Immigrants started leaving Ecuador for New York in the 1960s, but the number has multiplied seemingly exponentially as the country, unstable and riddled with official bribery and nepotism, has failed to generate enough jobs for its 13.3 million people, many of whom idle in the squares of its cities and towns. Ecuador, a mountainous country situated along the Pacific and bisected by the equator, exports coffee, cocoa, and bananas, but its major industry is oil. When petroleum prices slackened in the 1990s, the economy sank and the banking system collapsed, requiring the acceptance of the dollar as legal tender and causing the substantial loss of countless personal savings accounts. There were seven presidents between 1996 and 2005, including two deposed by marauding mobs. Opportunities for higher education are scarce, forcing even modestly educated Ecuadorians to seek degrees overseas.
Some simply fly to New York on a visitor's visa and never leave. But the desperation of most other penniless migrants was highlighted in August 2005 when a rickety wooden ship meant for fifteen passengers but carrying ninety-four sank in the ocean. The migrants were hoping to make it to Guatemala and then by land to the United States, where some were planning to join parents they had not seen for years. Some of the dead passengers had paid smugglers, known as coyotes, up to $12,000 for this voyage. “Their dream was just to get out of poverty,” said Manuel Coyago of Ecuador, who lost three sons on the doomed ship. “How can we live here earning five dollars a day?”
All that turmoil has shown up in the proliferation of mestizo faces in Jackson Heights and other parts of Queens. New York City in 2000 had 114,944 Ecuadorians, almost twice as many as it had a decade earlier, and more than half lived in Queens neighborhoods such as Corona, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, and Woodside. A fine series on Ecuadorians by Dustin Brown of Times Ledger Newspapers, a community chain in Queens, said Ecuador had received $1.3 billion in émigré remittances to families in 2000, an amount second only to oil revenue. The money that has been sent is evident in the American-style houses blossoming on Ecuadorian hillsides, the cell phones teenagers carry, the NYPD and Yankee caps. But the price has been the heartbreak of wives separated from husbands, fathers and mothers from their children. Videoconferencing provides a small dose of relief.
One New Year's Eve, Laura A., who was fifty and left Ecuador eleven years before, was able to see her husband, four sons, a daughter, three daughters-in-law, and six grandchildren all at once as they squeezed into and around the couch in a tiny room in Cuenca. The latest grandchild, swaddled in white, was just two months old, and she had never seen him. I watched from a corner out of range of the cameras as Laura sobbed with joy mingled with what I'm certain was the persistent regret that, once again, she could not be there to hold her blood kin. “He has the same face as his father,” she told her family, according to my translator, Carmen Mazza. It occurred to me later that this was a thought she could not have expressed were she speaking long-distance on a telephone.
Her daughter and daughters-in-law were quickly in tears, which she was able to see as well. “Please don't cry,” Laura said. “Not today. I'm going to be happy today. I'm OK, so don't you cry.” She asked her three grandsons to stand. “You are so beautiful, guys,” she said, according to my translator. She could see one granddaughter's long pigtails. She could see that one son was getting fat and admonished him, “You have to lose weight.” She could see that her daughter, Gabriela, eighteen, was staying in shape because Gabriela, hands on hips, showed off her figure.
Laura stood up, too, in front of the camera and exhibited her still-youthful figure. Of course, the presence of the camera made her more self-conscious, even vain, than she might have been with a telephone. “I dressed in black to look slim,” she said at one point, adding, “Can you see my wrinkles?”
She had been particularly concerned about twenty-year-old Danilo, her youngest son, who has struggled with a drinking problem but seemed at that moment to be winning the battle. She asked him to step forward and, seeing his long, sad face, said, “I'm always thinking about you a lot.” Her oldest son, Pablo, who is in his mid-twenties, and her husband, Jaime, began to cry. “Pablo, don't cry,” she said. “You're a man. You have always been a strong person. I will be back with you, and I will raise that grandchild.”
She could not resist giving some grandmotherly advice. “Maybe you should breast-feed the baby,” she said to a daughter-in-law. “That's why she cries.” She told them she knew how difficult the daily struggle to get by was in Cuenca. “But have courage and look forward…. It's too bad I have been apart from you and have not been able as a mother to raise you,” she said.
The day was particularly haunting because it was on a New Year's Eve that she left Ecuador. Her jewelry business in Cuenca had failed, and she hoped to find a new source of support in New York City, as many of her friends were doing. It meant leaving behind Danilo and Gabriela, both young children, and she has never stopped kicking herself for that part of the decision, even as she understands that migration made economic sense. Danilo, the troubled son, was only nine when she left. She makes a good living setting diamonds for a jewelry company in Long Island City, Queens, but she never got the appropriate immigration documents and so has never returned, though when we spoke she was working on getting a green card.
“Get together tonight and enjoy the evening as a family,” she said, her voice quivering. “Though I'm here, my heart is with you every day of my life. You are very precious to me. You should always be together and love each other. Any problem you encounter as a family can be solved if you love each other and teach your children to love each other.”
For forty minutes, thanks to videoconferencing, she was together with them—virtually—as a family in the same small room.
SATELLITE TELEVISION IS another medium for helping immigrants feel connected to the countries they left. It does not bring their families into a room for them to see, but it does allow them to be stirred by the same news and entertainments as their relatives or friends, which means they continue sharing the same cultural flotsam and jetsam as if they had never left home. Imagine yourself as an American living overseas, then returning and not knowing about the television Mafia boss with a musical name who is seeing a shrink or that Martha Stewart spent some time in jail or that Sandra Day O'Connor left the Supreme Court or that the St. Louis Cardinals won the 2006 World Series. You'd be at a loss. That's how immigrants here once felt when they returned to their homelands, warped time travelers to their own land. But there's less of that feeling now that there's a closer communion with life back home.
Wherever I went along Roosevelt Avenue, television sets in the shops were on, but tuned to home countries; almost no one was watching English-speaking channels. Lucy Mangual, who owns Libreria Cuarzo, a bookshop that sells religious books and articles, was watching Mexican television and looking forward that night to watching her favorite soap opera, Herida Del Alma (Pain of the Soul). “For Spanish people, they have a lot of feeling for what they left,” she told me.
Aashish Patel, who manages the Patel Brothers supermarket of Indian foods, was planning to gather with a half dozen compatriots that night at a local motel for a Super Bowl party of sorts, complete with beer and potato chips. Only the world-class game they planned to watch— until dawn, mind you—was not football, but cricket between India and Australia, beamed live from abroad. “We feel we are in India like that,” Patel told me.
Anil Merchant, who came here nineteen years ago from Bombay, keeps the television in his five-chair beauty salon on Seventy-fourth Street in Jackson Heights tuned to an Indian TV channel that broadcasts a stream of sinuous MTV-like songs and Busby Berkeley dance numbers, many with a playfully erotic edge. He also likes to keep up with the doings of local Indian politicians. “CNN doesn't cover it,” he told me. “We don't know John Kerry. We heard about him, but we're more interested in Indian politics.”
Marshall McLuhan's global village is thus breaking into its global parts. Relative newcomers can relax in fron
t of a television without being baffled by English. They can immerse their children in their native tongues, narrowing the generational distance.
All that fragmentation has some scholars worried; the availability of international channels makes it too easy for immigrants to continue to cling to their homelands. Neal Gabler, senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society at the University of Southern California, told me that although the phenomenon of foreign channels produces many benefits, it chips away at the “common cultural references” that have allowed for whatever melting is supposed to take place in the American pot. “The things that unite us will be lost in another competing identity,” Gabler said.
Satellite television also reduces the urgency to learn English. Immigrants who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s often used television to learn American idioms and mores; baseball alone was a master teacher. Brooklyn Dodger games taught my friend Simon's father, Sam Herling, not only a smattering of vernacular English, but also about an American sense of fair play, the rude democracy of the bleachers, and, for a Jew from the anti-Semitism of prewar Poland, the preciousness of a society that could finally accommodate Roy Campanella and Jackie Robinson on a formerly all-white team.
Pyong Gap Min is a Korean-born professor of sociology at Queens College who speaks English fluently and watches Korean soap operas almost every night with his wife. He worries that some of his compatriots may be using television to isolate themselves. “In a foreign environment they live comfortably, enjoying Korean food, going to Korean churches, working in Korean businesses, and now seeing Korean television,” he said. “This frees them from learning American English and American customs.”
Mudassar Khan, a twenty-seven-year-old Pakistani who runs an electronic appliance store in Jackson Heights, thinks that such worries— that satellite TV is encouraging cultural isolation—are overblown. “During the day you're surrounded by American culture,” he told me. “The only time you feel Pakistani culture is when you're home watching TV.”
Besides, the toothpaste can't be put back into the tube. Satellite and cable TV are here to stay. UHF television stations such as Telemundo and Univision long ago proved that a mix of soap operas, game shows, and news in a native language can draw a profitable audience. By the late 1980s, recalled Barry Rosenblum, president of Time Warner Cable of New York and New Jersey, his company was hearing from Greek, Korean, and Indian businessmen who also wanted to start channels that would package programs from overseas, supplemented with news of their New York ethnic neighborhoods. By 2005, the satellite provider Dish Network was offering fifty international or foreign-language channels, including Polish and Portuguese. Across the country, Time Warner Cable offered thirty, including channels in Arabic, Russian, Greek, Persian, Filipino, and Vietnamese. In New York alone, more than 90,000 of Time Warner Cable's customers get the international channels for roughly $9.95 a month above the standard cable price.
Some channels are beamed directly from abroad to providers here, and then quickly distributed to home televisions. Others are repackaged here by local entrepreneurs from either satellite feeds or videotapes. The satellite EcuaTV, for example, mixes programming from five Ecuadorian stations—the soap operas known as telenovelas as well as soccer matches.
Khan, the electronics store owner, who immigrated here as a teenager and graduated from Baruch College, watches mostly American television. Most children of immigrants end up doing so. Still, Khan orders the Dish Network's South Asian package of Indian and Pakistani channels for his parents, Mohammad and Sanjeeda Khan, with whom he lives. They like to watch Pakistani news, a soap opera called Lab-eDerya, and two popular Indian serials about working women, Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin and Kkusum. (The spoken forms of Pakistan's Urdu and India's Hindi are closely related.) He often watches the soaps with them and takes note of the differences between the lives they portray and those shown on American TV. “When a guy gets married in South Asia, he usually lives in the same house with his parents,” he said. “In the English soap operas, the kids move out.”
JACKSON HEIGHTS
WHERE TO GO
Banco del Austro (TELECONFERENCE YOUR RELATIVE IN ECUADOR)80-08 ROOSEVELT AVENUE; (718) 899-7805
Comandato (APPLIANCE STORE—IF YOU WANT TO BUY A REFRIGERATOR FOR SOMEONE IN ECUADOR) ROOSEVELT AVENUE AND 81ST STREET
Jackson Heights Historic District (STATELY CO-OP APARTMENTS, MANY WITH INTERIOR GARDENS, INCLUDING GREYSTONE APARTMENTS, 80TH STREET BETWEEN 35TH AND 37TH AVENUES, AND HAMPTON COURT ON 78TH AND 79TH STREETS, BETWEEN 35TH AND 37TH AVENUES)
Roosevelt Avenue between 74th Street and Junction Boulevard (LATIN AMERICAN BAZAAR, WITH FLAMBOYANTLY DECORATED SHOPS CATERING TO IMMIGRANT NEEDS, INCLUDING MONEY TRANSFERS, PHONE CARDS, AND 220-VOLT APPLIANCES)
74th Street Between Roosevelt Avenue and 37th Avenue (AN INDIAN BAZAAR, WITH SARI SHOPS, JEWELRY STORES, RESTAURANTS, AND PATEL BROTHERS SUPERMARKET)
WHERE TO EAT
Barzola (ECUADORIAN SPECIALTIES INCLUDING SOUPS, MILKSHAKES, AND SEVICHE) 92-12 37TH AVENUE; (718) 205-6900
Delhi Palace (WHITE-TABLECLOTH INDIAN) 37-33 74TH STREET; (718) 507-0666
Jackson Diner (INDIAN BUFFET) 37-47 74TH STREET; (718) 672-1232
El Palacio de los Cholados (LATIN AMERICAN ICE MILK AND CREAM CONFECTIONS) 83-18 NORTHERN BOULEVARD
Pollos a la Brasa Mario (COLOMBIAN ROTISSERIE CHICKEN) 83-02 37TH AVENUE; (718) 457-8800
Chapter 9
Family Ties and Knots in Flushing
BY ALL APPEARANCES, ASHRAT KHWAJAZADAH AND NAHEED MAWJZADA are thoroughly modern Millies. Long-haired, dark-eyed, and in their early twenties, they spurn the hijab, or head scarf, and other modest garb worn by Afghan women, preferring hip-hugging slacks. Both of them have also taken a route somewhat controversial among the enclave of Afghans in Flushing, Queens. They went to college. Khwajazadah, a stylish dresser with a glossy mane of black hair and onyx eyes, studied speech pathology at Queens College, and Mawjzada, more informally dressed with a ponytail, majors in political science at Adelphi University. Both also defy the Afghan ideal of a reticent woman, with Mawjzada speaking up forcefully when men talk politics at the dinner table.
But there are incongruities. Both are strikingly beautiful women, yet, by design, they have never dated. Like most young Afghan women in Flushing, they are waiting for their parents to pick their spouses. “It's been drilled into your head since you were a little girl: ‘Don't talk with guys, don't ruin your reputation, everyone will gossip about you,’” Khwajazadah told me.
Her tone was sardonic, suggesting she found such social strictures suffocating. She came here as a two-year-old with parents who were fleeing the Soviet occupation of tradition-bound Afghanistan, but she has grown into a high-spirited, sophisticated, and very American woman. So she surprised me a moment later when she went on to contradict herself and defend her refusal to date. “I'm happy with my decision,” she said. “I'm very close with my family and that helps me, because they want to do what's best for me.”
These two women illustrate the ticklish dilemma facing young Afghans, particularly women, in testing how far to go in forsaking tradition. Growing up in a comparatively freewheeling society but with parents—often uneducated and unable to speak English—who are trying to cling tightly to conventions, they have had to strike an anxious balance.
To be sure, the Afghans' transition to America is an old immigrant story—one that could be told about the Irish, Italians, and Jews. Those newcomers too looked on with anger or resignation as their children gradually (and their grandchildren cavalierly) adopted the prevailing culture. What is occurring in the Afghan community of Flushing is occurring also among newer groups seasoning New York's stew, such as the much larger, prosperous, and well-schooled Indian community scattered around Flushing as well as more upscale suburban patches.
But the Afghan version seems particularly hearty at this early point in their settlement in this country. It is not uncommon in Flushing
for parents to make sure their daughters are engaged as young as thirteen and married by sixteen, and even those who get engaged years later, having waited until they finished college or graduate school, will submit to an arranged marriage. Defiance can lead to a painful social ostracism, and few young women are strong enough to defy.
Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most tribal countries, has drawn more than its share of world attention, first in the Bush administration's response to September 11 and now as the government of Hamid Karzai struggles to establish a semblance of democracy amid a persistent insurgency. Few Americans, however, know that for almost three decades Afghans here have actually formed a discrete community in the hum-drum brick apartment buildings and stand-alone houses of Flushing. There are 5,446 Afghans in New York City and more than 9,100 in the metropolitan area, according to the 2000 census, with the two densest enclaves in the southern half of Flushing in the blocks below Queens College, and in a largely Chinese and Korean area in the northern half. The 751 Afghan renters in a single census tract along Kissena Boulevard form the nation's densest Afghan concentration (the census breaks counties into tracts of varying sizes usually containing between 2,500 and 8,000 people).
Flushing, founded by English settlers in the seventeenth century, and for most of the twentieth century a bastion of Protestant and Catholic churches and middle-class whites, now has four Afghan mosques, a half dozen kebab houses, and at least one Afghan butcher. Women in hijabs and robes can be seen walking down Flushing's lively sidewalks pushing strollers or carrying plastic bags laden with fruit and vegetables. On Sunday Afghan families can be spotted in Flushing Meadows Park—the site of two World's Fairs—barbecuing kebabs. Kouchi Supermarket is a virtual Afghan bazaar, selling not only native spices, breads, apricots, sugared almonds, and newspapers but also rababs (mandolins) and karams (billiards-like board games). Almost next door is Afghan Kabab Palace, a gaudily ornamented eatery that serves skewers of succulent marinated lamb with long-grained basmati rice. The mosques especially would have pleased John Bowne, a seventeenth-century landholder whose Flushing Remonstrance to Stuyvesant is considered one of America's earliest thunderbolts of religious freedom. In the wake of September 11, though, that tolerance broke down. Afghans, like other Muslims, were wantonly attacked. An owner of Kouchi Supermarket, Saeed Azimi, told a colleague, “I have three children born in this country. How do I explain this to them?”
The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York Page 14