The Opportunity They Never Had

Maria Rojas begged her five brothers to let her go with them to the United States. They all were fed up with stunted corn harvests and the prospect of laboring at the local brickworks in their hometown, Indaparapeo, in western Mexico's rural Michoac?n state. But Rojas's brothers refused to take her along, saying she was too young for the dangerous cross-border trek and would only face hardship and discrimination in America.

She forgives them now. No way does she envy the manual labor and undocumented status her brothers have endured in California. In a little more than a year, the 20-year-old, straight-A business student expects to become her family's first college graduate—without leaving her homeland. She couldn't have done it, she says, without the help of Grupo Indaparapeo, a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to keeping the town's young people from joining Mexico's northward exodus.

The organization was the inspiration of Horacio Tovar, 49, a bespectacled engineering professor and Indaparapeo native. For years he watched as townspeople—not only young men like the Rojas brothers but also his own parents and siblings—abandoned Indaparapeo in search of paying jobs north of the border. Migration to the United States has cut the town's population by at least one third, to roughly 15,000. Dream houses, built with dollars sent home by the expats, stand empty on the hillsides. Tovar, who lives in a modest house in town with a backyard and a barbecue, wanted to save Indaparapeo from becoming a 21st-century ghost town like hundreds of others across Mexico.

He first floated his solution five years ago when family members and childhood friends were visiting from up north. Instead of the paved roads, park benches and church renovations that are usually funded by Mexican migrant groups in the United States, why not set up scholarships for local kids? "It's not a cure," Tovar told his homecoming guests. "But we have to start asking what we can do." Tovar's idea resonated with his listeners. Poverty had forced many of them to quit school and go north. "College was a luxury we couldn't afford," says Juan Carlos L?pez, 49, who left veterinary school in the late 1970s to help feed his family with jobs in California as a landscaper, a construction worker and a grape picker before he finally managed to build his own plastering business. "It took a long time to get to this point, and days of hunger," he says. "I always wonder how it would've worked if I'd finished school."

Tovar, L?pez and others kicked off Grupo Indaparapeo in 2003. Today the scholarship program sponsors 40 students, most of them with monthly household incomes averaging about $300. The group provides stipends of $150 a month to recipients who keep up their grades and participate in community service. The amount may sound puny, but it helps cover incidental costs that students like Rojas (whose father works as a hired hand on a dairy farm) could not otherwise afford, like bus fares, books and photocopies.

The group raises money in the United States though dinner dances, raffles and other events in Chicago and Napa, Calif. (Most of Indaparapeo's migrants gravitate to those two places.) The Mexican government encourages donations by tripling every dollar that is contributed by migrants in the United States. Last October, a concert in Chicago by the popular Mexican band Sonora Santanera raised $11,000 for the scholarship fund, and this May a picnic that featured Michoac?n-style cooking drew a crowd of more than 350 in Napa and raised $7,000. Gabino Hern?ndez, a 40-year-old handyman from Indaparapeo, was there, feasting on enchiladas and tamales. He calls the scholarship program "the No. 1 most basic thing we immigrants can do for young people back home."