Dream interrupted: As gang violence soars in Mexico, migrants in US rethink plans to go home

PALMAS ALTAS, Mexico — Like many Mexicans in the United States, María Avila worked for decades north of the border with a simple dream: to one day return home.

She toiled at a Palm Springs country club by day, served meals to wealthy clients at night and cleaned houses and mended clothes on the weekend, slowly saving to build a home of her own back in Juanchorrey, the wind-swept pueblo high in the mountains in Zacatecas state where she grew up.

With five bedrooms, a Jacuzzi and a grand entryway capped by a cupola, the hacienda stood out from the crumbling adobe buildings nearby. Avila, 60, and her husband filled the yard with blooming fruit trees. After a lifetime of labor, they were finally making plans to retire there.

Then in 2020, narcos invaded Juanchorrey.

Within months, the sleepy rancho famous for its fluffy tortillas and a long history of sending migrants to the U.S. had been overtaken by gangs who robbed, killed and kidnapped with abandon.

When a horrific act of violence touched a member of Avila’s own family, her children begged her not to return.

“For me, that’s a no,” her youngest daughter, Andy Preciado, 34, told her mother. “I’m terrified of you going.”

Avila longed for Mexico — for the predawn crow of roosters, the salty taste of local cheeses, the languid afternoons in the plaza with friends. But as she wrote impassioned letters to Mexican leaders pleading for the military to intervene in Juanchorrey, she and her husband, Abraham, began contemplating a very different future.

With some $350,000 tied up in the house in Mexico, retiring in California would be tricky. The couple was still paying off their home in Cathedral City, a working-class suburb of Palm Springs,