A Tale of Two Cities, Global Village Style : Immigrants: With high-tech communications and easy jet travel, you can go home again--often.

By DOREEN CARVAJAL

Oct. 24, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

JALOSTOTITLAN, Mexico — In the dim, amber candlelight of morning Mass, the town’s aging parish is lined with souls.

Crowded in the rough pine pews are hundreds of worshipers who fled Mexico when their faces were smooth, their ambitions grand and their dream destination was truly the city of Disneyland--Anaheim.

“Los ausentes, “ they call them. The absent ones.

Yearly, they are drawn to the towering pink-stone, colonial church of this Jalisco village for wistful reunions and dazzling white-fire rocket bursts that celebrate the simple rites of a global village.

Their hometown is a state of mind, a village of cobblestone on one side of the border and suburban tract homes on the other, with boundaries made of faxes, flights and videotapes. “Transnational community” is the fashionable academic description for such hybrids, whose inhabitants have efficiently intensified immigration through a complex chain of hometown friends and high technology.

Other exotic strains are flourishing throughout California, mixing the tenement buildings of South-Central Los Angeles with the Mayan hamlets of northwest Guatemala or the bungalows of Monterey Park with the urban high-rises of Taipei, Taiwan.

“We talk about how corporations are going global. The reality is people are going global,” said Timothy P. Fong, an assistant professor at Cal State Northridge who has studied the immigrant chain linking Taipei to Monterey Park.

So many highly paid Taipei professionals jet between lives in Taiwan and California, for instance, that their countrymen have coined a nickname for these masters of the universe-- “tai kun fei jen”-- spacemen.

Technology has reduced travel time, eased communication and slashed immigration costs in such a way that new-wave immigrants are able to share countries like neighbors borrow cups of sugar.

From San Miguel, Guatemala, an isolated parish priest has fashioned an international pulpit with a video camera that he uses to deliver sermons and charity appeals to his missing flock of Kanjobal-speaking Mayans in South-Central Los Angeles.

The homemade videos are flickering images of parish members pounding nails on the village church or sentimental scenes of Sunday Mass with the sober chimes of the new chapel bell. Facing the camera, the priest does not dwell long on the heavenly; the hometown parish desperately needs money for repairs, he intones.

Similar pleas in other languages have resulted in a shower of civic gifts for Latin American and Asian global villages: new ambulances, rodeo corrals, paved roads, restored churches, youth centers. Often, these desperate messages are delivered personally by priests, politicians or visiting dignitaries such as “Miss Indigenous Guatemala,” who have trailed their countryfolk northward.

“To understand what’s going on you have to think of time,” said Father Ed Poettgen. The priest has followed Mexican parishioners from their Catholic churches in Anaheim and Stanton to Cargadero, Zacatecas and Jalostotitlan.

“When people say they’re going to Mexico, it sounds like a long way,” he said. “But when I think of Guadalajara, it’s actually a lot closer to fly to than, say, Chicago.”

Technology has so compressed time that it’s a relatively simple matter for a group of immigrants to alert relatives and hometown friends to a job opening in a San Gabriel Valley computer factory or a low-priced apartment in Santa Ana. It has allowed Oaxacan Indians from Mexico to savor minute details of a 15-year-old niece’s Southern California birthday party with a two-hour video.

“When we send audio cassettes to Guatemala, our relatives tell us it’s like having you there in person. They say, ‘It seems like you’re right there sitting in front of me,’ ” said Leonel Say, 23, of Los Angeles, who ships his tapes through a special courier service to his family’s hometown in San Miguel Acatan.

Poettgen, the priest, discovered the global nature of his former parish in Anaheim one Saturday afternoon while listening to whispered confessions. “All of a sudden I hear this band starting up,” he said. “It was a bus from Tijuana with the (statue) of San Rafael.”

In the darkness of a cramped confessional, he remembered an encounter in Mexico with a Zacatecas priest who bemoaned that he had lost many members of his Cargadero parish to Anaheim. In sympathy, Poettgen invited the priest for a California reunion, failing to realize the invitation would also draw the municipal band’s tuba section.

Eventually, the tubas and bus rumbled south, but the statue of Cargadero’s patron saint was left behind and circulated among the living rooms of more than 200 immigrant families for a year of prayer and rosary chants.

The elaborately robed icon offered more than divine inspiration; San Rafael strengthened the hometown bonds that social anthropologists consider one of the major driving forces in mass migration.

“Paisanaje” is the Spanish label for this relationship. It means common origin, a form of kinship that becomes a vital lifeline for immigrants from the same hometown who draw together in a foreign country to cope with the hardships of a new culture.

These paisanos --whose families have lived together in the same hometown for generations--are expected to share information about jobs, pool resources, loan money and provide room-and- board to newcomers who have followed the path of their hometown pioneers.

That camaraderie extends even to raising money for the one-way ticket for a friend’s final trip home returning to the hometown in a simple coffin.

In many transnational communities, so many dollars stream home that in some hometowns, there are more U.S. dollars circulating in their economy than pesos, according to University of Pennsylvania sociologist Douglas Massey, who has studied immigration chains in western Mexico.

“By the time you get to this level, jobs become relatively less important in drawing people,” said Massey. “Immigration becomes supported by social networks and the whole process takes on a life of its own. When people come of age, it’s just assumed that’s what one does.”

The network acts with the same efficiency of an underground railroad line, drawing people to established stations even though other cities and states may be geographically closer.

To a large extent, the chains explain why more than two-thirds of Mexico’s U.S.-bound migrants come from seven of the country’s 31 states and usually from particular villages within those provinces.

It also explains the immigration of upper middle class professionals and computer firm owners from Taiwan who were drawn to Monterey Park initially in the 1970s by a Taiwanese real estate agent who promoted the suburb as the Chinese Beverly Hills.

“The image of Monterey Park as Little Taipei has really facilitated a lot of immigration. The U.S. is really Los Angeles County for people from Taiwan” said Yen Fen Tseng, a sociologist from Taiwan.

Tseng herself is a “spacewoman,” shuttling between jobs at UCLA and Tun Ghei University in Taiwan. The frenetic life, she said, is considered a status symbol for Taiwanese men who can afford to send their wives and children to Los Angeles while they remain behind.

Charity flows in the same direction; the wealthy Buddhist welfare agency, Tse Ze, sends money to the Los Angeles area to support programs for Taiwanese immigrants.

“Communities are not just bonded by geography,” said Rob Smith, an assistant sociology professor at City College of New York and director of the Transnational Migration Project at Columbia University. “They are more powerfully bonded by people. And once a community is established in a foreign country, it lowers the cost of immigration tremendously, both psychologically and financially. Your community is waiting for you.”

As morning dawned in Jalostotitlan, the slow-motion stroke of church bells thundered through the town’s deserted plaza, calling the ausentes home. Slowly the square filled with sun-bronzed men in cowboy hats and women carrying fresh palm branches and gladiolas.

Jose Luis Reynoso, 22 years in Anaheim and still yearning for the colonial town of his birth, once understood the language of the tower bells. Now he knows only that they summon him home to a small town of sherbet-colored colonial houses nicknamed “Jaloswood” for the huge white letters spelling out Jalostotitlan along the emerald green hills.

“We’re divided, but Jalostotitlan is part of me,” said Reynoso, 38, a custodial supervisor at St. Boniface Church in Anaheim, who has returned to initiate his 14-year-old U.S.-born son, Roberto, in the rites of his hometown.

Together they have wandered the town, pausing at Reynoso’s old school and the festive plaza where young men in slender, faded jeans toss plastic confetti at girls strolling in endless circles in an old-fashioned dating ritual called the paseo. Reynoso gazes at them thoughtfully, remembering when he used to scoop the confetti in handfuls from the concrete because he couldn’t afford to buy his own.

“I came to California when I was 16, but I was born and raised with their rules, their morals,” said Reynoso. “My hometown made me the way I am.”

His soft voice is suddenly overwhelmed by the town band’s doleful music, the tubas bellowing and drums pounding. Behind the band are men and women singing mananitas, traditional songs of celebration, trailing a delicate, white-robed statue of the Virgin of the Assumption, the town’s patron saint.

The religious procession of mostly California immigrants stretches the length of a grassy soccer field and wanders up the hill toward the grand iron-grill archway of the 300-year-old parish of Jalostotitlan. Each pilgrim wears a lime green and white name tag that permits entry into a special Mass for ausentes , an event so crowded that last August parish priests limited services for El Dia de los Ausentes services to returning immigrants, who numbered more than 1,500.

Standing patiently in line is Reyes Jauregui, 61, a father of seven and a retired sugar beet farmer from Chico, Calif. with a stiff-brimmed cowboy hat shading his walnut-colored skin. A man who by nature carefully selects his words, Jauregui speaks with passion about the first glimpse of his hometown in 37 years.

“My heart practically jumped out of my body,” said Jauregui, his weathered hand stroking his chest. “I was remembering the farms, the people.”

People like Miguel Gonzalez, 61, the Anaheim patriarch of a family with 13 sons and daughters, children--most of whom followed their father to Southern California after he moved there in 1966 to bus tables at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.

Eventually, Gonzalez and his sons would launch an Anaheim supermarket called Northgate, which would spawn 10 other family-owned stores selling Mexican products. Although the family is scattered throughout Southern California, they still return twice a year for hometown festivals in Jalostotitlan, staying in an airy downtown house that they use only during family visits.

A huge sign touting the Northgate market in Anaheim is painted in the interior of the corrida de toros, the bull ring where fights are staged twice a year during the town’s annual carnival and its religious festival for the Virgin of the Assumption. The Gonzalez family posted the advertisement to help their Mexican hometown and--more importantly--their Anaheim businesses.

“We come here because our roots are here,” said Gonzalez’s son and business partner, Miguel, 44. “This is where we were born and we come to share with the hometown. Visiting here is a way of recharging our batteries.”

Many other large families of Jalostotitlan have painstakingly fashioned the same chain. First, the fathers emigrated to Southern California when farmers were recruiting Mexican workers through the bracero program of the 1950s. Later, their sons or brothers would follow them north even though the road trip to California was lengthier and far more grueling and lengthy than a trip to the Texas border. Eventually, the daughters, sisters and wives would take the same path.

“Often, you have two towns next door to each other. And one town heads for Texas and the other for California,” said Devra Weber, an assistant professor of history at UC Riverside. “And the reason usually is that someone has gone there first, learning the ropes, getting established.” As tiny communities took hold in the 1970s and 1980s in South Gate and Anaheim, the move to California became a basic rite of passage for the young men of Jalostotitlan. Townspeople said the wanderlust seemed to seize their boys about age 16. That’s when they started yearning for shiny Thunderbirds and stylish designer jeans sported by the returning ausentes.

Others simply drifted north, pulled by links in the family chain.

“My family pushed me to go,” said Maurilio Romo, 34, a solar energy research technician from Palmdale who faithfully attends his hometown’s annual celebrations.

“We’re from a big family and we didn’t have much money,” Romo said. “My older brother was already there and he said it’s not enough to work in a Mexican factory. You can make more money in the U.S. I was always dreaming of going there ever since I was a small kid. At that time, people in the U.S. had money. So people here treated them like they had university degrees. They had nice cars, clothes, spending money.”

When Romo decided to head north in 1977, he called his brother, who wired him money for a ticket and offered him room and board. A job was waiting in a San Fernando Valley lamination factory.

Now, eight of the Romo brothers live in Southern California, returning often to the colonial house in Jalostotitlan where they were born. The cool tile floor, huge stained glass window and hand painted mosaics are a tribute to the work of the California immigrants who have paid to remodel their parents’ home while living in the states.

Their success story draws others to the underground railroad; but the trip is not always pleasant.

Jimenez Delfino, a 30-year-old hotel clerk in Jalostotitlan, remembers trying to cross the border 15 times during a two-week period before he finally left Tijuana for Southern California. From there he caught a bus bound for Anaheim, where a hometown friend was waiting.

But the finale to his U.S. adventure did not have the same triumphant ending of other ausentes who return to Jalostotitlan’s festivals with golden tales of prosperity and the shiny cars to prove it.

Jobless for nearly three months, Delfino relied again on a hometown relative for housing and a hometown friend who shared restaurant leftovers. And although Delfino had traveled to the United States to improve his life, he found himself so poor that he could afford to eat little except potatoes.

With his hunger driving him, Delfino caught a one-way ride on the underground railroad. Last stop: Jalostotitlan.

Returning ausentes expect to be questioned about the California dream when they gather in the town for fiestas. Tact is the preferred approach.

“A lot of times the old men will ask us, ‘How’s California?’ ” said Jose Padilla, 22, of Los Angeles. “They kind of have these illusions that it’s a paradise. They say how is the beautiful weather? They think everyone is rich. I don’t want to shatter their dreams and I also don’t want to show off. So I tell them it’s fine.”

The return of younger ausentes like Padilla is particularly intriguing to anthropologists who wonder whether a global village can truly flourish past the first generation of immigrants.

Padilla, a graduate engineering student at USC, doesn’t know about such theories. He only knows that he and nearly 20 other young cousins from California are drawn to Jalostotitlan every year to a sea-green corner house on Calle Zaragoza that generations ago was the fabled location of the town’s only whorehouse.

There, a grizzled 94-year-old man in a vanilla cowboy hat rests in a plastic chair, his metal cane leaning against aquamarine tiles, his dark, brown eyes doleful and patient.

Don Matias Jauregui is the first link in the family chain of those who left for the United States during the Mexican Revolution. And during most days of the year, he rests on the porch waiting for the return of some of more than 300 relatives who followed his path to El Norte.