Hunting Season (6 page)

When Espinoza arrived in Patchogue, he and his friend Galo
Vázquez discovered they were the first Ecuadorians to move to the village, where a little over eleven thousand people lived then in an area of 2.2 square miles. Espinoza liked Patchogue. It seemed peaceful, pretty, and safe, a good place to raise the family he desperately wanted to get back. He rented an apartment in a twelve-unit building at 5 Lake Street, just off Main Street, and, because he was always fixing things, the owner made him superintendent.

Inflation in Ecuador had made it possible for him to pay his debt to the
chulquero
faster than he would have otherwise, but he was still supporting his family while spending about $300 a month in phone calls, at $1.50 a minute. From the moment Espinoza arrived, he had developed a system that allowed him to speak with his wife and children at least once a month. Since his wife didn’t have a telephone at home and no one in Bullcay or nearby Gualaceo had one they could use, the family traveled to a relative’s house in Cuenca, about seventeen miles away, to use the phone. In letters that Espinoza wrote frequently, he would alert them to the day and time of his call. For the family, that was a sacred appointment.

From early in the morning, Ana would remind the girls that today they would get to talk with their father. They would wash and dress and leave the house hours before the appointed time: better to be careful and early than risk an accident or traffic jam that would jeopardize their window of opportunity for the call. They would board the bus or catch a ride and arrive at least an hour early. On the phone Espinoza would tell his family about his life, his work, and how much he loved them and missed them, and the girls would mostly listen and cry.

In his letters and during the calls, Espinoza told them also about how jobs were plentiful and well paid. He would mention that schools were free and that all children were expected to graduate and go on to college, and how in the town where he lived there were playgrounds and safe beaches nearby and clean streets
with orderly traffic. Ana would relay the stories to their friends and relatives and they would spread the word.

Before Christmas of 1984, Ana arrived in New York from Ecuador with a visitor’s visa, leaving the girls behind for a year and four months. In February 1986, Espinoza returned home to get his daughters, now twelve, ten, and eight. By then Espinoza had become a legal US resident—he benefited from a 1986 amnesty that legalized about three million undocumented immigrants. With his family finally together, Espinoza felt he was working for their future and not merely for survival. For the first time in his life he was able to save money, and he began feeling more ambitious about his job prospects. Though he was still making salads, Espinoza was also observing the chef. His attentiveness would serve him well. Four years later, a job as an assistant chef opened up in the kitchen of a local country club. Espinoza took it and brought his wife along. They would stay for fourteen years.

While the Espinozas were busily working at the country club, Gualaceños started arriving in Patchogue, following the lead of those, like Espinoza, who had encouraged them to come. It didn’t take much to convince them. Ecuador, always a tumultuous country plagued by natural disasters, difficult to govern, and even more difficult to keep afloat economically, was hemorrhaging its most entrepreneurial citizens—mostly men—to the American dream at an unprecedented rate.

The Azuay province of Ecuador, where Gualaceo is located, had had a business relationship with New York since the first half of the twentieth century because of the incorrectly named Panama hat, that handwoven, blindingly white straw hat popularized in the movies of the time. But when demand for the hat decreased in the 1950s and 1960s, the Ecuadorian economy suffered, particularly for two groups: the businessmen who exported the hats and the peasants who made them. Both groups, taking advantage of the established business patterns and relationships
they had formed over the years, began to slowly migrate to the city they were somewhat familiar with: New York.
⁴

That first wave of migrants was nothing compared with what was to come. In the 1980s and 1990s a migration fever seized the country. Crippled by a mounting debt crisis, Ecuador began to export people instead of hats. Unable to find jobs at home or elsewhere in their own country, thousands of Ecuadorians left for New York in whatever way it was possible: either legally, with a visa, or illegally, by crossing the border surreptitiously or buying fake visas. Everyone seemed to be migrating north or knew someone who had already left on the perilous and costly journey.

In a 1990 survey conducted by the University of Cuenca, 45.5 percent of the respondents reported having at least one family member living in the United States. By 1991 the New York Department of City Planning estimated that there were approximately one hundred thousand Ecuadorian migrants in the New York City area (this figure did not account for undocumented immigrants, which would likely have doubled that number).
⁵
The Azuayan branch of the Central Bank estimated that remittances from migrants abroad amounted to $120 million in 1991, equivalent to sixteen years of straw-hat exports.
⁶

Espinoza himself helped at least twenty Gualaceños find jobs. On one day alone he placed seven men in a flower shop. At times it seemed as if every Gualaceño who came to Long Island went to see him first. As a building superintendent, he either had a space to rent or knew who had it and was willing to rent to newly arrived immigrants, often men who shared a room.

In this way, Espinoza quickly became what those who study migration patterns have called a “pioneer migrant”—immigrants who have a “decisive influence on later migrants,” who are guided not by job ads or recruiting agents but “by spontaneous individual and family decisions, usually based on the presence in certain places of kin and friends who can provide shelter and assistance,” as Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut note in their classic
Immigrant America: A Portrait.
⁷
After a group settles in a certain place, an enclave is established and others from the same town or nationality follow. “Migration is a network-driven process, and the operation of kin and friendship ties is nowhere more effective than in guiding new arrivals toward preexisting ethnic communities,” Portes and Rumbaut wrote.
⁸
Once this process is well established, the authors conclude, “migration becomes self-perpetuating through the operation of ethnic networks.” In theory, they explain, “this process may continue indefinitely.”

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.