The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (12 page)

The number of immigrants rose to 100,000 by 1990. Ten years later, there would be an estimated 2.3 million Latinos living in New York City, with Mexicans the fastest growing of all, at about 275,000. The movement of Mexicans from Puebla and the surrounding towns of San Matías, Atalixco, and Santa Barbara has accounted for 120,000 coming into the city. There is a large Dominican population in the city, as high as 500,000, most in the Washington Heights neighborhood. But there are a mere 8 million people in the Dominican Republic, as compared to 100 million in Mexico. Smith’s research showed that Mexico needs between 800,000 and 1 million jobs to support its growing populace. Of course so many would try coming here.

As Smith worked in his office, he did not notice the paper rustling. His pages about the Job came alive on the street below. Five blocks down Broadway, Raymundo Juárez, sixteen, and his father had jobs
in a supermarket on Broadway for $6 an hour. They thought it was millions. While the father swept the floor upstairs, his son was crushed to death in a basement compactor. They carried the body out through the basement, and the father never saw the dead son. Now the father stared at a large glass window in the medical examiner’s office on First Avenue in Manhattan and a screen over the window went up. The son, Raymundo Juárez, his face swollen, the eyes closed, was on a gurney against a blue cinder-block wall.
“Sí,”
the father said, sobbing. Then he and the cousins ran to a car and drove uptown. They were asked where they were going. “To the store. The store owes his pay,” a cousin said.

T
HE HOUSE
E
DUARDO
came to in Brighton Beach is in an old, crowded part of Coney Island. Coney Island is known for roller coasters and midgets and hot dogs and huge crowds on its wide beaches that run into the Atlantic Ocean. The ocean runs up against so much land at its edges, from New Jersey to the miles of Brooklyn and Staten Island, that the waves generally are small and the currents slow. The people duck and swim a few strokes in bays between old jetties. At one end of the island is Sea Gate Village, residences that are behind gates that keep out cheap day bathers. Sea Gate has its own lighthouse. Coney Island proper now runs past public housing, the super rides, hot dogs, and hot corn; the boardwalk ends at the large and famous New York Aquarium. All after that is Brighton Beach. The oceanfront is tighter, the streets lined by a crowd of five-and six-story apartment houses. The main street, Brighton Beach Avenue, is one block up from the ocean. The aorta of New York civilization, an el line, runs over the avenue. It is the last stop on the Brighton line. Also using this station is the F line, which runs as an el through Brooklyn and after that plunges underground to become a subway. It runs for twenty-five miles, under the wealth of mid-town Manhattan, through a tunnel under the East River to residential Queens, and out for miles almost to the beginning of suburban
Nassau County. There is no ride in the world this far at this price, a dollar-fifty.

Under the el in Brighton Beach, cars are double-parked, often triple-parked, by Russians. At the curbs, the street is a bazaar of Russians selling matryoshka dolls. They begin with a wood peasant woman that unscrews, and inside is a smaller woman, and inside this doll is another, and three or four dolls later, it ends with a peasant woman the size of a thumb.

The sidewalks are under the control of women with shopping carts who stop in the middle of the sidewalk to talk to each other for as long as they feel like it, while people edge by one at a time. The stores sell everything: children’s clothing, fruit and vegetables, meats, luggage, shoes. The signs are in Russian, in the Cyrillic alphabet. The stores are crowded and difficult to enter and leave. Push a woman and see what happens.

The streets running north, away from the ocean and the el, have mostly small low wood bungalows that were once summer houses in a resort town. But all this ends suddenly at featureless streets of brick attached houses sitting between old frame houses. Here is the start of a large colony of Mexicans, with young women who work in knitting factories and young men out on street corners for any manual labor. The first small bare Mexican restaurants are on the avenues. And prostitutes appear, of any race, not necessarily Mexicans. At the last of these streets, across from Grady High School, is the house where Eduardo and the other Mexicans lived. At one corner of the block is a small park that has basketball courts.

After that, on the other side of the high school, is a highway, and on the far side of that starts the long march through Brooklyn, miles of blocks, miles of people in a borough whose population nears three million.

Since 1970, Brighton Beach was an area of immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia, mainly from Odessa, which is exactly like Brighton Beach, a city on the shore of waters that do not get
stormy. So many Russians came to these streets that in the Russian national referendum of 1993, the Moscow Central Elections Commission declared Brighton Beach an election precinct. The Russian consulate in Manhattan sent representatives to conduct balloting in a crowded room on the second floor of 606 Brighton Beach Avenue, the meeting room of a Russian military veterans organization and the office of an accountant who prepares American income taxes. Only people who were still Russian citizens were allowed to mark paper ballots for an election in which one candidate was Boris Yeltsin. “You cannot vote for Yeltsin. You are an American. You must vote for Clinton,” they said to one man.

Five Russian bureaucrats, two women and three men, supervised the balloting. They writhed because they could not smoke. In Moscow, this balloting would be done in cloud banks from cheap Russian cigarettes.

After forty-five years of the two countries testing atom bombs to make sure they could perform as scheduled over Broadway and Red Square, after all these years of hate and fear, with all of it over different political systems, bureaucrats from Moscow sat in Brooklyn and supervised an election in Russia.

A
LEJANDRO TOOK
E
DUARDO
up to see the avenue and the train station. Alejandro knew his way around by subway. He would tell people, “Just tell me where you want me to meet you, and I can get there.”

At first, the subway must have been a marvel to Alejandro, but his face never registered astonishment. Then others were the same. Looking for work, or working, occupied their minds so much that they couldn’t capture the enormousness of the difference between their lives in Mexico and their lives in New York. Work and drinking were something recognizable and central. Beyond that, Alejandro was fatalistic about the drudgery of work. The trains were not wondrous, he told Eduardo. They were something you used to go to work. Eduardo, who understood work, agreed.

Alejandro told Eduardo how they took the train to the station called Smith/Ninth Street and transferred to a Williamsburg train. Eduardo tried to memorize what he was being told. But we will be on a different train right now, Alejandro said. We are going to be on the Sea Beach line that takes us up to Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park, where everybody is Hispanic. On the train, Alejandro showed Eduardo the transit map on the wall. The train rocked as Alejandro pointed out the lines: B, D, F, N. On the route map they were long lines—highways—in different colors with the stops noted. Often two and three lines used the same stops for at least a while. The M was dark brown, the F an orange line, the B a darker orange, the Sea Beach a light yellow. On the map the Sea Beach line reaches a fork at the Fifty-ninth Street stop and one yellow line mixes in with the light orange and dark orange and the other remains a single yellow line on a field of white. Eduardo still looked at the map in confusion when Alejandro poked him and they got off at the Fifty-ninth Street stop.

Up on the street, Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue was a two-story street of Hispanic signs and shops and Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, but the dominant group, more so each day, was Mexicans. Three blocks over, on Eighth Avenue, suddenly there is the city’s second Chinatown, the blocks and blocks of people shining and proud of their growing numbers. Eduardo bought a dark sweater with a hood attached.

Back in the house in Brighton Beach, he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and was so pleased with the sweater that he put it on the next morning and went out in the steamy August day to the el on Brighton Beach Avenue, so he could learn the route to work. It was too hot to wear the sweater, which he put on the seat next to him. He stood up and swayed and tried to read the map. Suddenly the train stopped at the Smith/Ninth Street station. He remembered being told about this one. He jumped out of the train, forgetting his sweater, and went to the other side and took the train back to Brighton.

It wasn’t until he walked into the apartment that something felt like it was missing. Immediately Eduardo clutched his shirt. His sweater was gone. In his mind’s eye, he saw it on the subway seat where he’d left it.

He turned around and without a word went back up to the el. He would look for the train that had his sweater. Somewhere there would be a terminal where he could find the train he had been on and come upon his sweater. Some 360 trains come in and out of this station each day. His new train moved, the stations went by, the hour passed. At the last stop, with buzzers and a shush of air, the train emptied. He looked outside for a second train. There seemed to be none. Behind him, a motorman walked up to what had been the last car of Eduardo’s train and now became the first car. Eduardo asked the motorman about the first train with his sweater aboard, but he couldn’t make himself understood. When the train started he rode a couple of stops, got off and waited for the next train. When this one came in, he walked through the cars looking for his sweater. He found nothing and now looked at the map and didn’t know what he was looking at. He asked a Puerto Rican for help. The Puerto Rican looked at the map for three stops and then came up with the route. Secure, Eduardo sat down and stared at the wall. Sand poured into his eyes. He had no idea of the time when he woke up. He asked a doubtful Dominican for directions.

The Dominican said learnedly, “Change at Canal Street.”

Two people in the conversation hadn’t the slightest idea of where Canal Street was: the Dominican and Eduardo. He did remember being on the train with the lone yellow line on the map. He got off at the last stop and walked. He asked Hispanic after Hispanic, and most were unsure of whether they were in Brooklyn or not.

Eduardo got back to the house some thirteen hours after he left.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

T
he New York City Department of Health reported that between 1988 and 1999, there was a 232 percent increase in births to Mexican women. The figures fit the life of the first woman to leave San Matías and make it to New York for the purpose of having children. This was Teresa Hernández, who at eighteen and a couple of months carried the strength of all the generations of suffering that had gone before her.

In the middle of the morning of June 21, 1998, with a sister holding her arm, Teresa Hernández of San Matías came out of her one-room Queens Village apartment in the basement of a frame house. Teresa’s husband, José Luis Bonilla, was at his job in a fish market over in the Rosedale neighborhood.

The sister drove her in a battered car approximately seventy-five blocks to the Queens Hospital Center, a large, gloomy orange brick complex on 164th Street and the Grand Central Parkway in the center of what was once old Queens, the Irish and German Queens. Teresa walked into the hospital’s main entrance as the advance woman for the new Queens.

With the first cries of her first baby later that morning Teresa saw her child held high in the delivery room lights.

She remembers saying a lot of things about the beautiful baby and her love for her husband. Of course, she maintains that she never for a moment considered the advantages of the baby being born in America as a citizen at first squeal. She says the social worker came through the maternity section and told her about the WIC program, which sees that babies receive free milk. Not until then, she states, does she remember looking at the baby and saying, “American.”

She named the baby Stephanie. The name, date, and time of birth can be found in the records of the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation. These show that Stephanie Hernández is an American citizen, and each and every one of her children and her children’s children and all who come thereafter will be citizens of the United States. Nowhere in the nation, and probably the earth, has such a large, heavily populated, and important place as New York changed with so many spangles and sounds, with the loudest, highest, and most vibrant a sound no great trumpeter can reach: a baby’s first cry.

Teresa gave every young person in San Matías great confidence. She could get to America and then do even more than find a job. In San Matías she remembers dancing at parties in halls; Eduardo was “the one who held up the walls.” He didn’t know how to dance. She tried to pull him off the wall. “You go to his house and he was always working,” Teresa says. “He never met a girl.” She saw Silvia at dances, but she was with other boys, not Eduardo.

Teresa Hernández, who went as far as the sixth grade, had never seen a picture of New York or heard anything about it from anybody who went up there. A cousin made it to the Bronx and she waited to hear from him, but he never called. Yet as she scrubbed clothes in an overcrowded room in San Matías, she planned life for children and grandchildren she didn’t yet have, and understood how she alone knew how to accomplish it.

She wasn’t going to live by the countryside rules for a young Mexican woman. If the girl is pregnant and gives birth at age fourteen or fifteen, the boy just takes the girl and baby away to his mother’s home. Only rarely do they take the trouble to get married legally after that. But if the girl is eighteen or twenty and not pregnant, the young man asks her father for her hand and they have a church wedding. However, if they can’t afford a big wedding or party, then they don’t get married.