It all started with a friendly wager over a soccer match.
On one side was film producer and Mexican entrepreneur Jorge Vergara and his partner, Enrique Alfaro Ramírez, the mayor of a municipality on the outskirts of Guadalajara. They had their money on Chivas.
Mayor Alfaro Ramírez (left) is betting that a sponsorship center will improve life in his municipality; CI–Jalisco director José Gallegos Coria agrees that the odds are in their favor.
On the other: Mexican pop star Alejandro Fernández and his compadre, Guillermo Romo, the CEO of a major financial consulting firm. They were pulling for the rival squad, Atlas.
But there was a catch. Mayor Alfaro’s municipality, Tlajomulco de Zuñiga, had just opened a new multi-sports complex in conjunction with the Chiva Barrio Foundation, and the mayor hoped to add a sponsorship center to address the needs of Tlajomulco’s poorest, most disenfranchised children. So he called up a few of his high-profile friends and asked them to put some money on the line in exchange for the bragging rights to their favorite soccer team.
Naturally, Chivas won. Fernández and Romo paid up – 1 million pesos, or roughly $75,000, apiece. Vergara threw in another million pesos in gratitude for the mayor’s support. The combined contributions eventually reached $300,000, providing the mayor with enough seed money to build a new Children International community center to the heart of Tlajomulco. It would be CI’s fifth center in Mexico since sponsorship was first offered there in 2005.
Despite a massive influx of migrants to Tlajomulco over the past decade, public housing has become blighted due to widespread unemployment and economic instability.
The indigenous Nahua people called the area the “Land in the Corner.” A flat, sprawling valley southwest of Guadalajara, the municipality of Tlajomulco de Zuñiga is bordered by a wall of mountains and eventually runs out of room when it hits the Pacific Ocean. In the past decade, it has become one of the fastest-growing regions in the entire country, with a population that has surged by 237%, according to Mexico’s 2010 census.
Families from rural areas began flocking to Tlajomulco with the rise of public housing and the false hope of good-paying jobs in nearby Guadalajara – a city that’s been dubbed “Mexico’s Silicon Valley” due to the presence of high-tech companies. What migrants and families in the area are encountering, though, is a much starker reality.
“Poverty has hit the community in a permanent way…” Mayor Alfaro explains. “It infuriates you. It hurts you to see the conditions in which most people in our municipality live.”
Before the mayor took office, public housing had been built in areas without streets, sewers, water services, schools or hospitals. People moved to the communities in waves, flooding the area and creating a host of social problems. “There are people whose source of work is outside of the municipality, who don’t know their neighbors, who belong to families that leave at 6 a.m. to go to work and return at 10 at night,” says the mayor. “There is no community life…no cohesion. [It] begins to create incredible degrees of social deterioration.”
Conditions were so dire, sociologists referred to Tlajomulco as the next Ciudad Juárez, a city widely considered to be the murder capital of the world. Seven out of 10 “delinquents” in Tlajomulco are minors, the mayor adds, then points out, “The repercussions from that can be very deep.”
A local street vendor by the name of Nora knows what’s at stake. From her perspective selling flavored ice along the hot, dusty roads, she sees scores of unemployed youth and delinquents with nothing constructive to do. “There isn’t any work here, and if there is work, the pay is bad,” she says. “You can work eight hours a day sometimes, and they only pay you 60 or 70 pesos (about $4 to $5).”
Nora (far right) is counting the days until her daughter can enroll in sponsorship and start school once again.
Nora uses her vantage point to keep an eye on the kids as they walk to school, to make sure nothing bad happens to them. “There is a lot of crime, a lack of security,” she warns. “There are a lot of thieves and a lot of poverty too. I’m always meeting people who don’t have anything.”
Children International’s agency director in Mexico, José Gallegos Coria, agrees. “The problem is mainly a lack of education, the unequal distribution of wealth and the lack of new jobs and business creation,” he says. “We are convinced that the intergenerational cycle of poverty and lifestyles that propagate crime can be tackled through training. They can be tackled through effective education programs, through programs that promote and support youth sports and through training for mothers and fathers so they believe from the beginning that they can create change and that there can be a better future.”
For Nora, the sooner Children International starts enrolling children the better.
“I hope they can help me with my little girl,” she told CI staff, “so I can get her back in kindergarten.” As the only breadwinner in her four-person family, Nora had to pull her daughter out of school because she couldn’t pay for tuition and transportation.
“My expectation is that within three years, this center will be able to serve 6,000 children with program benefits,” Agency Director Gallegos concludes. “But above all, that we make more strategic alliances with other organizations that will develop the community.”
With the opening of the new community center in Tlajomulco, disadvantaged children will get the support they need to play more than “games of chance.”
With the addition of a CI community center, or the Centro Comunitario del Valle, Mayor Alfaro firmly believes that conditions will improve in the municipality’s impoverished areas. However, an additional $200,000 is still needed to cover start-up costs and finish equipping the new center with furniture, dental and medical equipment, and library supplies before the center is fully operational.
Having wagered so much on the future of his municipality, the mayor is confident the remaining funds will be secured. “We are taking first-class infrastructure to the poorest area of Tlajomulco,” he enthusiastically boasts, pointing out that, along with the sponsorship center, the community complex also features amenities such as two soccer fields, a huge swimming pool, a playground and an art center.
With so much on the line for Tlajomulco’s impoverished residents, sponsorship could definitely help improve the odds for the area’s children and families – a bet that should start paying off any time now.
Reporting assistance and photos by Azucena Gollaz and Javier Cárcamo of our Jalisco, Mexico, and Guatemala sponsorship agencies respectively.
