SAN SALVADOR -- Half an hour into the party, a chorus of angelic voices burst from the loudspeakers near the palm trees. An 8-year-old boy scurried toward the sound. Ducking and swerving through the hands stretching down to ruffle his brown hair, René Antonio Flores halted at the dance floor and gazed at the approaching Quinceañera.
A dark-haired beauty in pink tulle and shimmery satin, his sister Karen entered her 15th birthday party to a ripple of oohs. A line of girls in royal-blue dresses followed, among them his 16-year-old sister, Evelin.
Karen Flores is escorted to her 15th birthday party in El Salvador. Karen's mother, who lives in Virginia and could not attend, is among thousands of Latin American immigrants who send money back home to families.
(Sarah L. Voisin -- The Washington Post)
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A Mother's Support
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Immigrants and Separation: Post staff writer Nurith Aizenman is discussing the separation of one El Salvadoran mother from her children in order to make more money in the U.S.
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About This Story
This article was based on interviews with and observations of Maday Flores in Northern Virginia and her children and mother in El Salvador, where staff writer Nurith C. Aizenman and staff photographer Sarah L. Voisin spent a week in July. Other than for accounts otherwise attributed, the reporter and photographer were present during key events described, including Karen Flores' birthday party and a shooting that occurred outside as the family gathered for evening prayers. All interviews were done in Spanish.
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At $170, Karen's gown cost more than many people in their town of Apopa make in a month. The $800 for the steak lunch at her party amounted to nearly half a year's wages. Their neighborhood, a warren of concrete huts set against a verdant mountain outside El Salvador's capital, is home to some of the country's poorest -- tortilla vendors, bus-fare collectors and factory workers who share the narrow streets with hungry dogs and vengeful gangsters.
René Antonio watched as a priest beckoned Karen's entourage to form a circle. "And now," the priest said in Spanish, "perhaps the parents would like to say a few words."
A hot breeze rustled the hem of Karen's gown. She stared straight ahead. The priest lifted his head to scan the crowd.
"Uh, do the parents want to say a few words?"
A guest shifted her weight from one high heel to the other. Evelin buried her face in her hands. At last, a voice broke the silence.
"Sólo la abuelita está."
Only the grandmother is here.
At that hour, a 35-year-old woman was clearing the last of the lunch plates from a Northern Virginia restaurant. The mother of the Quinceañera wasn't halfway through her 14-hour shift at the job that paid for the elaborate celebration that traditionally marks a Latin American girl's passage into womanhood.
Through the restaurant's plate-glass window on that Sunday in mid-July, Maday Flores could glimpse the smooth, four-lane road linking the Springfield strip mall with Interstate 95. It had been four years since she last saw the pocked highways of El Salvador. Four years since she left Evelin, Karen, René Antonio and their two sisters to join the exodus of Latin Americans heading north.
Those immigrants number more than 315,000 in the Washington region -- the majority of them legal, many illegal -- growing the ranks of the area's housekeepers, construction workers, nannies and cooks. The Flores children's mother makes six times what she did in El Salvador. In less than a decade, the money that she and other Latin Americans in the United States send home has swelled to $30 billion annually -- $1 billion of it from the District, Maryland and Virginia.
They are continuing a tradition followed by generations of immigrants to the United States: young men and women who left Ireland during the potato famine to support the starving parents they left behind, or Chinese fathers who spent years laying railroad track across the West in the 19th century in hopes of bringing wives and children across the Pacific.
But there is a difference. Studies suggest that more and more of those on the receiving end of today's Western Union wires are not elderly parents or struggling siblings, but young children. And more and more of those doing the sending are not just fathers, but young mothers.
Many who leave their children to come illegally to the United States know it probably will be years before they return even to visit. So it is that in the four years since Maday's departure, the warm, playful presence her children once knew as "Mami" has been reduced to something else:
"Mami," the soft, sometimes awkward voice on the telephone.
"Mami," the provider of a new tile floor, a new roof and countless stuffed animals and stylish dresses.
"Mami," the painful memory.
A Photograph to Remember
"No se vaya, Mami. No se vaya."
Don't go, Mami. Don't go. Evelin recalls pleading for more than an hour that late spring evening in 2000.
She sat on their sagging couch as her mother offered hugs and explanations. Maday's wages from the sock factory were barely enough to put beans and tortillas on the table. The children's father had never lived with them, rarely visited and hadn't sent money in months. Surely Evelin could understand?
The eldest of the Flores children shook her head and wept.
The next night, Evelin remembers creeping over to the gray backpack that would be her mother's only luggage on the dangerous trek across the Arizona border and slipping something inside: a photograph of a round-faced 12-year-old with soft curls and a dimpled grin.
Four years later, Evelin's cheeks still dimple when she smiles. But she's often frowning. Her sisters have learned to censor the radio. A few bars from such Latin pop songs as "Te Amo, Mamá" are enough to bring her to tears. And she can only talk about her mother for a few minutes before her voice chokes up.
