SALCAJA, Guatemala — This impoverished town is the place to go for those who want to know what Guatemalans think about their fellow citizens who have fled to the United States.
Here in Guatemala’s western highlands, the local government glorifies them with a towering 40-foot statue called “Homage to the Migrants.”
The statue’s massive presence cost $100,000 to create and evokes the Stalinist era of Soviet public statuary.
Salcajá Mayor Miguel Ovalle explained at the sculpture’s unveiling in 2010 that “between 1980 and 1985, the population of the town began to migrate and most settled in Trenton, New Jersey. Since then, the infrastructure of the town changed because remittances changed the situation.”
He said legal and illegal immigrants from the town sent back to relatives an estimated $192 million for housing and $123 million for the purchase of real estate.
The looming monument outside the town presents a giant man who faces north, with his arms reaching towards the United States.
He stands on a pedestal with long hair, a backpack and overalls representing the 1980s, when the first Guatemalans left for the United States.
A poem at the foot of the monument begins, “Migrant of Salcajá, emigrant of valor that by making your dream, you make the sweetest love.”
About 5,000 former residents of Salcajá — a number equal to a fourth of the city’s 1980 population — today call the U.S. home. Fifteen thousand still living in Salcajá receive funds from those in the U.S.
About 40 percent of Salcajá’s income is generated from remittances from legal and illegal immigrants living in the United States, according to Prensa Libre, Guatemala’s national daily newspaper.
The Bank of Guatemala estimated 1.5 million expat Guatemalans sent $5.4 billion back home in 2013, the single largest source of its national income.
The remittances exceed all other income Guatemala received from its exports, including coffee, sugar and bananas.
The CIA World Factbook describes Guatemala as “the top remittance recipient in Central America.” Even so, half of the population lives under the poverty line and half of its children are “chronically malnourished.”
