The journey back home
Photo:Courtesy Ruvalcaba family
Simon Ruvalcaba, 56, and Sylvia Ruvalcaba, 50
By Maria Pautassi and Ignacio Torres June 01, 2011
When a crate weighing 1,200 pounds fell on the right shoulder of Simon Ruvalcaba 11 years ago, the countdown of his days remaining in the United States started.
“My original plan was to come to the U.S., work for a while, buy a house; It was supposed to be one or two years and it turned into 39,” says Ruvalcaba, a 56-year-old Mexican immigrant who worked for three decades at Davis Wire in Hayward California before his accident in 2000. “I was not going to wait for another thing to happen to me.”
Courtesy Ruvalcaba family
Simon Ruvalcaba (in hat) celebrates wife Sylvia's
50th Birthday with family in Tracy, California.
With a shattered shoulder, Ruvalcaba had little prospects of returning to manual labor. So when the company shut down a year after his accident, he was forced into an early retirement, which he used to plan his return home. He bought a house in his hometown in Mexico four times the size of his home in the United States and remodeled it. He tore down walls to create larger, airy spaces and painted the walls red.
Ruvalcaba moved back in 2001 and today divides his time between Yahualica, a small town in the Mexican state of Jalisco, and his daughter’s home, in Tracy, California.
Courtesy Ruvalcaba family
Simon Ruvalcaba, 56, visiting a friend's ranch in
Guadalajara, Mexico
Like him, hundreds of immigrants of diverse origins are now choosing to retire in their native countries. Although there are no exact numbers on how many are going back, residents in Yahualica say, in the past three years, about 100 people have returned.
For some immigrants, after decades of toiling away in the United States, life-long savings and investments seem to go further back home. Health care and services are cheaper and readily available. And when retirement is a reality and frailty imminent, many begin to feel the pull of family and the desire to reconnect with their cultural roots.
“Ever since I came here, I have always had in mind going back,” says Edith Kenney, 61, who arrived from the Philippines over 30 years ago. “I don’t want to be a burden for my children when I can no longer take care of myself. I want them to be free.”
Courtesy Kenney family
Edith Kenney with her husband and their children
In 1995, when she got her green card, Kenney had to give up her original citizenship, as Philippine laws stated at the time. She had a stable job at Mobile Oil and her three children were getting free education in schools in Alexandria, near Washington D.C.
When the Philippine Bureau of Immigration passed the Citizenship Retention and Re-acquisition Act of 2003, by which all natural-born Filipinos who had given up their citizenship were re-naturalized, she saw the possibility of retiring in the Philippines. She is now building a house in Bacolod on the Island of Negros, where she plans to go in four years with her American-born husband. Her brother, a well-off businessman living in Manila, is looking over the construction of the family condominium. Kenney, her brother and their sister, who currently lives in Los Angeles, will move into separate houses just a few steps away from each other, she said.
Prof. Jose Moya, a world migration historian at Barnard University, says the desire to return home is not a new notion among immigrants. In the early 20th century, immigrants from southern Italy living in Argentina would occasionally bring their spouses back home with them; Chinese labor migrants in the United States would go home after periods of employment. However, Moya says, their tales have been rarely told.
Prof. Jose Moya, a world migration historian at Barnard University, says the desire to return home is not a new notion among immigrants. In the early 20th century, immigrants from southern Italy living in Argentina would occasionally bring their spouses back home with them; Chinese labor migrants in the United States would go home after periods of employment. However, Moya says, their tales have been rarely told.
“Very few books are written about going back; people almost assume immigrants don’t,” says Moya. “Returning is a notion that undermines the host county’s national narrative. If people are going back, where does that leave the idea of ‘the land of the free?’ ”
Listen to the story of one family's return to Ecuador:
A return to Ecuador
Reporters Aliza Moorji and Chienye Ogwo follow one family as they prepare for the move back to Ecuador
Reporters Aliza Moorji and Chienye Ogwo follow one family as they prepare for the move back to Ecuador
Lately, going home has become even easier, as the Internet, e-mails and Skype allow immigrants to stay in contact with their relatives, preventing ties with the native country from being truly severed.
Kenney calls her brother in Manila at least once a week and speaks every other day with her sister. Cheaper and faster transportation options make it possible for people to go back and forth from country to country, a situation that made it possible for Rubalcava to go back six times in four years to supervise the construction of his house in Mexico.
“Before it was pure emotional and cultural attachment,” Moya says. “Now immigrants have two incentives to go back.”
For one thing, they have more money by combining their savings, pensions and social security benefits. And because their destination countries have lower costs of living, their money is worth more there. Also, over the past 15 years, retirement has become an industry in countries like Mexico and Puerto Rico.
“They can have their cake and eat it too; be with the people they love and have more money,” says Moya.
Kenney’s return boils down to nostalgia. She looks forward to visiting the same beach where her father used to take her as a young girl; seeing the town’s church and her school; playing the piano - a hobby she rarely has time for because of work; and spending hours chatting with her cousins, who she saw six years ago on her last visit to the islands.
Courtesy Kenney family
Edith Kenney (second from right) with her family
Like others who’ve gone home to retire, Kenney feels that her job as a mother and an immigrant is done. “I wanted my children to have a good education and to be able to fulfill their ambitions and dreams,’’ she said, “and I have worked hard for them.”
Collin, the eldest, works in an engineering firm and lives in West Virginia; the middle son, Clarence, lives in New York and works with Columbia University’s School of the Arts; and Clint, the youngest, studies International Development in The Lund University in Sweden after returning from Iraq, where he served as captain of the U.S. Army’s civil affairs division.
Rubalcava, too, feels accomplished. His daughter Veronica is 32 years old and has a family of her own. Ruvalcaba, his wife and his two younger children, Damian, 22, and Alejandro, 15, went back 11 years ago.
When he first arrived in California in 1972, Ruvalcaba went back to Mexico once or twice a year to visit his family. Now he’s doing the reverse. He visits California twice a year to see his daughter and his primary physician.
“You have to leave the house that you have lived in for so many years, your neighbors, and all of your friends. It’s the same thing as when I left Mexico in the first place,” says Ruvalcaba. “I had to do it all again.”
Read one reporter's thoughts about his parents' plan to go back to their native country. Read more about the reverse migration of immigrants.
