Low Profile in Mexico : Alien Lottery Winner Plays It Cool, Frugal

APATZINGAN, Mexico —  When Jose Caballero came home last Nov. 15, a double millionaire after winning the California lottery, the dusty town square was a tumult of cheers and banners.

But the parade was for someone else--a local hero, a welterweight boxer named Rene Arredondo. Jose Caballero, the illegal alien who had been filmed and feted and then ordered out of the United States--with his winnings--watched the parade, with some bemusement, from the crowds on the raised sidewalks that encircle the square.

There never was a parade for Caballero, and that is the way he likes it.

Now, a few days away from what he calls his “other birthday”--Nov. 4, the day he receives the second of 20 annual checks for $70,000 (his winnings after taxes)--the 25-year-old Caballero is keeping a low and frugal profile.

Worldwide Headlines

When Caballero, working as a furniture deliveryman in San Jose, won $2 million in the state’s second “Big Spin,” and then left the United States after being arrested as an illegal alien, he made worldwide headlines. A Chihuahua, Mexico, paper bannered the story, “ ‘ Mojado’ y Millonario “--” ’Wetback’ and a Millionaire.”

But back home now, the one-time “mojado” is not living like a millionaire. Of his first-year winnings, he has spent perhaps one-third.

There is the new four-bedroom house he bought in distant Morelia, where the young bachelor spends weekends with some of his family. “When I go there, nobody knows me,” he says with some satisfaction. The house cost about $15,000, cash on the barrel head.

There is the new remote-control Sony color TV that sits on the shelf below the Spanish-language Reader’s Digest Condensed Books in the Apatzingan house his father built 27 years ago.

There is more rented acreage for their papaya business, and a little something toward some land for a home of his own.

And finally there is Caballero’s only toy: probably the only air-conditioned, stereo cassette-equipped Chevy pickup truck in Apatzingan. He still owes on this new truck. He paid only 50% down, the minimum in inflation-ridden Mexico. The salesman was “surprised,” says a smiling Caballero, when he didn’t pay it all, in cash.

Likes Donny Osmond

As the light-blue truck rounded the square on a recent morning, Caballero slipped in one of his tapes--Donny Osmond singing in Spanish. “He sings in six languages,” says Caballero.

Caballero’s English is severely limited at best; he didn’t bother much with it in high school or business school, and now he regrets it. “I didn’t think you need it, but you do.” But he still lapses into phrases he picked up in his months in the United States, occasionally answering the phone “Hello,” or once, shopping for a VCR in Morelia, startling the Mexican clerk--and himself--by saying, without thinking, “Excuse me, sir.”

He taps the brakes lightly as he turns a corner. Out here, in the arid plains of Michoacan, Caballero wears cowboy boots, instead of the Reeboks he favored as a furniture deliveryman. But he still wears Levis jeans, from the stockpile of 15 pairs he bought at the San Jose swap meet where he used to work weekends selling furniture.

His jeans belt, with the letter “A” on its buckle--for Adalid, his middle name--is cinched a notch tighter nowadays. He has lost about 10 pounds since he got back, he says. He has done without his U.S. fast-food--Burger King Whoppers with cheese, and pizza with almost anything--and he waxes nostalgic about them. “We’re new at that kind of thing here.”

Still, plump or slim, there is no mistaking Efren Caballero’s oldest boy. In this town of 70,000, fruit vendors and traffic cops wave as he drives by. In front of the Casa de la Constitution--Apatzingan’s guaranteed place in the history books, the site where Mexico’s first constitution was signed in 1814--he spots his cousin’s husband. He pretends to nudge him with the new truck; the man grins, and they exchange an enthusiastic soul handshake through the open window.

Still the Same Guy

Those who knew him then and now, including his father and his mother, Maria, say he is pretty much the same fellow. Only his sister-in-law, Blanca, the U.S. citizen who interpreted for Caballero during last year’s lottery brouhaha, believes he has changed “a little.” How, she would “rather not say.” He is still, she says, a nice guy.

Caballero seems to enjoy the glad-handing good wishes of townsfolk, like bank manager Roberto Barrajas, an old colleague who greets Caballero heartily at his desk in the bank, where Caballero still points out the stations where he once worked. Although the bulk of Caballero’s money is in investment funds in San Jose, he keeps some of it here, for loyalty as well as convenience.

The Caballeros have lived here for four or five generations, a comfortably middle-class family. People knew him here before he left in 1984, like his father had done 30 years earlier, crossing the border illegally to work for a time in California. There, Caballero hoped to save toward his goal--$15,000, a figure whose modesty now makes him smile.

Despite his wide circle of acquaintances here, few other Mexicans are aware of his fortune. In his concern for privacy and security, he has given no interviews to Mexican reporters, not even to the local paper, El Tiempo. Mexicans learned he had won the lottery when a blurb aired on “Hoy Mismo,” Mexico’s version of the “Today” show.

Even that was too much for Caballero’s liking. It generated a dozen marriage proposals from Mexican girls--photos included. “I threw away the proposal letters--they made me laugh.” A few local girls stopped him on the street to propose, too, and he declined as tactfully as he could. In a country whose per capita annual income is about $2,500, all the schemes and charities that have importuned him would have nibbled his fortune to bits.

When he strolled into town recently, holding hands with his new girlfriend--the old one married someone else, six months before he won the lottery--the ragamuffins teased him, calling out monikers like “Mr. Dollar.” In the United States, when he went to Reno and Lake Tahoe for a quick holiday before leaving the country, they recognized him, too; old ladies in casinos demanded “Give me a hug!” wanting the luck to rub off. He enjoyed the skiing more than the casinos--it was his first ski trip, and he says he still occasionally practices imaginary snowplow turns in the living room, for the day when he can go skiing again.

Some Townsfolk Disappointed

His prudent life style has disappointed some townsfolk, who think he should live high.

There were those who said, “ ‘If I had what you have, I’d live it up; I’d be happy.’ ” But the one-time bank credit officer, who worked after school in a snack factory as a boy, had thought about money long before he had any. “Money isn’t good or bad, it’s the person who uses it. If I spent it (all), I’d be lazy--I wouldn’t work. So I have to work to live. To do anything else would be to waste the money, like eating it. I’m like anyone else--your work shows what you are.”

The cautious Caballero carries little cash; folded in his wallet are only 7,000 pesos, less than $10. As he was having lunch, his brother Pedro pulled him aside to chat. Caballero shook his head and returned to the table. He did not have what Pedro wanted--cash to pay the papaya workers. “I didn’t have any--he had to go to the bank.”

There are two new Mexican bank cards in his wallet, and “at first it was hard to walk past” the shops full of things he could afford, harder than it was when he didn’t have money. “Now it’s easy.” Still, he admits that it gives him pleasure to walk into fine hotels and toss the plastic card on the front desk.

What does fill his pockets is memorabilia: the lucky rubbery green Gumby figure a relative bought him before the Big Spin, a signed $2 bill from Pedro’s wedding, his identification cards from his old bank job and the San Jose factory, and a California driver’s license, good until 1989. “What a thing,” he marvels. “I have a license to drive in California but I can’t enter California.”

One thing his money cannot buy him is a visa to the United States. His alien status already costs him $10,000 a year more in taxes on his winnings than a U.S. citizen pays. Now, although his parents got their tourist visas, Caballero said, he has made four unsuccessful trips to the consulate in Guadalajara. He had hoped to join them next month, to watch his mother’s reaction to her first visit north of the border.

“To any other country I can go, but not there,” he says, more perplexed than angry. Except for entering the states illegally, he has “not even a parking ticket” on his record. But “they told me ‘No way.’ ”

Needs Proof of Ties

Celio Sandate, head of the consulate’s nonimmigrant visa unit, said that to get a visa, Caballero, like everyone else, “must show proof of his ties to Mexico,” to guarantee that he will return. “Unfortunately this young man was never able to do that. With the money he has now, he doesn’t seem to be investing in his country.” The papaya orchards he rents and harvests with his father are “really very little” as a tie. “He should invest in his country; he doesn’t want to do that.”

But Caballero says he’ll keep trying. There is much he wants to see; his friends, Disneyland, Yosemite. He would also like to visit his nest egg in the San Jose bank, where he was told he would be welcome any time.

A year ago, when he was arrested, he talked of becoming a citizen, of opening a business. He loved the United States, he said, he loved San Jose. But that talk has abated. Now it is a family fruit empire he talks of.

The rented land, about 90 acres, lies well out of town, on the plain between Paricutin, the volcano that rose from the earth 40 years ago, and the mountain called Sleeping Woman.

All the way out a rough, rutted road to the land, he talks papayas. There is even a papaya tree in the courtyard of his family’s flat-roofed home in town. When he was in the states every month, he sent money to rent this land. Growing food is “a noble kind of work,” he says.

‘One of My Dreams’

“This was one of my dreams: an orchard, my pickup, working for myself. What else could I want?” With his Swiss Army knife, he hacks off an Apatzingan papaya, and extols its virtues: its sweetness, its tenderness, its beautiful coral-colored flesh, its usefulness as a digestive aid. He wants the Caballero family to bring it to Mexico’s big-city markets, and ultimately to dinner tables in the states. It is one more reason for wanting to be able to visit his San Jose bank.

On a hillside above Apatzingan, three blocks from his father’s house, is a plot of land that he is in the process of buying. From here, one can see the cathedral. Caballero says this is where he wants to build his own home, his swimming pool, and this is where, one day, he will bring his wife.

Farther still there is another piece of land. One day, he hopes to help build something that impressed him about the United States--a home for the elderly. “This will be the first social work I want to do for my town. I have a lot of plans. . . . We want to create some image that will endure for years, even when I’m dead.”

When he tries to figure out why he won the lottery--he, and not his friend or his cousin--he can only figure that it is because it has enabled him to do the things he planned, “and without waiting years and years to do it.”

His eyes scan toward the hill town of Acuahuato, where the Virgin Mary is said to appear every February. His family goes to the chapel there to pray and meditate.

“The person who wastes money is happy for the moment, he is amusing himself,” he says, but in the end is “the most unhappy person. Those of us who work day to day, knowing who we are--that is normal life. We don’t all have the same luck, but we accomplish things by working, not by luck.”