The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez

by Jimmy Breslin

  “She might call the police,” he said. The police would not bury them in jail for harassing some woman, but they surely would call the immigration agents. And for telling a young woman that you want to get next to her, you would be back in the worst of the dust in Mexico, sent there broke.

  It was surer and safer to walk around the corner to Neptune Avenue and toward Coney Island Avenue and run into one of the many whores who were out there every night.

  For his first dinner in the house, Eduardo came to the big kitchen table and sat. Around him, everybody was eating and getting up to go to the stove and then returning to the table. He watched them and wondered when his plate would be put in front of him.

  There was a discussion about a group of students who were black and who had come out of the high school across the street. They had called Alejandro “Mexican shit.” Alejandro said he pretended not to hear them.

  “That was the right thing to do,” Lucino said. “The Negro. You get in a fight with them, the police come, and then you are fucked. They don’t have anything to worry about. They are citizens. You have no ID. They send you back to Mexico.”

  Eduardo decided that he would never go out of the house except to work.

  At that point, he had not worked for a single day yet. He had barely been around the neighborhood. Yet skin color, which was never an issue in San Matías, now touched everything. Already he was aware of the quick, short glances of the whites as he passed them, particularly the white women. And he was learning that the black people didn’t like him, and of course he didn’t like the looks of them, either. The Puerto Ricans sneered at the Mexicans. The Puerto Ricans didn’t like the Dominicans, either, but they most disliked these Mexicans.

  “Incas and Mayans! Little people with straight hair!” said Herman Badillo, the first Puerto Rican elected to Congress and now the head of the City University of New York system. “When they speak of La Raza, they don’t speak Spanish, they speak in indigenous languages. They should be in separate classes.”

  Eduardo looked around again for his food. In his whole life, he had never served himself. The mother’s hands were always close: one on his shoulder, the other putting his food in front of him.

  “What are you looking for?” Martha said.

  Eduardo shrugged.

  “You get your own food,” Martha said.

  He got up. He didn’t like it. Eduardo’s first Saturday night in Brooklyn was the same as the ones that would follow. He was in a commune of the lonely. All week, they worked and came home to eat and sleep so they could work tomorrow. On Saturday night, they preferred being drunk. Lucino wanted them to stay in one loud room while they did this. His brow furrowed whenever somebody said they wanted a bar with women. All he could think of was police walking him to the border and throwing him back into Mexico. Stay here, he said. So each Saturday night, everybody stayed in the room and drank big cold beers, Corona and Heineken with lime twists wedged in them. After every third beer they had tequila. The belief of people from Puebla was that three big cold beers caused an indigestion that only tequila could calm. They got good and drunk and talked about going back to Mexico, where they would climb all over the girls.

  Eduardo listened and laughed. He drank a couple of beers but not much else, and this left him as the only one in the crowded room able to deride their fantasies. Alejandro, Gustavo, and Miguel were married and had lived faithfully with their wives and families back home. The religion was in them deep enough to keep them out of adulteries.

  “How could you do this to these girls?” Eduardo asked them.

  They all called out over the alcohol that not only would they do what they said to these girls, but that they would go far beyond that.

  “How can you do that if you don’t know any girls?” Eduardo said.

  As the night grew late, the laughter turned into the silence of homesickness. Alejandro’s wife and two children were living with his family at number 29 Avenida Cinco de Mayo in Santa Barbara, Mexico. He told Eduardo that he imagined his children out at a party. A fiesta. The children are playing while he is talking to everybody at the party. The band is playing cumbia music, a mixture of Mexican and Colombian. Then he said he was thinking of all the times he went out with his wife and visited relatives. Dropping in. Nothing formal. There are so many cousins in each family that they take the place of friends.

  Eduardo thought of his mother and father, and then the store. He told everybody about the store, as if the video game machine was the attraction, not Silvia, the owner’s daughter.

  EDUARDO LIVED in local history.

  On a larger scale, sociologists first traced Mexican immigration to New York through the Twenty-third Street YMCA in Manhattan, where in the 1920s a small number of people recently arrived from the state of Yucatán established a social club. For some reason, that particular migration ended, but studies of it did not. As there is no way to jump in and out and question some immigrant who doesn’t even keep his name on his person, any realistic study must come from a large school, with professors who have a year or two off to work on the project, with papers gathered from everywhere and researchers with the time and funds to travel. Still, it is work done over the longest of hours and you must fall in love with the subject.

  The work now is being done by a young professor, Robert Smith, of Barnard College in New York. In a crowded office in Milbank Hall, he writes papers about Mexicans who come to us across the hot sands of an empty desert. On the street outside his window, 116th Street and Broadway, there rise the sounds of New York City traffic at its steadiest and heaviest.

  Robert Smith does work that will help so many understand. Others will make a living from his work. He gets a satisfaction that he realizes in the small of the night. He would never trade his life for money.

  Two men from a farm south of Puebla live in Professor Smith’s studies as the men who started the Mexican migration to New York. They were Don Pedro and his brother Fermin. They had attempted to bribe local Mexican officials and a hungry American bureaucrat to get a contract for the Bracero program that between 1942 and 1964 recruited Mexicans to work in U.S. agriculture. The American sneered at the size of the bribe offer, and the brothers were shut out. They then walked across the border, which at that time, on July 6, 1943, was virtually unguarded. The brothers got on the road and hitched a ride with a man named Montesinos, who was coming from an annual vacation in Mexico City. After talking to them during the long ride to New York, Montesinos thought he could get them started. He put them up at a hotel in Manhattan for two days while they looked for work. At that time, during World War II, anyone could get a job anywhere, and both brothers did. They started sending money home to Puebla. The arrival of a money order in the town was an event comparable to none other because money describes itself. It is money. Its presence in the hands of the relatives of brothers Don Pedro and Fermin caused others to follow, first in small groups who crossed uncontrolled borders and survived desert and river and, once arrived, ran their palms over the sidewalks of New York, feeling for gold.

  By 1980, as many as forty thousand Mexicans had slipped through to New York for the Job. In 1986 there was an amnesty that allowed immigrants to apply for temporary residency, then permanent residency, if they had been living in the United States since 1981. Immigrants who had been unable to leave New York—they had beaten the border once, and most didn’t want to try again—suddenly found they could leave the country and return whenever they wanted. They carried messages home about the wonders of New York. Some even told the truth: that it was hard work for higher pay than in Mexico, but low pay for the expensive city of New York.

  The number of immigrants rose to 100,000 by 1990. Ten years later, there would be an estimated 2.3 million Latinos living in New York City, with Mexicans the fastest growing of all, at about 275,000. The movement of Mexicans from Puebla and the surrounding towns of San Matías, Atalixco, and Santa Barbara has accounted for 120,000 coming into the city. There is a large
Dominican population in the city, as high as 500,000, most in the Washington Heights neighborhood. But there are a mere 8 million people in the Dominican Republic, as compared to 100 million in Mexico. Smith’s research showed that Mexico needs between 800,000 and 1 million jobs to support its growing populace. Of course so many would try coming here.

  As Smith worked in his office, he did not notice the paper rustling. His pages about the Job came alive on the street below. Five blocks down Broadway, Raymundo Juárez, sixteen, and his father had jobs in a supermarket on Broadway for $6 an hour. They thought it was millions. While the father swept the floor upstairs, his son was crushed to death in a basement compactor. They carried the body out through the basement, and the father never saw the dead son. Now the father stared at a large glass window in the medical examiner’s office on First Avenue in Manhattan and a screen over the window went up. The son, Raymundo Juárez, his face swollen, the eyes closed, was on a gurney against a blue cinder-block wall. “Sí,” the father said, sobbing. Then he and the cousins ran to a car and drove uptown. They were asked where they were going. “To the store. The store owes his pay,” a cousin said.

  THE HOUSE EDUARDO came to in Brighton Beach is in an old, crowded part of Coney Island. Coney Island is known for roller coasters and midgets and hot dogs and huge crowds on its wide beaches that run into the Atlantic Ocean. The ocean runs up against so much land at its edges, from New Jersey to the miles of Brooklyn and Staten Island, that the waves generally are small and the currents slow. The people duck and swim a few strokes in bays between old jetties. At one end of the island is Sea Gate Village, residences that are behind gates that keep out cheap day bathers. Sea Gate has its own lighthouse. Coney Island proper now runs past public housing, the super rides, hot dogs, and hot corn; the boardwalk ends at the large and famous New York Aquarium. All after that is Brighton Beach. The oceanfront is tighter, the streets lined by a crowd of five-and six-story apartment houses. The main street, Brighton Beach Avenue, is one block up from the ocean. The aorta of New York civilization, an el line, runs over the avenue. It is the last stop on the Brighton line. Also using this station is the F line, which runs as an el through Brooklyn and after that plunges underground to become a subway. It runs for twenty-five miles, under the wealth of mid-town Manhattan, through a tunnel under the East River to residential Queens, and out for miles almost to the beginning of suburban Nassau County. There is no ride in the world this far at this price, a dollar-fifty.

  Under the el in Brighton Beach, cars are double-parked, often triple-parked, by Russians. At the curbs, the street is a bazaar of Russians selling matryoshka dolls. They begin with a wood peasant woman that unscrews, and inside is a smaller woman, and inside this doll is another, and three or four dolls later, it ends with a peasant woman the size of a thumb.

  The sidewalks are under the control of women with shopping carts who stop in the middle of the sidewalk to talk to each other for as long as they feel like it, while people edge by one at a time. The stores sell everything: children’s clothing, fruit and vegetables, meats, luggage, shoes. The signs are in Russian, in the Cyrillic alphabet. The stores are crowded and difficult to enter and leave. Push a woman and see what happens.

  The streets running north, away from the ocean and the el, have mostly small low wood bungalows that were once summer houses in a resort town. But all this ends suddenly at featureless streets of brick attached houses sitting between old frame houses. Here is the start of a large colony of Mexicans, with young women who work in knitting factories and young men out on street corners for any manual labor. The first small bare Mexican restaurants are on the avenues. And prostitutes appear, of any race, not necessarily Mexicans. At the last of these streets, across from Grady High School, is the house where Eduardo and the other Mexicans lived. At one corner of the block is a small park that has basketball courts.

  After that, on the other side of the high school, is a highway, and on the far side of that starts the long march through Brooklyn, miles of blocks, miles of people in a borough whose population nears three million.

  Since 1970, Brighton Beach was an area of immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia, mainly from Odessa, which is exactly like Brighton Beach, a city on the shore of waters that do not get stormy. So many Russians came to these streets that in the Russian national referendum of 1993, the Moscow Central Elections Commission declared Brighton Beach an election precinct. The Russian consulate in Manhattan sent representatives to conduct balloting in a crowded room on the second floor of 606 Brighton Beach Avenue, the meeting room of a Russian military veterans organization and the office of an accountant who prepares American income taxes. Only people who were still Russian citizens were allowed to mark paper ballots for an election in which one candidate was Boris Yeltsin. “You cannot vote for Yeltsin. You are an American. You must vote for Clinton,” they said to one man.

  Five Russian bureaucrats, two women and three men, supervised the balloting. They writhed because they could not smoke. In Moscow, this balloting would be done in cloud banks from cheap Russian cigarettes.

  After forty-five years of the two countries testing atom bombs to make sure they could perform as scheduled over Broadway and Red Square, after all these years of hate and fear, with all of it over different political systems, bureaucrats from Moscow sat in Brooklyn and supervised an election in Russia.

  ALEJANDRO TOOK EDUARDO up to see the avenue and the train station. Alejandro knew his way around by subway. He would tell people, “Just tell me where you want me to meet you, and I can get there.”

  At first, the subway must have been a marvel to Alejandro, but his face never registered astonishment. Then others were the same. Looking for work, or working, occupied their minds so much that they couldn’t capture the enormousness of the difference between their lives in Mexico and their lives in New York. Work and drinking were something recognizable and central. Beyond that, Alejandro was fatalistic about the drudgery of work. The trains were not wondrous, he told Eduardo. They were something you used to go to work. Eduardo, who understood work, agreed.

  Alejandro told Eduardo how they took the train to the station called Smith/Ninth Street and transferred to a Williamsburg train. Eduardo tried to memorize what he was being told. But we will be on a different train right now, Alejandro said. We are going to be on the Sea Beach line that takes us up to Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park, where everybody is Hispanic. On the train, Alejandro showed Eduardo the transit map on the wall. The train rocked as Alejandro pointed out the lines: B, D, F, N. On the route map they were long lines—highways—in different colors with the stops noted. Often two and three lines used the same stops for at least a while. The M was dark brown, the F an orange line, the B a darker orange, the Sea Beach a light yellow. On the map the Sea Beach line reaches a fork at the Fifty-ninth Street stop and one yellow line mixes in with the light orange and dark orange and the other remains a single yellow line on a field of white. Eduardo still looked at the map in confusion when Alejandro poked him and they got off at the Fifty-ninth Street stop.

  Up on the street, Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue was a two-story street of Hispanic signs and shops and Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, but the dominant group, more so each day, was Mexicans. Three blocks over, on Eighth Avenue, suddenly there is the city’s second Chinatown, the blocks and blocks of people shining and proud of their growing numbers. Eduardo bought a dark sweater with a hood attached.

  Back in the house in Brighton Beach, he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and was so pleased with the sweater that he put it on the next morning and went out in the steamy August day to the el on Brighton Beach Avenue, so he could learn the route to work. It was too hot to wear the sweater, which he put on the seat next to him. He stood up and swayed and tried to read the map. Suddenly the train stopped at the Smith/Ninth Street station. He remembered being told about this one. He jumped out of the train, forgetting his sweater, and went to the other side and took the train back to Brighton. />
  It wasn’t until he walked into the apartment that something felt like it was missing. Immediately Eduardo clutched his shirt. His sweater was gone. In his mind’s eye, he saw it on the subway seat where he’d left it.

  He turned around and without a word went back up to the el. He would look for the train that had his sweater. Somewhere there would be a terminal where he could find the train he had been on and come upon his sweater. Some 360 trains come in and out of this station each day. His new train moved, the stations went by, the hour passed. At the last stop, with buzzers and a shush of air, the train emptied. He looked outside for a second train. There seemed to be none. Behind him, a motorman walked up to what had been the last car of Eduardo’s train and now became the first car. Eduardo asked the motorman about the first train with his sweater aboard, but he couldn’t make himself understood. When the train started he rode a couple of stops, got off and waited for the next train. When this one came in, he walked through the cars looking for his sweater. He found nothing and now looked at the map and didn’t know what he was looking at. He asked a Puerto Rican for help. The Puerto Rican looked at the map for three stops and then came up with the route. Secure, Eduardo sat down and stared at the wall. Sand poured into his eyes. He had no idea of the time when he woke up. He asked a doubtful Dominican for directions.

  The Dominican said learnedly, “Change at Canal Street.”

  Two people in the conversation hadn’t the slightest idea of where Canal Street was: the Dominican and Eduardo. He did remember being on the train with the lone yellow line on the map. He got off at the last stop and walked. He asked Hispanic after Hispanic, and most were unsure of whether they were in Brooklyn or not.