MALINALCO, Mexico _ On a cloudy morning last October, Agustin Poblete Ortega stopped by his wife's house to tell her he was leaving again.
Rosa Icela Nava, then 27, didn't want him to go.
Her whole life she had been surrounded by men who had gone north, and sometimes never returned.
And while her relationship with Poblete had been rocky over the last year _ she had moved out of his family's house because of his drinking _ he was a good father to their two young daughters.
She wanted to ask him to stay, to tell him about the sick feeling in her stomach. But Nava kept her feelings inside, as was her habit.
"I can't stop you," she told him.
"Take care of the kids," he said.
If Poblete was addicted to alcohol _ he could never have just one tequila or beer _ he was also addicted to American wages. On his five previous trips north, he had grown accustomed to earning $15 an hour. Back in his hometown of Malinalco, Mexico, he chafed as bosses handed him the equivalent of just $10 after a day of hard work.
He had been part of a large wave of Mexicans returning home in recent years, a phenomenon fueled by harsher conditions in the U.S. and new opportunities back home that is upending the immigration narrative on both sides of the border.
Coming back to Mexico is not easy for everybody. For Poblete, who had tasted the good life north of the border, the real winners in Mexico's growing economy seemed to be the millionaire business and political leaders who arrived by helicopter to play at Malinalco's exclusive golf resort _ not high school dropouts like him.
Poblete knew that sneaking into the United States had become more dangerous than ever. Migrants died dodging immigration agents in the desert heat, drowned crossing the Rio Grande and suffocated in the back of sweltering tractor-trailers.
Yet he yearned for paychecks that would allow him to save a little, instead of just scraping by. He wanted to build a home in Malinalco for Nava and the kids and get his life on track.
"This is the last time," he promised his younger brother before he left.
For the next nine days, Nava's phone lighted up with messages as her husband made his way north and then waited at the border. Criminal groups were moving drugs across the desert, Poblete told her in a phone call, and his smuggler had counseled waiting till it was clear.
Then Poblete sent a message saying he would be crossing that night. "Take care of the kids," he implored again. He told her he would call soon to say: "Hey, I made it."
But several days passed and the phone didn't ring.
Some of his friends figured he had been caught by immigration agents. Or assumed he had been robbed, and couldn't call home.
Nava kept her darkest fears inside, where she kept most things. And she waited, because there was nothing else to do.
