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Deportee builds new life in Tijuana

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The son and grandson of bakers, Jesús Gaytán grew up outside Mexico City, around flour and mixing machines, and the smells of rolls and pan dulce. And for nearly three decades in the United States, he supported himself by baking. Now deported and living in Tijuana, he is counting on those skills to pull him through.

“Every day, to be earning something, even a little bit, it allows you not to be seized with despair, to say, ‘I’m going back to the other side,’” Gaytán said one afternoon as he pondered his new surroundings in a hilly working-class area of the city known as Cañon del Sainz.

His mother, two daughters, ex-wife and nine brothers and sisters live in California, but he holds no hope of returning: The journey is far too dangerous, he said, and if he is caught he could face jail time.

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His birthplace in central Mexico feels like part of his past, and too far away from his daughters in Bell Gardens. So after 27 years in the United States, he now sees his future in this corner of Tijuana, where he is building a small bakery along an unpaved road, and counting the days until the new woman in his life leaves her home in Longview, Wash., to join him.

For many deportees, Tijuana is a city of transit, a way-station on their journey back to their home communities in other parts of Mexico. For others, it has become a place to stage a return to the United States, with some sinking into a life of despair, drug addiction and homelessness. But a good number, like Gaytán, are quietly finding their way in this city as they opt to stay in Mexico.

“People are very hardworking,” Gaytán said. “If you go out on a Friday to the store, and you see people buying their groceries, people who are working in factories, many people (are) from all over Mexico. Tijuana offers many opportunities.”

Since 2010, Baja California has received 608,034 deportations, according to figures from Mexico’s National Migration Institute. Of nearly 227,000 deportations to Mexico during the first 11 months of 2014, Tijuana received 31,218, second only to Nuevo Laredo on the Texas border, with 36,341.

Gaytán’s story is like that of so many other deportees who end up in Tijuana: He crossed to the United States while young, worked for years and launched a family. A brush with the law led to his eventual deportation.

Gaytán came to the United States from Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a working-class community outside Mexico City, where his father built two bakeries and died when Gaytán was 4 years old. In 1986, at age 18, Gaytán followed an older brother to Los Angeles where some cousins lived, crossing easily near Tijuana’s Colonia Libertad. He remained in the Los Angeles area, married, had two daughters, working in a series of bakeries and settling in Bell Gardens.

He put in papers to legalize his status in 1992, he said, and was provisionally approved. But 1994, “I had a problem” he said, when he was charged and convicted of second-degree robbery. He served 18 months for the crime, which he said he did not commit. Dark and thin and with a mustache, he bore a physical resemblance to one of the perpetrators, he said, and was incorrectly identified by a witness.

Still, he held out hope for remaining in the United States, and went to immigration court. He eventually lost the case, was ordered deported, but because he had changed addresses, never received the notification letter, he said.

In 2008, while working at a bakery in Vancouver, Wash., U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents came to the door looking for someone else, and ended up arresting him, he said. After checking the license plates of Gaytán’s vehicle, the agents found he had a deportation order, and deported him to Tijuana.

Four months later, Gaytán returned to the United States, paying smugglers $3,000 to take him across near Mexicali. It was a dangerous journey, fighting a current in the All-American Canal, and Gaytán grew so exhausted that he nearly gave up. Returning to Washington state, he found work in the small city of Longview, near the Oregon border.

In Longview, he met Luz, a legal U.S. resident who worked at a produce packing plant. They moved in together, he purchased an oven and mixer and in 2011 the couple opened Lucy’s Bakery. But in December 2012, ICE found him one morning at the store. Soon after, he was sent to Tijuana, where he initially lived with Luz’s sister.

“I was desperate, sad, unmotivated,” Gaytán said. “It’s very traumatic, because one isn’t used to being in Mexico.”

An easygoing man, he said it took him a year to regain his equilibrium. With his car, oven, mixer and baking trays delivered to him in Tijuana, he was able to once again take up his trade, and moved to Cañon del Sainz, where he has been purchasing a small plot of land and building a bakery. In the meantime, he has been baking in provisional spaces, at first a borrowed wood shack and more recently in a small rented house.

Being in Mexico has its benefits: He has all his papers in order, he feels free to ask questions, doesn’t worry about getting stopped, and is getting reacquainted with his native country. He wants to work as a volunteer, baking bread for the Casa del Migrante, a Catholic-run migrant shelter where he stayed during his 2008 deportation.

“What you need here, is a bit of patience, and to know how to work, he said.

And for Gaytán, that means baking the rolls and pan dulcecuernitos, conchas, puerquitos and elotes. “It is such a nice thing, to bake all kinds of bread,” he said. “To mix the vanilla, the shortening, the flavors. I bake my bread, and I go out and sell it and people say, “I like it, you make very good bread.”

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