While factory grunt work has always been a big employer of immigrants, so has household work. The 2000 census, notoriously wide off the mark when it comes to jobs filled by illegal immigrants, counted more than 18,000 household workers in New York City—nannies, maids, cleaning people, home health aides—who endure daily trips of ninety minutes or more for jobs paying less than $25,000 a year. More than 90 percent are women, three out of every four were born outside the United States and do not speak English well, and most seem to hail from the West Indies or South America. Daniel Cornfield, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University who specializes in labor issues, told me that people who take these jobs come from terribly poor or unstable countries and are “desperately seeking work.” “The transportation they take is often a reflection of an intense need to find any kind of job that will pay them,” he said.
Even into the 1950s, unskilled immigrants could rely on manufacturing jobs clustered in a central location such as Manhattan's Garment District, but a large proportion of manufacturing jobs have evaporated, while much of the low-wage growth has been in household work and home health care. Even if those jobs are available close to home, landing them often requires submitting to an indignity or two. A Times colleague of mine, Nina Bernstein, reported in a 2005 article that immigrant women—Mexicans, Ecuadorians, and Poles—were lining up on an overpass of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the Hasidic Williamsburg section of Brooklyn for $8-an-hour cleaning jobs. Most of them were hired on the spot by pious Jewish women who, burdened by eight or ten children, needed them to render their homes spotless for the Sabbath. While Americans are familiar with street-corner clusters of men seeking landscape or construction work, the photograph accompanying the article showed what on the docks used to be known as a shape-up, though this time it was made up of twelve women in jeans and T-shirts sitting on an overpass railing shaded from a sultry sun. If those cleaning jobs had any advantage, it was that they were not too far from some of these workers' homes. In many cases, though, it takes several years for immigrants to gain enough English, savvy, and contacts to find jobs closer to home.
When I decided to write about her in 2004, I met Museitef at her apartment in the regally christened but nondescript neighborhood of Bedford Park. The neighborhood, a collection of brick apartment houses that were built after the opening of the Jerome Avenue elevated subway line in 1917, was given the cachet of the name of a London suburb by early-twentieth-century developers. Like most unheralded Bronx neighborhoods, it has an array of modest shops and services—groceries, candy stores, beauty parlors, drugstores, travel agencies, shoe repairers, cell phone retailers, medical clinics, and churches. They may seem unremarkable to a visitor, but they contain insular worlds where the intimacies of clothes, body, diet, faith, and family are discreetly traded every day. Most of the neighborhood is tucked within the boundaries of the New York Botanical Gardens and Fordham University on the east, the Jerome Park Reservoir on the west, and tree-lined Mosholu Parkway on the north. The Grand Concourse is its spine. Some of the buildings have fire escapes braiding down their fronts and privet hedges concealing small rectangles of earth. Some have weathered decorative Tudor half-timbers that testify to the genteel ambitions of the people who built them. (One of the neighborhood's residents was William Fox, the Hungarian immigrant garment worker who bought a nickelodeon in Brooklyn for $1,666 and turned it into Twentieth Century Fox.) A few buildings have the faded charm of the Art Deco confections that once made the Grand Concourse so grand, with striped tan brick façades, wraparound corner windows, lobby murals, and sunken living rooms. Interspersed on the hilly side streets are Queen Anne–style cottages and wood-frame houses, many of which have been divided up into two or three apartments.
A large patch of the neighborhood to the west consists of acrid-smelling, cyclone-fenced yards for parking subway cars. But then comes its most famous institution, the Bronx High School of Science, a selective school that has produced seven Nobelists in physics, not to mention singer Bobby Darin and novelist E. L. Doctorow. I went to that school in the early 1960s and got off daily at Museitef's Bedford Park Boulevard station and walked a half dozen blocks among the Irish, Jewish, and Italian residents to the spare Bauhaus school building. I remember not a single shop or hangout that might have diverted me, though school-mates were often drawn by the enchantments south of Bedford Park around Fordham Road—the long-gone ice cream parlors Jahn's and Krum's and the ornate movie palace of Loew's Paradise Theater, with its cavernous ceiling of twinkling stars.
Thirty years ago, Bedford Park's outlook seemed grim, as a plague of arson, drug dealing, and middle-class flight rolled up from the South Bronx across Fordham Road to its very doors. Neighbors organized, often led by Roman Catholic church groups surviving from the days when Bedford Park was heavily Irish (the Academy of Mount St. Ursula, the oldest continuous Catholic girls' high school in New York State, and St. Philip Neri Roman Catholic Church, where Rudolph Giuliani married his first wife, are still there). The enclave held on long enough to benefit from the influx of immigrant strivers, the product of the 1965 immigration reforms, who were by the 1980s ready to make their next step up the economic pyramid. They found the sometimes battered apartment buildings far more inviting than the dwellings they knew in their native lands and appreciated the choice of two subway lines to whisk them to work.
Today, the neighborhood is no longer defined by a dominant ethnic group. Instead, it is inhabited by a motley patchwork of ethnicities, including Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, West Africans, Bangladeshis, Koreans, Jamaicans, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Albanians, and Latin Americans. Museitef's census tract, number 413, has 7,515 residents, but only 21 percent are white, with a large proportion of those defined as elderly. More than 55 percent are Hispanic, 11 percent black, and 8 percent Asian. One of every three residents was born abroad, and only 20.6 percent finished college. The median household income in 2000 was a low $32,037—compared to more than $38,293 for the city as a whole. One of every six residents has no job.
Museitef fits right in to the neighborhood. With a handsome bronzed face and an engaging, even flirtatious tooth-filled smile, she is the daughter of an itinerant businessman, Fahmi Museitef, who for twenty years sold carpets door to door in Wisconsin, which may explain her ease with English and her midwestern conviviality. She was born in Ramallah in the West Bank, which Israel conquered from Jordan in the Six Days' War of 1967, four years before she was born. As if in contradiction of that territory's occupation, she was named Intesar, which means “victory.” She grew up in Ramallah in a family of seven sisters and four brothers and married there as well. Museitef was seven months pregnant in 1997 when she was instructed by her husband to travel to New York to get them both residency papers so they could eventually immigrate. Museitef and her son, Mouath, stayed for a time with a sister, Hanan Khalil, who lives in the Bronx with six children. But the home was so crowded she moved to a shelter run by Women In Need and stayed for two years. The organization gave her two weeks of classes in working as a home health care aide, teaching her how to help elderly clients get in and out of bed, shower, dress, and walk safely. She also learned to do their cooking, shopping, and cleaning. Her job title barely existed forty years ago, but such jobs, often paid for by Medicare and Medicaid, have allowed more established working couples to provide care for their elderly parents.
Around 2003, Museitef was dismayed to learn that her husband had started a second family with another woman in the West Bank. She decided to remain in New York and see whether she could make it on her own. (She and her husband divorced in 2004.) The sparsely furnished apartment she lives in costs $995 a month, but all but $106 is paid for by federal Section 8 subsidies. With only $140 a week in part-time income, that $106 is hard to squirrel away, though she does receive food stamps, Medicaid, and a stipend from Women In Need for transportation and telephone. At the time I decided to tag along on one of her daily commutes, she worked for the Personal-Touch Home Care agency of Queens,
which would assign her for a few weeks or a few months to an elderly person's home. The clients usually lived in Brooklyn or Queens.
“I keep telling them to look for something in the Bronx,” she told me. “They say, ‘We're going to find for you.’”
Such mismatches are not uncommon for the 12,000 home care aides affiliated with the health care workers union, 1199SEIU. Jennifer Cunningham, executive vice president of 1199SEIU, explained that the union negotiates with large providers who monitor the patients but they subcontract the job of home care assignments to small agencies such as Personal-Touch. The union, she admitted, has “not done a very good job” pressuring the providers to compel Personal-Touch and other employers to match job sites more conveniently with the addresses of workers such as Museitef. Workers who are not attached to agencies or unions have it worse, since they rely on an informal word-of-mouth network, not on hard information about where jobs can be found.
“There has to be a more rational way,” said Cunningham. “To be poor in this country and new to this country, there's a sense that you should be happy to have a job, period, and not question why you travel so long and get paid so little.”
On the day I accompanied Museitef, she rose at 5:30 a.m. after a night of sleeping on her couch (she had given her bed to her visiting sister, Ola). She murmured her Muslim prayers, put on a stylish cream-andtan striped jacket, and ate a breakfast of toast and butter accompanied by a cup of Arabic tea. She woke Mouath up at 7 a.m., watched the morning news shows, paying special attention to events in the Middle East and the reports on subway delays, then called her mother in Ramallah, a call that she could afford with a $2-an-hour phone card. While I waited for her to get ready, I looked around the tidy apartment, noticing a mix of the American and the Middle Eastern—prayer beads on a table, framed parchments with passages from the Koran, the kitschy touch of a telephone shaped like a basketball and inscribed with Michael Jordan's name. Like other American kids, the spirited Mouath, a lean straw of a boy with an impish smile, is a huge Michael Jordan fan. With Mouath in tow and myself tagging along with a notebook and pen, Museitef scrambled down three flights to the sidewalk and crossed the wide Concourse to meet Mouath's school bus, displaying in her darting dark eyes and quick smile an enchantment with the city's bustle. “I love walking,” she told me.
At 8:23, she kissed Mouath good-bye and headed for the Bedford Park Boulevard station. Ten minutes later, the D train barreled in, with its gift of empty seats. Getting comfortable in a snug corner seat—“I always love sitting in the corner,” she confided—she took out a sheaf of potential questions on the American citizenship test she was going to take the next day. As the train sped through dark tunnels and brightly lit stations, she tried to remember how many stars and stripes are in the flag, who is the vice president, how many amendments there are to the Constitution. Museitef told me she also passes the time on such commutes reading from the Koran and daydreaming about what future her Mouath will have in America.
On her subway trips, Museitef told me, she has seen people smoke, drink, brawl, and, even once, try to jump in front of a train. She is often wary of people who stare at the scarf wrapped trimly around her scalp and neck, a headdress she calls by its Arabic name, mandeel. “People ask me if I shave my head,” she said. “I say, ‘I'm not Jewish.’” If someone who seems threatening approaches, she said, she prays quietly in Arabic: “Allah, protect me from bad people.” “I was not scared in Ramallah, even with the killings,” she said. “Since I'm here, my mother worries about me. But you can't hide from death. Whatever happens, happens.”
At 9:03, the D train pulled into the Seventh Avenue station in mid-town Manhattan and she stepped off, skipping briskly downstairs to the next platform, only to watch a Queens-bound E train pull away. She would have to wait for the next train, which appeared a few minutes later. For much of this stretch of the ride, the car was largely empty and she got lost in her cocoon of thoughts. Scattered around the car were passengers listening to their iPods, studying textbooks, snoozing. The mechanical subway voice announced the names of the stations and warned riders in a singsong, “Stand clear of the closing doors.”
Inevitably, she scanned the ads that ran like a banner across each side of the train. One was about lead poisoning, and it reminded her that she had once noticed her son displaying some of the symptoms and called her landlord, who quickly repainted the apartment. The many ads for business schools and technical colleges, though, prompted a twinge of remorse that she had not pursued more than a few courses toward a nursing assistant's degree. She took such courses at the Borough of Manhattan Community College but dropped them after the September 11 attacks partly because strangers on the downtown streets taunted her for being Muslim. Besides, she said, if she took courses, “Who is going to be with my son?”
Her inability to secure a better job weighs heavily on her, she told me in the rumbling din of the train, but she takes heart in what her mother has told her: “I'm proud of you. For an Arabic woman to do what you're doing.”
Several times during our subway conversation, Museitef used the expression “inshallah,” which means “if Allah wills it.” It speaks of a fatalism underlying Muslim culture, and Museitef has much to be fatalistic about. She told me matter-of-factly, possibly suspecting that I was sympathetic to the Israeli side of the half-century-old quarrel, that working as a nurse's assistant in Ramallah, she had endured even longer commutes than she now has. When she needed to get from her village of Beiteen into Ramallah itself, she could spend hours clearing Israeli checkpoints.
“If you're lucky, they let you in,” she said. “If you're not, they send you back home. That's why people come here.”
She seemed to harbor no ill will toward Jews, though. She spoke affectionately of the Jewish woman in Brighton Beach she had cared for for three years before getting the job in Jamaica, Queens. They are still in touch. “Here we're friends and there we're enemies,” she said. At 9:44, the E train pulled into Jamaica Center, the last stop. She climbed up to the street in time to be disappointed once again—the Q85 bus was pulling away. “Sometimes, I miss the bus, I have to wait twenty minutes,” she said. “In winter, it's so cold.” This time another drew up quickly, and soon it made its sputtering way along Merrick Boulevard, a major Queens artery that runs through a largely black neighborhood. She gazed out at passing storefront churches such as Abundant Life Deliverance, beauty parlors, hair-braiding shops, and fried chicken restaurants. At 10:05 the bus dropped her off at Rochdale Village, among the world's largest housing complexes, with twenty middle-income cooperative apartment buildings, each fourteen stories, built in 1960 on the site of the Jamaica Race Course. Most of its 25,000 residents were once Jewish, but the makeup changed there after 1970 just as it did in the surrounding South Jamaica neighborhood.
At 10:12, almost two hours after leaving her Bronx neighborhood, Museitef rang the doorbell of Mary Spencer's sixth-floor apartment. Spencer is a retired postal worker who has progressive supranuclear palsy, a Parkinson's-like disease that impairs walking, balance, and focus of one's eyes. To this stranger, the disease was most noticeable in Spencer's glazed, frozen-eyed expression. Spencer lives with her ninety-one-year-old mother, Elizabeth Riggs, in a well-kept apartment graced with plants whose lushness betrays Spencer's fussiness. Spencer's daughter lives too far away to care for her regularly, so for the past three months, it has been up to Museitef to feed and bathe Spencer, straighten her room, and dress her. This morning she tenderly buttoned Spencer's jacket and eased her legs into the footrests of a wheelchair before rolling her outside for a visit to the pharmacy.
“One day I'm going to be old,” Museitef whispered to me. “If you take care of somebody well, it will come back to you.”
When they returned, Spencer was fed and dressed and helped into bed to watch television. We spoke briefly, and it was clear how firmly aware she was of her caregivers' long commutes. “They should get paid well,” she said. “They have to travel
so far to take care of me.”
Toward the end of the four-hour shift, Spencer, lying in her brass bed under her covers, and Museitef, in a chair alongside, were together watching a rerun of The Cosby Show. Soon it was two o'clock and time for the trip home. Museitef may have felt slightly self-conscious that she was not working at a job that was more taxing on her obviously nimble mind, because as she was about to leave, she told me, “If I leave this job I have nothing. So I'd rather take this job than do nothing.”
At 2:14 the Q85 bus wheezed to a stop outside Rochdale Village and Museitef swiped her MetroCard in the fare box. The bus passed a Wonder Bread outlet and Museitef mused how much she loves fresh bread. “Sometimes I eat a whole loaf. I love bagels too.” It occurred to me that she had not had lunch. She rarely does while working, though she sometimes nibbles on carrots and sips from a bottle of water.
By 2:34, she was on the E train heading toward midtown. She let me know that while she traveled, she often thought about her family on the West Bank. She is most worried about her mother, who has diabetes. She spoke of her sister Ola's visit and of how she enjoyed taking Ola to the local International House of Pancakes, though Ola disappointed her by her lukewarm response to New York. Someday, she said, she wants to return to Ramallah as a full-fledged nurse. As if to prove her merit, she remembered how her brother Ayman, who lives in the Bronx, once cut himself on a bologna slicer, and it was she who soothed it with a home-grown remedy of olive oil and salt. “Nursing is in my blood,” she said.
The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York Page 12