SANTA ANA — In a haggard Orange County neighborhood of rental houses and faceless apartment buildings, of litter and rusting shopping carts, 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.
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 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 each other, 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.
Experiences Repeated Elsewhere
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," said Leo Chavez, an anthropology professor at UC Irvine. Those who follow cluster together for a generation or two before assimilating into American culture.
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 tightly to the intimacy of a small town.
Over time, however, the immigrants learned that with opportunity and vastly higher incomes came financial pressures, fear of crime, occasional--though still rare--divorce and unrelenting competition from others with the same dreams.
