Amando Come Home

Amando Munoz, 28, a wiry migrant worker from Texas, was picking tomatoes on a farm near Lake Worth, Fla., when four agents of the U.S. Immigration Service swooped down on the field in a search for illegal immigrants. They asked Munoz for his identity papers, but he had lost his billfold and so he had nothing to show them. "I told them I was from Harlingen, Texas," Munoz recalls, "but they just said, 'Get in the truck.' "

Along with twelve other captured farmhands, Munoz was taken to Miami Airport and flown to the nearest point in Mexico, which happened to be the Yucatan peninsula--600 miles across the Gulf of Mexico and about 1,200 miles overland from Texas.

"At the airport in Merida," says Munoz, "they dumped us all out of the airplane, and then they shooed us away like chickens. I had only $10 in my pocket, so I started out on foot. I walked, I thumbed rides, then I walked some more. None of those rich tourists in their big fast cars would pick me up, just ranch folks in their broken-down trucks or oxcarts."

When he got tired of walking, Munoz stopped at a farmhouse and cut some wood or helped to gather in the crops. "People were very friendly, taking me in for the night, feeding me, and some would give me a little money when they found out what had happened to me."

Let Me Cry. Mexico City, about halfway to Texas, was less friendly. "Nobody would pick you up there in the city," says Munoz. "It got cold there at night, and I had to sleep in doorways, under old newspapers." It took him all of two days to walk across the city.

Then cross-country again, still on foot. "The one thing that stayed in my mind was my mother," says Munoz. "and when I was in a depressed mood, I would ask myself, would I ever see my mother again?"

It took nearly two months for Munoz to cover the 1,200 miles from Yucatan to Matamoros, just across the Rio Grande from the southern tip of Texas. There, he telephoned his sister Elvia, 19, a senior at Harlingen High School, and Elvia called her mother, Mrs. Ovidea Munoz, 53, a cleaning woman with six children. Mrs. Munoz snatched up Amando's baptismal certificate, got a ride in a friend's old car, and barreled off to the border to retrieve her son. "Don't cry, Mama, I'm back," said Amando. "Let me cry," said Mrs. Munoz.

Munoz now has a lawyer and is suing the Immigration Service for $25,000 in damages. He has also given up his wanderings and is working on a local farm. "I'm staying close to Harlingen," he says, "where everybody knows me."

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