Lou and I never discuss any of this. He never mentions my documentary or me in public. He is a complete gentleman the one time we run into each other in an elevator. I don’t really know what to say
I travel to Los Angeles to promote Latino in America before an audience of community leaders. I sit at the end of a long table with two personalities from our documentary, Lupe Ontiveros, a Hollywood actor who has played the Latino maid numerous times, and Edward James Olmos, whose productions put Latinos on center stage in film and theater. Ontiveros is this warm, delightful personality who squeezes me tightly every time she sees me. She is a ball of energy who could more appropriately be cast as a television aunt. She told me from the first time I met her that she recognized what I’d be up against trying to tell Latino stories. She has suffered a career of breaking ceilings. Her support and her fast smile mean so much to me.
“It’ll be okay,” she says numerous times. “Stick to your work.” She is a star in the documentary, full of pride and promise, urging Latinos to not take anything sitting down. We sit there as the documentary plays. It wraps to ferocious applause. Then we begin a question-and-answer session. At first there are outsized compliments. The discussion is going well. Then, out in the audience, I spot a smiling Roberto Lovato. Lupe looks at me and rests her cheeks into the palm of her hands. She flashes the smile. Roberto goes on for a bit but the headline is clear: How can CNN launch a documentary called Latino in America and still air a nightly show attacking Latinos? The applause is thunderous. I pause before I respond.
“I think the strategy for me as a journalist has been this: To do good journalism and speak for people who want to support it. And follow what we do. I guarantee you that if people will watch our documentary and say, ‘This is what we would like to see, fair and accurate reporting, storytelling of things that we have not seen.’ At the end of the day it’s about big numbers and people watching and someone will say, ‘Wow, so there’s an audience for important nuanced reporting, not puff pieces on people, but nuanced thoughtful reporting on everybody in every category’ And, guess what, that sends a very big message. I guarantee that. That’s sort of always been my strategy on every story I’ve ever reported. To go and do good journalism. And what I’ve discovered is good journalism in the end wins out—it does. And people have to vote with their clickers.”
That is all I ever say about Lou Dobbs. I say it again when we prescreen our material in New York and Georgia and at schools around the country. I say it at parties and events. I refuse to lose time on a debate about whether his reporting has fueled or furthered a growing divide in the immigration debate. That is for others to dispute. I have my own perspective to contribute, my own job to do, and I am going to do it if it kills me. And it just might.
My mother and father never talked to us much about their immigration. They looked forward, not back. Dad is the youngest of eight; Mom is one of five. They are the only ones who left. Dad is clear on why he left Toowoomba.
“There was nothing much going on in Toowoomba,” he says. “It meant ‘swamp’ in Aborigine terms.” Back home, he and his family had never even met an Aborigine, much less someone black. “The people there didn’t know anyone to be racist to,” he says. They had no reaction to him marrying my mother because they had no idea what reaction to have. He didn’t even think of moving her back to Australia with him.
“When I met Estela, that made it easy to stay,” he says. They got married just as Castro overtook Cuba. After that, Mom couldn’t and wouldn’t go back either. America was suddenly their home, their future. America was an unwelcoming place for a mixed-race couple, but it is a land of many options. Maryland had plenty of black people even if they didn’t always treat them right. “I was too busy to tangle with the legal authorities,” my dad says. “We couldn’t eat in the white places, though the black places always let us eat there. I figured she was a good cook so we’d just eat at home.”
Dad sees the racism as this annoyance, an inconvenience, and a shame on his adopted country that he alone cannot erase. He doesn’t understand it. He just avoids it. My father has always had a gift for taking nothing personally He is slow to anger, always calm. Rarely have I seen him mad. He was shocked to confront such a harsh reaction here.
“There is this stupid view of the whole racial problem,” he says. He found Maryland a hostile place to interracial couples, but didn’t pay it much attention. There were plenty of black people there, many folks in the same situation but he felt like there wasn’t much he could do about it. He took a job at the College of Engineering in Stony Brook, New York, out on Long Island. He chose to move us to Smithtown for its proximity to work and good schools. It seemed like a place where his kids could prosper, but he didn’t take my mother when he went to visit real estate agents. He likes to avoid conflict and he was not naive. This was the best town for his young family to live, but he didn’t believe anyone would sell to someone black.
The only African-Americans on Long Island were slaves until after the Revolution. But slavery was shorter-lived than it was down South, ending entirely in 1827. Most of the blacks became day laborers or domestics, just like the Latinos of today. They established communities in the 1900s in places like Sag Harbor, Amityville, and Setauket. Some even married the Native Americans for whom the towns were named.
By mid-century, nearly every town had a suburb where the people were predominantly black. It wasn’t until the period when my parents arrived that there began to emerge a black middle class. There wasn’t the economic opportunity to form one. By moving to this nearly all-white section of Long Island, my parents became immigrants once again in some respects. They are newcomers in a foreign place, trying to find a way to fit in.
When Dad arrives in Smithtown, he tells the real estate agent his wife is black. There is no reaction, but he doesn’t see any homes he likes. Then the agents introduce him to William Reed Huntington, a rich, progressive Harvard-educated architect with a big piece of land right near an inlet to the Long Island Sound. Bill Huntington is a pacifist and a devout Quaker. My mother and father like him a lot. Bill directs a camp for conscientious objectors in rural upstate New York. He spends his time with legendary civil rights activists who are white like him. My father remembers Huntington’s stories about sailing on the Golden Rule. He and the crew used the boat to protest atomic testing in the South Pacific in 1958. They are arrested as they approach Honolulu. The confrontational act inspires future groups like Greenpeace. On Long Island, he takes a tract of land and builds a meetinghouse for the American Friends Society
Huntington has a small house and rents it to my white father, black mother, and their growing mixed breed. Two years later, he sells them a large parcel of land where they can build their own home. “He sold to us at a good price,” says Dad. “There was a lot of distance between neighbors and he was this big deal, out protesting things. So he built this little area with a Quaker house and us, reducing his own property.” Dad built us a house on the land with a big green buffer from the rest of Smithtown.
Bill Huntington continued to travel the world fighting an array of injustices as my parents raised their mixed-race kids on his land in Long Island. Bill Huntington passed away in 1990. He was an activist to the end. At his fiftieth Harvard reunion, he implored his classmates to seize the opportunity to change the world for the better, in whatever way possible:
I always get very excited and nervous attending powerful theater. As I take my seat for the final act, I cannot imagine how the author is ever going to make it come out right. But in my heart I know that it must. Somehow something or somebody will turn the tide. The grand-children will live; Harvard and the world will go on. But in today’s reality we are not just audience. If we are to applaud with joy and relief when the curtain falls, we shall have to help with the script and play parts on the stage, too.
America’s history is full of people like Bill Huntington, who refuse to leave the world as they find it. Their touch is often ligh
t, but they make a difference in the way they touch life. The land he sold my father made it possible for us to grow up in storybook America. He made it possible for me to report stories about race. Bill Huntington’s decision forty-five years ago is still paying dividends today
“It would have been impossible for a black person to buy a home there,” my father says. Impossible. Dad had no “rhetorical stance,” as he would say, on the race issues blossoming around him. He was too busy building up the local university to be very political. He just wanted a place for his family to live. He wasn’t the type to dwell on Smithtown’s housing segregation. What he took away from the experience of our move was that Bill was a good guy That is the America he introduced us to, a place where the kindness of a single stranger can change everything.
The Smithtown where my parents built our home was full of descendants of Irish and Italians and Jews, some who would travel back to explore their roots. It makes no sense that they would have trouble with someone different. This nation doesn’t naturally give you the option of living in a bubble. Our democracy forces participation in the world outside your community. You can’t win in America without building bridges. We have public parks and public schools and public transportation that constantly force us to find new commonalities with total strangers.
That’s what should have happened in Smithtown. Smithtown’s resistance to things like Section 8 housing did more than rob a few folks of the opportunity to get access to better housing and good schools. A whole community was robbed of the chance to grow. We were supposed to be going to school with kids from a diversity of incomes and racial and ethnic backgrounds. Yet my family might not have even been there without a guy like Bill Huntington to make it happen.
My dad appreciated the impact this move would have on his family. He wasn’t very political, but he felt his kids needed to make a statement of some kind about their race. It didn’t matter that their father was white; they were to identify as black.
“I didn’t have to go around telling people I was white,” he says. “It was more important for them to say they were black.” It meant something for us to stand up for ourselves, to embrace the identity others might scorn. That is one way in which my parents’ immigration experience played heavily in our lives. They had not walked away from their provincial roots to see their children reduced by small minds. America gives you the option to redefine your world, to reclaim an identity that has fallen in disfavor. They had come seeking a chance at a different life, a place that affords them the opportunity to express their true self. They hadn’t traveled across a vast sea, giving up their culture and severing family ties, to be told they don’t quite fit in. Dad predicted that children like his might change the world, that education and pride and perseverance would take us forward.
We were to define the posture of the newcomer. We were to stand upright, proud of our race, and build an identity as achievers. The goal was to do so well that people looked past their prejudices and met you in a common place. That is the challenge of America, a country that is made up of so many moving parts. Immigrants arrive to ethnic enclaves and often choose to hyphenate themselves. But if we push past our differences we have the potential to become one America. The hyphenated identity—Italian-American, Pakistani-American, African-American-can be something to celebrate and explore, not something that divides us. We have the option to build coalitions with each other, to join together to face common problems rather than to fight over scant resources. We don’t need to put other people down so we can feel big.
Years after we’d all left Smithtown, our area of Long Island would be torn apart by a debate over new Central American immigrants. I had no dog in this fight. I’m American born, and I’m a journalist who is accustomed to analyzing every debate from many sides. My parents had no immigration issues, nor do any of my relatives, even though I certainly know people whose lives are affected by their immigration status. So I am saddened by the acrimony but try to preserve my objectivity on the issue by keeping a distance from it. It is hard for my immigrant father to do the same.
“It is depressing,” my father says. “The whole issue seems completely absurd to me, to treat people separately. I have no tolerance for how those people are treated. There needs to be a clearer policy, sure, but I don’t see any reason for the reaction.” He is an immigrant from a country whose relationship to U.S. immigration has always been friendly. His accent has mellowed. He has lived in this country for more than fifty years and he looks exactly like any retired professor on any American campus might look. All of that doesn’t matter to my dad. These immigrant newcomers were just like him and his kids, people in search of opportunities to join the American family, if only given a chance.
The day that Judge William Baldwin sentenced Derrick Donchak and Brandon Piekarsky, he told them that illegal immigration was not the issue in his courtroom. A group of young athletes had beaten to death an unarmed man. The young men had no way of knowing whether Luis Ramirez was in the country illegally The penalty for crossing the border illegally is “deportation, not execution,” the judge said. But all he could give them for their assault conviction was seven to twenty-three months in jail. Colin Walsh, who pleaded guilty for the same crime, faced nine years in jail. He had the potential to be free in four if he cooperated with authorities.
Judge Baldwin tried to divorce the sentencing from the immigration debate raging outside his courtroom. What was happening inside the town of Shenandoah was altogether different. On the one hand there were people like Lou Ann Pleva, a former newspaper reporter whose grandparents had come to this country from Germany and Poland. Lou Ann had moved away from Shenandoah to raise her family and then come back. She believed the death of Luis Ramirez was more about ignorance of the outside world—a world she had experienced—than simple racism. Lou Ann worked to heal, helping out with a rally for the community, but she faced considerable opposition to her call for introspection in the wake of the attack.
She was out on her front porch one day, talking into our cameras when suddenly her neighbor Jaelynn Mackalonis emerges from her house. She is brimming with anger. She is a local bartender. She feels like the controversy around Luis’s death is tainting her town. She waves her arms and whistles loudly, until she gets our attention. “We just want to let you know, the neighbors around here, it’s not fair that one person is going to speak for us,” Mackalonis insists. “This wasn’t a racial crime.” We roll tape on her, too, in an effort to get her perspective, but what we get is a window into Shenandoah’s conflicts.
“I’m sorry; do I know you?” Pleva asks.
“I don’t care if you know me or not,” Mackalonis answers. “Do not say this town is racist.”
“I didn’t say that,” Pleva says.
“Don’t speak for anyone else,” demands Mackalonis.
“I promise you, I don’t,” Pleva says.
“It’s putting Shenandoah on the map for being a rotten town. It’s not a rotten town,” Mackalonis says. “I talk to people, and it’s, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re from Shenandoah, where that illegal immigrant got beat.’ Get your story straight before you go babbling anything,” she tells Pleva. “If he wasn’t here illegally, I think it wouldn’t have happened.”
Pleva doesn’t understand her neighbor’s anger toward her. She believes she is only trying to make sense of a tragedy Our team made a dozen trips to Shenandoah. Each time we heard an alternate theory for why Luis died. Mackalonis raised the possibility that he was raping Crystal’s little sister. She speculated that drug dealing was involved. My team of producers encountered many locals who blamed new Latinos for a spike in local crime. The police said there was little evidence of that. The most common scenario for what happened between Luis and the young men was that it was a fight that got out of control. Pleva insists the facts have been blurred because of an underlying anger in Shenandoah where 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. They feel the need to blame someone for what is happeni
ng to the economy in Shenandoah. Why not hate the people whose economic outlook appears to be looking up?
Derrick and Brandon’s sentencing on simple assault and alcohol-related offenses didn’t remove Luis’s death as a center-piece in the debate over the state of Shenandoah’s soul. The pair had barely served out their sentences when a federal grand jury charged them with a hate crime for fatally beating Luis while shouting racial epithets. Both young men and most of Shenandoah’s tiny police department were also accused of scheming to obstruct the investigation of the fatal assault. A conviction could send both of the teenagers away for life.
Shenandoah Police Chief Matthew Nestor, Lieutenant William Moyer, and Police Officer Jason Hayes face charges of witness and evidence tampering, and also lying to the FBI. Moyer and Hayes were the police officers allegedly coaching the boys in Derrick’s garage the night of the attack. The three of them could serve twenty years in prison on each of the obstruction charges and an additional five years in prison for conspiring to obstruct justice. The indictment charges that the Shenandoah police were engaged in corruption even before Luis’s death. Chief Nestor and Captain Jamie Gennarini allegedly extorted cash from illegal gambling operations from 2004 to 2007. Then they obstructed investigations of the scheme. They are even accused of holding a man hostage in exchange for cash.
By the spring, the two young men are living under house arrest and the police officers have resigned. One of their subordinates is made police chief, over the objections of a town board member who is the father of one of the officers. A bilingual Latino war veteran is elected to the town board in a first-ever show of political integration in Shenandoah. On May 5, downtown Shenandoah is festooned with pinatas. The Latino community comes out to play music and dance beneath broad sombreros with their kids. The Cinco de Mayo festival is sponsored by the local senior center at the Legion Memorial Park. A mural is being painted of flags of many countries. One of the senior centers even makes cupcakes iced with the colors of the Mexican flag. The Heritage Parade of Nations is scheduled to be held as always during the summer of 2010.
The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities Page 18
