The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York

Home > Other > The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York > Page 13
The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York Page 13

by Joseph Berger


  Lulled by the train's rhythm, she was daydreaming again after a few minutes, sometimes anxiously pondering the citizenship exam. “I'm thinking about my test tomorrow,” she said. “The whole week I'm not sleeping. I wait for this for seven years.” (She passed the test the next day.)

  At 3:14 she switched at Seventh Avenue for the D train, which was so crowded with rowdy homebound teenagers, she had to stand. She was not in a rush, because Mouath is in an after-school program, but she wanted to have enough time to prepare supper, say her prayers, and take Mouath to the playground. The D train emptied at 125th Street, and as she took a seat, she revealed to me that she had not had a paid vacation in three years. Union rules require that she complete 1,800 hours of work to qualify for one.

  The way back seemed longer to her, but at 3:50 the train pulled into familiar Bedford Park, and a few minutes later she turned the key in her apartment door. Another two hours of commuting had passed, but this time she was home.

  BEDFORD PARK

  WHERE TO GO

  Bronx High School of Science (ONCE THE NATION'S BEST PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL, PRODUCING SEVEN NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS, AND STILL AMONG THE TOP) 75 WEST 205TH STREET; (718) 817-7700; www.bxscience.edu

  Fordham University (A 160-YEAR-OLD JESUIT UNIVERSITY, THE FIRST CATHOLIC COLLEGE IN THE NORTHEAST) 441 EAST FORDHAM ROAD; (718) 817-1000; www.fordham.edu

  New York Botanical Garden (ONE OF THE WORLD'S GREAT COLLECTIONS OF PLANTS) BRONX RIVER PARKWAY AT FORDHAM ROAD; (718) 817-8700; www.nybg.org

  St. Philip Neri Roman Catholic Church (GRACEFUL NEIGHBORHOOD INSTITUTION WHERE RUDOLPH GIULIANI GOT MARRIED FOR THE FIRST TIME) 3025 GRAND CONCOURSE; (718) 733-3200

  WHERE TO EAT

  THERE'S NOT MUCH IN BEDFORD PARK, BUT THE ARTHUR AVENUE ITALIAN DISTRICT IS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF FORDHAM.

  Bedford Café Restaurant (GREEK DINER) 1 BEDFORD PARK BOULEVARD EAST; (718) 365-3446

  Dominick's (COMMUNAL TABLES) 2335 ARTHUR AVENUE; (718) 733-2807

  Roberto's (STELLAR ITALIAN) 603 CRESCENT AVENUE; (718) 733-9503

  Chapter 8

  Staying in Touch in Jackson Heights

  JESUS L., A RUMPLED, BRAWNY CONSTRUCTION WORKER, IMMIGRATED to this country alone and illegally eleven years ago from the southern highlands of Ecuador and never returned. Just as he figured, he was able to support the wife and three children that he had left behind in more than tolerable style with regular wire transfers of cash. He even sent a daughter to college, something he could not have done had he remained in Ecuador with a shoemaker's earnings that barely put food on the table. But what he had not counted on was how much he pined for those three children. He had not seen his daughters mature into young women nor his son mushroom from an infant to a near teenager.

  But just before New Year's 2005, there all three children were, or virtually so, conjured up in real time on a wall-mounted, flat-screen television by the hocus-pocus of the Internet. Jesus, sitting on a black leather couch in a storefront in the teeming immigrant quarter of Jackson Heights, Queens, could see his children seated together in a small room in Cuenca, his graceful sixteenth-century hometown city, and his children could see him. Television cameras on the walls in both rooms were beaming images from Queens to Cuenca and from Cuenca to Queens, and the images were displayed on corresponding television screens. Jesus could see his children giggling self-consciously in the way young people are prone to do in home movies. He gazed in wonder and delight as they spun around to show him how they had grown. He was not even annoyed when, in the eternal way of children, they asked him for a dog. And the children could see their father's face, read his expressions, calculate the meaning of his movements. They could sense his love and remorse coming through the ether, and the encounter diminished the fear that the man who gave birth to them—and could not visit them in Ecuador because he might never be able to reenter the United States— was becoming a stranger.

  “You are so tall,” Jesus was able to tell his son, Santiago. He had not laid eyes on Santiago since he was nine months old, but Santiago was now, Jesus could plainly see, a lean, dark-haired boy of twelve.

  Maribel, twenty, and Nadia, seventeen, showed off their shapely figures, hands on hips in mock fashion-model style, and Jesus was spellbound. “You are so nice, very beautiful,” he told his daughters.

  Jesus' wife, Maria, was sitting next to him on the leather couch. She had joined her husband in New York two years before and had not seen the children since, leaving the younger boy under the eye of the older girls and other relatives. So she stood up in front of the camera to show them the latest family event: her bow-shaped belly.

  “One more brother is coming up!” Maria, who works in a hat factory, informed them, although in truth she did not know then whether she was expecting a boy or a girl. The children were tickled to see their pregnant mother in her crimson maternity blouse, as Jesus and Maria could clearly see by their dazzled faces on the television screen.

  This tender reunion, a small but significant salve for the heartbreak of severed families, took place the way it did because of the wizardry of videoconferencing. A technology first devised for business titans to communicate with their far-flung underlings has now been adopted by the hole-in-the-wall travel agencies and money-transfer offices that dot nearly every block in Jackson Heights and other immigrant neighborhoods like it. And that is not the only technology that has transformed the immigration experience and narrowed the chasm between immigrants and their homes and cultures.

  Walk around Jackson Heights or heavily Asian Flushing next door, or Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, or Flatbush in Brooklyn, and televisions are tuned not to American soap operas and quiz shows but to foreign programs in a hodgepodge of languages. I stopped in randomly one morning at Jong Ro Barber Shop on Union Street, Flushing, and customers waiting there for the seventeen-dollar haircuts were watching soap operas on the orderly shop's Samsung television beamed not from Hollywood but from South Korea. They were riveted by melodramas with the same languid pace, low-rent sets, and over-wrought music that makes American soaps what they are, but in a language that let them feel at home. “I do watch American TV, but for an emotional outlet I need Korean TV,” Soo Oh Choi, the shop's owner, told me, speaking with the help of a translator.

  Hundreds of thousands of immigrants in New York and millions more across the United States receive these foreign channels—from the Philippines, the Middle East, Russia, Colombia, Ecuador, Italy, France, Poland, Greece, India, even Vietnam, because of the feverish competition between satellite and cable companies eager to expand markets. These immigrants can follow the same local catastrophes, laugh at the same homespun jokes, and revel in the same corny soap operas as their kin overseas. And if they want to discuss those shows with their relatives, a phone card makes doing so far cheaper than in the days when calls overseas had to be booked hours in advance and depleted a working family's budget.

  And there is much more. Those scruffy, ubiquitous travel agencies offer incredibly cheap flights back home, so cheap that many Dominicans, Indians, Colombians, and Guyanese with kosher immigration documents can afford to fly home once or twice a year. These “shuttles” allow immigrants to straddle two worlds, work or operate businesses in two countries, and, in more than a few cases, raise children with different spouses in two countries. How different that is from the immigrants of a century or even a half century ago, who knew when they left their homeland that the decision was irrevocable and they would probably never have the money or free time to see their kin again. “Danny Boy” is a lament for such an Irish emigrant. Indeed, the Irish would hold a wake for someone departing for America, so like a death was the experience.

  Now not only can immigrants keep in gossipy touch with their relatives, but other technologies make it simple to transfer money to their native cities and towns on a weekly or monthly basis, allowing poor immigrants here to subsidize their relatives back home. During the 2004 uprising against the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide i
n Haiti, I went to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn to a shop called Boby Express, where Haitian men, most of them with the shopworn look of subsistence laborers, lined up to send small amounts of their earnings—$50 or $200—to their beleaguered relatives back home. Food deliveries had been disrupted by the violence in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and prices had multiplied three and four times for whatever foods were available. “Everybody is desperate to send money,” Marie Chery, who manages the threadbare office, told me. But money would be in the pockets of those relatives in the Caribbean within hours if not minutes so they could eat.

  The totality of technologies has irrevocably transformed the look and commerce of the city's neighborhoods. While a typical American commercial drag caters to the needs of living here—eating, dry cleaning, cutting one's hair, furnishing a home—the stores along Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, and Dyckman Street in Washington Heights, and Flatbush Avenue in Flatbush seem to cater to the needs of living in foreign countries, or at least staying in touch with relatives who do. Not only do there seem to be more satellite TV antennas along the faces of apartment buildings, but the sidewalk storefronts have a preponderance of shops that handle or sell money transfers, travel arrangements, cell phones, phone cards, and overseas packages—sometimes all in one spot.

  Not too long ago, I took a stroll on Roosevelt Avenue, the Broadway of Jackson Heights and a teeming but cheerful street peppered with flamboyant Spanish signs and overpowered by the shadows and rumble of the elevated tracks that carry the fabled number 7 line. It was this subway line that in the 1920s allowed Jewish and Italian immigrants from the overcrowded Lower East Side and middle-class WASP professionals looking for swanky but reasonably priced housing to settle in Jackson Heights. The neighborhood had pioneering “garden apartments,” with Gramercy Park–like private parks hidden among the tall buildings, and many handsome two-family houses. Its residents have included comedians Don Rickles and John Leguizamo, photographer Alfred Eisenstadt, and Alfred Moshe Butts, the inventor of Scrabble.

  But in the 1970s that subway line became known as the Orient Express and more recently the International Express, as first Asian and then Latino immigrants seeking a neighborhood on a more human scale than Manhattan began moving in. Along Roosevelt Avenue's bazaar, Little India on Seventy-fourth Street soon segues into a Little Ecuador and Little Colombia by the Eighties blocks, with sprinklings of Korean, Afghani, and Filipino along the way. With the exception of a few American franchises such as McDonald's, the shops are aimed mostly at immigrants in their own language, including Patel Brothers, a large Indian supermarket that sells snake gourds, porcupine-like cucumbers, and the knishlike dumplings known as samosas; Indian Sari Palace, with racks of wraparound silks in vivid magentas, sherbet orange, and robin's egg blue; Butala Emporium, where you can buy Hindu-English dictionaries and statues of Nataraj, the god of dance; Los Paisanos, a grocery stocked with Colombian, Peruvian, and Ecuadorian foods and produce; and El Indo Amazonico, a botanica that in addition to erotic herbs and love potions sells plastic statues of Jesus on crutches next to others of lovers en-twined within a heart.

  In the more Ecuadorian strip, I was not surprised to see groceries that sell frozen guinea pig or restaurants such as Barzola that sell a spectrum of batidos—fruit milkshakes—and seviche—marinated cocktails of octopus, shrimp, or tuna. But I was struck by the sheer number of global service offices, three or four or more to a block, that permit immigrants to call their relatives, sometimes videoconference, send packages, and arrange monthly giros—the wires of cash—to send back home. Delgado Travel, founded by an Ecuadorian immigrant and now boasting two dozen offices in the United States, has three branches on a mile-long stretch of Roosevelt Avenue alone. There are appliance showrooms—branches of such large Ecuadorian chains as Comandato and Créditos Económicos—where a flush immigrant construction worker can pick out a refrigerator and stove for his wife back in Quito and the same model will be shipped from an Ecuador warehouse right to her doorstep. One corner store allows a migrant here to pick out the style of house he wants built for his family in Ecuador.

  Watching Jesus videoconferencing with his three children in Cuenca, I could not help but think how my immigrant parents had far fewer resources back in the 1950s. My mother's one remaining relative in Poland was an aunt who had survived the Nazis' occupation by hiding in the sewer. My mother certainly could not afford to visit her in Warsaw or call her by telephone, and the idea of watching the same television programs was an H. G. Wells fantasy. Their chief mode of contact was the airmail letter. My mother would write one every few months, and a flimsy envelope with an address in that aunt's spidery handwriting and some odd postmarked stamps would arrive a few weeks later. While the letter would contain news, it also usually contained a plea for money, which my mother would dutifully send. The cash would take weeks to arrive.

  One day my mother's letter came back stamped “Deceased.” My mother's English was not yet good enough to know what the word meant, so I had to explain to her that her aunt had died. That is how she learned. From a bureaucratic rubber stamp.

  The methods of communication have changed, and wondrously so. At some of the immigrant storefronts, with their tattered awnings and windows saturated with gaudy posters for cheap flights and money transfers, Ecuadorians, Colombians, Pakistanis, Mexicans and others in the past two or three years are discovering what Jesus L. found: spanking small conversation rooms with computer-driven plasma televisions and video cameras. With a few clicks of a remote and at a relatively low cost—$1.50 per minute for Jesus L.—the setup takes them back to their hometowns and brings their hometowns here. When I asked an urban sociologist, Sharon Zukin of Brooklyn College, what was the significance of videoconferencing, she told me simply, “It reduces the emotional distance.” Jesus puts it even more simply: “I can see their faces, I can see how they are, tall or small, so the emotion is very different,” he said.

  Videoconferencing cannot re-create the warmth of a relative's hug or the scent of a cherished child. Nevertheless, it is a qualitative leap in turning the experience of immigration into something less than a permanent break. Rather than being confined to memories and nostalgia, immigrants today can participate actively in the daily events and decisions of their native homes, guiding the schooling of the children they left behind or having a voice in whether to rent or buy a home. The conversations are often emotionally excruciating, testimony to the toll that living abroad alone for so many years can take on marriages and family life. At Austro Financial Services on Roosevelt Avenue, Jesus' intercontinental exchange with his children was not all playful. His daughters were angry with him for becoming involved for a time, as other migrants often do, with another woman, even if he was now sitting amicably beside his wife. “Please try, Father and Mother, to stay together,” pleaded Maribel, who can attend college in Cuenca because of the hundreds of dollars her father sends home every month, “If you separate, what will happen to us? We are a family; please don't break up.”

  Her younger sister, Nadia, clearly the more voluble one, was more sentimental. “Don't do it just for us—do it for you two,” she said. “I need love, and the little boy coming up, he needs love. Try again. Forget the problems from before.”

  In contrast to a telephone, videoconferencing allowed Jesus to see— not just hear—Maribel's anger and Nadia's fear. “I can promise you I will try,” he told his daughters, kneading his calloused workman's hands in shame. “I don't want any more problems. I want to change what I did before. It's going to be good because one more guy is coming. I want to try.”

  The call went on like this for forty-one minutes, lasting beyond the half hour that Jesus had booked, but the daughters kept returning to the main topic on their minds. “You remember when we were children,” Nadia said. “You told us not to fight, to be peaceful with one another. Now you do it. Do it now.”

  Videoconferencing is favored not just by the most prosperous immigrants but m
ore often by poorer and illegal immigrants because they cannot afford to travel back home or are afraid they will not be allowed back into the United States. Jesus, for example, left Ecuador because he could barely support his family on a shoemaker's wages, but he cannot fly back to visit his children because he has no legal documents.

  While the videoconferencing systems have long been available here, they have only recently been introduced in the less technologically advanced countries that most immigrants come from, so the eureka moment of connection is a new phenomenon. Banco del Austro, the Ecuadorian parent company of Austro Financial, has provided the service for a year and a half in its offices in Azogues, Canar, and Cuenca, Ecuador's third-largest city and a place that wasn't connected by paved road to the rest of the country until the 1960s. When I saw Jesus, they were planning to open a branch in Quito, the capital, which they did a few months later. Diego Pinos, a genial, courtly man who manages the videoconferencia for Austro Financial Services, said that he handled thirty conferences a weekend and that business was especially brisk during the Christmas season. Another Ecuadorian company, Costamar, has a satellite-linked service at five locations, and in 2003 two American-born, non-Dominican Harvard roommates opened a videoconferencing service to the Dominican Republic, Face to Face Media, on Dyckman Street in the Inwood section of northern Manhattan.

  For some, videoconferencing provides the only way to communicate in real time. Paola Palacios, who manages the Cuenca end of the conversation for Banco del Austro, told me of two Ecuadorian brothers, both deaf and mute and separated by continents, who were able to talk for the first time in sign language because they could see each other's hand movements on a television screen.

 

‹ Prev