Nativists may hope the mounting death toll of undocumented migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border may serve as a symbolic deterrent. But in the hometown of three brothers who died in an April 6 crash following a high-speed chase by Border Patrol, the buses leave for the north almost daily -- filled with news of labor shortages in California's fields. PNS editor Ruben Martinez is a writer and performance artist based in Mexico City and Los Angeles.

CHERAN, MICHOACAN -- Two months ago, brothers Jaime, Salvador and Benjamin Chavez-Munoz set out from this small Indian town in Michoacan's highlands for Watsonville, Ca., to pick another season's crops. They never made it. The pick-up they were riding in along with 23 other undocumented immigrants catapulted off the highway in a high-speed chase with the Border Patrol. The three brothers and five others were killed in the crash.

The accident occurred on April 6, five days after the highly publicized beating of three undocumented immigrants by Riverside sheriff's deputies. Before the end of that month there was another fatal accident involving a truck smuggling immigrants into California. On Father's Day, three Mexican nationals were found dead, apparently from dehydration and exposure to the Arizona desert sun. At least 14 others have been found dead in the California desert since the beginning of the year.

As the toll mounts, the numbers begin to look like body counts from a battle front. A study by the University of Houston documented over 3,000 deaths along the border in the last decade, most of them drowning in the Rio Grande.

Nativists north of the border may hope that Cheran's body count will serve as a cautionary tale for migrants across Mexico -- a kind of symbolic "deterrent." Late last month, the Border Patrol initiated a new campaign called "Stay Out, Stay Alive" -- a publicist's equivalent of hanging the bodies of the dead on the border fence.

But here in Cheran, some 1000 miles from that line, the North still represents a chance -- albeit an increasingly slim one -- for life.

Maria Elena Chavez-Munoz, mother of the dead, would rather no one left Cheran for the north ever again. "I don't want any mother to have to go through the pain I feel," she tells visitors in her one-room dirt-floor house. But Wenze Cortez, her 19-year-old son-in-law, is all set to make a break for the United States. "There's just no way to feed my wife and child here," he says. "What's worse, this living death or dying trying to truly live?"

"Just days after the brothers were killed, a bus carrying 80 people left Cheran for the north," says Jose Luis Macias, a public school teacher here. Macias's own family is split between Cheran and "los United". The mostly unpaved roads are clogged with cheap and sometimes not-so-cheap cars brought back after stints of work in the U.S., bearing license plates from California, Missouri, Illinois, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Indeed, this town of 30,000 would wither away without money from relatives working in the States. Town mayor Salvador Campanur estimates some $3 million comes back each year in "remesas" (money orders from the states). Roughly half the town's families still live in dirt-floor adobe brick or scrap aluminum structures, but a good number of concrete-and-plaster two-story homes, crowned by satellite dishes, line many streets.

"What's funny is that the gringos are the ones who taught us to live like this," says Sergio Velasquez, an attendant at the only gas station in town. "And now that we're doing it, they tell us to stop!"

Velasquez began to migrate north at age 16. Now 22, married, with a daughter, he built a modest home from money he earned picking tomatoes in Mississippi, tobacco in North Carolina, watermelon in Kentucky. As a youngster in Cheran, he dreamed of owning his own bicycle. Only in the U.S. was he able to afford a second-hand one. "At least I had that one luxury, something I could call my own. Once you've tasted the fruits of your work, it's difficult to let that go."

The Chavez-Munoz brothers' tombstone is an elegant, five-foot high miniature of a white twin-steepled church set on a slate-gray slab -- paid for by donations that have trickled in from relatives, friends and strangers ever since the news of the accident arrived via one of the town's two long-distance public phones.

Now the family is being pressured by the local loan-shark who lent the brothers about $1200 for the trip. "It's an insult to the dead," cemetery worker Ramiro Payeda says. He recalls an incident in which a big property owner in town wanted to kick out some tenants who hadn't paid rent. "We decided those people were born on that land and we weren't going to let them be kicked out." After a not-so-subtle threat, the owner desisted. The family still lives and works in Cheran.

Payeda falls silent as a blast sounds from the engine of a bus grinding along the highway, headed north. Another chance to live.