Picture: Floridalma Tobar, 24, makes a phone call from Tropical International Calls in Port Chester to Guatemala, her native country. She spoke yesterday to her cousin, who is looking after her two children.
STORY:
Gustavo Gutierrez is one of many business owners in town who help Latin American immigrants stay connected to home.
Along with running a Colombian restaurant, he sells long-distance telephone cards at $5 apiece. Other Main Street merchants sell plane tickets, money orders and shipping services. Their customers are people like Floridalma Tobar, a fast-food worker who calls Guatemala four or five times a week. She calls to check on the two daughters she and her husband are working to support.
But Gutierrez says his life, unlike that of his customers, is firmly transplanted in the United States. He emigrated from Colombia 20 years ago to escape the political violence that killed his father and uprooted his family. He has no desire to go back.
"I have my job here. I have my family here," he said. "You see the news every day, the big problems in my country. That's the reason I don't want to go."
A new study tries to measure such variations in the degree to which Latino immigrants maintain ties to their home country. Researchers have long paid attention to "transnational" migration - the efforts to live in two countries at once, rather than leave the old country behind. But it's been unclear how common the phenomenon is.
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