Immigrant life - single Mexican moms in big city

The only spot where Ermila can fit her cot and crib in the one-bedroom apartment she shares with 10 others in East Harlem is in the kitchen. Cockroaches dart along the wall over the bed where her two baby daughters are sleeping in the thick heat of a recent summer morning.

Yet this is where she finds hope. Ermila - who asked that her last name not be published, out of fear of immigration authorities - is part of a new community of single Mexican mothers trying to improve their lives in the US.

Many women, like Ermila, have crossed the border in recent years, fed up with worsening opportunities in their home country and eager to join an already-transplanted network of encouraging relatives.

While the precise number of such immigrants isn't known, a definite pattern has emerged in several major US cities, including San Antonio and Los Angeles. In New York, Mexicans are the fastest-growing immigrant group, and, by at least one estimate, 60 percent of that population is female.

Had the women stayed in Mexico, marriage may have been a way of life, but here, other priorities, like school and work, take hold. Most of the women are undocumented and work long hours for almost no pay. Some live with extended family, but that network has been overburdened by the number of mothers.

Still, many are sure they're doing the right thing. "Women no longer have faith that things will get better in Mexico," says Robert Smith, a sociology professor at Barnard College, who has been studying Mexican immigrants in New York City since the 1980s. "They see the US as their long-term solution."

Maria Siuhanca, who has a 3-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter, left familiarity in Puebla, a sprawling state in central Mexico. Her parents were corn farmers, and she spent the first 20 years of her life planting and tending to fields. But as her neighbors continued to leave throughout the 1980s, she saw farms deteriorate and stores shut down.

Soon, the only people left in her town were the elderly and women and children. "It's hard to survive. There is no work in Mexico," she says. "The only thing you can do is work on the land."

Ms. Siuhanca, who came to Brooklyn in 1987 and is still undocumented, cleans homes when she can for $8 an hour. She usually can find no more than 16 hours of work a week. When she needs extra money, she fills a shopping cart with sodas and sells them to children playing soccer in the park. Other days, she stands over her kitchen table for hours stuffing corn shucks with cornmeal and marinated pork, then hauls a metal pot to the street corner and sells homemade tamales for $1 apiece.

Child support isn't an option for Siuhanca, who doesn't know where her son's father is -other than somewhere in Mexico. Sometimes, if she can't take her son to the local day care, she brings him to her job. Or she doesn't work that day.

As single-wage earners with precarious incomes, finding appropriate housing is daunting, especially as the community swells. The Mexican community in New York City increased by 180 percent in the past decade - from 93,000 in the 1990 census to 261,000 in 2000, says Jeffrey Passel, the principal research associate at The Urban Institute in Washington. According to Emily Rosenbaum, a sociology professor at Fordham University here, 70 percent of Mexicans who rent apartments in the city live in cramped conditions, compared with about 40 percent of other immigrant groups.

While single men crowd together in almost any space, mothers need places where children can sleep at night and do homework during the day. With many relatives' homes already filled to capacity, these women move in with other families or strangers.

Ms. Rosenbaum says about 20 percent of Mexican households include nonrelatives. This is particularly true for women. "There are more single women than their support network can support," says Mr. Smith.

For example, Maria Elena Ranchero, who lives in Brooklyn, wants to live alone with her two children. But after more than a decade in New York, that dream remains unfulfilled. She earns $8 an hour at a clothing factory, but the hours are unsteady. As a result, she can't afford to support her two children and pay the rent. She had rented her back room for $200 of the $535 she pays in monthly rent to a coworker, but the woman did not treat her children well, she says, and she asked her to leave.

Ms. Ranchero was looking for another female roommate last fall, but then her sister's brother-in-law needed a room. "I was scared to live with a man," she says. For the nine months they lived together, she never once left her children there alone, she says, even if she was running across the street for some milk. He left two months ago. And while she says her comfort has been restored, she can't continue for long with the room vacant.

For most of the single mothers, it is the transience of their lifestyles that they find hardest.

From the day Siuhanca got to the United States, she has bounced between living situations. She lived in her brother's home until she got pregnant. She spent the next years in a convent as a single mother. When she got pregnant again, she and her boyfriend moved into an apartment. When he left her to reunite with his wife and children in Mexico last summer, she began renting out a cot in the hallway to another single mother. Now that roommate has left, and she is searching for another woman to help pay $200 of her $700 monthly rent.

"It's not homeless homelessness," says Martin Needelman, a project director for Brooklyn Legal Services Corp. "It's homelessness of a different kind."

But to raise their children as Americans is worth the social stability they may have left behind in Mexico, says Lydia Ariza, a Mexican mother who has lived in Brooklyn since 1987. Their success in improving the lives of their children depends not on their earning money, but on their children becoming a part of the city's fabric - the health, social, and education systems.

And they are willing to stay to make that happen. If they can't pay their bills or their rent, they are willing to sacrifice their comfort, their privacy, and their stability, says Ms. Ariza. "Each woman lives as she can."