MEXICO CITY - When Raul Briseno, a restaurateur near Chicago, was shot to death by robbers last year, his family immediately went online and put the news on www.atolinga.com.
Briseno hailed from the village of Atolinga, in the north-central Mexico state of Zacatecas. But Atolinga is isolated and empty from decades of emigration to the United States. On the other hand, www.atolinga. com is a hive of activity, receiving 2,500 visitors a month, far more than the village itself.
"We could let people know the sad news really fast and without having to be on the telephone all the time," says Briseno's sister, Maria Socorro.
Indeed, the Web site acted as the village telephone operator and word of the killing spread quickly enough to allow former townspeople from as far away as Indianapolis to attend Briseno's funeral.
The family later used the site to put out a reward for information leading to the arrest of Briseno's killers, and a notice when four people were arrested and charged with his murder.
The Web site is the labor of love of Israel Yanez, a 34-year-old immigrant from Atolinga who lives in Houston. He and his brothers started the site two years ago.
"We never believed we'd have this much support and acceptance from our own people. It's really shocked us," says Yanez. "It was just to keep everybody [from Atolinga] together and united. There are some people who left 20 and 30 years ago, and some of them haven't been back."
Yanez's site is one of dozens of Web sites that have popped up in the past three years for Mexican pueblos or villages, serving as forums for immigrants scattered across the continent. The response to many of them has been huge.
These sites are usually a hobby for a young person who comes from the pueblo, but who lives in the United States and has an interest in computers.
Yanez's brother Gregorio has started a site for the town of Tlaltenango, near Atolinga: www.tlaltenango.com. Another brother, Amador, runs www. zacatecanos.com, a site for immigrants from Zacatecas state.
Jose Cruz Lopez hasn't returned to Huandacareo, Michoacan, in 11 years, but he runs www.huandacareo.net out of his home in Oxnard, Calif. Lopez started the site two years ago and it now gets 600 visits a day. "Many of us were born in Huandacareo, but we know little of the town," says Lopez, a 36-year-old computer technician who was a farm worker as a teen-ager. "Through the Internet, they can virtually travel there."
Because of the informal nature of these sites, there is no way to know how many exist: At least dozens, probably hundreds, say those that run them. All, however, exist because of the desire of immigrants to connect with their hometowns and with each other in the United States.
On the Web site www. jalpazac.com, for Jalpa, Zacatecas, townspeople can see weather reports for the area, consult classified ads of businesses and land for sale, and read commentary on whether the recent personnel changes at City Hall were good for the town.
People from Tamazula, Jalisco, can go to www.tamazula. com to pay homage to the police officers who died in a jail riot last year, or see photos from the birthday party for Maria Guadalupe Llamas.
Father Antonio Basurto went on www.zacapumich.com.mx, the site for Zacapu, Michoacan, to ask migrants for donations to help repair the roof to the town church.
Used frequently by young people, the chatrooms on these sites can occasionally break down into vulgarity, with teen-agers trading insults brought on by the bravado that distance allows - a common aspect of chatrooms across the Internet.
But mostly the sites are used to send greetings from Colorado Springs; to tell parents that a son in Van Nuys is doing well; to allow someone from Dallas to discuss the coming village fiesta with a friend from Chicago.
Others use the sites as high-tech bottles in which they send messages out to cybersea, hoping long-lost friends or relatives discover them and respond.
At these sites, the term "virtual community" is literal.
"We are a community," says Ricardo Santoyo, a dentist who runs www.jerez.com.mx from his house in Jerez, Zacatecas. "We feel we're together, those of us here in Mexico with those in the United States."
The site www.jerez.com.mx saw its visits almost double from 250,000 per month to 490,000 per month during a campaign for mayor last year. Some sites have the economic and social activity that is lacking in the pueblos back home, which have been emptied by emigration. Often sites offer ad space for businesses in Mexico and the United States.
A few sites, such as www. durangomexico.info, have become enormous.
The site was started by Jose Herrera, a computer programmer in Chicago, to show his relatives the photos he'd taken of his hometown of Las Palmas, Durango. Herrera soon noticed people were visiting the site looking for information about other towns in Durango. So he put up a message board. It was swamped by immigrants greeting friends and family in their hometowns in Durango, though his site had nothing to do with their hometowns.
It does now. Herrera's Web site has message boards for 173 villages, photo boards for 47.
"Now the purpose of the site is to display pictures and messages about Durango and to allow people from all the local towns to pass messages and maybe get in touch with old friends scattered around the U.S.," says Herrera, 27.
Immigrants' need for contact with home has revived the Web site of Imagen, a daily newspaper in Zacatecas.
In 1998, its site, www. imagenzac.com.mx, had very few visitors, says Francisco Barradas, the newspaper's editor. Then the paper started "Saludos a Paisanos" (Greetings to Countrymen) on the site. Today the site has revived and gets 15 messages a day from immigrants in the United States.
The site "now functions as a kind of plaza on Sunday afternoon," says Barradas, referring to the Mexican traditional time and place of congregating. "It was something we put together casually, from one day to the next, but the response has been incredible."
Immigrant-pueblo Web site design remains a grass-roots activity. These sites are rarely run by local governments, who often will not help subsidize the sites. Ricardo Santoyo, for example, had to design his own Jerez tourism page, complete with hotel and restaurant listings.
"I offered [the city government] a municipal section," he says. "They weren't interested."
Immigrant-pueblo Web sites are still in their infancy. So most site designers don't earn much except the satisfaction from watching a nebulous thing grow into a vibrant community.
Despite earning no money from the site, Israel Yanez continues to innovate; www. atolinga.com offers pictures of the town, information on the annual fiesta in August, and free e-mail to anyone from Atolinga.
"It's little things I'm trying to do to keep them coming back," Yanez says. "I guess I just like the fact that people are coming and seeing and talking to other people."