Ed Carter, utahvalley360.com
Villa Corona, which is southwest of neighboring Guadalajara, is approximately 1,800 miles from Provo. Still, this doesn’t deter many “Villa” residents from making the trek to Provo each year.
In Utah, the holiday is called Pioneer Day and it refers to the group of Latter-day Saints led to the Salt Lake Valley by Brigham Young in 1847.
But for most of the native Spanish-speaking customers at Los Once Hermanos, a Provo taco shop, July 24 has nothing to do with handcarts and wagons. Rather, these Latino pioneers celebrate their own arrival in the land of milk and honey over a plate of fried beef, onions and beans.
Instead of watching the customary neighborhood fireworks display, I spent part of Pioneer Day in the closest thing Utah County has to a Latin American enclave. In addition to Los Once Hermanos, the strip mall on 100 West in Provo is home to a Spanish-language video and audio store and a Latin American-style butcher shop.
Seeing only one other gringo all evening gave me a taste of what it’s like to be an outsider. For me, though, unlike most of the 9 percent of Utah’s population classified in the 2000 Census as of Latino origin, the wary looks and communication barriers lasted only an evening.
The mass migration of Latter-day Saints to Utah is well-documented. They congregated in Illinois before walking across Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming in the days before railways connected East to West. They settled in desert valleys that nobody wanted, and their stories of suffering, faith and courage would be told for generations to come.
While Utahns are acquainted with the idea of a people moving en masse across a continent for religious reasons, the story of Villa Corona is less familiar.
The 2000 Census served as a kind of wake-up call for much of the nation that Latinos are a growing and vibrant segment of our society. At 7 percent of the population, Utah County’s Latino community is comparatively smaller than statewide. But 10.5 percent of Provo residents in the Census classified themselves as Latinos.
We may have heard those numbers reported in the news, but most of us still don’t realize what it means to say that, over the last two decades, the heart of a small town in southern Mexico has picked up and moved itself to Utah County.
“Some came (to Provo) and saw there was work,” said Obdulia Bizkarra, who moved to Utah County from the small town of Villa Corona in Jalisco, Mexico, with her husband and three children seven years ago. “Then they went back and told friends and family.”
Now, it seems, there are more Villa Corona natives in Provo than there are in Villa Corona itself. The town in southwest Mexico lists its population as 16,000. No one knows for sure how many are now along the Wasatch Front, but there is no doubt the mass migration has left its mark on both Villa Corona and Utah County.
“Come April, there are entire neighborhoods down there that are just empty,” said one Villa Corona resident who, like many others in Utah County, is undocumented and feared to give his name. “A lot of people come up from Villa in the summer and then go back there in the winter.”
Villa Corona is a small agricultural and tourist town about 45 miles from Guadalajara, one of Mexico’s largest cities and most important industrial and cultural centers. In recent years, Villa Corona has become a tourist destination as wealthy Mexicans and even some foreigners discovered the area’s mineral hot springs.
Of course, the modern water parks with their green grass, waterslides, lazy rivers, picnic areas, RV parks and high ticket prices are not enjoyed by most Villa Corona residents. In fact, most of the immigrants now living in Utah County could not have even gotten a job at the water parks, let alone pay for their families to play there.
Now, they content themselves with living in cramped and dilapidated mobile homes. They endure discrimination. They sometimes feel almost as persecuted here for their ethnicity and cultural heritage as the Latter-day Saint pioneers were for their religious beliefs before they found that this was the place.
If there is a late 20th century version of the hardships endured by Brigham Young’s followers, then that story must involve Villa Corona and hundreds of other towns like it throughout Mexico and the rest of Latin America.
But suffering and difficulties seem as far away as the Mexican border on a gentle summer evening while a steady stream of customers enters Los Once Hermanos. They come for the food, and they come for the company.
The restaurant itself is nothing special. The chairs and tables are the white plastic kind you pick up at Wal-Mart for a summer barbecue in the backyard. The walls are a dirty yellow color, and the decrepit drink cooler receives a swift kick after a part falls off while a boy opens the door to reach for Jarritos, a Mexican soda pop.
A small television set perched on top of the drink cooler is permanently tuned to Univision, a Spanish-language news and entertainment channel that alternates news of the weird or sexy with the serious. Major topics this evening are a 9-year-old Mexican girl who is setting the macho world of soccer on its ear by scoring goals at an amazing clip in a boys’ soccer league, and a proposal by the administration of President George Bush that would legalize undocumented Mexican workers.
One customer is a middle-aged, worn-faced laborer coming to eat after a long day mowing lawns or toiling at Stouffer’s. The next one is a trendy twentysomething talking on a cell phone. It is clear that cultural displacement affects people differently: Some immigrants appear rooted in their native culture while others seem to have little connection to it.
Sipping on Jarritos and watching Univision’s report on the Mexican national soccer team’s progress in the Copa America tournament, I reflect on a recent conversation with Villa Corona native Socorro Luna.
She is a 45ish woman whose 10 years in the land of the free and home of the brave have mostly been spent languishing in a trailer park on Orem’s State Street. Along with her husband and five children, she has established a new life in an unfamiliar and sometimes unfriendly land. She serves as somewhat of an unofficial historian for the Villa Coronans who now live in Utah County.
“The men would come and work in the orchards,” said Socorro Luna as a small crowd of children and adults gathered to listen at the Four Season Estates Trailer Park. “Now the orchards are almost all gone so we work in factories.”
As if to make sure that none of her people forget their beginnings and their perilous journey north, Socorro Luna recounts for everyone how many of her friends and family set out from Villa Corona with just the clothes on their backs and whatever cash they could scrape together.
Usually, the men would leave first. If they survived the heat of the desert of northern Mexico and Arizona – and if they escaped the U.S. Border Patrol – they sometimes made enough money to bring their families to a tin trailer along a street of neon strip malls. Many, though, did not even get to experience that relative opulence.
“Many have died in the desert en route,” Socorro Luna recalls. “They came looking for life and they found death.”
The rewards may not seem to justify the risks, but that was their dream. For people like Socorro Luna, the dream is a reality and there can hardly be complaints.
Although her parents and other family members remain in Villa Corona, Socorro Luna doesn’t feel homesick. When you’re raised in a country of graft, poverty and crime, you don’t turn your back on the comparative paradise that is a somewhat stable factory job, food on the table and a school for your children.
“Here we have better opportunities for our children to study and prepare for a career,” she says, marveling at the wonders of Orem’s Suncrest Elementary School and Lakeridge Junior High School, where her children attend classes.
Socorro Luna tells me that Villa Corona is known as “tierra de bandas,” or land of the bands. A touring musical group, Banda Maguey, recently traveled from Villa Corona to Utah to give a concert for the town’s departed-but-not-forgotten sons and daughters. The event, one in a regular series of such parties during the summer months, drew a crowd to Sandy’s South Towne Exposition Center but flew under the radar screen of mainstream Utah culture.
I also learn that there is in Villa Corona a cathedral called Nuestra Señora del Rosario, built in 1624. In the hills near the town is a monument to religious devotion: the Lourdes Caves, a series of shrines carved from the rock by a solitary man during most of his life.
My attention turns back to the activity at Los Once Hermanos. It’s nearing 11 p.m. but the pace of business has not slowed. A butcher from the shop next door stops by and tells me that former Villa Corona neighbors tend to stick together once they arrive in Utah.
While there are Villa Coronans in Salt Lake County, the bulk of them seem to be in Provo, Orem and Springville. They not only live together but they tend to shop at the same stores – the ones that sell authentic Mexican products – and eat at the same restaurants. They meet at the St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Orem for Mass every weekend.
Drive past Provo’s Dixon Junior High School or Westridge Elementary School on any Saturday or Sunday during the summer and you’ll see some of Villa Corona’s best soccer players participating in highly organized leagues that don’t need the help of any city’s parks and recreation department. After soccer, you can find Villa Coronans fishing at Utah Lake or barbecuing in Provo Canyon.
Eventually, I leave behind the plastic chairs and dirty yellow walls of Los Once Hermanos. As I walk toward my car in the parking lot, it is nearing midnight but the grill still busily churns out tacos. The words of a man I have spoken with run through my head. They remind me that pioneers still live.
“When I am here in Provo and Orem, I almost feel at home because there are so many people I know from Villa Corona.”
Edward L. Carter covered Utah County news for three years for the Deseret News. He is now pursuing a degree at BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School.