Following the tiled aisle to the altar of a century-old adobe church, Tony Herrera and Rosario Gonzalez walked the same path underneath the same wooden roof as Rosario’s parents had more than 40 years ago.

Herrera and Gonzalez live in Napa, but exchanged vows in El Llano, Mexico, where they and many other Napans retain strong ties.

Just 10 years ago, the walls of El Llano’s quaint church were crumbling, and tiles fell from the ceiling. But the Herreras and many other families who came to the United States from El Llano have donated thousands of dollars to renovate the church.

Through fundraisers fueled by homemade tamales and a strong current of hometown pride, these families have helped replace red roof tiles, reinforce walls and adorn the church’s decade-old altar with banisters. A fresh coat of paint gives the church a brilliant glow.

The church is a symbol of the links between Napa and El Llano, a town about the size of Yountville located in the vast Mexican state of Michoacan.

Herrera works for Swanson Vineyards and Winery in Oakville, while Gonzalez raises their 2-year-old daughter.

“When you’re raised there your dream is to go back home and get married in the church — to walk around the plaza,” said Rolando Herrera, Tony’s older brother and the owner of Mi Sueno Winery in Napa. “The whole town comes together around these events. That’s the beauty. Everybody is welcomed.”

International ties

Since 1942, when the United States’ Bracero Program began luring workers north of the border, more than half of El Llano’s population of 4,500 have emigrated to the U.S. Many live in the Napa Valley. The story is similar in other Michoacan towns: El Capricho, Chavinda, Patzimaro, Churintzio, Atacheo, Zamora, Indaparapeo and Morelia.

Napa Valley is home to some 30,000 people of Mexican descent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Frances Ortiz-Chavez, a Napa Valley Unified School District board member who is a member of the El Capricho Association of Napa, said her guess is that the majority of Mexican immigrants come from Michoacan.

They are winemakers, vineyard and cellar workers, office workers, business owners and students at Napa, Vintage, St. Helena or Calistoga high schools. A vineyard in St. Helena is named for the Michoacan town of Patzimaro, because the majority of the winery staff has roots there.

For more than 25 years, donations from the Napa Valley have poured into El Llano for restoration and beautification projects, and for the elaborate December fiestas that reunite Napa Valley families with their friends and relatives.

The family ties, and the financial ties, are only growing.

Spring of hope

On a sunny day in Patzimaro in December 2007, about an hour east of El Llano, a group of men — locals and wine industry workers from the Napa Valley — linger over photographs of themselves from the 1960s. In the photos they are kids, crouching by a natural spring near the center of town.

The spring is now the focus of Club Patzimaro, a group of Napa Valley and Sonoma residents looking to improve ties between Mexico and the U.S.

Club Patzimaro’s current project is to create a filtration system for sewage that flows directly into a nearby stream used to irrigate farmland. The stream originates from a natural spring that overflows from an 180-year-old cement pool, “El Ojo de Agua de las Fuentes.”

Rigo Castillo, the club president, says that through donations and hard work, the water from the stream will improve.

“It’s a great priority because we don’t want sewage to contaminate the water used for irrigation,” said Castillo, who works for Gallo Vineyards in Sonoma County.

Castillo said several other improvement projects are in the works. “We are inviting people from Patzimaro to work together on projects that we may create in the future,” he said.

Rebuilding in Mexico

These projects help Napa Valley’s immigrant families stay connected to their hometowns. Their efforts are part of a huge transfer of funds from workers in the United States to relatives in countries around the world.

According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development, an arm of the United Nations, immigrants from around the world — many in the United States — sent some $300 billion to their countries of origin in 2006.

The IFAD estimates that $68 billion a year goes to Latin America and the Caribbean, with more than $24 billion going to Mexico.

According to a separate report from the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C., in 2004 so-called remittance money sent to Michoacan formed 14 percent of the gross domestic product of that Mexican state of nearly 4 million inhabitants.

Migrants’ paychecks help feed and clothe their families and pay other living expenses, as well as providing a few luxuries that Americans would otherwise take for granted, like filtered water.

Jesus Valenci Alvarez is the parish priest of Parroquia del Sagrado Corazon, or Sacred Heart Parish, in El Llano. The town, he said, is “an agricultural community. The only ones who stay here cultivate the land. There isn’t a lot of business. It is a community only hoping for those who go to the United States to send money for them to survive.”

Transformation

After the wedding ceremony, a mariachi band led Herrera and Gonzalez through a courtyard and past a newer church — which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2007 and was built largely with money earned in the United States.

They strolled hand in hand into the paved street along the plaza to the yellow dance hall. Much of the ground they walked on had been altered and improved by the El Llano natives who call the Napa Valley home.