Roberto.
Roberto has been picked up by ICE and is in a county jail near Chicago. It is not clear to me whether this is good or bad. Roberto is from an indigenous group in rural western Mexico. The group is close and poor. They are descended from Aztecs but have developed their own culture and language. They live in a beautiful mountainous region with a shortage of productive farmland. They have a long history of traveling north to work temporarily, saving money, and then returning to the group until the money runs out. It is expected that their young men will travel to the United States or other parts of Mexico temporarily. Their Catholic Church has a yearly ceremony to bless the men who are working elsewhere. A tighter border has made this more difficult and some men, like Roberto, have not returned to families in Mexico.
The main work area in the United States has been New York City where 9 or 10 men live together in a high rent apartment. Some men from Mexico move in and others return home. Roberto was part of that population until he joined a group that traveled to the Mid-west where they tended to establish community ties and start new families. There are seven members of this group in our community and three of them have married outside the group and started families.
Roberto occupied a trailer which was abandoned by his cousin and other members of the group stayed with him. From New York Roberto brought a positive work record and recreation that focused on alcohol. He quickly established a positive work reputation in our community and became an assistant night manager in a restaurant. His days off were spent with alcohol. Gradually alcohol took over his life, he left his job, was charged with a DUI, and was summoned to numerous court appearances which he eventually ignored. When a family member entered his half of the trailer they found that he had sold all of the furniture to buy alcohol and had been sleeping on the floor. He had stopped paying lot rent and his cousin who still legally owns the trailer owes $2,000 rent. Other members of the group feel that they let him down and he owes all of them money. Their current plan is to wait until an immigration judge establishes a bond for him, pay it collectively and keep him with a family under their watchful eye until he again establishes a work record and pays everyone back. Alcohol is the elephant in the room which neither his relative nor ICE seem to know how to address.
