Paper: Houston Chronicle
Date: SAT 03/01/2003
Section: A
Page: 31 MetFront
Edition: 3 STAR
 

Mexican worker wants money back

By THOM MARSHALL
Staff

A WORKER FROM MEXICO said he came up several thousand dollars short after Rosenberg police took him into custody and separated him from the cash after a minor traffic accident.

He wants it back. He said the money does not belong to him, and many people at both ends of his journey are depending upon him to deliver it. At the starting point are the friends and relatives he works with in the crawdad ponds of Louisiana rice farms. They were sending money they had earned to their families who live at Martin Mendoza's destination in the Mexican state of Guanajuato.

Mendoza, 31, said that he helps to provide for his mother and two sisters who live in the Mexican town of Ojo de Agua, and he has been working in the United States to do that since he was just 14. He is here legally with a permanent alien resident card.

He explained that the men from Mexico who are working in Louisiana take turns delivering money to their families.

U.S. major source of income

It's happening all across the United States. Working Mexican immigrants are sending billions of dollars home every year. According to a recent Associated Press story, this has become Mexico's second-largest source of income. Oil exports are first.

Mendoza said he and his co-workers have an informal arrangement. Any time someone is going back, he serves as a messenger for the others.

That is why Rosenberg police found so many envelopes containing cash Feb. 10, when they searched Mendoza following the crash, and after arresting him for no insurance and no driver's license.

It turned out that he did have a driver's license and proof of insurance, and the charges were dropped. But when police returned the money and Mendoza counted it, he told them he came up short.

When that failed to get any results, Mendoza turned to the Mexican consulate in Houston for help, and officials there put him in touch with Randall Kallinen, a lawyer who is with the Houston chapter of the ACLU.

A detective at the Rosenberg police station said on Friday that an internal investigation is being conducted into the allegations of missing money. He said he couldn't comment on specifics because Mendoza has retained an attorney and "because of potential litigation."

However, he did say that Mendoza and Kallinen were "not being cooperative." A couple of examples he offered of this lack of cooperation were that police have not yet received a written complaint, and Mendoza has not provided the precise amount of money he alleges is missing.

Kallinen said a part of this case he finds particularly aggravating is that Rosenberg police telephoned the Immigration and Naturalization Service in what he views as an effort to solve the problem by getting Mendoza deported. He said that police call to INS was placed after Mendoza was released from police custody and after he had complained about missing money.

Interest in story is building

Mendoza said he is in a tough spot and has no choice but to pursue the funds, which he told me on Friday total about $16,500. He said he doesn't know how he could deliver so much less than he started with or how he could explain to the people in Louisiana who sent the money or the people in Mexico who are waiting for it.

"I want to go as far as I can go," he said. "I'm not going to quit in the middle."

He said he has been trying to figure out what he can do, and all he can come up with is taking a video camera around to all the men who entrusted money to him and getting them to tell their stories and verify that he is telling the truth about them.

Kallinen said ACLU officials at the state and national levels have expressed an interest in the case, as have a couple of the local Spanish-language TV stations.

This story could easily wind up in the national spotlight because so many people from Mexico work here and can identify with Mendoza's plight.

Meanwhile, Mendoza is staying with a cousin in Houston, hoping he can find some work and earn some pay while waiting to find out how his missing money story will end.