by Jan Haldipur
A number of the non-Mexican young adults I spoke to used the word “Mexican” as a catchall term to describe all non–Puerto Rican or Dominican Latinos. In some circles, the word even took on negative connotations, becoming a pejorative term. For example, as one young person mockingly stated to his friends during a pickup basketball game, “that nigga look Mexican as fuck.” Izzy, a Puerto Rican young adult from the area, tried to shed some light on just how strained relations had become on his block. One evening, he found himself having to stop a group of black and Puerto Rican young men in the neighborhood from jumping his Mexican neighbor:
Where I live at, it’s a bunch of Mexicans. You know, a lot of people like to pick on Mexicans and I don’t have no problem with them, so I looked out the window and these young kids from the projects was actually beating up on the dude that actually live in my building . . . and he’s a young dude. I’m like, why they doing that. And I actually went out and asked them, like, what happened? And he was like, yo, these people just want to pick on us. I was like, whatever, next time, I got you.
So, next time it happened, I actually went out and I seen . . . he was scared to cross the street. I actually went out and escorted him to the building because they was actually looking for him too. I walked with him to the building so he could at least be safe. . . . They seen me with him, they didn’t even bother. . . . When I actually see him walking around on his own, it’s like, okay, cool. They know he got peoples.
For Adriana, spending time with other Mexicans was a source of comfort, but also created a level of distance between her and other non-Mexican peers in the neighborhood. Due to the area’s ever shifting composition, she at times feels alienated from the community, and has even become somewhat resistant to hanging out in public spaces she once frequented:
Adriana: There used to be a lot of Mexicans. When I was smaller, there was a lot of blacks and Puerto Ricans. There was a lot of Mexicans also, so they used to have a lot of beef. . . . It was fine for a minute, but then the Mexicans just left. It’s only like a little bit. It’s different now. Now I see different people. Like now, in my building, I don’t know nobody. Yeah, before, I used to know like everybody. Now, I see people, and I’m like, oh, I don’t know them.
Jan: Mexicans, and who were having conflicts—
Adriana: With the Bloods and Crips . . . actually, I don’t know if it was Bloods and Crips but, from the Patterson [a public housing project in the area]—
Jan: What would happen?
Adriana: I mean they would just get into it. It was an everyday type thing. They would fight over the park, or just the neighborhood.
Jan: And so they would just jump Mexicans—
Adriana: It would be vice versa . . . sometimes they’ll win, and sometimes the Mexicans. Yeah, I mean, but after a while they just kept it cool. Them over there, and we over here.
Until a year ago, Adriana’s mostly negative feelings about the police were predominantly colored by the negative experiences of family and friends. As she said, “I don’t like them, point blank. At all. With my family, it’s been a lot, a lot of problems. A lot of violence with the police.” Eighteen months earlier, a neighborhood fight that also included her sister escalated to the point where the police were called. Adriana was given a misdemeanor assault charge and a three-year probation term, while her sister, who was out on bail from a previous charge, received a two- to four-year prison sentence. “When she got arrested, I got arrested with her,” Adriana explained. “It was like, we didn’t touch the girl . . . the cops just took us. They pepper-sprayed us, they threw us on the floor . . . we was like, yo, we didn’t touch her, but they didn’t want to hear it!”
Much of my fieldwork reinforces the claim that young men are disproportionately the targets of police attention. In the case of Adriana and her sister, however, they were the siblings involved with the criminal justice system, while her younger teenage brothers had managed to remain largely outside the attention of the law. Still, Adriana remains worried about how her son will come to understand the police:
He seen my family talk about police in a bad way . . . he seen me get arrested before. There are a lot of police in the neighborhood, so he just be like, “Mommy, Mommy, why the police is there? Why the police is there?,” or “They gonna take you? They came for you?,” or stuff like that. So, automatically he’s like “I don’t like them. I don’t like them.” . . .
I mean sometimes, yeah, I used to talk to him bad about the cops, but then I’d just be like, oh, as long as you don’t do nothing bad, you don’t rob. If you do your thing and behave, they not going to tell you nothing. But he still be like, when we walking in the street: “Mom, Mom, why the cops is there? Why the cops is taking that person? Why they bad? They bad.” And I just be like [shrugs]. Sometimes, I don’t know what to tell him. I want to tell him bad stuff, but then I just don’t tell him anything. I just be like, “No, don’t worry, as long as you behave and you don’t do anything, nothing’s going to happen to you.”
On Crime and Citizenship
Dominicans are among the largest immigrant groups in New York City. In the Bronx, they make up approximately a third of all new immigrants, with Jamaicans a distant second at 11.2 percent.7 Compared to other immigrant groups, however, Dominicans often face greater levels of disadvantage. Many sociologists trace this to a combination of factors, including racial discrimination, lack of parental educational attainment, and language barriers.8
When he was six, Manny came to the United States, settling in with his mother and other relatives in the Gouverneur Morris Houses, a public housing project in the 42nd Precinct. According to Manny, after he moved to the States, it didn’t take long for him to fall in with the “wrong” crowd. By his early teens, he had already been arrested for a number of minor offenses. These transgressions resulted in him doing stints in juvenile institutions such as Lincoln Hall in upstate New York and the now closed Spofford Juvenile Detention Center in the South Bronx.9 Despite not being an American citizen (Manny has a green card), he insists that officials never raised the issue of his immigration status.
As Manny got older, he and his crew began selling increasingly large amounts of heroin in the nearby Soundview Houses:
Honestly, when you see me like this, I never smoked weed, I never did no drugs at all. I used to sell them, but never did it. Never . . . I mean coke, you know what I’m saying, I seen that before, but dope? I think that’s the craziest drug ever, bro. Because that shit gets you sick. You NEED that shit in your system, bro. You need that in your system.
Spurred on by the profitability of selling the highly addictive narcotic, Manny and his crew, a mix of other Dominican, Puerto Rican, and African American young adults he grew up with, became more organized as a direct response to police pressure in the neighborhood:
They knew we was hustling and everything. It was always like . . . we had rules. You had a couple of shifts, from 9 to 11, it was like . . . it was like we had a job. A normal job. We had certain people from 9 a.m. to 12 in the afternoon. From 12 to 3 . . . and then from 3 to 9 . . . the last shift was from 3 to 9. At 9, we closed shop basically . . . no more, you know? That’s how we had it.
It was a dude on the corner . . . there’s the building right here [motions to the cement]. He would send the customers to the building. There would be somebody in the building serving them, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Hand to hand . . . it was always like someone on this corner, someone on that corner. This is an avenue. This is another avenue. We had somebody on both corners to make sure the cops don’t come through. They come through, “Yo, they coming!” Making sure they . . . once they pass by, making sure nothing’s happening. But we also had them on the roof sometimes. We also had cops on the roofs, watching . . . yeah, it was crazy. . . . We just knew the whole thing. Before we start the shifts, we used to have somebody ride their bike around the whole hood making sure TNT [Tactical Narcotics Team] is not out.
In 2010, Manny was ar
rested on a robbery and assault charge. Because of the severity of the allegations and his precarious immigration status, the threat of being deported became increasingly possible:
They were supposed to give me three years for this case. . . . They told me that if I plead guilty, do those three years, I’m getting automatically deported. So, the lawyer was like, you take probation, you finish it, you know you’re going to be able to stay here . . . so I took the best offer, which was probation. So, I’m trying to do that. But at the end of the day, I’m trying to see, because I have a couple of people who told me about probation, that once you done, immigration can pick you up, you know what I’m saying? So I’m kind of thinking about it. Right now, I’m working on my immigration status . . . like, I’m working on being a citizen, but I don’t know if I could because I already got a felony.
Although Manny has spent most of his young life in the United States, there is a clear risk that he could be forced to move back to the Dominican Republic, a country he has seen only once since he arrived in America more than 20 years ago. According to Manny, he has been able to avoid deportation largely due to his ability to avoid prison time upstate.
As he asserts, “They usually grab you up when you upstate, when you do more than a year or something like that.” His codefendant in the case, another young man with Dominican citizenship, was also given five years’ probation as part of his sentence. Since the initial sentencing, his friend has cycled in and out of jail for a slew of subsequent offenses, violating the conditions of his probation. According to Manny, at this point immigration officials intervened and deported him back to the Dominican Republic, where he remains.
In addition to the all-consuming fear that he may be deported, Manny must try to maintain steady work, an already challenging task compounded by his felony record:
Right now I got this job. . . . I got like two months, three months probably, on the job and that’s a problem, right there. They’re telling me that’s a problem because they took my fingerprints and everything, they looked at my record and they said that I have a felony and there’s a possibility that they might not take me in the union. Yeah, so that might be an issue. That’s a big problem for me.
Ralphie understands all too well what Manny’s future may hold; after all, he was only in his teens when his father was indicted under the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, a law typically reserved for people involved in organized crime. After serving nearly seven years of his lengthy sentence, he was ultimately deported back to the Dominican Republic. Ralphie, who was raised primarily by his mother and a host of aunts, cultivated his own unique sense of being in the world, in many ways a direct response to the way his father operated:
My father was a hustler. . . . I learned crime doesn’t pay, no matter how much cars you got, how much women you got. At the end of the day, what are you doing now, the next 20 years of your life. . . . How quick is your money? Do you have enough money to get a lawyer when the hammer . . . you know, when it comes down to it? That’s not forever. It’s rare. I don’t even know how to explain it. You have a better chance of walking on water then actually being rich and getting away with it, know what I mean?
Having spent much of his childhood in the Soundview section of the Bronx, Ralphie’s awareness of inequality began at an early age. Even before his father was sent away, one particular event seemed to sharpen his understanding of the role the criminal justice system played in his community. In 1999, an unarmed Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo was fatally shot 41 times by four New York Police Department officers on the doorstep of his apartment.10 All four officers were ultimately acquitted. For Ralphie, these events in his own neighborhood made a lasting impression:
I remember as a kid going to the block and seeing the bullet holes in the door and not knowing what just happened . . . knowing that somebody got shot, but not knowing who it was and not knowing how big it was. That’s like two, three blocks from where I’m from. My babysitter took me there. It gave me a bad feeling. I was a happy kid, I loved watching cartoons, wrestling, so everything was happy. I never was sad. I love my mother for giving me the childhood that I had. So the fact that I had to see bullet holes in a wall gave me this bad feeling I didn’t like.
Like many of his peers in the neighborhood, Ralphie has developed a deep mistrust of police. This was primarily due to how he felt police often misunderstood him. In Ralphie’s opinion, due to the combination of his ethnicity, the area’s negative reputation, and the way he dressed, police would often single him out. As he summed it up, “Growing up in the hood and being the kid that sags his pants, you’re already stereotyped as being on that side of the line, you know what I mean?”
In his view, police often use these cues in deciding who to stop. For Ralphie, one of the few things in his control is the way he dresses. Like other young adults I spent time with, he believes that a police officer’s perception about a local resident is heavily influenced by what the person is wearing. Still, consistent with many of his peers, Ralphie does not feel that he should have to monitor his style of dress in order to conform to a police officer’s standards:
The image I give off is how I dress. Not only how I dress, how I look. With short hair, long hair, I look . . . I don’t know how to explain it. I guess, a lot of people who look like me, a lot of Latinos, Hispanics, young age, that look like me, already give off a bad name for me, so I’m stereotyped basically. And I don’t help myself either, because I’m walking around with my pants sometimes hanging halfway down my behind and dressing how they dress, not necessarily, but, you know, the same way. Jean jackets on, you know, because everybody wears jean jackets. So, I’m pretty sure if I was to walk around with shoes and change it up with a collared shirt, it wouldn’t be such a big problem. But I guess it’s just the image.
In high school, Ralphie’s sense of ethnic identity was reshaped. Having attended a high school in the North Bronx where most of the students were West Indian, he found himself gravitating to other Latinos, regardless of their specific ethnicity. Unlike Adriana, Ralphie cultivated a form of pan-ethnic Latino identity and adapted accordingly:
It was very, very, very bad. The school was uptown, full of West Indians, Jamaican dudes. School was very bad. I heard stories about a kid using the urinal got stabbed in the back of the head, so my whole freshman year I didn’t use the bathroom. Just a way to maneuver . . . people say it’s being dumb or being scared, I call it being intelligent.
When dealing with the criminal justice system, Ralphie employs the same awareness he used to navigate his neighborhood and his school. As time passes, however, his perception of the police has begun to change. Part of this he attributes to age—he turns 21 in a few months. The other part he attributes to his schooling. After high school, Ralphie moved to a small town in upstate New York to attend community college there. He began taking criminal justice courses, and eventually decided to major in the field.
After losing his job in retail, and no longer able to pay rent and tuition, he moved back down to the Bronx, transferring to a community college in Manhattan. Although he was only gone from the city for a few years, his outlook on policing in New York has shifted dramatically. He shies away from canonizing the police, but at the same time he has developed a sense of empathy for officers, even going so far as to express interest in one day joining the force. As he says:
Just respect them. Show them respect. If you show them respect, they’re going to show you respect back. A lot of people give them attitude . . . “I gotta go to work, I’m late! You want to stop me for no reason!” I see it all the time. . . . One of my favorite shows is Boston’s Finest. It shows a bunch of undercover minority policemen doing their work . . . and I love that show, because it shows undercover minority policemen! These guys look like they could be gangbangers, but you see them put on they vests and it says “Gang Squad.” I love that. I want to be that.
Besides, he adds, “I’m not gonna lie. You on a train at
nighttime and as much as you hate cops, you see a cop at the train station on the platform. You feel safe because you know nobody’s gonna do nothing to you!”
Given what his father has been through, I was admittedly surprised by Ralphie’s current interest in becoming a police officer. The transformation of his outlook seems to be rooted in his desire to defy many of the stereotypes that others, particularly the police, have bestowed upon him.
Moreover, on a purely pragmatic level, one of the more underacknowledged realities is that many of the civil service jobs available in the city’s Police Department, Fire Department, and even the Department of Corrections remain some of the few viable career options available to New Yorkers that provide a living wage, extended benefits, and do not have substantial postsecondary educational requirements. This helps explain why some recent immigrants seek to join the New York Police Department, despite having grown up in heavily policed neighborhoods and experiencing negative interactions with the police firsthand.
As this chapter demonstrates, the police can play a variety of roles in the lives of immigrant young adults. For some, contact with the police seemed to expedite the process of assimilation, albeit in a downward trajectory. Others were afforded a protective buffer because of their ethnicity or how they interacted with the neighborhood. Saikou, for one, demonstrated how easy it is for black immigrants to forfeit their “protective layer,” while Gauri, as a South Asian woman, seemed to be given second chances from the police precisely because of her gender and ethnicity.
For immigrants coming of age in the South Bronx and other “high-need” areas of the city, the process of learning how to deal with an aggressive police presence adds a unique layer to the process of becoming a New Yorker, one that immigrants in different parts of the city may not experience in quite the same manner.
