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Foundation for Better Life
Program lets Mexicans in the U.S. send home cement, other building blocks in lieu of money
September 01, 2005
By Cara Marcano
The latest shipments in the booming United States-Mexico remittance market isn’t cash, but piles of cement.
Thanks to a 2-year-old program launched in both countries by a subsidiary of Mexican cement giant Cemex S.A., a growing number of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are instead opting to send building materials back home.
Construmex, which has 13 offices in markets such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Las Vegas and Atlanta, charges senders a flat fee of $5 and helps them calculate how much material they need to build a home or a small business back in Mexico. Also included with the $5 fee is a design consultation with a Mexican-trained architect. Additional offices are to open in the next few years in New York, Dallas, Colorado, Arizona and North Carolina.
“[The immigrants] have the power to control the final use of their remittances. Their cash is converted into house materials for the specific project that he or she planned for from the U.S.,” explains Héctor Ureta, Cemex director for low-income programs. “It is a way to control and ensure that the remittance money doesn’t go to daily spending, but to a life plan for savings.”
According to Cemex research conducted in 2002 and 2004, 56 percent of Mexicans in the U.S. have expressed an interest to build a home in Mexico, and 18 percent are actively executing plans today. To date, the program has helped 5,500 Mexicans living in the U.S. to send building materials for their families, and Cemex anticipates $4 million in revenue from the program this year.
To promote the service, Construmex has been making a push through extremely localized grass-roots initiatives. In Los Angeles, for example, the Asociación Zacatecana, which represents Mexican immigrants from the central state of Zacatecas, is particularly active in the process. The group often holds Sunday afternoon parties for its membership and other Mexican nationals, and, naturally, Construmex representatives are in attendance to explain the program. On weekends, vans of Construmex employees also fan out to flea markets and other events to promote the program.
As Construmex has learned, traditional media buys are not as effective as grass-roots and word-of-mouth marketing, mainly because the offering is complicated and many immigrants can be skeptical. Often it’s because Latinos have had a negative experience, such as sending a television home to Mexico, only to find the wrong model had arrived, Ureta says.
The company’s logo, “Hazla Paisano” (Just Do It, Countryman), is a play on words on the common Mexican expression, “Ya La Hizo.” That phrase roughly translates to, “He or she has made it.”
The phrase is often used to refer to an individual’s rise in socio-economic status, whose catalyst is often a migration to the United States. The logo also is a play on words because the word Hazla, a conjugation of the Spanish infinitive “hacer,” also means “to build.”
Individual orders average $1,800, but because the building process is continuous, about 50 percent of customers repeat their initial purchases over time, Ureta says.
The executive adds, “They don’t finish a house with one order.” nn
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