LEXINGTON — It's been nearly a year since Juan Gabriel has hugged his 4-year-old daughter or 6-year-old son, who live in Guadalajara, Mexico.

        Mr. Gabriel, like hundreds of Hispanics who work in Lexington, try their best to get home for Christmas, to the pinatas, fireworks, bright red poinsettias, family dinners and slow processions down the streets of their hometowns.

        “Here it's kind of depressing,” said Abdon Ibarra, Lexington's immigrant services coordinator. “There is no support system where everyone gets together. They try it, to make tamales and stuff like that, but it's not the same.”

        Both those coming and staying are statistically anonymous. There aren't any good numbers on how many Hispanics are in Lexington, much less how many leave at the end of the year.

        “It's seasonal workers. It's people who come in and out of Lexington, and it's just hard to keep data on them,” said Rick Maurer, a sociology professor in the University of Kentucky's College of Agriculture and past chairman of the Lexington Hispanic Labor Task Force.

        The 2000 Census put Lexington's Hispanic population at 3.3 percent of total population. The city's Hispanic Initiative Network estimates it at 13 percent.

        After another season of stripping tobacco on a Georgetown farm, Pablo Mendez said he's ready to go home and rest his hands. “I'm going back to see my family, my people, my town,” Mr. Mendez said.

        His wife and four children are waiting for him in Guanajuato. It had been a year and a half since he'd seen them.

        During their twice-weekly phone conversations, Mr. Mendez said, his children always had just one question: “When are you coming back?”

        “I tell them I have to work to get money to buy their food.”

        Many traveling home for the holidays wondered if border security would be tighter after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

        Doug Mosier, a Border Patrol spokesman in El Paso, Texas, said there has been a big drop in people trying to scramble from Mexico to the United States.

        In the past two months, he said, his agency has arrested about 30 percent fewer illegal immigrants than during the same time last year. Mr. Mosier added that in his 14 years with the agency, he's never seen tighter security.

        “Sept. 11 has really slowed down the going back and forth,” Mr. Ibarra said. Central Kentucky Spanish-language radio producer Don Souleyrette agreed. Callers, he said, have told him “the border right now looks like a militarized zone.”

        Fortunato Cabrera, 19, who rides racehorses at Keeneland's Thoroughbred Center, will spend his fourth Christmas away from his home in Guadalajara.

        “I dream about the celebrations; I dream about my family,” he said. “I miss everything.”

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