by Mirta Ojito
Joselo appeared surprised and relieved at the question. His shoulders dropped, as if releasing tension. His face relaxed. Why? he asked. Because it’s been a few days, Wolter said. What are you going to do with the body?
A brief discussion ensued. No one knew what to do, but Wolter knew that shipping the body of a murdered undocumented Latino to Ecuador would be a complicated, multistep process. There was no point in saying that to Joselo, Wolter reasoned, and changed the topic. Are you going to have a service to put some beauty and healing into this?
I don’t know, Joselo said. Maybe at the funeral home.
A funeral home, it’s not going to be big enough, Wolter said. Then he pointed to the tower of his church, the tallest structure in town. I’m Reverendo Wolter, he said, trying to reach out with a word in Spanish.
Oh, said Joselo. That’s your church?
No, Wolter replied. That’s your church. Then proceeded to offer it for the service. He gave Joselo choices: You can have the service in the morning, afternoon, at night. You choose the preacher, the language, the music. Whatever you want.
Joselo agreed and said he would call the funeral home.
But Wolter knew that too could be cumbersome for Joselo to handle alone. The body was still in the morgue. There was an investigation going on. You know what, he said, I’ll talk to the funeral home.
Shortly after their talk, Joselo went to Wolter’s church to plan the service for his brother. The Reverend Allan Ramírez, a local Ecuadorian-born pastor and an advocate for immigrants, would play a role in the service. A friend of the family had offered to sing. The rest, Joselo said, he wanted Wolter to handle.
The first thing Wolter did was to make the decision to close the service to the media. He wanted the service to be solemn and memorable. The idea of photographers focusing their lenses on Lucero’s corpse repelled him. He also feared that, as rattled as everyone’s nerves were, the memorial could turn into a forum to air differences. Already Wolter had felt the sting of criticism. Several of his parishioners and others in the community had criticized him for offering the church for the service. Was he siding with the Latinos? Whose side was he on anyway?
The night before the funeral service, Wolter had attended a community meeting at the local synagogue. Several civic leaders and elected officials were there, and some spoke. But the meeting had deteriorated as many began to hurl insults at legislator Jack Eddington. They criticized him for introducing legislation, mostly unsuccessfully, that they described as anti-immigrant.
Eddington, who was trained as a social worker and had been taught to solve problems, didn’t perceive his attempts at improving the Patchogue-Medford area as anti-immigrant. He viewed them as practical solutions that could benefit all in the community, including immigrants. If, for example, Eddington was concerned that there were too many accidents at a particular intersection and a study revealed that the accidents were caused because cars stopped to pick up immigrants looking for work, the obvious solution to him was to prevent the laborers from standing in the streets soliciting work. To him that seemed logical. To many in the community, that seemed racist.19
Eddington deeply resented being called “racist.” Born in 1947 and raised in a housing project under the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge in Long Island City, he had been the victim of black and Latino bullies who singled him out for being white, red-haired, freckled, and Irish. His body still bears the scars from being shot with a zip gun—a crude homemade weapon—when he was about ten years old. “I couldn’t understand why they were attacking me,” he told me the first time we spoke in 2010. Later he understood. “They were doing to the whites what the whites had done to them,” he said, referring to the African American kids who had terrorized him. In an unpublished memoir that he wrote a few years ago, he described how he viewed the world when he was young: “It can be a hostile place. A place where you must always be prepared for an attack. Where you must always be vigilant and armed for defense.”
He had found no respite at home. If he misbehaved, his father would hit him with a contraption he called “cat o’ nine tails,” a foot-long wooden stick with nine two-foot-long strips of rawhide. “It would leave welts on my back and often break the skin. And the strange thing about it is that I never thought to tell anyone or complain to anyone or seek help. Who would I go to?” He writes that he was beaten once or twice a week with that instrument of torture.
Eventually, after a four-year stint in the navy, he became a clinical and school social worker and an educational consultant with the US Department of Education and the New York State Department of Substance Abuse Services. He got into politics, as a member of the labor-backed Working Families Party and later as an Independent because he figured his training as a problem solver would help him find solutions to issues in his community. Instead, he said, he found very little willingness to compromise and even less common sense among his fellow legislators. He was first elected to the Suffolk County legislature in 2005 and was reelected twice. Most of his time in office, he was the chairman of the Public Safety Committee, which means that many of the complaints against immigrants landed on his desk.
“No one wants you to be fair,” he told me often. “They want you to be on their side.”
The complaints varied, but mostly he heard from people who, like himself, worried that Hispanic immigrants, who remained stubbornly monolingual, hadn’t been able to assimilate in the community as quickly as earlier waves of immigrants. And why is that? he pondered. Eddington didn’t know, but he did know that advocates for immigrants spent all their time and energy criticizing those they perceived as anti-immigrants, such as him, and yet no one was helping the new arrivals. Why can’t they teach them how to properly dispose of the garbage, for example? Eddington wondered. Why do they keep parking their cars on the grass? Why do they sit on the lawn drinking beer? Why can’t they live in families, like everyone else, instead of having twenty-seven single men living together in a house meant for four? Why haven’t they been told that it is not a good idea to play volleyball in the backyard until the late hours of the night? Those games had become noisy, unlicensed businesses where food and beer were sold, while everybody else on the block tried to sleep. During his years in the legislature, he had personally shown up with the police at several volleyball games to stop them.
These immigrants, Eddington concluded, “were not following the rules.” But the social worker in him could also see that the Hispanic immigrants probably didn’t know any better. Unlike earlier immigrants, who had migrated with their families for the most part, the immigrants from Ecuador or Mexico or El Salvador settling in Suffolk County tend to be men who had left their families at home, poor and with little or no formal education.
When Eddington was running for reelection in 2008, there was not a community meeting or activity he went to where someone didn’t stop him to ask, What are you doing about illegal immigrants? Eddington told them what he always said to such requests, Let me see what I can do. In fact, he had already done plenty. In 2006, he cosponsored a bill to require companies doing business with the county to certify that they had verified that their employees were authorized to work. In other words, hiring of undocumented immigrants was not allowed. The bill became law. He had also on occasion referred to Hispanic immigrants in ways that, he could now see, had been interpreted at best as insensitive, if not racist.
So Eddington was an easy target.
The night before Lucero’s funeral, as Eddington stood in the middle of a circle at Temple Beth El, many in the audience blamed him for contributing to the atmosphere that had turned average teenagers into killers.
Undaunted, he attempted to communicate who he was and what he stood for. “Very few people here know Jack Eddington,” he began. “They don’t know me. They know the legislation. . . . I have not given up trying. I want to let you know that the people who are pointing the finger at me [have] not reached out to me.”20
At that point some shouted, “Balo
ney!” To which Eddington replied, “When I do try, I get shouted down.”
He kept talking, and the shouts subsided as he told the audience about his service in Vietnam and about his hope that everyone in Patchogue and Medford would get together to create a safer environment so that no one would be afraid to walk the streets at night. He ended his three-minute speech by quoting an Irish blessing that he had learned from his grandmother: “May God give you for every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile; for every care, a promise; and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life sends, a faithful friend to share, and for every sigh, a sweet song and an answer for each prayer.”
The next day, he did not attend the memorial service for Lucero. Levy did not attend either. The Times reported that Pontieri had asked Levy not to come.21
People had been lining up outside for hours before the Congregational Church of Patchogue opened its doors shortly after 5:00 p.m. on November 15, a week after Lucero’s murder. The service crammed 1,452 people inside the church; 420 were able to find seats, but the rest stood in the aisles and around the back, while a few hundred more remained outside.22
Though emotions were high, it was a subdued event, with music—there were two choirs and a folk singer who sang in Spanish—and some deeply felt speeches by people who had known Lucero from Gualaceo. Joselo, dressed in a simple black suit jacket with a large silver cross dangling from a chain on his chest, stood by the casket embracing mourners. Dark circles framed his brown eyes.23
Wolter, who explained that he was speaking on behalf of Joselo, said that Lucero was a talkative man who relished a good debate. “If you held up a black stone,” Wolter said, “he would claim it was deep blue.”
Before the service, Wolter had arranged for a private viewing for the family who had yet to see the body. Almost two years later, Wolter would describe those forty-five minutes with Joselo and some friends and relatives as “very, very difficult.”
“I heard howls of pain, emptiness, and horror gurgle up from the throats of the family as they looked upon the body of the young, Latino, undocumented, murdered Marcelo Lucero,” Wolter wrote in a published essay.24
Once the service began, the coffin remained open near the altar: Lucero was dressed in a dark gray pin-striped suit, crisp white shirt, and gray- and blue-striped tie. He lay with his hands folded in a white-lined coffin piled with bouquets of flowers.25 Next to the coffin, there was a painted framed portrait of him dressed in white and surrounded by a green-and-gold halo—as if he were a saint—with the Ecuadorian flag to his left and the flag of his hometown on the right. Copies of that image were printed on the offering boxes at the front of the church. Lucero’s older sister, Catalina, who lived in Queens, sat in the front pew, along with Joselo. Representative Nydia M. Velázquez, a New York City Democrat, sat next to Catalina and consoled her as she sobbed when people approached the casket to kiss her brother’s forehead.26
“Perhaps what Marcelo accomplished in death is far greater than he might have been able to do in his life,” Wolter said in his sermon. “What he has done for this community since his spirit left this earth is that he can possibly be the source of healing, hope, and reconciliation for a town that can reform itself.”27
The Reverend Allan Ramirez took the pulpit as well, with a mixed message: he urged forgiveness but not without accountability first. “As believers, we also must be ready to extend forgiveness, even for Mr. Levy,” he said, referring to Steve Levy. “For that forgiveness can only happen—it can only take place—when Mr. Levy can take responsibility for the way in which his legislation and his views may have influenced a climate of racial hatred.”28
The mourners listened intently, their arms draped around each other, occasionally wiping away tears. At least one man appeared to have come straight from work—he was wearing dirty jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. A woman with a long braid wore a red-and-gold necklace, a traditional ornament among the Quechua Indians of Ecuador.29
After about an hour and a half, the service was over. It took more than thirty minutes to carry the casket from the front of the crowded church to the funeral home’s car waiting outside. So many people approached to touch it one last time. When the casket was finally placed inside and the door was closed, many who knew him in life sighed in relief. Marcelo Lucero was finally going home.
CHAPTER 9
A LITTLE PIECE OF HEAVEN
The body of Marcelo Lucero arrived in Gualaceo on November 19, a Wednesday, in a gun-metal coffin draped with the yellow, blue, and red flag of Ecuador. It had arrived in Quito, the sprawling capital of the country the night before and traveled in a hearse overnight two hundred miles south to Lucero’s hometown. Gualaceños congregated at the town’s entrance to receive the hearse at about 9:30 a.m. Some held handmade signs that said in Spanish, “No to Yankee Racism,” “No Human Being Is Illegal,” and “Ecuador Is a Country of Peace.”1
The coffin was carried through town by some of Lucero’s friends. Two of them held up a sign made of flowers that spelled TUNAS, an acronym in Spanish for Everyone United, No One Walks Alone, noted Newsday reporter Bart Jones who traveled from Long Island to Gualaceo to await the arrival of the body. Hundreds of people—including children in school uniforms (girls in blue or red sweaters and plaid skirts, and boys in yellow shirts and black pants)—accompanied them in a procession that took them to City Hall “for a brief ceremony under a blazing sun.” The mayor declared three days of mourning. Flags were flown at half-staff and public employees were given the day off to attend the services.
“Some schoolgirls held hands and raised them in salute as the coffin passed. Others waved small white flags that said ‘Paz’—‘Peace.’ Other people threw flower petals on the coffin as it went by, while some mourners watched from balconies. Lucero’s mother and sister walked arm-in-arm behind the coffin as hundreds of mourners followed,” Jones reported.
Finally the body lay at rest on the first floor of the house that Lucero’s labor in New York had built, a house he so cherished that it had been carefully built to his specifications. It took two years and about $100,000 to get it built. His mother had been able to move in on Mother’s Day, 2005. In phone calls and letters to his family, Lucero had detailed his vision: one space downstairs for a family business or shop, along with a two-bedroom apartment and a patio; one main floor with three bedrooms where he would live with his family; and a third floor for a two-bedroom apartment with a terrace to rent. From afar, he had chosen the light beige and rust floor tiles, the dark caramel wooden kitchen cabinets, the intricately carved wooden door for his suite off the living room, the paint colors for the walls with tones that complemented each other, and all the furniture—elegant but comfortable.2
The entertainment center had to be custom-made because the television set he wanted was too big to fit in any of the furniture available in the local stores. It was to occupy a prominent place in the living room, and, had Lucero moved back home, it would have been the first thing he saw as he opened the door of his bedroom. A portion of his ashes, inside a small box adorned with an angel and a copper image of the Virgin Mary, now rest on a shelf of the entertainment center, just above the television set. The bedroom that would have been his remains locked. No one likes to go in, but Doña Rosario, frail and deeply sad, indulged me when I visited in July 2010.
A large TV dominated the room, which is kept dark and cool by heavy, gold-colored curtains tightly closed against the sun. A queen bed was in the center of the room covered with a burgundy-and-gold duvet. For the flooring, Lucero chose warm wood, instead of the cool tiles more typically used in South American homes. The walk-in closet had nine shelves for clothing and shoes. A gray stuffed bunny sat on top of the unopened bags of clothing that awaited his arrival.
With a deep sigh, Doña Rosario left the room and returned the key to the pocket of her apron after locking the door behind her.
Marcelo Lucero’s death was especially shocking to Gualaceños because murder is almost alie
n to their way of life and because it shattered their ideas about the United States as the land of prosperity and opportunity.
In their pretty, compact city there is hardly any violent crime, but there are plenty of social ills that most agree have been brought about by the emigration of hundreds of men, many of whom have left behind wives and children. Undoubtedly, those families lead more prosperous lives than they would have if the head of the household had stayed home. Yet, behind many of the attractive facades of the newly built outsized houses of Gualaceo, there is a lot of sadness and despair.
Divorce is rampant: men and women have sought lovers in their loneliness and created other families in Patchogue or in Gualaceo. Some children who long for the missing parent have turned to alcohol and drugs, and bitter relatives resent the success of those who left and think that they too ought to benefit from emigration. Especially worrisome for some here is that young people, assuming that everything that comes from the United States must be good, have started to sport American garb: jeans torn at the knees, pants that fall perilously below the hips revealing checkered underwear, and nose rings and other facial piercings.3
When I visited Gualaceo, my first impression was that I had stepped back in time to a gentler, slower era. It’s no wonder that Lucero thought he was working too much and that Angel Loja resented the way he was treated in the United States. I paid ten dollars a night for the no-frills but perfectly adequate and clean hotel where I stayed. I took a walk by the river and around the pretty central plaza, and I visited the church and the local weekly newspaper, the same that had helped immigrants find their way to Jean Kaleda and the library in Patchogue.
Even an outsider can clearly see that the connection between Gualaceo and Patchogue is like an overextended umbilical cord, nurturing both Gualaceños who left home and those who pine for them and want them back but depend on them for their survival.