Carlos Salcido struggles to recall the names of the other members of his group, a lonely and fearful band of strangers huddled together in the desert at the dead of night, but the memory of their collective helplessness still haunts him. News had filtered through that the first party attempting to flee Mexico for California had been caught by the US border patrol. The teenage Salcido was in the second group. With the marshals on full alert, it would be two or three days at least before it would be safe to attempt another crossing.

He was afraid, hungry, virtually broke and dealing with his failure in something at which his elder brothers and sister had earlier succeeded. What money he had was spent in the morning telephoning his father, Pablo Salcido Rodríguez, in his hometown of Ocotlán. "We'd turned back, I had nothing left and was scared," Salcido Jr says. "I had to phone him and say: 'I'm broke. I'm not going to make it.' I thought he would be disappointed, but he told me to come home. 'No one dies from hunger in Mexico,' he told me." Such a story is not uncommon among impoverished Mexicans lured north by the promise of a new life in the US. Among Premier League footballers, it is exceptional.

Carlos Arnoldo Salcido Flores is anything but a typical top-flight defender. Fulham fans welcomed the 30-year-old's £1.6m signing from PSV Eindhoven, having been swayed by his performances at successive World Cups. Or even by the impression he made in a PSV side that eliminated Arsenal from the Champions League in 2007 and have regularly faced English opposition in that competition over the past four years. This is a player who has 81 caps for his country, was a runner-up in the Copa Libertadores with Chivas, and won successive Dutch league titles. He will take to the field against Sunderland this afternoon as a relatively new arrival, but with pedigree. Yet he is also a player who 11 years ago had never kicked a ball for a professional club and whose only source of income came from washing cars in a busy suburb of Guadalajara.

Youngsters are affiliated to Premier League clubs at the age of 10 or 11 these days. For Salcido, football was not an option back then. Carlos was the fifth of six sons and a daughter born to Pablo and María Flores Ruiz in Ocotlán, a small working town built around the timber trade. His mother died of cancer on 7 December, 1989, when Carlos was nine – he has a tattoo that reads "In memory of my mother RIP" on his left shoulder – and the family's wages that once paid for her medication were duly eaten up by the other debts accrued during her illness. By the age of 11, necessity had driven him into the town's timber trade. Three years later he was seeking illegal passage into the US just as his elder siblings, Erika María, Sergio, Francisco and Yahel, had before him.

"A lot of the family's debts fell on my father's shoulders when my mother died and I saw that I, too, would have to start working to pitch in," he says. "I'd work in the timber factories after school – I'd go to class in the morning, then to the factory at 1pm – and the money I earned paid for my clothes, my school books. Anything extra went to the family. We had hard lives, like a lot of Mexicans, and trying to get into the US was common. I tried when I was 14, in a group of nine or 10 people, but when that failed my father found a bit of money from somewhere and sent me to my aunt in Guadalajara.

"It was a while before I found regular work even there. I washed cars and trucks, but the rubber boots I had to wear reacted with the soapy water and took the skin off my feet. It was agony, so I had to find something else to pay my upkeep. I worked in a glassworks for a while, then in a mechanics in the old bus station building on Los Angeles. But when I was 19, the police raided our workshop – they hit a lot of the scrap metal places on the block – and arrested people for selling stolen parts. I was terrified and told my boss I didn't want to be a part of this, so he sacked me.

"That was on a Saturday and on the Monday, a few of my mates who played in an amateur team in Tlaquepaque [a suburb of the city] were a man short. I wasn't working, so I went along. I hadn't played since back in Ocotlán with my friends. I had no trainers, only my work shoes, and was wearing jeans. The other team agreed to let me play because I was so clearly just 'an amateur'. But my father had played for La Piedad, a second division team, and I'd inherited some of his ability. There was a scout at the game, Ramón Candelario from Gallos de Aguascalientes, and he asked me then and there if I wanted to play professionally.

"I told him I made 700 pesos [£35] and needed to pay my board at my aunt's and send money back to Ocotlán. He reached into his pocket, gave me 1,000 pesos and said: 'This proves I'm serious.' I still can't get my head around how far I've come since. I made my debut in the third division for Gallos and, 18 months later, I was playing for Chivas and, soon after, for Mexico. I'd stumbled on a career, going from washing cars in the streets to having people stop me for photos and my autograph on those same streets overnight. My life has been a whirlwind ever since."

He excelled at Chivas and with the national side, most naturally as a stocky and combative centre-half but also as a marauding full-back with a vicious shot and an accurate delivery. International scouts were alerted by a wonderful end-to-end extra-time goal scored against Argentina in the 2005 Confederations Cup in Germany. Arsenal looked at him extensively, though when he was lured to Europe it was by Ronald Koeman's PSV. "I didn't know where Holland was, what the weather would be like, or what type of football I'd encounter," he says. "But my father told me: 'Here, or in China, football is always football.'

"I'd always had that survival instinct in me, that need to improve, especially after my mother's death. That had really toughened me up. Once I was at PSV I settled quite quickly. Ronald Koeman spoke perfect Spanish, which helped, and I was joining a winning team. I played alongside Alex, who's now at Chelsea, at centre-half and we had huge success, winning the league twice and competing regularly in the Champions League. I had a little entourage of friends from back home who I'd fly over when we played Internazionale, Arsenal and Liverpool. They lived this dream with me, and still are."

Salcido was impressive again in South Africa over the summer as Mexico matched their performance from Germany by reaching the second phase, where they were eliminated by a heavily fancied Argentina, with the chance to play in England he had long craved eventually offered by Fulham. Mark Hughes had lost Paul Konchesky to Liverpool, the full-back following Roy Hodgson to Anfield. Salcido, even at 30, represented a bargain. There was an assist on his debut against Blackburn Rovers and a consistency of performance thereafter to suggest he was adjusting well until Aston Villa's Luke Young ploughed into a horrible tackle at Craven Cottage that went ignored by the referee but took its toll on the Mexican's ankle ligaments.

Even so, an injury that would normally keep a player out for a month sidelined the defender for only a fortnight, even if he may have regretted a return against an uncharacteristically expansive Manchester City who ran riot at Craven Cottage. Yet the full-back appears to be a player who will thrive in this league as a high-profile member of a flurry of Mexican imports to these shores. Giovani dos Santos and Carlos Vela remain on the fringes of Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal respectively. Pablo Barrera is finding his feet at West Ham. Javier Hernández has already caught the eye amid the glitz and glamour at Manchester United.

Vela and Celtic's Efraín Juárez are currently banned by their national federation after members of the squad allegedly held a party in a Monterrey hotel after the 1-0 friendly win over Colombia in September. Salcido, along with Hernández, Dos Santos and Barrera, was fined £2,500. "We all learned from that experience – the players, the directors, the staff – and a lot of changes have come in since then," Salcido says. "But it shouldn't be allowed to affect the progress of the new generation of players coming through.

"These guys who have come over here to England are younger than me, but I'd still consider them my idols. A lot of them are playing in very big teams, and they're still learning. They're skilful, talented and have a great opportunity ahead of them. Give them time. I'm sure they can establish themselves, improve and progress. If I'm honest, I wish I'd come to the Premier League when I was younger. My advice to these guys would simply be: take advantage of this chance."

Salcido is a player who took an unexpected opportunity and has gone on to forge an unlikely career. Back in Ocotlán, he is considered an idol.