Prosperity eludes many in Monterrey

By Jesse Christopherson, Maniel Egea and Sarah Muench

While Monterrey's standard of living is steadily rising, poverty is never far away.

Every year, nearly 70,000 people from other parts of Mexico immigrate to Monterrey in search of jobs in one of its many factories and businesses. Those immigrants often settle in "poverty belts" on the outskirts of the city in communities like Colonia la Aliauza, where a few thousand families have built makeshift shelters out of boards and scrap metal.

Stray dogs and old horses nose along through dirt yards and dirt streets while two children play atop an abandoned toilet. There is no city trash collection; that job falls to enterprising residents who haul away trash for a small donation. They dump their loads into the weeds along the sides of roads.  

Pablo Bernal, 60, came here from Salinas years ago to find work and ended up operating a jackhammer for the government, breaking up concrete for building projects.

He's too old to work now, he said. "I can't. I fall."

But he still wears his construction helmet; it helps protect him when he falls.

He's missing most of his teeth, and his speech is barely intelligible, but he's eager for company. He sits, his back straight and his cane propped in front of him, on a chair parked in a patch of shade in front of his house. He spends many hours this way, watching the dirt road and greeting passers-by.

Minverva Montoya also came here from a small town looking for opportunity after she and her husband separated. She found work at a clinic, cleaning and doing odd jobs, but the pay barely supported her family. Now she stays home to care for her 80-year-old mother, five children and numerous grandchildren.

She would like to go back to work, but she doesn't expect to ever get ahead.

"Almost all the jobs pay the same," - no more than 650 pesos a week or about $57, she said.

Otilia Lisiago, 48, was among the very first settlers in La Alianza about eight years ago. She came because she had no place else to go.

Lisiago grew up living next to a train track. One day, the Mexican government forced her family and others to leave, saying the place was too dangerous. The squatters moved to a settlement outside of Monterrey, but it was soon boiling over with crime and gangs, so they moved again, this time to a place where no one else lived.

But the community soon grew to 30 families, then 300, and began climbing into the thousands.

Lisiago and other women have begun several projects to make money and improve their community: they gather in an old classroom to make arts and crafts to sell, and they plan to refurbish some old carnival rides abandoned in a nearby dirt lot.

"I've made lots of friends here," Lisiago said. "Here, they know how hard one works for everyone else."

While some government officials deny there is a poverty problem in Monterrey, preferring to concentrate on the prosperity of a rising middle class, others acknowledge it.

Romeo Flores Caballero, executive coordinator for northeast regional development for the city of Monterrey, says Monterrey's poverty rate is below that of the rest of the country, where nearly 50 percent of the people are considered poor. In Monterrey, that figure is less than 20 percent.

The city is constantly struggling to accommodate immigrants who come because "there is hope, there is life, there is hope of work," he said.

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