Leaving Guatemala 12 years ago was the hardest thing Carlos Sanchez had ever done. Until he decided to come back. Sanchez still remembers the day he left home: saying goodbye to his parents; leaving his friends; that last tear-stained glimpse of his sweet mountain village in western Guatemala as the bus carried him over the ridge to an uncertain life in 'the north.' Painful, anxious times. But not as hard as the return trip. When Sanchez, 36, arrived back in Central America recently, after living a third of his life as an illegal immigrant in suburban Washington, D.C., he stepped off the flight from Dulles International Airport into a cultural no man's land. He had been an outlaw migrant in one country; now he was a native-born stranger in the other. For years, Sanchez had worked all the overtime hours he could handle as a supervisor for a granite counter contractor in Springfield, Va. Last year, overtime slipped to part time and then almost no time. After months of looking for work, he started looking at airfares. An expatriate's longing for his native land is often searing. But Sanchez, like thousands of Latino immigrants forced back across the border in recent months by the sinking economy, is learning sooner than he wanted to that going home again can be even more complicated. Almost at once upon his return, he was felled by a bout of the 'turistas.' His Arlington County, Va.-born toddler, Marvin, also took sick, and Sanchez nearly panicked at the difficulty in finding a doctor. His wife, Gladys, was no longer comfortable in the traditional garments of Mayan women, finding them heavy and stiff compared with the Old Navy blouses and jeans she bought at a Virginia mall. At the airport, they were met by nieces and nephews Sanchez had never seen. Even the elderly couple at the front of the crowd was hard to recognize. 'When I saw my parents for the first time, it was like they were different people,' Sanchez said. 'I thought everything was going to be the same. I was wrong. Everything is different, including me.' Immigrants jump back and forth across borders all the time, and the recession-driven movement from the United States to points south is not yet registering as a mass exodus. But it is increasingly easy to find workers who have decided that they are better off weathering the downturn in their ancestral homelands. In Washington, the Guatemalan Embassy reports a substantial uptick in the number of nationals walking in to apply for travel documents. At U.S. airports, airline agents and government officials describe increased winking and nodding as illegal immigrants 'self-deport' with no hassle from authorities. 'When somebody is already showing that they intend to depart the United States, it doesn't serve any interest for us to serve them a notice to appear before an immigration court,' said Lloyd Easterling, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. 'That isn't good stewardship of tax dollars.' At Valdemar Travel in Takoma Park, Md., the proportion of one-way air tickets south has reached unprecedented levels, nearing 60 percent of the firm's business earlier this year, manager Devin Reyes said. Sanchez had been sending home extra money -- about $50,000 over six years -- to build a cement-block house next to his parents' home. In three rooms and a bath next to the yard where his mother grinds corn and cooks over an open fire, he works to overcome the lingering cultural vertigo. 'Sometimes I don't know just where I am,' he said. Sanchez liked Washington life. When he arrived, he had never ridden an airplane or even an elevator. He had never walked on carpeting. But he mastered the subway and liked shopping at the Chinese market in Arlington and seeing movies at a nearby mall. He worked six days most weeks but made time for occasional weekend trips to Virginia Beach or Atlantic City. Family members visited the mall often, and Six Flags once. They had cable. Sanchez misses the History Channel. Marvin misses Elmo. He learned English, mostly at two-hour classes at a public library. And he learned to drive. He loved the orderly traffic -- a stark contrast to Guatemala's pell-mell road culture, where old American-made school buses, tattooed in bright colors and fitted with bellowing air horns, are buses-gone-wild. No stop-at-every-railroad-crossing caution here. 'I still try to be careful,' Sanchez said. 'I stop when children are crossing the road. And they honk at me.' He met his wife in Arlington, where he was surprised one day to see a woman walking along dressed in a huipile, a traditional Mayan blouse, embroidered, amazingly, in the colors and patterns particular to his home village. There, at Pershing Drive and North Glebe, Sanchez chatted up a girl from Concepcion in their native Indian language of Mam. (Begin optional trim) In Washington, Sanchez lived in a Guatemalan bubble. Immigrants tend to follow each other to U.S. cities, and a huge proportion of Guatemalans in Washington come from certain villages of the Western Highlands. Those from Excumucha, for example, live mostly in Langley Park, Md. Those from next-door Concepcion make Arlington their base. Carlos had no stronger link to home than his big brother, Adrian, who went north first. Carlos followed a year later, borrowing about $5,500 to pay the coyotes, the ruthless fixers who hid him in an empty tank truck for hours, sharing a tiny air hole with dozens of panicked migrants. Neither brother was eager to take a dangerous trip to an unknown future. But their father, an education-minded tailor, needed to pay school fees for the boys' seven siblings, and the lure of big northern wages was too tempting. Adrian and Carlos, working together as painters, began sending home as much as $500 a month. That all six boys and three girls have graduated from high school is remarkable by village standards. That two of the boys went on to medical school is spoken of as something of a local miracle. One is finishing his residency in the capital, Guatemala City. The other has started a rural practice, driving a 1987 Nissan pickup that Carlos shipped down for $650. From thousands of miles away, the brothers managed to start a Red Cross chapter in Concepcion. Going door-to-door in Arlington and holding a dance fiesta in Langley Park, they raised $14,000, bought a used Chevy van, fitted it with emergency lights and shipped it to the village, where years later it still does duty. (End optional trim) When Carlos, working a painting gig at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md., was invited to apply for a permanent job on the maintenance staff there, he knew he would be sunk as soon as they asked for a Social Security number. But Adrian had married a U.S. citizen and become one himself. So Carlos filled out the application in his brother's name. Adrian was called in and soon landed a good job with benefits. Then the bottom fell out for Carlos. His family in Guatemala still needs the cash Carlos used to send home, and he had wanted his son to attend Arlington schools. But Sanchez felt compelled to give up his apartment in Arlington and head south. 'My goal was always to come back one day, but I thought it wouldn't be for several more years,' he said. 'I felt comfortable there, I felt safe. But I couldn't just sit around and not work.' Slowly, Sanchez is catching his breath in his old and new world. Now he strides up the steep streets that used to leave him panting every time he left the house. His stomach has settled, and he delights in the fresh vegetables that come down daily from the terraced fields. Marvin has developed a taste for frijoles and tortillas and chasing chickens around the yard. Sanchez teaches typing at his house each Saturday on 27 manual typewriters his sister stockpiled for him over the years. And he landed a day job teaching English in a local high school. Sanchez feels lucky to be surrounded by family; his parents dote on their Americanized son and American-born grandson. But he misses his brother. Adrian, with his golden U.S. passport, has visited once, and they often speak by phone. That keeps Carlos, emotionally at least, with one foot in Washington. 'As long as he is there,' he said, 'I feel like half of me is there, too.' 