Funds Sent to Needy Families Back Home Exact a Price

By Michelle Garcia
Special to The Washington Post

NEW YORK -- Lilliam Perez remembers the frantic calls from the Dominican Republic to her home in the Bronx. A medical emergency, an unforeseen crisis or a problem paying for food -- and her aunts, uncles and grandmother turned to her mother for help. Without fail, Perez's mother rushed to Rivas Travel, a neighborhood one-stop shop for immigrants where she often wired money to the Caribbean island.

"Even if she had to borrow, she had to provide," said Perez, 28, who immigrated to the United States when she was 12 years old. Memories of her island relatives remained vivid, but she could not help but feel slighted by her mother's role as family heroine. "At that age, I just didn't understand why they couldn't provide for themselves."

Millions of immigrants make weekly or monthly pilgrimages to money-transfer storefronts where they send small fortunes -- called remittances -- to families in places from Eastern Europe to the tip of the Americas. Modern technology and a global economy have tethered immigrants more closely than ever before to their distant homelands. But as parents send money back to their homelands, their U.S.-raised children grow up balancing an allegiance to a distant family with immediate wants and needs.

"You feel jealous that you don't get 100 percent attention," Perez said. The money diverted did not bother Perez; her mother owned a successful beauty salon in Manhattan. But she struggled to understand the tangled human bonds with people who were becoming lost to childhood memory.

"My mother calls the Dominican Republic every night. Even today, I feel like [my parents] live a double life," Perez said.

In fact, many immigrants do -- working here and worrying about relatives back home. The bulk of the money sent to homelands -- pegged at more than $38 billion by the Inter-American Development Bank -- comes from Latino immigrants in the United States. Wired south in small installments, this money amounts to a vast income transfer that feeds families in Oaxaca, Mexico, helps to bury the dead in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and starts businesses and fixes schools in the highlands of the Dominican Republic.

Remittances are "more than just sending money," said Donald Terry, director of the Multilateral Investment Fund, which tracks remittance patterns among immigrants. "It has to do with human bonds."

Earlier waves of immigrants arrived in the United States bound by the same promise to never abandon families left behind. Today's technology, however, makes it easier with affordable phone cards and the Web redefining the immigrant experience.

Still, the comfort and obligation of staying in touch with distant relatives can be lost on immigrant children. Many describe growing up wondering why their parents must sacrifice to provide for two families.

Daniel Chavez, 24, looks around the cramped tenement apartment where he grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "Until I went to college," he said, "there was always a need for something."

The rent and Catholic school tuition stretched the limits of the wages his parents earned sewing and working in restaurants. When he began playing soccer, he turned to his parents for help.

"I needed the money for a uniform," said Daniel Chavez, but that was considered a luxury and he had to earn the money himself doing odd jobs. "We needed the money here, and they still sent it back."

He said he remembered thinking, "I have more pressing needs here."

At her parent's kitchen table, Daisy Chavez, 18, prints the name of her grandmother onto a money-transfer slip. In her stiff handwriting, Daisy Chavez writes the Mexican address, a place called Chila de la Sal. But she barely remembers the faraway village or the grandmother whose face she has seen only once.

Daisy Chavez's mother takes the slip and a wad of cash and wires the monthly gift of $100 to the elderly woman who relies on the money to survive.

Each time Daisy Chavez's mother, Margarita, sends that money, the teenager knows it is money that could be spent on clothes, a book or a weekend trip.

"Sometimes [my mother] says she's sorry that she didn't give me everything I wanted, but I understood," said Daisy Chavez, an aspiring chef. Years earlier she traveled to Mexico and witnessed the dire poverty her mother escaped and that persists around her grandmother. "I learned to accept that they need the money more than I do."

Manuel Orozco, a researcher at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University said that as the younger generation matures, they develop an "amazement" for their parents' sense of duty that transcends borders.

"You develop a sense of respect and you see them as a role model in a heroic sense," he said. "In turn, it gives them a sense of belonging to a community that values family bonding."

Beverly Solorzano, 14, can quote the latest currency-exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Honduran lempira. She knows that her three siblings and grandmother can eat and live comfortably because of the $100 her mother sends every month. "That's family, and family comes first," Solorzano said.

At times, her mother, Susana Nunez, feels guilty about dividing her modest income as a caregiver for the elderly. She says after the bills are paid here and money sent back, she sometimes has to put off special requests for new sneakers or outings.

"You feel sad because they depend on you," she said. "But they have learned to wait for when I do have extra money."

Dilip Ratha, an economist at the World Bank, said it is difficult to predict the future of this multibillion-dollar economy or whether the next generation will assume the financial ties.

But New York's ethnic neighborhoods offer a glimpse of the future. The Irish and Polish associations, and Indian and Colombian collectives founded by immigrants, have survived for generations and are evolving into vehicles for policy advocacy and philanthropy. "Ties never go away," Ratha said. "In fact, second- and third-generation migrants continue to send money, maybe not to families, but through charities."

Lilliam Perez does not send remittances, except for holidays and birthdays. But she has inherited her mother's promise to remember the relatives she left behind. She became a community liaison for a New York state senator whose district includes a sizable Dominican American constituency, and she belongs to numerous advocacy groups that work to improve the economic conditions of Dominicans in the United States and on the island.

"Different events in our lives determine where we are and what we care about," she said. Her mother's devotion to maintaining the family connection "kept me in touch with how much people here and in the D.R. still need."

© 2004