SANTA ANA — In a haggard neighborhood of rental houses and faceless apartment buildings, of rusting shopping carts, produce trucks and litter blown against chain-link fences, the rebirth of a dying Mexican village began.
Here, near 1st Street and Grand Avenue in the heart of Santa Ana, the first people from Granjenal settled 35 years ago, after two decades of following crops around the American Southwest under the U.S.-sponsored bracero program.
This is where hundreds of relatives and friends followed--some with papers, some illegally--as their town in the parched hills of northern Michoacan state emptied.
Orange County's fast-growing suburban sprawl created a hungry job market, and Granjenal's people developed a reputation as uncomplaining and adept at the low-skilled muscle work that was the foundation of the construction trade--digging ditches, pouring concrete, laying irrigation lines and planting sod.
Their new neighborhood was affordable and, more important, within walking distance of the Laborers Union, Local 652, where most men reported at 5 a.m. to be trucked to work at new tracts in the southern part of the county.
Newly arrived families shared apartments or houses near one another, slowly re-creating their community and cushioning the jolting transition from rural Third World poverty to urban blue-collar life.
At the same time, they helped transform Santa Ana from a city of English-speaking, American-born Anglos to one that is overwhelmingly Latino and Spanish-speaking, and increasingly foreign-born.
Their story is typical of immigrant movement from rural areas, a process known to anthropologists as network migration.
"A pioneer manages to establish a foothold in a place and then serves as the focal point for others," UC Irvine anthropology professor Leo Chavez said. Those who follow cluster together for a generation or two before assimilating into the culture. "That's pretty much the story of immigration."
Joined by weddings, baptisms, funerals and Sunday Mass, by twice-a-year dances at the union hall and by soccer games that pitted them against other immigrants, the people of Granjenal held on as tightly as they could to the intimacy of a small town.
Over time, however, the immigrants learned their new community was as fleeting and illusory as the summer rains at home that so often promised, then failed, to give life to fields of corn.
