“Latino” is what happens once we all arrive here—the U.S. experience of tearing off roots from those twenty-one countries down south and joining them to American culture. Latinos are happy to include you, even if you’re half something else. It suits us to play a numbers game. We have a deeply vested interest in being many Our numbers ensure that we are the inevitability of “American” culture. We are the majority minority now. All minorities combined will comprise the majority by 2032. That is why I have insisted my next documentary project be Latino in America.
The chatter of two languages creates a happy hum in the room. I enter a roped-off VIP zone and J.Lo and Marc Anthony begin to offer me suggestions of ways to cover Latinos. We huddle in conversation as photographers snap and shout toward us. The faces in a Latino crowd are remarkable. Marc Anthony’s skin makes his dark eyes stand out. A photographer leaning toward him has a thick Afro and black skin. I strike up a conversation with a cocktail girl whose sloping cheeks and almond skin could be stamped on a coin celebrating indigenous people. There are blonds, or wannabe blonds, with my husband’s sea blue eyes. The range of ages here is distinctly Latino; when there’s a glittery party, everyone gets to go. A child squirms around on a grandmother’s lap. Teens huddle around fake cocktails looking big in their formal clothes. George Lopez, a Mexican American, and his Cuban-American wife shower me with story ideas and jokes.
George takes the stage to announce that we have just elected our first Latino president. After all, Obama is moving his mother-in-law into the White House. The crowd laughs. There is some excitement for the new president. But no one in this room is arguing that a black president necessarily guarantees good times for Latinos. There is a presumption that their enthusiastic voting for him will pay off, but nothing feels certain.
The community is at a difficult moment. A majority of Latinos, as well as a majority of everyone else, tells pollsters that Latinos have become America’s most derided subgroup. A lot of Latinos have achieved personal wealth and newfound influence; they are enjoying an opportunity to choose between assimilation and remaking American culture all their own. But so many more are mired in poverty, stuck in failing schools, coping with immigration challenges, and struggling to adapt their values to a new home. The shared border means that immigration has never stopped. Latino is the one community that is constantly replenishing itself with cross-border newcomers. That means the entire community is often viewed through the prism of the immigration debate.
To illustrate the rising tension in the immigration debate we travel to a place much closer to the Canadian border with the United States than the Mexican border. Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, might be 1,800 miles from our southern frontier, but the issues surrounding the death of Luis Ramirez were as raw in Shenandoah as if the town sat in southern Arizona. As illegal immigrants from Latin America have moved into towns outside of the Southwest, the debate over their presence on U.S. soil has moved with them. The irony of Shenandoah’s situation is that it is a town, like so many American towns, that was built by immigrants. In Shenandoah’s case they were Eastern Europeans, who came to the area to dig out the anthracite coal in the late 1800s. The town grew to be a thriving community of 30,000 in the twenties but when the mines closed, this town born of immigration almost died from migration. The 2000 census counted 5,600 residents, a 10 percent drop from 1990. When we were there, the town often felt empty, on the brink of dying completely.
Shenandoah is a town withering from a lack of people but is at war with what newcomers there are. Not that it’s a new phenomenon for an established immigrant group to be resentful of the wave coming in behind them. But Latinos’ perpetual border crossing and tough economic realities seem to have combined in some heads as a toxic mix. There are towns like this all over the country that don’t want anyone new. It doesn’t matter if they take the most menial jobs, or even if they create new ones. The people who are already here don’t want to see newcomers filling up empty housing if they are going to live ten to a room and gather outside. They don’t want them overpopulating the schools, stressing out the teaching staff by learning English late in life. They just don’t want them.
A young man from Mexico named Luis Ramirez ran headfirst into the pushback one night on a street corner in Shenandoah. Luis had come to Shenandoah from Mexico to look for work. There were plenty of jobs for him in Shenandoah despite the high unemployment rate and dearth of businesses. He picked cherries and fixed roofs and odd-jobbed his way through nights and weekends. Luis met Crystal Dillman, a local girl with a young biracial kid who lived mostly off public assistance until Luis came around. They had two children together and were planning to get married, which would in time have changed Luis’s immigration status from undocumented to legal. The night of July 12, 2008, Luis was walking across a park on Vine Street in town with Roxanne Rector, Crystal’s younger sister, when they were confronted by six white teenagers, football players from the local high school. One of the six tells Roxanne to get her “dirty Mexican boyfriend out of here.” There’s a scuffle. Luis walks away. Then witnesses report the teenagers began yelling “Mexican” this and “Spic” that and “eff you” as if the F-word itself is unseemly even in these circumstances. A fight breaks out—six against one—and Luis goes down under a barrage of punches and kicks. As he’s on the ground, Luis’s head is kicked repeatedly. Luis Ramirez never regained consciousness and was declared dead on July 14. The police report spelled out the motive: “Get your Mexican boyfriend out of here.” The death was tagged a hate crime.
Crystal Dillman tries to teach the kids she had with Luis some of the few words of Spanish she picked up from him. I saw her trying one afternoon in the small white house she had shared with Luis. I speak a little Spanish to my own kids some days. Sofia and Cecilia take Spanish in school and a friend’s babysitter tutors the twins at home. My mother never spoke Spanish to us back in Smith town. She said it was because my dad didn’t speak any and she wanted us living in the here and now. I want my kids to live for the future. When my grandmother came to live with us it was awkward because all she could say in English was “Hello” and “Bye-bye.” We absorbed our abuelita’s presence not through conversation but through what she did. I loved to watch her stirring big pots of black beans and painting her long nails fire-engine red. I drank in her warmth. She smiled and laughed even if she didn’t understand us. She was chatty. She lived to be surrounded by friends and food and music. She was a spark of life in our quiet little American suburb. Abuelita was our living link to Cuba, to the cacophony of that other place. It was sad when she ended up in a nursing home where no one spoke Spanish. None of the other patients or nurses could talk to her.
It was odd that my mother never taught us to speak better Spanish. She speaks three languages fluently and was a Spanish teacher, a woman who told us from the get-go that being black and Latinos was half of our immigrant stew. My mother was our cultural standard-bearer, the boiler of our rice. She enforced a strain of discipline and encouraged a social attitude that was deliberately Cuban. We learned that family came first, to mind our manners, to feel pudor, humility, even if we couldn’t say it—to be aggressive but never to act aggressively. These are common denominators in Latino homes in our country Things the most profound assimilation plunge cannot erase. Humility is the firmament upon which our unending cultural heritage was built. Family ties are what ground us. In some homes we connect through language; in others just by the way we use our words.
My home in Smithtown seemed so regular at the time, but in retrospect it was unmistakably Latino in nature. We heard our mother talking on the phone to distant relatives, in a voice she rarely shared with us. It was the voice of cultural connection, the language for who she was. She would always count in Spanish, balancing her checkbook of American dollars in a quiet math in Espavtol. We ate rice every day: rice with chicken, rice with pork, rice with stew. She would occasionally plunk down a plate of boiled potatoes and indicate they were for our father. Otherw
ise, the food was a constant boil of rice. We learned to make churros and ate black beans and rice with our turkey for Thanksgiving. There was carne asada and picadillo, natilla and flan, sofrito from fresh peppers. But it’s tough to keep those cultural ties when you never get to travel back home.
Cuba was our moment of disconnect. Until I was an adult, I never went. Even though it is ninety miles from Florida, Cuba is like some far-off island, a place you cannot go. What we knew of our culture we learned in our home. I am jealous of all the Latinos who grew up with a lifetime of vacations down south. They got to touch home base, to taste the food and culture of their ancestors, to understand the impulse of the journey to a different life. The infusion of this wonderful Latino culture was forever being renewed. They would come home flush with memories and souvenirs. I felt like my world opened up when I first went to Cuba. The visit made sense of so much of our life in Smithtown, from the vats of rice to the flotilla of happy children that were the center of every conversation. Seeing their poverty I understood why my mother left. I also saw the richness of their lives and know a part of her will never really leave.
I always wondered if my father deferred to my mother’s Latino household because he knew she couldn’t go back. She had to preserve her culture here.
Dad could take us back to Australia, and he did. Australia was the land far, far away, of lengthy plane rides and long stays. One of our visits lasted for so long that my little brother Orestes was born there and my siblings enrolled in school. Going to Australia taught me so much about my father. I remember traveling there when I was fourteen. My father’s family was having a big reunion in his hometown in Queensland in a tent set up on a big lawn. My dad made sense there, surrounded by legions of relatives. I met my part-Japanese cousins, the part-Greek cousins, several who are part Italian. There was nothing odd in his family about marrying outside your clan. My father’s people are all about big, colorful families.
We stayed with cousins who had seven boys and two girls, one for every age of ours, with some to spare. Their house was rambling, large, and open with lots of land to roam around. I played with a sea of O’Briens, all of our connected kin. Barbecue smoked in the background of every party: big slabs of meat and plentiful bread to go with it. We toured the family business, Defiance Milling, where the bread was made. Dad came alive in Queensland, chatting with his brothers and sisters, visiting with family and friends who wanted to meet his children. His accent sounded too American in Australia but people got his jokes. I made an embarrassing faux pas when I asked for a napkin and everyone laughed because it means sanitary pad in Australia. Now we’re the ones with the funny accents. My father and his family did not see skin color; they saw people. A different nationality was a cause for celebration and exploration.
My father’s family also practiced the kind of Catholicism that preaches a high measure of social justice. My father’s twin brother is a priest; two sisters are nuns. His own life philosophy calls him to embrace the people standing right in front of him, to not pick and choose. That was clear in the way he and his family related to each other and everyone around them. When you look past people’s complexion, you see their spirit. You get to meet a rainbow of humanity His brothers and sisters and cousins were all like him, ready to give themselves to the vast world and all the different people in it. That’s what the immigration experience meant to us, embracing new things and reaching out to new people.
Back in Smithtown, Mom and Dad decided we were to identify as black Latinos, prideful, studious, driven, and directed. There was a hint of defiance in that, but mostly it was pride. Though outside our home it was hard for us to talk in Spanish or of Cuba or Australia or being Latino. Having any kind of immigrant identity out there in Smithtown was tough. I didn’t know other Latinos much less Australians, no one with whom we could share traditions or explore our roots. We only knew the black families we joined for barbecues and playdates. We were fortunate that immigration issues played no role in our lives. Anyone can come from Cuba; it has a favored status because of the Communism that took root after my mother left. My mother had no barriers to coming to the United States; in fact, she sponsored my father’s visa, which also came easily. They were not escaping something as much as they were moving toward something else. I knew that my mother’s family wanted to come here and couldn’t. That was a consequence of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, not the United States. But we didn’t suffer the indignities and disappointments of fighting for our immigration status.
I didn’t suffer from being considered from someplace else; I just didn’t fit in to the place where I was. They’d catch me calling my mom Mami, which sounded a lot like Mommy, and tease me in the halls. Outside that, Latino was something that didn’t really register. We kids had enough issues with skin color. People focused painfully on our race; the color of our skin distinguished us from everyone else. It was the thing burnt most indelibly into our consciousness. Adding Latino would have only provoked a “whuh dat” from the other kids.
I see Angela Cinqmani flash by in the halls of our high school. I look toward her with a knowing smile. She was an outsider in the school, too, and somehow her presence gave me an odd comfort. She is Latina; I am certain of it. And even more on the fringe than I. She is seriously chesty with all these deep curves, big black hair, and fragile eyes. Unlike me, she doesn’t rush past a thing. Angela isn’t like my shy friend Shevoy and me. She is all about confrontation. She shuts down her adversaries. She has a smart mouth and high spirit. There is something wild and racy about her. I have this image of her lancing into these big guys in the hallway like she was engaging in a fair fight. I sometimes wish I could break my trajectory and harness that kind of energy, stand up for something in the high school hall. But I rush past her, moving steadily forward. It’s hard to want to associate yourself with trouble when your own positioning is at risk. She is in the thick of it, courting danger; I am racing by
The trial in Shenandoah unfolded as small-town community dramas often do, in a bubble. The prosecutors, defense attorneys, witnesses, and the young men on trial all lived minutes away from each other, on the inside. The only person referred to as an outsider was Luis, who lived on the street where he died along with his girlfriend and three children. Brian Scully testified that he had known Derrick Donchak since they started playing Little League in the third grade. They played every other major sport together and shared a common history, a community pride. The high school teams were nicknamed the Blue Devils; the athletes were the Devils’ pride. In Shenandoah it was unusual to date outsiders, particularly if they’re black or brown. Crystal already had a baby with a black guy Now this. Twenty years ago there were 504 white kids at the local high school, according to the U.S. Department of Education—and that was it. In 2007, there were 461 white kids, 12 African-Americans, and 56 Hispanics. Still, the town was described in 2009 as being 97 percent white and two percent Latino, hardly a deluge.
Inside the courtroom there was talk of murder and motive. Outside there was talk of immigration and outsiders. Latinos were coming to town each day and finding work. We met residents who told us that Latinos were taking jobs but at the same time they couldn’t identify anyone they knew who had lost a job to a Latino. It backed up the research we were reading, like the 2008 study from the Kaiser Family Foundation that asked U.S. workers earning less than $27,000 whether they thought illegal immigrants were depriving legal U.S. residents of work. Nearly half said they did. Yet 80 percent of the same people reported that hadn’t been affected negatively by illegal immigration themselves. Of course this is completely contradictory—both these things can’t be true. But there is this sense of something being stolen but not what it is. There’s a pattern here—better education, better jobs, less fear of immigrants. That’s the story of working-class conflict.
I met many people in Shenandoah who ached for these kids, even as they conceded there was no excuse for this vicious murder. Brandon Piekarsky was a National Honors student who wa
s on the varsity football team as a sophomore and worked part-time at Sears; Derrick Donchak was the Blue Devils’s quarterback planning on attending Bloomsburg University that fall; Colin Walsh was a straight-A student who ran track and played football. Later Walsh would be the only one to express remorse and plead guilty in the attack. These young men were not so very different from so many young men I’d known back in Smithtown. They were remarkably average. They didn’t know anyone Latino very well. They just felt someone had to be held responsible for so many frustrating things. At the trial, the boys had to testify against each other. Brian Scully, who was tried as a juvenile, and Colin Walsh, who pleaded guilty, both took the stand. The courtroom was never very full. Administrators from Shenandoah Valley Junior/Senior High School attended the trial to make sure none of the students was there, threatening to ban kids who went to the trial from graduation. Crystal Dillman sometimes went along with Gladys Limon, a lawyer from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), a prominent Latino civil rights organization.
The trial described how the teenagers came across Luis and Roxanne on the street. Brian Scully told Roxanne, who was thirteen at the time, that it was late for her to be out. Luis answered in Spanish and Brian told him to go back to Mexico. Within seconds Luis is down on the ground. Colin Walsh testified that Brandon Piekarsky kicked Luis so hard when he was unconscious on the ground that his shoe came off. An out-of-town police officer testified that Luis’s face was swollen and that he had a shoe print on his chest. Richard Examitis of Lost Creek Ambulance said he found what he described as “an assault victim.” He was unresponsive and had “snoring respirations” and Luis never regained consciousness; he never reopened his eyes. It was said in evidence that Luis’s brain was so swollen that it oozed from his head.
The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities Page 16
