“You have to go to work very early,” he said. Knowing that he could get work in Mendota harvesting melons and asparagus, he decided to go live with an uncle there. When María Hilda Carballo’s brother, Julio Carballo, left El Salvador in 1994, he was 14 years old. In 2019 the county’s farmworkers yielded $1.5 billion in almonds, $962 million in grapes and $660 million in pistachios. Originally developed in 1891 as a storage site for the Southern Pacific Railroad, Mendota was incorporated in 1942, and its prosperity hinges on the production of almonds, pistachios, melons, tomatoes and corn. “The Salvadoran population has quadrupled in a decade, and it is because people go where they feel at home,” Obaid added. It’s the daily routine in a community whose residents help stock the refrigerators and fill dining-room tables across America.Ībdul Obaid, a businessman from Yemen, said that the town’s demographic map has completely changed in the 17 years since his family established the Sonora Market and its nearby sibling, the Mendota Valley Food supermarket, both liberally stocked with popular Salvadoran fare. But some also feel the nagging burden of expectation, of having to work long hours while trying to master a new language. The farmworkers and restaurant owners of Mendota take pride in being able to subsidize their far-flung relatives.
“It is very difficult because there are no homes available,” said Sindy Orellana, 19, a Salvadoran immigrant who is looking for a house for her family and currently pays $1,000 to rent a two-bedroom apartment. Those are princely sums in a nation where the yearly per capita income is $4,000.Īnd while remittances soar in Sensuntepeque, in Mendota residents face a housing shortage. In the downtown area of Sensuntepeque, whose Indigenous name means “400 hills,” some houses now cost up to $300,000, while a lot of about 2,700 square feet goes for $10,000, said Paul Nimrod Salgado, a real estate agent. While more homes in Sensuntepeque now sport flat-screen TVs and late-model cars in their driveways, the region’s roads remain cracked, its schools underfunded, its medical clinics lacking in supplies. Inequities are more visible than in times past.
But there are strains.ĭollars dispatched from California have turned this corner of El Salvador into a commercial hub - it now boasts 10 banks and financial cooperatives - but also made housing costs soar. In many ways, the relationship between these kinfolk communities is mutually beneficial and harmonious. “That they are so far away, without being able to see them, it is a nightmare, and the family is not complete,” said María Hilda Carballo, 53, whose two daughters left for the Central Valley years ago. But the mass outflow left many broken households in its wake.
Most Salvadoran exiles were desperate to escape endemic poverty, failing farms and the lingering torments of a long-ago civil war. The San Joaquin Valley has become home to so many Salvadorans that the government of El Salvador opened a new consulate in Fresno this month, adding to those already in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Over the last three decades, Sensuntepeque, population 40,000, has sent migrants - thousands of them - to the United States. Separated by 2,500 miles, Sensuntepeque, in central El Salvador, and the dusty farming community of Mendota, 35 miles west of Fresno, are joined as if by an umbilical cord of financial need and emotional codependency. The people who stayed behind in this Salvadoran hill town, and those who fled to California’s San Joaquin Valley, think of each other with mixed emotions.
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