’t want to integrate and be part of the United States.”

All For The Children

Delia Guajardo’s happiness peaked in Mexico.

“My dream was my career, my profession,” she said.

A respected administrator in her home state of Michoacán, Guajardo was surrounded by family and the people she describes as her true friends.

That life slipped out of her hands after the devaluation of the Mexican peso in the 1980s. Guajardo was safe from the onslaught of layoffs, but her husband, an agricultural engineer trained in land and water conservation, quit his low-paying job before he could be laid off and sought work in the United States in 1988.

“My husband wanted to try his luck here,” she said. “I thought he would stay six months and return.”

But Juan Guajardo had savored the taste of the dollar. Spitting it out was not an option. Delia Guajardo and her daughters, then 4 and 2, arrived in Wallingford the next year for what was supposed to be a three-month visit. She had a return ticket home, but Juan had other plans.

She would have celebrated her 27th service anniversary this year at the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, the national health insurance system, and would have qualified for full retirement benefits. If someone had described to Guajardo what her life would become, she would have dismissed it as fiction.

“Assume that I exchanged an entire world for that family unity,” she said. “I left my career, my job, my friends, my personal evolution.”

Like many of the men who work at the steel mill, Juan Guajardo moved to Wallingford first, then acquired visas for his wife and two daughters to join him. Their only son, the family’s first American citizen, was born here in 1990.

Today, Delia and Juan Guajardo are homeowners, and their children are tallying their own successes. Ana, 20, spent a semester in France and earned a full scholarship from Eastern Connecticut State University, where she is a biology major and French minor; 22-year-old Brenda, the oldest, is completing her master’s degree in teaching at the University of Connecticut and has worked with international students studying English at Choate; Juan Luís Guajardo, 16, began high school last year.

Delia Guajardo has kept a loving archive of her children’s pasts: Brenda’s uniform from her partial schooling in Mexico, awards, certificates, poems and videos of the girls’ quinceañeras - their 15th birthday celebrations.

The girls still watch those videos, and they still ask their mother to braid their hair. It is during these moments that Delia seems happiest. She shares her love of poetry with Brenda Guajardo, who was first introduced to meter and rhyme in the womb.

“In writing a poem, what one has tucked inside blossoms,” Delia Guajardo said.

During an impromptu reading of the anonymous “I Gave You Life,” Brenda’s and Delia’s voices stream in and out as they take turns reciting the verses from memory. The sadness that manacles Delia releases her for a few precious moments.

She arrives at her favorite poet, Manuel Acuña, whose final poem, “Nocturno a Rosario,” stands as a testament to the pain of unrequited love. Guajardo recites the lines with the intensity of a man willing to end his life rather than live without love, as Acuña did in 1873.

“I have to tell you that I adore you,” she incants. “That I suffer very much, that I cry very much ... With a cry, I implore you, I implore you and I speak to you in the name of my last illusion.”

The soliloquy could easily express Guajardo’s relationship with Mexico, her homeland, and the United States, her keeper and tormentor.

U.S. citizenship is a loaded topic in her home. For Delia and Ana Guajardo, even dual citizenship isn’t palatable; they consider themselves Mexican and intend to stay that way. Brenda became a naturalized citizen about three years ago to obtain student financial aid. “It made me angry,” Brenda says.

While taking a break at Choate’s infirmary waiting room, Delia reveals that her husband is once again tapping into his persuasive abilities. This time, Juan Guajardo wants to convince her that they should become U.S. citizens.

Juan tells his wife that he won’t become a citizen without her - a ploy - but Delia flushes the idea out of her system. U.S. citizenship, she said, would dilute the blood that runs through her veins.

“I am a very sincere person - very frank,” she says. “I don’t like to do things without feeling them. My blood is Mexican, and I want to continue feeling Mexican.”

The Quinceañera

If the Lagunillans are reluctant, so too is Wallingford.

The Mexicans are practiced at fading into the crowd, but they are unmasked when their outsized celebratory style overwhelms the neighborhood.

The quinceañera, an homage to blossoming womanhood, is one of many Mexican traditions the Lagunillans have preserved.

The 15th birthday party is a window into the Americanization of the youth of Lagunillas and the tension between the quietude of Wallingford and the boot-stomping joy the Lagunillans long to feel, even if for just one night.

On a cool fall evening, Jacqueline Serna is in her backyard rehearsing a choreographed waltz for her quinceañera. José and Jonathan Soto and four other teens take their places. They are Jacqueline’s chambelanes, her dance partners. The festivities will include a Mass with a mariachi band, a white limo and a party that will draw about 400 guests.

Gloria Rodríguez, a family friend who has been teaching the teens the choreography, cues the music. A swooning arpeggio, a broken chord played on a harp-like instrument, fills the air and a man begins to sing in Spanish.

“While visiting your garden, 1,000 butterflies began to say beautiful things,” he warbles. “The prettiest of the 1,000 kissed a rose and then went to you, marvelous.”

The boys tap their feet, right to left, left to right, lightly scraping the concrete. Jacqueline unceremoniously spins toward the boys and they each take turns twirling her with upturned pinkies.

Later, the boys try to create a dance routine to Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” to complement the sentimental waltz. For a moment, they lose all self-consciousness, gyrating their hips and gesticulating with their hands.

From the edge of their makeshift stage, they look like children, freed from the demands of their evolving identity. Later, they deny that any enjoyment took place.

On the day of the party, they are at the Hungarian Community Hall, stomachs in knots, as 400 people turn to watch them. Jackie, in a pink, poofy dress, is waiting for her cue. Her dark hair is curled around a gold crown.

Juan Rodríguez Jr., one of Jackie’s dance partners, is not sure if they will have enough space to dance.

“I’m really nervous,” he says.

The performance is perfect, except for a moment when Gloria Rodríguez thought a candle was going to set Jackie’s dress on fire.

Everyone who contributed to the event drinks a toast and the party gets underway.

Couples dance in each other’s arms. Fathers and mothers hold their babies as they dance with their spouses.

For a few moments, cultures mix. The crowd line dances to the song “Achy Breaky Heart” in Spanish. The younger guests form a loose circle and begin dancing to a pulsing beat. They are wearing glow sticks around their necks and doing their best tricks, spinning on their backs and doing the wave with interlocked fingers, moves that were invented on the streets of New York City before they were born.

Culture Clash

Someone has called the police about the music pulsing from the Hungarian Community Hall.

At 10:50 p.m., two police officers work their way through the crowded hall. They approach a man near the stage, exchange words, then walk up the steps to the stage and talk to a musician.

After a few moments, the man makes an announcement: The party’s over. The audience boos. He repeats, offering condolences to those who planned to stay until 2 a.m.

People slowly slip on their coats and file to the front exit, passing the empty Bud Light cans on the tables.

Gloria Rodríguez turns and as delicately as she can, says it’s actually better to end the party early. This way, people go home before they’re too drunk, she says, pointing out that at the last quinceañera, someone got into a fight on the dance floor.