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TEHUACAN, Mexico — On the western edge of town — past the brightly painted townhouses of the middle class, past the new shopping mall, off the highway and across the railroad tracks — the prosperity and the pavement end.

In an unpainted cinder-block house on a dark street, a man swats mosquitoes and recounts how his 13-year-old son died chasing the dream of prosperity.

Faustino Francisco Galvan is 38 but looks older. Under a bare hanging light bulb, he speaks of how he might have saved his son, Eloy.

The year before, his 16-year-old nephew, Rosario, persuaded Eloy to join him on a dangerous illegal journey to the United States.

Francisco lives every day with his regrets. If only he had told the boy to stay home instead of agreeing to go along in May 2006. If only his own body had not given out in the Arizona desert. If only he had told his rescuers about the teenagers who had gone ahead, then Eloy and his cousin Rosario might not have died of dehydration and returned home in caskets.

Rosario had wanted to quit his job at the blue jeans factory in Tehuacan and join his father, Maximino, in North Carolina, working in a plant nursery. He would make more money and send some home to his mother. Eloy's dream was to escape poverty by getting an education.

"He wanted to be a civil engineer in construction," Faustino says. "(He) said, 'Why wait so much time to have money? I'm going to the United States.'"

Tehuacan is the city once hailed as a Mexican miracle, where a seemingly inexhaustible supply of jobs promised to stop the exodus of poor Mexicans to the U.S.

Until the 1990s, Tehuacan was a small agricultural city 130 miles southeast of Mexico City. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement lit the fuse for an explosion of garment factories in Tehuacan. During that period, American textile companies outsourced hundreds of thousands of sewing jobs to Mexican factories. Tehuacan, which already had a small-scale garment industry, went into overdrive.

In the late 1990s, Tehuacan's factory employment climbed to 70,000. Men, women and young teenagers worked night and day, often several shifts in a row.

The Tehuacan municipal population grew from 190,416 in 1995 to 215,174 in 2000. Workers flooded in from poor rural villages, some from hundreds of miles away. They came because a patch of corn and beans could no longer support a family in a globalized era, when Mexico was flooded with cheap corn imports.

They came because factories were paying the equivalent of $50 a week, twice the agricultural wage.

Levi's, Guess, the Gap, Ocean Pacific, Polo: American clothing icons, stitched together by hands that just yesterday flattened tortillas and guided the plow.

But environmentalists and downstream farmers complained that the creeks and rivers were poisoned with blue dye from stonewashed jeans. Labor organizers in Mexico and abroad alleged dangerous conditions and workers' rights violations in the factories.

Maria Luisa Ruiz Aponte, a Tehuacan native, recalls her few months working at a factory.

"We had to sew 2,000 pockets a day or you wouldn't get your full day's pay," she says. "They didn't tell you that when they hired you. I made 350 pesos a week ($35 dollars) for working six days."

Newcomers built shacks on the edge of town out of cinder block, scrap metal and cardboard. The new shantytowns outgrew the Tehuacan valley and climbed up the surrounding hills, into rocky terrain without pavement or sewer.

New arrivals included Faustino Francisco and his family. He had grown up 30 miles west of Tehuacan in Nopala, a village of 300, where he learned to grow corn and beans and raise goats.

In Tehuacan, he found work in the booming construction industry, working with cinder block.

Faustino's sister, Cecilia, and brother-in-law, Maximino, moved with their family to the same new neighborhood in Tehuacan. Maximino worked in construction, while Cecilia sold tortillas from her home.

But just as quickly, the jobs began leaving and flowing in the early 2000s to Asia, where labor was even cheaper. Meanwhile, a downturn in the U.S. economy around 2002 also hurt the market for Tehuacan's products, economists say.

The garment industry that employed 70,000 Tehuacan workers in the late 1990s would decline to 15,000 by 2007, says Javier Lopez, head of the national industrial chamber of commerce in Tehuacan .

Gordon Hanson, a University of California San Diego economist who studies immigration, says Tehuacan is a prime example of how economic forces can either endow or derail prosperity.

"Tehuacan went from an era of stable poverty to an era of unstable prosperity," he says. "When you look at places like Tehuacan and how tied they are to the global economy, they're now exposed to competition from places they never had to compete with before."

For that reason, Hanson says it's simplistic to think that job growth in Mexico will stop Mexicans from heading north.

"Globalization creates a new source of shocks that can force people into migration," he said.

Through boom and bust, the better wages of the United States remain an ever-present temptation. By Hanson's calculations, the average Mexican man in his mid-20s with a couple of years of high school could expect to earn $8.21 an hour in the United States in 2000. In Mexico, he could expect the equivalent of $2.10 an hour.

Faustino and Maximino now sometimes went weeks without work.

Maximino finally decided to try his luck working at a plant nursery in North Carolina, a state that had become a magnet for immigrant labor. There, he could make more than $300 a week. He could make more in a day than a minimum-wage worker could make in a week in Mexico.

The employer in North Carolina encouraged the journey and arranged a guide to take him through the Arizona desert.

When Maximino left, 16-year-old Rosario was operating a sewing machine in one of the plants in Tehuacan, often working the night shift. The job paid about 600 pesos ($60) a week. Rosario decided not to go with his father to the U.S.

But a few months later, he changed his mind. He told his father he wanted to join him.

"He had much ambition to come," Maximino says.

Maximino told his son to wait until he paid off his debt to the smuggler, but Rosario refused. Maximino and his boss worked out a loan to help Rosario with the $1,700 fee to travel to North Carolina the same way he did, through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. Maximino felt confident his son would be safe because Rosario would go with the same guide who successfully smuggled him through the desert only months before.

Rosario persuaded cousin Eloy to come with him and Faustino couldn't talk his son out of it. He decided to go with his son on a journey through some of the harshest terrain on the North American continent.

That year, in a lonesome stretch of Arizona desert, 184 migrants would die trying to enter the American promised land. Eloy Francisco and Rosario Hernandez would be among them.

The news came down like a hammer. In December 2006, regional officials from the Mexican Secretary for External Relations informed Maximino and Cecilia Hernandez of the results of a DNA test that proved the remains found in Ironwood Forest National Monument in May were those of Rosario.

Eloy's body, found near that of Rosario, had already been identified.

"When we got the results that the tests were positive, we lost all hope," Maximino says. "All the illusion that we had disappeared. There was nothing left to do but accept it."

By this time, Maximino had returned from North Carolina to be with his family as the investigation continued. Considering the debt he had incurred to travel to North Carolina, he had nothing to show for his effort.

"I sacrificed all of my journey, all that I went through to cross," he says. "The trip was useless. Now I feel culpable because I told (Rosario), 'Come on, there's work here.' I never imagined that this would happen. Nobody knew that this was going to happen."

"There's only one person who's guilty for encouraging them in their American dreams," he said. "That's me."

Maximino tried but failed to get a temporary work visa in December 2006 to return to the land of promise. He plans to return illegally to North Carolina sometime this year, taking his chances with another desert crossing.

Not so with Faustino. He feels shame for breaking another country's laws and searing guilt for not reining in his son's ambitions. He cannot bear the thought of crossing the desert again.

"In our crossing, we encountered cadavers, poor souls in the middle of the desert. We encountered bones that were very dry, people in decomposition. I realized then that it was a place where only the desperate go...."