BajaNomad

Your Gardener Could Be a Banker

Gypsy Jan - 5-20-2012 at 08:50 AM

By Cyril Jones-Kellett, April 25, 2012

"Miguel Herrero is just another Mexican.

Six days a week you might drive by him anywhere in the Carlsbad/Oceanside area. You'd see him building fences, planning drainages, wiring timers, and caring for trees. But the most interesting thing about him is what you can't see.

In his off hours, Miguel is a community banker, an insurer of last resort, and a fixer of problems. A whole community turns to him for advice, and for money. There are even people deep in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, almost all the way down at the border with Guatemala, who give him a call when they have a personal problem, or when, say, the local church needs re-stuccoing but can't afford the necessary scaffolding to do the job.

On his best day he might hit 5'6", even counting the virile mass of wavy black hair atop his head. He is a neat dresser. The day I meet him for an interview, he's wearing a stylish black T-shirt with some kind of heavy-metal-looking skeleton design on it.

We meet at Oceanside's L&L Hawaiian Barbeque. I have no idea why we're meeting here, except that my brother, who has known Miguel for a decade and a half and who has agreed to translate, told me to show up at 4:30 on a Sunday afternoon.

The mall parking lot is half empty. Actually, a good part of the mall itself is empty. Not only empty of customers, but of tenants. The old Mervyn's a few doors down from L&L just sits there, empty, month after month. The frozen-yogurt shop is gone. The Hallmark card shop is gone. So is the car dealership across the parking lot.

All over Oceanside, probably all over America, gaps have formed in consumer society. Dead spots. A lot of people are living through their own private financial hells.

Miguel is standing outside the L&L when I get there. My brother is late, so we go inside, order a couple of sodas, and talk in my poor Spanish and Miguel's poor English about his financial work.

I ask what this money thing he does is called.

"Tandas [or] cundinas," he says, "it's the same thing."That word does he prefer?

"Tandas."He explains that, right now, he is in the second week of a 12-week tanda. Its structure could not be simpler - each member agrees to contribute $100 per week for 12 weeks. They will give the money to Miguel, who will hand it each week to one of the members. When the 12 weeks are over, a new tanda starts. Miguel says membership varies from 10-20 people each time.

Before the first week of each cycle, members choose numbers. The number chosen signifies the week the member will get paid $1100 (and will not have to contribute the weekly $100).

Members can buy one week, two weeks, even partial week arrangements such as one and a half weeks.

Some members ask for an early number, "because they need the money right away," Miguel says. Such a request is perfectly acceptable.

"Some other people can wait to take their money," he adds. Such a person can ask for a late number. The member might ask to go last, for example, so that each week constitutes, essentially, a payment into a 12-week savings plan.

In an emergency, a member can tell the group that he or she needs the money on any given week, and the group will rearrange paydays so that the member with the emergency can get paid immediately.

In this way, the tanda acts as a system of savings, of loans, and of insurance for emergencies.

Miguel says that, even if a person has already been paid in, say, week one, and they have an emergency in week nine, they can get paid again immediately, so long as they agree to give up their number in the next round.

"You know the people," Miguel says. "It's okay."

Most of the people in Miguel's tanda live in or near Oceanside's Crown Heights neighborhood.

The tightly packed quarter is a short walk to the beach, to Oceanside High School, to the strip mall that has stood across from the high school for ages, and even to the new Fresh & Easy market on Oceanside Boulevard. There are plenty of spots nearby to shop and bank at, but a good percentage of the neighborhood's banking goes on right here, just as a good percentage of the neighborhood's shopping is done off the backs of trucks that park for hours along Division Street, or around the corner on Grant Street, down by the community garden.

For as long as there has been an Oceanside, this has been "the barrio" - one of those little Mexican hearts that beat near the center of nearly every beach city in Southern California. Once a seedy spot, Crown Heights today is mostly free of graffiti; the streets are clean and the sidewalks relatively busy. But the little houses and apartment buildings are much more crowded than is typical of Southern California.

You can get vegetables, baked goods, beverages, candies - almost the whole grocery array - off of those trucks. And you can get it without venturing out of Crown Heights, which is important if you don't have a car or much English vocabulary.

Despite its outside reputation for crime, Crown Heights is a family place. Most of the small communities that make up the neighborhood are peaceful clusters of families, each with its own regional flavor.

Miguel's flavor, like many people in Crown Heights, is Oaxacan. He figures there are probably 1000 Oaxacans in Oceanside.

If it seems odd that so many people from Oaxaca, one of Mexico's southernmost states, would end up in Oceanside, one only has to understand a phenomenon that migration researchers call "sister communities."

Dr. Ramona Pérez, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at San Diego State University, has worked in Oaxaca for two decades. She says, "You could go into any community in Oaxaca at this point and ask them,
'Where's your sister community?' And they'll say, 'We go to Los Angeles,' or 'We go to San Diego,' or 'We go to Vista,' or 'We go to Chicago.'"

Many of these sister community relationships date back to the Bracero Program, a U.S. government program from the World War II era, in which Mexican laborers were given a chance to work in the U.S. while homegrown labor was off fighting in Europe or the Pacific. The program lasted until the early '60s. Many Mexican participants put down roots in the U.S., later serving as helpers for family members and townsfolk who wanted to come to the U.S.

"Once you get a few people that have settled in an area and know the lay of the land, they serve as a hub for other people coming in," says Dr. Pérez. "Some of them have been able to acquire linguistic skills. Where that doesn't exist, they still understand transportation, they understand where jobs are, they know where healthcare is, they know where housing is, which landlords will allow them to come in with limited documentation, that kind of thing."

In the past few decades, Miguel says, more and more Oaxacans have gone to Las Vegas, where they plant flowers and ferns around the big casinos in the morning, then tear out those same plants around midnight, when truckloads of new plants come and the daily cycle of dressing one of the hottest and driest cities in the world in a coat of tropical plants starts all over again.

But if you live in the town of El Trapiche, the people you know, the people you grew up with, they go to Crown Heights.

El Trapiche is a dirt-road farming town just off a sharp bend of highway about 40 miles south of Oaxaca City, which is, itself, about 1400 miles straight south of San Antonio Texas, or about 400 miles southeast of Mexico City.

I've never been there, but on Google Maps and Google Earth, El Trapiche compares to Oaxaca City, a city of about 250,000, in the way that Bonsall might compare to San Diego.

Before he first came to the U.S., Miguel was at one time a 12-year-old bull-riding champion from El Trapiche, winning prizes at rodeos all over the area. More than 20 years later, he recalls the bull-riding fondly, but, with three children, he says he would never get on a bull now.

When my brother arrives at L&L, we are able to get into a deeper discussion. I ask Miguel why members of his tandas don't just go to a bank and start saving that way.

He doesn't have much of an answer to this. In fact, the question seems, at first, to make little impression on him. In his view, it's not that the Mexicans - and a few Guatemalans - who are in his tandas are afraid of the bank or unwilling to pay bank fees. They stay out of banks simply because banks are not something they are familiar with. They do not feel confident about walking into a bank, filling out a lot of paperwork that means nothing to them, and handing over their money to people they do not know and whose motives they cannot guess."

woody with a view - 5-20-2012 at 12:26 PM

Quote:

They stay out of banks simply because banks are not something they are familiar with. They do not feel confident about walking into a bank, filling out a lot of paperwork that means nothing to them, and handing over their money to people they do not know and whose motives they cannot guess."


funny thing is when you go into a bank on a friday (who goes into a bank anymore?) there are MANY Latinos standing in line. with the advent of the ATM card i haven't been into a bank in 5 years, at least.

Leo - 5-20-2012 at 03:03 PM

Interesting story. wish it was my gardener who exchanges his earnings same day for all the cerveza he can drink.

BajaBlanca - 5-20-2012 at 03:27 PM

I first heard of this informal banking system about 15 years ago when I taught English to a latino community in downtown san diego. I thought it was incredible that the students had gotten together to form this "money pool".

805gregg - 5-20-2012 at 06:16 PM

What's difference in saving $100 per week and giving it to Miguel? Same outcome.