Rains Bring Mexico's Poverty to Surface

Another reason for the low profile of Tabasco's poor is that the state, unlike other disadvantaged spots in Mexico, sends relatively few migrants to the United States. The migratory phenomenon is something of a mystery, though locals say Tabasco has always tended toward insularity, dating to the 1800s, when swamps and rivers cut it off from the rest of Mexico.

For those not willing to swim -- though many here are willing -- the only way into impoverished Gaviotas Sur is by boat. By early Tuesday morning, hundreds of people had lined up along the banks of the Grijalva River, pleading for rides in dugout canoes, flat-bottom motorboats and homemade vessels crafted from wooden planks, wire and plastic water-cooler bottles.

Emma Alvarado Rodríguez flagged a ride on a boat donated by an oil services company and pointed to the deepest corner of Gaviotas Sur. She had been coaxed out of her home by Mexican military rescue crews over the weekend. On Monday, she took a canoe and made it up to her roofline, only to be startled by what she said was a tlacuache, a marsupial creature similar to an opossum that plays a role in many indigenous legends. Terrified, she jumped back into her canoe and left.

On Tuesday, she tried to make it back with her two sons.

The oil company boat passed over streets that had buckled under the force of the water, leaving great slabs of asphalt titled toward the sky, forming mini-waterfalls on city streets. The stench of rotting animal carcasses was in the air; the sun beating down on spilled oil made murky rainbows in the water. Her ears were assaulted by the whines and howls of skinny, stranded dogs, some left tied to posts and struggling to keep their mouths and noses above water.

"I still can't believe it," she said.

Alvarado Rodríguez, who sells soft drinks for a living, had placed a big order the day before the Grijalva broke loose. What little money she had is gone. She has not a single peso.

"Maybe," she said, "there will be something at the house that survived, something I can sell."

She waved as the boat pulled away, leaving her to scavenge with her sons.

"Everything is going to be all right," she called out.

On a rooftop about a mile away, Maria Mai Bautista and her husband fed a rooster with chicken feed that had turned soupy in the floodwater. Her husband, Néstor Daniel Vera Murillo, built the house now steeping below them in the slimy water delivered by the channel-hopping Grijalva River.

"Of course, we're going to fix this place," she said. "Where are we going to go if we don't? We can't afford to live someplace pretty."

She slumped back in a chair that displayed the various heights of the flood with stains like rings on a tree trunk. Her eyes reddened, but she fought back the tears. In seconds, she was on her feet, searching beneath a blue tarp, searching for something worth saving.