HOUSTON: They came to Houston from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Colombia seeking a new life, and it is going to take more than a hurricane to make them leave.

While nearly everyone in the Texan city high-tailed it, Manuel Mendoza, a 57-year-old Mexican wearing cowboy-style jeans and a gold earring, leant against a wall near the porch of his house as the wind gathered pace.

“I hope that nothing much will happen,” he said of the looming storm, which has the United States in a panic. “We are used to a lot of things happening in life,” he added with a shrug.

Forty per cent of Houston’s population of 2mn is Latino and many took the same attitude to the Hurricane Rita as Mendoza.

In Mexico, he had worked on a maize farm toiling under a searing sun or in a week of rainstorms. At the age of 32 he walked across the frontier to find a better job and ended up as a house painter.

Just down the road, Benarda Hernandez, 30, who comes from Guatemala, was sat outside with her four children, Lady, Claudia, Karina and Elvis.

Hernandez wanted to leave and did not want to be at home when the storm struck. “But we don’t have enough gasoline for the car,” she explained. Many petrol stations ran out as the mass exodus got under way.

“We wanted to go to a shelter but they would not let us in, there were already too many people.”

The woman said she was afraid of the storm. But she has also had her share of troubles in the past.

When she was 20, her brother was kidnapped and killed. “That was when we decided to leave,” said the house cleaner.

But the Latino immigrants do not only tell of hardship in Houston.

“We are people who fight, we are entrepreneurs,” said Nelson Reyes, head of a community organisation called Carecen.

“Once upon a time this territory was Mexico. People of Mexican descent are now leaders or belong to the middle classes. The new Mexicans work in services and construction, but the second generation has reached a higher level,” he said.

Another Mexican crossing the empty streets of south Houston, who refused to give his name, said he was staying to watch over his two “taquerias” restaurants.

“People who work from nine to five can leave but not us,” he said.

“There is a culture of risk and danger in the Latin community,” added Reyes. “We come from violent countries where there are natural disasters, we are less likely to panic.”

Eberto Romero, vice president of the association of Hondurans in Texas, once saw a vicious storm that devastated his country – Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

“It made me scared just to listen to the wind, which seemed as if it was talking,” he said.

Three years after Mitch, some people were still living in the debris of their wrecked homes. He is counting on that not happening in the United States. – AFP