Island People – A Mexican immigrant’s long journey to a new life on Ocracoke

In the winter of 1985, 15-year-old Margarita Gonzalez left her impoverished home in central Mexico and, with her sister and a group of strangers, set out for the forbidden land of plenty to the north.

Now, 25 years later, she lives and works on Ocracoke Island. She is an American citizen, with her own home and a family, and two daughters bound for college.

Ocracoke’s population of Mexican people has become a significant part of the community here. They work in the restaurants, in motels, and in construction. They go to Catholic Mass on Fridays and Sundays. Their children attend day care and public school.

Some are here legally, like Margarita, while others lack the documentation required by the U.S. government. They are here seeking a better life than they could find in their home country, and they are willing to work for it. Many send money back to poorer relatives at home.

Their stories are varied and fascinating, filled with courage, determination, and sometimes danger, but most of the people who live and visit here know little about them. Margarita’s story is one example of the amazing journey she took to get here.

Realizing how little I knew about the Mexican people I saw here daily, I decided to try and learn more. I got in touch with Margarita through her friend and former employer, Martha Garrish, who asked her if she would like to tell her story. She agreed. Her English is quite good, but she asked her daughters, Jasmine, 16, and Alma, 13, both born in the United States and bilingual, to help with the interview. We sat in my living room. When answering some of the questions, Margarita consulted her daughters in Spanish, letting them translate the answers for me.

Margarita grew up in the Mayan village of Itatlaxco Mpio de Nicolas Flores in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, about five hours from Mexico City. The village is very small, rural, and poor. Many of the people living there are descendants of the ancient Mayan culture, and they still speak their own language. Margarita’s family is not Mayan, but Mexican.

She reminisced about her childhood there.

“There are mountains, and it is cold in winter, hot in summer. My Pa and Ma had 12 children, but two of them died. My Pa, he used to work the farm, planting beans (black beans) and corn for us to eat. For money my mom made bread and the children went to each house to sell it.”

The bread, recalls Margarita, was oval-shaped and meant to be eaten with morning coffee. It was made of flour, shortening, and agave juice. The juice was scraped from large agave plants, several times a day, and collected in a bucket. Her mother made both sweet and salt bread, adding either sugar and cinnamon or salt. She baked it over wood coals in an igloo-shaped outdoor oven made of rock and mud. Neither Margarita nor her daughters could think of a similar bread in the United States.

“I used to have it in my basket on my back or (she indicated her shoulder). If people don’t have money, they trade eggs or beans. Then we give money to my Ma.
 
“Mi casa (house) was small — just one room, made with straight branches tied together. When I came to the United States, it was the first time I slept in a bed. At home we slept on mats on the floor. The land belonged to us, but it was not very big. My dad worked the land with bulls to grow the beans and corn. We also had pigs and chickens and dogs. My aunt, who lived in Mexico City, would send us clothes people gave her.”

Margarita and her siblings grew up eating black beans, corn tortillas, and salsa. They rarely ate meat, but on the children’s birthdays, their mother would kill one of the chickens for a special dinner. Raised Catholic, they were able to attend church only twice a year, when the priest came to the village.

How, I wondered, did a 15-year-old girl get up the courage to leave her home and move to such a faraway land?

At that time in Mexico, Margarita explained, public school only went through what here is called middle school. Her mother could not afford to send her for more education, so when her older sister, Irene, offered to take Margarita with her to the United States, she accepted.

The sisters took a bus, riding for twelve hours to the town of Matamoros. There they met up with a “coyote,” the man who would get them into the States. Along with 25 other Mexicans, they were taken to a big river, the Rio Grande, which forms the border between Mexico and the United States.

“I came illegal,” Margarita explained. “We crossed the river at night, on (she looked to her daughters for the right words.) rafts, made from boards tied on inner tubes — four to a raft. I was scared very much.”

Men in boats pulled the rafts, silently rowing across the river toward the land of opportunity.

They came ashore at Brownsville, Tex. Making it to the American shore did not mean, however, that they were safe. The illegal immigrants spent the next two days and nights walking and hiding, getting as far as possible away from the border.

 “It was bad cold at night,” recalls Margarita, “so that the water in the milk jugs we had to carry froze.”

After 36 hours of walking they arrived at a place Margarita called Cowpul — a small village or ranch, she thought. Two vans driven by Mexican men picked them up there and took them to Florida. 

There Margarita began her new life as a migrant farm worker. Irene soon thereafter returned to Mexico, but Margarita stayed to pick oranges and strawberries on farms near Tampa and green beans outside Miami. A man she called a “clue worker” took them from farm to farm, and they all stayed in an old dilapidated house. In May she and her fellow workers boarded a van that took them to North Carolina, where she worked in the tobacco fields. She also picked apples in Michigan.

It was not long after Margarita’s illegal immigration to the United States that President Reagan passed immigration reform for farm workers, making it possible for her to get a green card and live here legally.

“A very nice American lady, the owner of a big orange farm, gave me paper and signed for me,” Margarita says.
 
At the age of 16, Margarita became involved with the Mexican “coyote” who had helped bring her to the United States. She had a daughter and a son by him and thereafter settled down in North Carolina. She lived in the Greenville and Wilson areas and continued to do farm work, picking not only tobacco but also cucumbers, sweet potatoes, and asparagus.

Looking back, she says that the coyote had relationships with a lot of the young girls he brought over. He was mean to most of the immigrants, but he was nice to the young girls, because he wanted them. Then he got caught for smuggling illegals, and now he is no longer allowed in this country.

When Margarita was 17, she had a dream that her father had been killed. She bought an airline ticket and flew home. What she learned had a huge impact on her life.

“When I got home, I saw one of my aunts. She was crying, and I didn’t know why. She thought I had come home because someone had told me about my papa, but no one had. I learned then that my papa had been murdered — stabbed by one of his cousins. We don’t have doctors close — maybe three hours away — and he bled to death.”

Upon returning to North Carolina, Margarita began working in factories, jobs which included sewing and making plastic balls for children. She also packed eggs on chicken farms. She did not care what kind of work she did, she said, as long as she was able to support her children and send money home to Mexico. She met and married Aden Flores, with whom she often worked, and they had the two daughters, Jasmine and Alma, who were helping with the interview.
 
Ten years ago her younger sister, Araceli, persuaded her to come to Ocracoke and go to work at Ocracoke Island Realty. She has worked there ever since, cleaning rental cottages, and is now the head housekeeper and inspector. Two years ago, with the help of her daughter Jasmine, she passed the test to become an American citizen. It was hard, she said. Jasmine added, “I helped her study for it. It was like what I was studying in high school.”

 Last year Margarita and the father of her 2-year-old daughter, Eliana, bought a house together.

What, I asked her, was life in Ocracoke’s Mexican community like? There is not a unified Mexican community, she answered. Rather, people divide into groups based on what state they came from. They have different cultures, different foods. There are a lot from Hidalgo, she added.

Most Mexicans living in Ocracoke go to the Catholic church, Our Lady of the Seas in Buxton.

When asked about their life at Ocracoke, Jasmine and Alma said that they like it.

“You know everybody here and don’t feel judged as in a bigger school,” said Jasmine.

“We have cousins in Washington (N.C.), and there they have fights and racism.”Alma agrees, adding “I’ve know all my classmates since Pre-K.

Both girls want to go to college, possibly into a medical field, although Jasmine, who loves to sing, plans to try out for “American Idol” first.

After the interview, I visited Margarita and her family at their home. She proudly showed me the new kitchen and floors she and her partner had added. Jasmine showed me the album she had kept from her 15th birthday party. Known as a Quincenera, the party celebrates the occasion of a girl becoming a woman. Both Mexicans and Americans were invited to attend the lavish affair.
 
“Most of my sisters are citizens now and have homes in Little Washington,” Margarita says. “Our mother came from Mexico to visit last year. She was very excited, and is very proud of her children.” 

Margarita’s story, along with that of many hard-working Mexicans who have come to the Outer Banks to find new lives, is something to be proud of.