by Mirta Ojito
There was a farmer’s market on one side of the Catholic church, where a disproportionately large and beautiful cabbage went for fifty cents and a Sponge Bob cake cost thirty dollars. On one block alone I counted fifteen shoe stores, a sign that the shoe business is thriving again in this part of the country. Another store carried dozens of T-shirts with logos in English; most had the stars and stripes of the US flag. There were fragrant flowers everywhere—hibiscus, callas, and bougainvilleas. Indigenous women squatted on the uneven sidewalks, roasting cuyes, or guinea pigs, a local delicacy that often finds its way to Long Island, packed in ice.
Several small businesses in town serve as direct links between Gualaceo and New York, sending packages and receiving money for a fee, and a spacious office on the main thoroughfare helps Gualaceños with all sorts of migration issues, from visas and death certificates to tracking down relatives who have not been heard of since they left for the United States.
I visited a food market, lodged in a cement-and-brick building, with such variety of meats, potatoes, and fruits that it was overwhelming to the senses: gorgeous, impossibly yellow and fat bananas; several varieties of eggs, including goose and ostrich; a row of four roasted pigs, with eyes closed and open mouths; and at least a dozen sacks of potatoes, each different in color and texture. The air smelled of ripe fruit; spices like thyme, paprika, and cinnamon; raw and sizzling meat; human sweat; and women’s perfume combined with the occasional whiff of fresh, dewy air from the mountains. It seemed impossible that anyone would starve in Gualaceo or even feel the urge to leave this lush land for greener pastures. Yet about fifteen thousand Gualaceños have left for the United States. Six thousand of them live in Patchogue or nearby, according to an estimate of the Gualaceo mayor, Marco Tapia, who, like most people here, has been both a victim and a beneficiary of migration.
Two of his siblings live on Long Island, he said. His brother left when Tapia was nine, and his sister left five years later. With their economic support, he became a physical education instructor and, when I met him, his brother was paying for his law school education. Tapia was thirty-one and lived rent-free with his wife and children in the modest house of an uncle who has been in the United States for twenty-five years.
Gualaceo, which in 2010 had about forty-seven thousand residents,4 is part of Azuay, the province that has sent the largest number of emigrants to the United States. Of the municipalities in Azuay, Gualaceo, which is known regionally as el jardín de Azuay, or Azuay’s garden, has had more of its people leave for the United States than any other municipality, with the exception of one, San Fernando, which is about sixty miles to the southwest. In the elementary school that Lucero attended as a child, about 120 of the 500 students registered in 2008 had at least one parent living in the United States. María Cuesta Rodas, a teacher there, told the Newsday reporter there was so much sadness and suffering among the kids that the school had hired a psychologist to help.5
At the same time, Tapia, the mayor, estimates that at least 80 percent of the local economy is fully dependent on remesas, remittances from overseas—from the United States, certainly, but also from Italy, Spain, and Israel. That Azuay leads the nation in emigration makes sense given the characteristics of the region and of migrants everywhere. In his book Portrait of a Nation: Culture and Progress in Ecuador, former Ecuadorian president Osvaldo Hurtado explains that the people of Azuay are entrepreneurial, with a rigorous and uncharacteristic work ethic. Hurtado argues that well into the nineteenth century the rest of the country had not yet recuperated from the bad habits of colonial times: a toxic combination of racist Spanish conquistadors and natives who saw no benefit from hard work because, no matter how much they exerted themselves, the Spaniards were never going to accept them in their seriously stratified society. Hard work also seemed unnecessary because, for the most part, Ecuador is such a generous, lush land that survival was attained with very little effort.6 But the people of Azuay had to contend with an irregular topography, with rivers, valleys, hills, glaciers, and mountains. Getting to Cuenca from Quito, for example, used to be a long and arduous project that involved riding horses up and down the frigid Andes. So the people of the Azuay region were mostly isolated and had to learn to use their “assiduous effort,” their “intelligence and their arms” to survive and even thrive, Hurtado explains.
For decades, the local economy relied heavily on the straw-hat industry, which required only the cultivation of the plentiful toquilla plant for the straw and dexterous fingers to weave it into seamless, beautiful hats. When the hat business decreased, the workers were poised and had the contacts to follow the path north that their hats had forged. Then, in 1993, a landslide near Cuenca killed about three hundred people and destroyed the road that connected the city with the towns in northeastern Azuay. Many lost their jobs, which forced them to migrate, thus accelerating a process that had begun decades earlier.7
Those who study migration patterns would find that Gualaceo is not a rare case. In fact, emigrants tend not to be the poorest of the poor. To leave home, to travel to unknown lands without a safety net, family structure, or even language, requires a resourcefulness typical of those who have received some formal education, have access to capital to pay for the trip, and have an entrepreneurial spirit. Those characteristics are usually found not among the destitute but among a striving middle or lower-middle class. What most immigrants are looking for, then, is not a plate of food, a warm bed, or a safe roof. They have that at home. Instead they are looking for opportunities to prosper beyond the somewhat rigid social and economic structures of their native countries.
“Immigrants all have different skills and characteristics, so any claim about them is by definition a generalization,” writes the British economist and journalist Philippe Legrain in his book Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, before he offers a sweeping, but fitting, generalization: “Immigrants tend to be younger, fitter, more hard-working and more enterprising than local people. Why? Not because foreigners in general are more industrious and adventurous, but because migrants are a self-selected minority.”8
Tapia, Gualaceo’s mayor, is not a student of immigration patterns, but he knows enough about his people to want them to come back. He especially wants those with acquired skills, and those who left families behind. He said that he is worried about the kids who are growing up without their parents. His own sister-in-law left when her daughter was two and her son was five. They are now twenty-two and twenty-five. And Tapia remembers growing up without his brother. When he wanted a toy, his brother would send it from New York, but Tapia said he would have preferred to have his brother at home.
“We would have childhood memories now,” he said.
His message to his people is simple, “Enough, Gualaceños. You’ve made enough money. It’s time to come home.”
The government of Ecuador agrees, and it has launched a program known as Plan Retorno, which allows migrants to return with all they need to set up a home or a business or both without paying taxes for items such as a new car or an industrial-size stove. According to figures cited on a government website, 3,279 Ecuadorians had taken advantage of the offer and returned to Ecuador as of March 2010. Tapia knew of at least twenty who had returned from Patchogue.9 Some of them spoke to the Newsday reporter the day Lucero’s body went home.
“When I heard the news,” José Rómulo Ríos González told Jones, speaking of Lucero’s death, “it was as if I had been stabbed myself.” Ríos had once shared a house with Lucero in Patchogue. Unlike Lucero, he had made it home alive.10
When Doña Rosario saw her son’s body inside the casket, she practically didn’t recognize him. He had left a young, thin man with lush hair and a face scarred by acne. He had returned as a grown man, strong and thick, taller than she remembered him, and with a lot less hair.
All afternoon the day of the wake, mourners came to visit. A picture of Lucero wearing a baseball cap and tan overalls was placed on a chair near his coffin. His frie
nds from TUNAS watched over him somberly. TUNAS was more than an acronym, it was the way to define a group of about forty men who had been friends since childhood. They shared memories of roaming around town together, swimming in the nearby rivers and playing trompillo, a kind of top on a string that is a popular game in Latin America.
As they got older, most of the members of TUNAS left for the United States, specifically Patchogue, where, the moment one landed, others would follow because they knew that, at the very least, they would have a helping hand and a place to stay. Indeed, when Lucero had arrived in Queens he had gone to live at the house of a TUNAS friend in Bay Shore. Later, in Patchogue, some of his roommates were TUNAS, including Ríos.
“An innocent man had to die so people would realize the racism occurring against Latinos on Long Island,” said Juan Pablo Jadan, who, at thirty-eight, was the leader of the group keeping vigil next to Lucero’s body. He too had lived in Patchogue. “A natural death is one thing. Dying because of violence, racism, and hate is another.”11
At one point during the wake, Lucero’s younger sister, Isabel, walked out of the house to face the television cameras and microphones and demand punishment for those who had killed her brother.
“We don’t want the criminals who did this to end up laughing because they think it is a joke,” she said. “We want justice to be done so my brother can rest in peace.”12
The body was cremated the following morning. Later, around 4:00 p.m., Doña Rosario and Isabel, in a black dress, walked out of the house, each carrying a wooden box with Lucero’s ashes. Once again, they were surrounded and followed by hundreds of people, many holding flowers in arrangements made to look like crosses. Together they walked a few blocks to the Catholic church in the center of town. The church bells rang as some six hundred people found seats on the wooden pews. The family placed the two boxes—one with a cross, the other with an image of the Virgin Mary—on a table covered with a purple cloth, surrounded by six candles.
In the homily, the Reverend Jorge Moreno denounced the “xenophobia” that he said had killed Lucero, but it was Isabel, speaking on behalf of her mother, who made everyone cry.
“Marcelo, my son, you will never be far from my heart, because the love of a mother is interminable,” she said, as her mother wept from her seat in the front pew.13
At the end of the Mass, and surrounded by what seemed like the entire town, the family walked to the cemetery about a mile away. Toward the back of the cemetery, across a section with brittle and dry grass, there is a twenty-foot-high mausoleum made of concrete, painted white, and divided into two-foot-by-three-foot openings. The Lucero family located No. 150 and gently placed one wooden box inside. Doña Rosario pressed her head against the niche and began to wail.
“Why did they take my son?” she sobbed. “Why did they take you?”14
In Suffolk County the same questions were being asked, and although the pain was surely less raw than it was at the Lucero home in Gualaceo, it was equally tinged with anger. Immediately after the murder, there was a lot of navel-gazing and finger-pointing.
Teenager Jeffrey Conroy may have plunged the knife into Lucero’s chest, but the culprit, it was almost universally believed, was Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive who had managed to get overwhelmingly reelected in 2007 by recognizing and exploiting the insecurities of newcomers behind all of those white picket fences. He had expertly and cynically stoked their fears—of rising taxes, of aliens, of single unemployed men who drank too much, of Spanish, of a different culture encroaching on their little piece of heaven in suburbia, of rape, of diseases, of terrorism—and picked and picked at it as if it were a scab until it bled. When it did, the shed blood was Lucero’s, but Levy’s hands were tainted by the expanding, ugly stain of racism Lucero’s murder had left behind.
Looking for guideposts in a situation he had never before faced, Mayor Pontieri, in the days following the killing, sought the advice of two people: his wife, who listened and offered support, and Rabbi Joel Levinson, of Temple Beth El, just one block north of Main Street. The Brooklyn-born rabbi had moved to Patchogue eight years earlier, and he was especially shaken by the attack because it had taken place on the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht—the night of November 9, 1938, when the Nazis in Germany and parts of Austria unleashed a series of attacks against Jews, killing ninety-one, sending some thirty thousand to concentration camps, and destroying thousands of their businesses.15
Rather than give Pontieri advice, Levinson validated the choices he had already made: to be the mayor for all by reaching out to the Latino community, to law enforcement, to educators, and to anyone else who could help them move forward. Pontieri kept those ideas in mind when, on the evening of November 19, as Lucero’s body lay in the coffin in Gualaceo, he faced a crowd of 125 people at the Patchogue-Medford Library. The meeting took place just a few weeks after Jean Kaleda’s alarmed call about attacks against immigrants, but to Pontieri and everyone there that night that seemed like a lifetime ago. Everything they thought they knew about their village had changed overnight. From the beginning, Pontieri set a conciliatory tone, but the meeting had moments of anger and tension.
“We are here to help and serve,” Pontieri said, once again relying on Gilda Ramos to translate his words into Spanish. He added that Hispanic immigrants were as important to the community as his own family members were and as his grandparents had been. His grandparents, he emphasized, had come to Patchogue as the Ecuadorians had: without much, but looking for a better life.16
Deputy Inspector Dennis Meehan of the Fifth Precinct, who was transferred to another police precinct shortly after that meeting, told the audience that police wanted to “start now” to create opportunities to have an open dialogue with the community, and he encouraged those present to report incidents of harassment and abuse to police.
At that point, a man who spoke only Spanish said he had been chased, not by young thugs, but by plainclothes officers on a street near his home. They had caught him and beat him, and he had ended up with a broken arm, he said. Meehan seemed to be aware of that case but scolded the man for bringing it up, despite his opening the door to such reports just a few minutes before.
“This meeting is not the place for this,” Meehan said, firmly ending that line of dialogue.17
Thus, the gathering ended on a confusing note. On the one hand, Pontieri had opened his arms to all with his “we are one community” assertions; on the other hand, a representative from the police said come to us with your complaints, just don’t do it in public, where the media can hear you.
The following day, six of the seven teenagers who had attacked Lucero were arraigned in Suffolk County Criminal Court. They were charged with multiple counts of gang assault and hate crimes, not only for Lucero’s death but also for other assaults prosecutors said they had committed against Hispanics, notably Héctor Sierra and Octavio Cordovo. The judge set bail for five of them at $250,000 cash or $500,000 bond. Chris Overton was denied bail because of his previous felony conviction for the 2007 burglary in East Patchogue.18
The teenagers, one by one, were led to a courtroom, where their parents and high school friends awaited. Lucero’s relatives and friends were also there, and they wept openly as the prosecution laid out the sequence of events that had led to his death.
The seventh defendant, Jeff Conroy, was arraigned the following week and denied bail. He was charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter as a hate crime. Conroy was the only one charged with murder because, prosecutors said, the other teenagers did not know he had stabbed Lucero until he told them. Lawyers for the six defendants argued that their clients had been unfairly charged with a crime that others committed, and they took pains to point out that their clients could not possibly be racists because they had friends of all colors and races. To try to prove it, they pointed to the diverse group of young men and women in the courtroom.
All pleaded not guilty, but in the eyes of the prosecutors, the me
dia, the Ecuadorians in Patchogue, and just about everyone who had been paying attention, they were already guilty. Suffolk County district attorney Thomas J. Spota sounded an ominous note when he spoke at a news conference after the arraignment.
“To them, it was a sport,” he said. “We know for sure that there are more victims out there.”
From the start, Bob Conroy said that the treatment his son and his friends had received from the media was unfair.
“Jeff was ostracized by the press,” he told me the first time we met and every time I saw him after that. “He was used as a poster boy of everything that’s wrong with this country about illegal immigration. It all fell on the back of teenagers, on my son’s back.”19
On November 25, a Manhattan-based advocacy group, Latino Justice/PRLDEF, wrote a letter to the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division asking for an investigation of the Suffolk County police, which, they claimed, systematically violated the rights of Latinos by downplaying or ignoring constant attacks against Hispanics because of their ethnicity.20 That same day, Suffolk police commissioner Richard Dormer announced that he was stripping Fifth Precinct commander Salvatore Manno of his command and appointing a Hispanic, Arístides Mojica, to take over the job. Mojica, who grew up in the South Bronx as the oldest of five in a Puerto Rican family, was the department’s highest-ranking Hispanic member.21
In an interview with Newsday, Mojica acknowledged that he faced a serious challenge.
“You can’t assume it’s an anomaly,” he told Newsday, speaking about Lucero’s murder. “You can’t assume it will never happen again. You can’t assume that bad behavior is localized to Patchogue.” He promised to earn back the trust of the Latinos in the area.22
To find out just how many silent victims and unreported crimes were out there, Reverend Wolter opened the doors of his church on Main Street on December 3 to Latinos who felt they had been victims of hate crimes. He invited them to share their stories. Their tales were recorded by a reporter for the public radio station WSHU, an affiliate of National Public Radio. Wolter invited the media, but at least one reporter, New York Times editorial writer Lawrence Downes, found the whole thing distasteful. He called it a “guilt fiesta” and questioned whether those who were being interviewed knew that their words were being recorded.