Hunting Season

by Mirta Ojito

  In 1993, twelve years after his arrival in New York, Espinoza, who by then had had two other children with Ana, a son and a fourth daughter, realized that practically everybody he knew from Gualaceo had at least one family member in Patchogue, which gave him an idea for a business. Most immigrants he knew, himself included, had to travel to Queens whenever they wanted to send a package or wire money to relatives at home. Wouldn’t it be great if they could do it right here in Patchogue? Espinoza described this idea to his wife, who was hesitant about leaving their stable jobs but knew enough not to stand between her husband and his unwavering optimism.

  With their savings and a loan of $5,000 from a relative, Espinoza rented a seven-hundred-square-foot space on Patchogue’s Main Street and called it Envios Espinoza. Failure was not an option, but, just in case, the ever-careful Espinoza team kept working at the restaurant on the weekends. By the time they opened a second store, a few blocks away and also on Main Street, Espinoza decided to stop working for others and focus on his own thriving business. Eight years after he opened the first store, Espinoza opened a third store in 2001. Every day he shuttled from one counter to another, where he sold products—such as manichos (chocolates) and galletas (crackers)—that Gualaceños yearned for. He offered immigration advice, rented Spanish-language movies, wired money home, and sold phone cards. Gualaceños would stop by after work or on their lunch break and greet him as they would back home, respectfully and in Spanish. Buenos días, Don Julio, they would say, and Espinoza felt right at home.

  Yet Espinoza was aware that Patchogue was not home. It was where he lived and where he had settled and where he hoped to stay, but he was not naive enough to assume that just because he liked Patchogue, Patchogue liked him back. Though he had a thriving business, he knew that his business depended entirely on the Ecuadorian population. No one who was not Hispanic had ever ventured into his shop out of curiosity or need. It was as if there was an invisible line separating the Ecuadorian immigrants from the rest of Patchogue.

  His children admitted that they experienced the same line running through the hallways of their local high school: those who spoke only English stayed on one side, while those who spoke only Spanish stayed on the other. Then there were the rumors Espinoza had heard of young people harassing and attacking immigrants late at night, particularly if they had had too much to drink, stealing their money and sometimes their bicycles, and calling them ugly names.

  Espinoza knew there was a name for that, racism, but he himself had not felt it. He was content in his small world, tending to his customers, paying the rent on his shops on time, and rushing home at night to share a meal with his family. In 2002, Espinoza and his wife bought their first home in the United States, a three-bedroom house on a busy road, built far enough from the street that it was possible for them to ignore the world outside, even the traffic.

  One of the Espinozas’ most loyal customers was a young man who had arrived in New York in 1993 and had moved to Patchogue soon after, just like Espinoza a decade earlier, looking for a better-paying, more stable job. His name was Marcelo Lucero and he was the son of a small, walnut-skinned woman who had a reputation for being the best cook in Gualaceo. On market days, people would line up to buy Doña Rosario’s home-cooked meals.

  Almost every day after work at a dry cleaner’s, Lucero would stop at Envios Espinoza and buy a $2 phone card so that he could call home and talk with his mother for about twenty-five minutes. Espinoza was fond of Lucero. He admired especially how often Lucero wanted to speak to his loved ones, but also understood what Lucero was feeling: he was homesick and alone, though surrounded by people he knew from childhood, people who were his neighbors in Gualaceo and who had become his neighbors in Patchogue as well.

  Between 1999 and 2000, four hundred thousand Ecuadorians joined their one million compatriots already in the United States.9 Almost two-thirds of them were living in the greater New York area.10 According to the 2000 US census, there were 2,842 Hispanics in Patchogue then, more than an 84 percent increase from the previous census in 1990.11 Most of the Hispanics were from Ecuador; the majority of them were from Gualaceo and its surroundings. Yet for a while Ecuadorians in Patchogue remained under the radar—not because they weren’t visible but because most people didn’t want to see them.

  At first, immigrants were working menial jobs in the stately homes near the waters of the Great South Bay, in nurseries, and on construction sites. That was the case for years and the townsfolk had accepted and even welcomed the cheap labor of immigrants, as long as at the end of the day they left and went home—wherever that was. What was different with the Ecuadorians in Patchogue—and a little unsettling for those who noticed—was that at the end of the day they stayed, living in the small apartments behind Main Street and in the subdivided grand houses of absentee landlords who long ago had moved to Florida. Patchogue had become their home, not just the place where they worked.

  Suddenly, it seemed, there was a proliferation of signs in Spanish asking for dishwashers, ads for restaurants serving “Spanish” food, and even a bilingual teller at the bank on Main Street. Dark-haired delivery boys predominated, and men gathered on main roads looking for daily construction work.

  Ecuadorians had become a visible but quiet presence in the streets of the village, scurrying off Main Street whenever a police car approached or a large crowd gathered. Few wanted to engage with them, but some people tried to bridge that divide. One who tried, perhaps more persistently than anyone else, was a local librarian, a Long Island native with an ear for languages and a stubborn and particular love for Spanish.

  CHAPTER 3

  WELCOME TO PATCHOGUE

  In 1997 Jean Kaleda became a reference librarian in the Patchogue-Medford Library. At thirty-eight she had finally found her dream job in a library that served a vast and diverse population in Suffolk County. Practically from childhood, Kaleda had trained precisely for this career.

  Kaleda was born and raised in Hicksville, a hamlet within the town of Oyster Bay, Nassau County, which became a bustling New York City suburb during the construction boom years after World War II. Her father, who was from Brooklyn, had two jobs: providing customer service for the then-thriving Eastern Airlines and cleaning offices at night. Her mother, who had been a flight attendant, stayed home after her first child was born. The couple had five children in seven years. Jean, their second-born, was the oldest of three girls.

  Growing up in a boisterous house and sharing a room with her sisters, Kaleda found her refuge in literature. She would spend hours in bed reading, mostly British mysteries. Her first job, when she was twelve, was delivering newspapers. Kaleda would peek at the headlines before throwing the bundles on her neighbors’ manicured front lawns. Though her paternal grandparents had been born in Lithuania and her mother’s father in Sicily, only English was spoken at home. Her ancestors, Kaleda understood, had wanted to assimilate quickly, put their unhappy memories behind them, and restart their lives in a new country.

  At home Kaleda’s parents stressed a sense of fairness, respect, and hard work. The “golden rule” was a teaching tool. Even as a child, the simple idea of treating others as she would like to be treated herself resonated with her. In ninth grade, the curriculum of the Catholic school she attended dictated that students take a foreign language, and she chose Spanish. Kaleda then studied English at Towson University in Maryland, and in the fall of 1979, her junior year of college, she decided on a whim to go to Spain. It was there, in the narrow streets and smoky bars of downtown Madrid, where Kaleda fell in love not only with the language but also with the bohemian culture of a country that felt electric and giddy with possibilities. General Francisco Franco, the strongman who had ruled Spain for thirty-six years, had died four years earlier, and Spain had transitioned to a democracy with a new constitution.

  Kaleda’s political sense heightened in Madrid, where she followed the Spanish media coverage regarding the fifty-two Americans taken hostage in Iran that yea
r, and she was surprised and saddened to see that some Spaniards found joy in the suffering of Americans. She thought she understood the reasons for it. She remembered as a child reading the daily news coverage of the Vietnam War, with the photos of dead children and soldiers in caskets. If that’s the way the war had played in America’s living rooms, she could only imagine what the world had seen and how that had influenced how other countries viewed Americans.

  Upon graduation, with a major in Spanish and a minor in English, Kaleda stayed in Maryland, first working as a secretary in an accounting firm, and then for three years as a translator from Spanish to English for the Defense Department. When her father became ill with emphysema, Kaleda moved back home and switched careers, enrolling in St. John’s University, in Queens, for a master’s degree in library science.

  Her first job after graduation was as a librarian in an investment bank in New York City, where she had done an internship during graduate school. She worked there for three years, though the job never fulfilled her. She wanted to be a librarian to share knowledge, not to be a facilitator of data for a big corporation. Taking a pay cut, Kaleda, at thirty-one, returned to Long Island to work as a librarian in Riverhead, near where she had grown up.

  From 1990 to 1997 she was relatively content with her job as a reference librarian, but barely used her Spanish. Then, in 1997, the offer came to work at the Patchogue-Medford Library, where, she was assured, her Spanish would be put to good use. So it was with eagerness and a great sense of mission that she accepted the position, seeing herself as a link between the library and the growing Hispanic population on the south shore of Long Island. She envisioned all she could do with her language skills and her curiosity for a people who she knew were underserved and often misunderstood, as many newcomers are.

  Kaleda was surprised and disappointed to find that the library’s patrons were not as diverse as the population she could see right outside the library’s front windows. Where is everybody? she wondered. And who are they? Where are they from?

  She would strain her ears walking up and down Main Street trying to identify the soft Spanish accent she had come to know and love in Spain, or the more musical but truncated Spanish of the Caribbean that she was used to hearing from the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in New York City. What she heard in the streets of Patchogue resembled neither of those accents. This was a more formal, clipped way of speaking that seemed to skip over the vowels and end each word with an expectant tilt, as if the other person was supposed to finish the thought.

  Kaleda couldn’t place it, and didn’t know who could. She didn’t know anybody in Patchogue outside the library or at least not anybody who shared her interest in Hispanics and her love of Spanish in particular. But she was determined to attract Hispanic patrons to the library.

  There was plenty of history to draw from. Chartered by the state of New York in 1900, the Patchogue-Medford Library is the main library for Suffolk County, serving a population of more than fifty thousand people.1 During the 1970s and 1980s, Puerto Ricans made up the vast majority of Spanish speakers in the community. A librarian named Barbara Hoffman decided to reach out to that community by focusing on the youth. With her support, a local band of teenage musicians, mostly Hispanic and African Americans, was hired for a library dance. Local teens who thought of themselves as graffiti artists were enlisted to redirect their talents to paint a mural for the library, and the library provided video equipment and a videographer to film events in the Hispanic community. To develop a young adult collection in Spanish, English-speaking librarians asked local teenagers to accompany them to the Borders Bookstore to select books they thought other teenagers would like.2

  The program was a victim of its own success: as the community became more bilingual and more integrated into the fabric of Patchogue, there was no longer such a need for a Spanish program. Eventually the library’s outreach to Spanish speakers came to a near-standstill. While the library blinked, the Spanish-speaking community was reinventing itself, but this time with the Ecuadorians.3

  In early 2002 the library revised its long-range plan, and Spanish-language outreach was designated a priority. Soon after, the library established a Spanish Outreach Committee, which was chaired by Kaleda. A Literacy and Languages Center with materials to learn English and other languages was established, printed materials were translated into Spanish, and the bilingual and Spanish collections were greatly expanded. Bilingual suggestion boxes were placed everywhere in the library.4

  The only problem for Kaleda was that there seemed to be no clear path to reach out to the community. The library was like a perfectly laid-out buffet with all the trimmings and no takers. Unlike other groups that tend to unite to lobby for recognition, jobs, or political power, the Ecuadorians in Patchogue seemed to be leaderless. Everyone went about his or her business individually, a behavior typical of recent arrivals. Ecuadorians were not yet seeking a presence in the town’s life; they were trying to survive.

  Then, in the early fall of 2002, Kaleda found an item on the front page of the local paper, the Long Island Advance, that caught her eye: “Planting Roots on Long Island, Surging Hispanic Population Hopes to Break Barriers in America.”5

  Finally, Kaleda thought as she read, somebody else has noticed the obvious:

  Martha Vázquez is a long way from home, but she has lots of company.

  A native of Gualaceo, Ecuador, Vázquez says there are more than 16,000 people from her South American homeland who have migrated to Long Island during the past 30 years. The Patchogue Village resident, who moved here 15 years ago and officially became a US citizen on Aug. 15, 1998, also says that at least 4,000 Ecuadorians now live in the greater Patchogue areas.

  The most interesting statistic, according to the 32-year-old wife and mother of one, is that all of them came from the same small village in Ecuador.

  [ . . . ]

  On a local level, the Hispanic population in Patchogue village, for example, has increased by 84.1 percent between 1990 and 2000, according to recent census figures. Approximately 2,842 individuals of Latino descent now live within the borders of the 2.2-square-mile village. The cultural metamorphosis is most apparent on South Ocean Avenue, where Spanish bodegas and meat markets now dominate the commercial corridor.

  [ . . . ]

  In addition to seeking employment opportunities, the majority of Ecuadorians living on Long Island either are or hope to become full-fledged tax-paying American citizens, according to Vázquez, spokeswoman for the newly incorporated Ecuadorians United in Long Island. The Patchogue-based group now boasts almost 60 members, but only two speak good English, highlighting one of the barriers that the growing local Hispanic population must contend with.

  Kaleda had found her answers. In a few paragraphs she had noted a need she knew she could fulfill—English lessons—and learned the name of a person who seemed poised to help, Martha Vázquez. She picked up the phone and called Vázquez. The article had identified her as working for a local bank.

  Vázquez was receptive, immediately grasping Kaleda’s intentions, and invited her to the next meeting. The group—no more than ten that night—met in a space above a Chinese restaurant on Main Street. Kaleda went and mostly listened. Group members were discussing one of their first projects: a community garden on South Ocean Avenue. Kaleda understood that if she wanted to attract Ecuadorians to the library she needed to reach many more than ten. She needed to do it in Spanish and through a publication they trusted. Someone at the meeting mentioned that the most trusted publication among Hispanics in Patchogue was not on Long Island, but in Ecuador, more than three thousand miles away: a weekly newspaper called Semanario El Pueblo, which was edited and published in Gualaceo on Sundays, and arrived in Patchogue by Thursdays.

  The next day Kaleda composed an e-mail in Spanish to the publisher, Fernando León, telling him that the doors of the library were open to the Ecuadorian community and that library employees were eager to work with them. She also asked him f
or advice on how best to reach the community. She was hoping for an e-mail response, or even simple confirmation that her e-mail had been received, but heard nothing. A few days later, the first three Gualaceños walked into the library looking for Kaleda.

  How did you find me? she asked, startled but pleased.

  They pointed to a copy of El Pueblo they carried with them. The publisher had used Kaleda’s e-mail as a letter to the editor. The ice was broken.

  The outreach program was set into high gear. Bienvenido al Pueblo welcome packets, modeled on the library’s English-language “Welcome to the Community” packets, were created and distributed to all patrons applying for library cards. Spanish-language and bilingual workshops were offered on topics that ranged from immigration and health awareness to fair housing, and bilingual story times were started.6

  For much of the translation work the library relied on Kaleda, who had learned Spanish as an adult, a part-time clerk who was not in a public service area, and a part-time custodian. No one else in the library spoke Spanish. Kaleda knew she needed to find a full-time employee who was truly bilingual. She found what she was looking for right under the library’s roof, but it took time and a dash of luck to make it happen.

  One day Kaleda was speaking with a man who had attended one of the bilingual workshops and who stressed that what he and other Latinos in the area needed was a primer on how Patchogue worked. For instance, how to pay a parking ticket, understanding the difference between the local constables and the Suffolk County police, or how to apply to use the soccer field for a game. Kaleda listened and set out to organize the first bilingual village/library meeting. She spoke to the mayor, Paul Pontieri, who was interested. The meeting was set for November 3, 2004, and it was billed as “Viviendo en la Villa de Patchogue”—Living in the Village of Patchogue.