Frightening news from Mexico alarms immigrants in Mass.
Trips back home put on hold as worries mount
As the death toll from swine flu mounted yesterday in Mexico, immigrants across Massachusetts stayed glued to televisions, postponed trips back home, and made frantic telephone calls to relatives to ensure that they were safe.
Stunned Mexicans and Mexican-Americans said they were alarmed by images of cities gripped by fear, of empty office buildings, padlocked schools, and faces shrouded in blue masks. More than 150 deaths in Mexico have been attributed to swine flu.
"I was thinking of going in June, but now forget it," said Rocío Sáenz, the president of SEIU Local 615 and who is originally from Mexico City, which has virtually shut down. "My mother is trying not to make me worry, but seeing the images of all those people. . . . I can't imagine that there's no school, no work. I can't imagine it paralyzed."
The uneasiness was elsewhere in the state, where thousands of Mexican descent reside. Panicked immigrants scoured the Internet for news about la gripe porcina and reached out to relatives in the capital city as well as the states of Guerrero, Querétaro, and Nuevo León.
Samuel Hurtado, coordinator of the Latino Education Action Network for Massachusetts Advocates for Children, an education nonprofit in Boston, said his siblings in the city of Monterrey took their elderly parents and a young niece to a house in the country to protect them. In the city, stores were running out of blue masks.
"They're very afraid," he said. "Nobody knows what is going to happen."
In the immigrant enclave of East Boston, talk of the illness was heard on nearly every corner, among the diners at Taquería Cancún, and at the Coral Travel agency, which is advertising trips to Latin America. The neighborhood is made up mostly of immigrants from Colombia and El Salvador, but many Mexican immigrants own businesses or work there as well.
Maria Salgado, the owner of Taquería Cancún, who just visited relatives in Mexico this month, said she was worried about how this outbreak could affect her family - and Mexico's economy.
"My poor country," said Salgado, 43, a US citizen with relatives in Mexico City and the state of Guerrero.
At a money-transfer shop, a 28-year-old dishwasher named Hector said he is especially worried about his father in Mexico City, who is battling an infection from diabetes.
"He's in the hospital, and now it's going to be full of people who are sick with this flu," said Hector, who arrived here illegally four months ago and spoke on the condition that his last name not be used. He came to the United States after his second daughter was born, because he earns more here as a dishwasher than he did at home as a mason.
Behind him, his 19-year-old cousin Jose shouted into a cellphone to his mother in Mexico City. "Are you OK?" he asked.
A few minutes later, he clicked the phone shut; she was fine.
"I'm worried about my family," Jose said. "I don't want it to happen to them."
