by Mirta Ojito
While the federal government spends millions of dollars building an ineffective wall at the US-Mexico border, the 11.1 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States wonder if the wall is being built to keep them out or in. In fact, 40 percent of undocumented immigrants, or more than four million people, did not climb a fence or dig a tunnel to get to the United States. They arrived at the nation’s airports as tourists, students, or authorized workers, and simply stayed once their visas expired.9
The immigration debate affects not only Hispanic immigrants, who comprise the largest number of foreign-born people in the United States, but all immigrants. The Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, DC, think tank, reported in August 2012 that the number of immigrants (both documented and undocumented) in the country hit a new record of forty million in 2010, a 28 percent increase over the total in 2000.10
In a 2007 report researchers at the center generated population projections and examined the impact of different levels of immigration on the size and aging of American society. They found that if immigration continues at current levels, the nation’s population will increase to 468 million in 2060, a 56 percent increase from the current population. Immigrants and their descendants will account for 105 million, 63 percent of that increase.11 By 2060, one of every three people in the United States will be a Hispanic.12 Another study, released in 2011 by the Brookings Institution, revealed that “America’s population of white children, a majority now, will be in the minority during this decade.” Already minorities make up 46.5 percent of the population under eighteen.13
As a nation we remain stumped over immigration. Are we still a nation of immigrants? Or are we welcoming only to those who follow the rules and, even more, look and act like us? In Suffolk County, the answers are complex.
The county likes people who have legal documents, who speak English, who don’t play volleyball in their backyards late into the night while drinking beer with buddies, who don’t produce a lot of garbage, who pay taxes, who know when and where to put the garbage outside and keep the lid on it, who support—or at least don’t interfere—with school sports programs, who don’t urinate behind 7-Elevens, who don’t look for jobs on the sidewalks, and who keep bushes trimmed and fences painted, preferably white.
“As I often say to immigrants,” said John F. “Jack” Eddington, the grandson of Irish immigrants and a former Suffolk County legislator, who lives in Medford but kept his legislative office in Patchogue, “When you move to a new town, the moment you walk in your new house—in fact, before you walk in—stand on the front steps and take a look around. The way people maintain their homes, their lawns, their cars: that’s what you must do.”14
Paul Pontieri, the mayor of Patchogue, said almost the same words to me in two separate interviews. Others in Patchogue have given similar answers to questions of assimilation. It is clear that in this town—if not the entire country—the notion of what it means to be an American is tightly woven with the idea of home ownership: how to get it, how to keep it, and how to protect it from strangers. And nowhere is home a more sacred, almost sanctified, concept than in suburbia, the very place where, for decades, the middle class has sought refuge from urban blight, despair, poverty, and the kind of social ills that cities confront and suburbia—mythically, at least—narrowly escapes.
In the last decades, though, immigrants have been following jobs to rural and suburban areas. In 2010, census data showed that “immigrant populations rose more than 60 percent in places where immigrants made up fewer than 5 percent of the population in 2000,” while in big cities “the foreign-born population was flat over that period.” The data also showed that the country’s biggest population gains were in suburbia. “But, in a departure from past decades when whites led the rise, now it is because of minorities. More than a third of all 13.3 million new suburbanites were Hispanic.”15
A study released in September 2012 by Brown University confirmed that trend, and found that “of the roughly 15,000 places in the country—defined as cities, towns, suburbs or rural areas that govern their own fiscal affairs—some 82.6% were majority white in 2010, down from 93.4% in 1980. Places where whites made up at least 90% of the population fell even more sharply, to 36% in 2010 from 65.8% in 1980.”16
And so the process of acculturation that an immigrant used to experience in the anonymity of the city—from learning the essential first English words to understanding how close to stand when speaking to an American—now occurs in the wide-open spaces of suburbia and under the scrutiny of neighbors who worry about property values, taxes, and the height of a blade of grass on the lawn, just like Alba and Logan envisioned so many years ago.
Suffolk County, where the population’s growth in the last two decades has been fueled by immigration, fits squarely in this demographic trend. Some towns have gone from being practically all white to having a 17 percent Latino population.17 In 2008 the Latino population in Patchogue and Medford, mostly from Ecuador, had reached 24 percent.18
In Patchogue, learning how to mow one’s lawn the proper way is a serious, defining matter—a milepost on the road to assimilation. Francisco Hernández, who was born in New York City and moved to Patchogue from Queens, remembers how a neighbor had to teach him what products to use to keep his lawn pristine. “Spanish people [Hispanics or people who speak Spanish] do learn,” he told a documentary filmmaker in 2009. “Look at Raúl, my neighbor. His lawn was like crap. He’s got one of the best lawns now in the neighborhood. He won’t let one car park on his lawn.”19
Such are the issues that can turn neighbor against neighbor in Suffolk County, particularly if the one who won’t use the right fertilizer speaks a language other than English.
While six of the zip codes in Suffolk County are among the hundred wealthiest in the United States, Patchogue and Medford are predominantly middle-class towns with strip malls and pizzerias. These are towns where teachers, police officers, and deli owners live, not where Wall Street tycoons vacation or where pint-size Park Avenue trust-fund children learn to ride their first horses. Thus, working-class families that live in places like Patchogue and Medford are likely to view immigrant newcomers not as hired help but as competitors for the jobs they too covet.20
Immigrant advocates say that the attitudes young people develop against Hispanics are fueled by the rhetoric they absorb in the hallways and classrooms of their schools, in the news media, or in conversations at home.21 In fact, research has shown that to be the case. Research has also shown that much of the immigrant-bashing rhetoric is caused by fear.
“I think the difference in the situation now,” Eddington, the former legislator and Medford resident, told me, “is that you have people . . . moving into Patchogue that can’t speak English, didn’t grow up in the community, and I think what happens in that situation is that people become afraid because there are cultural differences.”22
It would be easy and convenient to have a villain in this book. Take Jeffrey Conroy, for example, the teenager convicted of killing Lucero. He was seventeen, restless and unruly in school, and he once asked a friend to tattoo his body with symbols of white power: a swastika and a lightning bolt. But many in Suffolk County see Jeffrey as a victim as well—a jock who, though friendly to the Latinos in his circle of friends, absorbed the hateful rhetoric of those around him in positions of authority.
No one had more authority in Suffolk County when Jeffrey was growing up than Steve Levy, a man with such striking anti-immigration views that a report released after Lucero’s death by the Southern Poverty Law Center, of Montgomery, Alabama, called him “The Enabler,” blaming him for fueling the attack on Lucero and others before him. He was fond of calling critics “communists” and “anarchists,” and he cofounded Mayors and Executives for Immigration Reform, a national group that advocates for local ordinances against undocumented immigrants. On one occasion he said that immigrant women were crossing the border to have “anchor babies,” a term used by those who claim
the country is under siege by invading Mexicans.23
While it is true that Levy was the most vocal and most visible of the Long Island politicians who continuously stoked the flames against immigrants, he wasn’t the only one. More important, shrewd politician that he was, Levy would not have used immigrant bashing as one of the pillars of his campaigns and speeches if he hadn’t recognized that his words would be well received by the majority of the registered voters in the county.
Lucero’s death has left a mark on Patchogue, and placed the village in the eye of the political storm that immigration has become. On the night of November 8, 2008, a Saturday, everyone went to sleep in a town that was almost totally anonymous and awoke the next morning to find satellite trucks in their front yards. Pontieri found out about the attack as he sipped coffee and read the Sunday paper in his backyard. Diana Berthold, a local artist, heard the story on TV. In desperation, and out of habit, she began to quilt. Jean Kaleda, a local librarian, was coming back from a short vacation when a friend told her about it; her stomach lurched at the news.
Film and television crews descended on the town. A half-hour documentary was promptly filmed and released, PBS taped a show, and a local theater group staged a well-received play about the murder. In addition, college students wrote essays about Lucero and hate crimes to win scholarship money. Later a separate scholarship fund was established by the Lucero family to help seniors from the local high school—the same school where the attackers had been students—pay for college. (At the end of 2012, four students had received scholarships ranging from $250 to $500.) A group of about twenty women worked for more than a year on a three-part quilt that has been used in a local anti-hate campaign. Soccer tournaments that include Latino teams have become yearly events spearheaded by Eddington, the former legislator, and a group of Ecuadorians, under the banner of the Lucero Foundation, has met regularly to discuss issues that affect their community. (At a meeting in November 2011, the discussion wavered between two issues: whether to give toys or candy to children at a Christmas gathering, and how to react to a man who disrupted a town parade because Latinos had been included.)
But beyond the headlines, sound bites, and community meetings, and after the satellite trucks left, what remains is daily life in this seemingly sleepy and charming village. It is here, in the mundane details of personal stories and relationships, where my book dwells. This two-way process of assimilation and adaptation—a drama unfolding every day, in every small and not-so-small town across the United States—is how stereotypes are shaped and cemented, opinions are molded, and political decisions are made. When the process works well, as it usually does, America is at its best: welcoming and gracious, showering newcomers with handouts and opportunities like no other country on earth. When it doesn’t, as has been increasingly the case, America is at its worst: parochial, protective, and dismissive of the other. (Arizona and Alabama, with their punitive anti-immigration laws, are relevant examples.)
In Patchogue, Marcelo Lucero thought he had found a home, albeit a temporary one, but to the town he was always a stranger, a foreigner, an invisible other. Pontieri is still upset when he recalls that a few days after Lucero’s death a local Hispanic man approached him to talk about his fears. Pontieri asked him where he lived. Over there, the man said, pointing to a small, white, wood-framed home two doors from the house where Pontieri grew up, the house he visits every day to check on his mother. “How is it that I never saw him?” Pontieri asked me rhetorically. “He’s been living here for years and I never saw him before, and I know everybody in this town.” Four years later, wanting to meet that man, I asked Pontieri what his name was. He had forgotten—or never learned it.24
Of course, Pontieri does not know everybody in his village. He didn’t know Lucero either, just like most people in Patchogue. Only in death did they learn his name. Only in death were they forced to see him.
CHAPTER 1
A BLOODY KNIFE
From his perch on the witness stand, Angel Loja knew he was doing well—composed, in control, hands folded on his lap. Just as he had been instructed, he was giving straight answers, looking at the lawyer as he spoke, occasionally glancing at the prosecutor or the judge for reassurance, trying to enunciate every word carefully and truthfully, to the best of his recollection. But then the lawyer for the defense mentioned the knife, and Loja, thirty-seven, almost lost his composure.
“Did you ever see a knife?” asked William Keahon, the lawyer representing Jeffrey Conroy, the young man who, at seventeen, had confessed to stabbing and killing Loja’s friend, Marcelo Lucero.
“Never.”
“Did you ever see anyone stab Marcelo?”
“No, because in the second attack . . .”
“I’m not asking—please stop.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry about that.”
“That’s fine,” the lawyer said, and he went on to the next question.1
But it was not fine. A simple no couldn’t convey Loja’s feelings, the nights he had stayed awake thinking “what-if,” the hours he had mulled over his actions on the day of the attack. It wasn’t fair that the lawyer wanted a simple yes or no. Neither of those answers could accurately describe his fears or his regrets.
The truth was that Loja had turned his back momentarily on his friend and their attackers to run for safety to a nearby alley. He had called out to Lucero to follow him, but Lucero had stood his ground and fought. The truth was that he had not seen the knife. He wished he had.
“And when you got to the police precinct did you talk to a detective or a police officer right away or did you have to wait?” the lawyer continued.
“I had to wait.”
“Do you know about how long?”
“Two, three hours. Three hours.”
“And during that time, that two or three hours that you were waiting to speak to a police officer, did you learn about what had happened to your friend, Marcelo Lucero?”
“No.”
“Okay. So, when did you learn that?”
“I didn’t find out until the detectives approached me. They introduced themselves. They said they were detectives. The first thing I asked was, ‘How’s my friend?’ ”
“And what did they say?”
“They said, ‘I’m sorry. Your friend passed away. He’s dead.’ ”
At this point in the trial, Loja could no longer hold back the tears. He wanted to go back in time to Lucero’s one-room apartment, shut the door, and stay inside with his friend, watching TV. He wished he had never gone out that day at all. If he hadn’t, if he had said no instead of yes when Lucero called the afternoon of November 8, 2008, if he hadn’t been so accommodating to his older, wiser friend, perhaps Lucero would still be alive.
He had briefly considered turning down Lucero’s invitation that day, but in his friend’s voice he had detected something akin to desperation or loneliness. Later Loja would wonder: Did Lucero know that he was going to die that day? Did he somehow intuit that he had hours to live and that’s why he didn’t want to be alone? Lucero may not have needed a savior that day, for Loja knew he couldn’t have saved his friend. What Lucero had needed, he had concluded after the attack, was someone to bear witness.
And so here he was, more than sixteen months after that day, bearing witness.
“And how did you know Marcelo Lucero?” the prosecutor, Megan O’Donnell, asked, unleashing a flood of memories.
Loja cleared his throat before answering.
“I have known Marcelo Lucero since I was five years old.”
There was little they didn’t know about each other. They were born sixteen months apart, and their mothers were friends and neighbors in Gualaceo, a dusty speck of a town in a valley near Cuenca, a mid-size city in Ecuador known for its colonial buildings, narrow streets, and a river that divides it in two. Their town, though, has little in common with Cuenca, which for Gualaceños is more like a point of reference, a way to anchor them to the better-known geography of a pl
ace. Gualaceo, with only one main street, one cemetery, and one bus station, does not have the colonial charm or tourist-fueled relative wealth of Cuenca. There are no fancy hotels or restaurants in Gualaceo, and not one that serves, say, an omelet for breakfast. A tourist would be hard-pressed to find a place to eat after 7:00 p.m., but there are dozens of stores that sell leather shoes in a dizzying array of colors and styles, at least two food markets, two churches, and two local weekly newspapers. What beauty Gualaceo has it owes to nature. Cleaved by the Santa Bárbara River—once believed by the Spanish conquistadors to be brimming with gold—and surrounded by majestic mountains, some locals call it pedacito de cielo—little piece of heaven.
For Lucero and Loja, Gualaceo proved to be too small a piece of heaven. They wanted more.
Loja came from a large family, one that had known unimaginable pain and addiction but also redemption, prosperity, and perhaps even a miracle.
He was the second-oldest boy of a family of nine, but knew only six of his siblings. By the time he was born, his parents, who had once been too poor for medicine or doctors, had lost three daughters, ages three, five, and six, to mysterious ailments that no amount of home remedies could cure. At that time, Loja’s mother was supporting the family, while her husband buried his helplessness and sadness in alcohol. The couple and their surviving children lived with Loja’s father’s parents in a modest house in the countryside; the arrangement upset Loja’s mother, who thought each family ought to have its own house.
She moved out with the children and, with sticks and stones, built a hut with her own hands. Jolted by her move, Loja’s father sobered up, pulled his family from the makeshift shed, and became a devout follower of the Virgin Mary. During the day he worked in construction. At night he prayed the Rosary with friends and neighbors. The family prospered and moved to the center of town. The father did so well that he eventually began selling construction materials, a much less demanding and better-paying job. The Lojas, though never rich, managed to reach a lower-middle-class status. Loja, unlike Lucero, never went to bed hungry.