Hunting Season

by Mirta Ojito

A supervisor for the Patchogue-Medford Adult Literary Consortium agreed to bring some of their English-language learners to the meeting. The consortium held citizenship classes at the library as well, and, by coincidence, one was scheduled the same day as the meeting, so those students too were expected to attend. The woman who taught the citizenship classes was Gilda Ramos, a part-time employee of the school district, who had been born and raised in Peru but who had lived on Long Island for six years.

  Flyers all over the village advertised the meeting, and though the text was riddled with mistakes and spelling errors it was understandable. Mayor Pontieri was expected to explain everything from where to park legally to how to apply for low-income housing.

  When Pontieri arrived shortly before 7:00 p.m., dozens of people were waiting for him. In the end, about one hundred crammed into a small room in the library basement. The mayor began to speak, but it was clear from the beginning that the community volunteer who was helping to interpret his words to Spanish was unable to translate. From her seat in the front, Ramos started whispering the correct translation to the beleaguered interpreter, who finally gave up, turned to Ramos, and asked, Do you want to do this? Because I can’t.

  Ramos leaped at the chance, went to the front of the room, and flawlessly translated the mayor’s words.

  From the side of the room, near the door, Kaleda liked what she saw and realized she had found just the person she was looking for. In 2005 Ramos began working in the library part-time as a clerk. Two years later, Kaleda was able to hire her in a new full-time civil service category called “Spanish speaking library assistant,” and Ramos became an indispensable member of the library, teaching computer classes in Spanish, English as a second language, Spanish conversation, and, of course, her citizenship classes.

  Gilda Ramos was, like Kaleda, the right person at the right time in the right job. Trained as an interpreter in English and German in her native Peru, and endowed with a passion for public service and a terrific work ethic, Ramos was eager to help the newly arrived immigrants.

  She had started to learn English as a toddler in a Catholic preschool. Her love of the language and facility with it was such that, at night, before she said her prayers in Spanish, she recited the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary in English. When she was twelve, Ramos, one of two daughters of a single mother who worked as an assistant nurse and studied psychology, started earning money for the family tutoring older kids in English. By sixteen, she was translating for missionaries while going to school and continuing her training in English. The language school was far from her house, and it took her hours to navigate the city. At that time, the terrorist Maoist group Shining Path was keeping Lima alert and in fear with constant bombings. But nothing could deter Ramos in her drive to succeed.

  At twenty-two, secure in her knowledge of English, Ramos turned her attention to German, and moved to Stuttgart, Germany, to work as an au pair. Her plan was to stay for a year and then return home and find a job in a pharmaceutical lab or a German brewery, but she fell in love with an American soldier. When she returned home, the soldier followed her. On his third visit, the two married and he whisked her off to an apartment in Center Moriches, on Long Island. The couple had two children, but the marriage quickly soured.

  In 2000, just two years after she arrived in the country, Ramos started working for the Patchogue-Medford School District as a teacher of English for newcomers. Then her supervisor asked her to begin teaching citizenship classes at the Patchogue-Medford Library, and that’s how she found herself translating the mayor’s words in the village/library meeting in November 2004.

  Both Kaleda and Ramos started 2008 with great hopes. Kaleda was finally seeing the fruit of years of effort in trying to attract diverse patrons. Ramos, who still sees herself as the voice of the voiceless, translated all kinds of materials—from flyers to calendars—and the library truly became a hub for newly arrived English learners.

  But things began to change in the fall. Ramos and Kaleda noticed that the Spanish-language materials—dictionaries, films, and compact discs—were not being checked out as often as they had been just a few months earlier. The classes were packed, but when there were no classes, few Hispanics went to the library, especially at night.

  In late October, as Halloween approached, Ramos asked her students what was happening, and what she heard made her shiver with fear. The library had become such a magnet for immigrants that, at night, when they left classes walking or riding their bicycles, gangs of young men would follow them to harass and beat them or steal their money and bicycles. One had suffered a cut on his scalp from an attack, and a woman had been chased by a group of young men, who threw soda cans at her. The attacks were taking place all over Patchogue, not just near the library. That’s why some of them were staying away, they said. They were afraid to be targeted, but risked attending the classes because they were so hungry to learn.

  Ramos was horrified and immediately found Kaleda.

  “You won’t believe this,” she said, a little out of breath and resting against the doorframe in Kaleda’s office. “I want you to hear this with your own ears.”

  With Kaleda in the room, she asked her students to repeat their stories. Kaleda, who was aware that racism was rampant on Long Island and had heard stories of harassment and violence against immigrants elsewhere, immediately grasped the urgency of the matter. She was shocked that she hadn’t known what was happening at night in the streets of Patchogue, and she felt vulnerable, exposed, and, above all, scared.

  The year had not been kind to immigrants. Though 2008 was an election year, the candidates, US senators Barack Obama and John McCain, rarely talked about immigration. The issue was not raised at all during their three debates.7 One of the few times McCain discussed immigration he was campaigning in Mexico City and yet stressing the need to secure the border. Few heard him because his talk in a helicopter hangar “was interrupted by the deafening sound of a heavy rainstorm that made his remarks unintelligible,” the New York Times reported.8

  As it has happened with certain periodicity in the United States, immigration had become the nation’s most heart-wrenching, divisive, and vexing issue at the turn of the century. Even before George W. Bush assumed the presidency in 2001, he had announced his intention to mend the country’s broken-down immigration system. Specifically, he had called for legislation to legalize the twelve million immigrants who were then believed to live in the country illegally. The bill he championed died in Congress in June 2007, with only twelve of forty-nine Senate Republicans supporting him on a key procedural vote.9

  In fact, any possibility of immigration reform died long before that vote, perishing in the rubble of the World Trade Center on 9/11. After the terrorist attacks perpetrated by foreigners who had entered the country with visas, the nation closed in on itself. Fluid borders turned rigid and the national conversation swiftly changed: it was no longer about helping immigrants assimilate and become Americans. Rather, it was about keeping aliens out. Caught in the rhetoric were the millions of immigrants, many of them Hispanics from Mexico, who were already in the country and—in their eyes, at least—part of the United States, though with no documents to prove it. Funding was diverted to enforcement, deportation, and homeland security. Indeed, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service became the Department of Homeland Security.10

  In the spring of 2006, millions of immigrants took to the streets in cities all over the country, demanding immigration reform. But the effort backfired. It didn’t help that the most visible flags in all demonstrations were not red, white, and blue, but red, white, and green Mexican flags. Instead of raising consciousness of their plight, the protesters managed to raise consciousness of their numbers. In television interviews, they came across as angry and ungrateful. Americans wanted to hear them asking for permission to stay, not demanding a change of the laws they had already flaunted by crossing the border illegally or overstaying visas. Middle America became even more afraid of
a so-called Hispanic invasion.

  Every day, it seemed, newspapers carried stories that detailed the mood of the country, and it was clear that the country was torn. On the one hand, businesses and liberals advocated for less restrictive immigration policies and a kind, generous approach to legalizing the millions who were in the country illegally. On the other hand, conservatives and anti-immigration activists decried the lax security at the border and angrily demanded that the federal government establish a coherent way to control illegal immigration.

  In a 2008 editorial titled “The Great Immigration Panic,” the New York Times described the situation as a war:

  Someday, the country will recognize the true cost of its war on illegal immigration. We don’t mean dollars, though those are being squandered by the billions. The true cost is to the national identity: the sense of who we are and what we value. It will hit us once the enforcement fever breaks, when we look at what has been done and no longer recognize the country that did it. . . . The restrictionist message is brutally simple—that illegal immigrants deserve no rights, mercy or hope. It refuses to recognize that illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life. Unless the nation contains its enforcement compulsion, illegal immigrants will remain forever Them and never Us, subject to whatever abusive regimes the powers of the moment may devise.11

  With more than 175 bills relating to immigrant employment introduced by states in 2008, it was obvious that the war was being waged at the local level.12 Two years earlier, municipalities and towns had started to propose—and sometimes pass—resolutions and laws aimed at curbing illegal immigration. Towns from Long Island to Palm Beach, Florida, and beyond tried to dictate what documents employers had to check when hiring workers to fix a roof or cut the grass, where day laborers could stand while looking for jobs on street corners, and even whether they could wave their arms at incoming trucks looking for workers. In the summer of 2006, the city council of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, passed the Illegal Immigration Relief Act to target employers and landlords who hired or rented their homes to undocumented immigrants. The act also declared English the city’s official language. Courts prevented most elements of the ordinance from going into effect, but it brought national attention and much angst to a divided Hazleton.

  “What I’m doing here is protecting the legal taxpayer of any race,” the then-fifty-year-old mayor of Hazleton, Louis J. Barletta, the grandson of immigrants, told the Washington Post. “And I will get rid of the illegal people. It’s this simple: They must leave.”13

  From June 2008 until Election Day that year, the war against immigration played out on the front pages of local and national newspapers. Everyone knew about the factory raids: 595 workers, said to be in the country illegally, were detained in Laurel, Mississippi;14 300 were arrested at a kosher meat plant in Postville, Iowa;15 and 160 were arrested at a used-clothing and rag-exporting plant in Houston.16 Everyone heard about the detention centers and the growing number of deportations and about the 670-mile high-security fence along the US-Mexico border that was to be built by the end of the year.17 Often the words “illegality,” “terror,” “detention,” “crime,” “prison,” and “drugs” were linked directly or indirectly to immigrants.

  In Suffolk County, the tone of the debate regarding immigration had become openly hostile. On September 17, 2008, Newsday reported that nearly two dozen immigration advocates had asked the Suffolk County legislature to “tone down what they say is the legislature’s hostility toward immigrants, especially Hispanics.” Some were particularly frustrated with legislator Brian Beedenbender, a Democrat from Centereach, who introduced a bill requiring “those with occupational licenses to verify that their workers are in the country legally,” Newsday reported. The legislature passed the bill, but the state supreme court voided it. The county appealed. The battle was raging here as well.18

  So Ramos and Kaleda were not inclined to take any comments about threats and violence lightly. If this was indeed a war, who was protecting the immigrants? Did you call the police? Have you told somebody? Ramos and Kaleda asked their students, who said they had, at first, but when the police ignored their calls, claiming that because the attackers were underage there was little they could do, they hadn’t bothered calling again. Although it wasn’t articulated, it was understood that undocumented immigrants were afraid to bring attention to themselves by pressing charges. Best to pick yourself up from the street, stay quiet, and buy another used bicycle.

  Kaleda rushed to her office and composed an e-mail message to Mayor Pontieri. We have to talk, she told him. The next morning, for good measure, she called Pontieri’s number in Village Hall.

  This, she felt sure, was a phone call he would want to take himself.

  CHAPTER 4

  NOT IN MY BACKYARD

  Paul Pontieri picked up the phone knowing Jean Kaleda was on the line. His secretary had transferred the call and said it sounded urgent.1

  She must be really concerned, thought Pontieri, who knew Kaleda to be a calm and caring woman: a librarian, not an agitator. He understood her urgency, though. He too was concerned after reading her e-mail. No one should be afraid of using the library, he thought. No one should fear walking the streets at night because an accent or a skin color made one the target of hatred.

  It wasn’t as if Pontieri hadn’t heard about violence against Latinos before, but not in Patchogue, not in the streets he knew so well. He refused to believe that anti-immigrant hatred had seeped into his home turf.

  Pontieri, sixty-one, was born and raised in Patchogue, a town he had always known as an immigrant enclave. His grandparents were Italians: from Calabria on his mother’s side, from Bari on his father’s side. In a drawer of his desk he kept a copy of From Steerage to Suburb: Long Island Italians, a book that chronicled the arrival and settlement of Italians in Patchogue and other towns of Long Island. One of the men shown on the faded cover was his maternal grandfather, Frank Romeo. On a shelf in Pontieri’s office was another picture of Romeo, shirtsleeves rolled up and a fedora hat on his head, helping build the village’s roads.

  Pontieri liked pointing to the photo any time someone came to his office to discuss the growing number of Hispanics in town. “We are the same,” he would stress. “Small, dark men with thick arms and heavy souls working to build a better life.”

  In fact, there are numerous similarities between the Italian immigrants who settled in Patchogue in the late nineteenth century and the Ecuadorians who started arriving after Julio Espinoza moved to the village in 1984. Both came to find better work opportunities. Many in both groups settled in Patchogue immediately or soon after arriving in New York City, lured away from the city by the promise of jobs in the open pastures and vast spaces of Long Island. Most Italians in Patchogue came from a specific region, Calabria, which is at the tip of the boot-shaped Italian peninsula, and most Ecuadorians in Patchogue are from one region in Azuay, a south-central province of Ecuador. Both groups worked primarily in construction, and, like Ecuadorians would more than a century later, the pioneering Italians on Long Island encountered discrimination. It wasn’t unusual at the turn of the twentieth century to find a sign excluding Italians in advertised properties for sale on Long Island communities.2 Though there are no such signs rejecting Hispanics now, many say they have felt the sting of racism.

  Just as Gualaceños migrated once Espinoza and others sent word about the wonders of Patchogue, Calabrians had moved there at the urging of relatives or friends who had preceded them and who often had found them housing and jobs once—or even before—they arrived in town. That’s how Pontieri’s maternal grandmother, Rose Mazzotti, happened to find a home there, and that’s how Frank Romeo, who knew Rose from Calabria, happened to build a life with her.

  In 1896, Rose Mazzotti, born in Terranova di Sibari, was brought to the United States in the first of three transatlantic journeys her family made over ten years before settling permanently
in the United States. The Mazzotti family came to Long Island because an uncle of Rose’s mother, Louis Lotito, had sent for them. Lotito, the earliest Italian to reside in Patchogue, was a caretaker at a farm that needed more laborers, and Rose and her parents joined him.

  In their seminal work The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, first published in 1927, William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki explain this process of transoceanic migration to America from Europe almost the same way that Rumbaut and Portes would eighty years later. “When many members of a community are settled in America and keep contact with their home, America appears almost as an extension of the community,” they observe. “When a member prepares to leave, though he may travel alone, he goes at the invitation of another member and goes to him; from the standpoint of his group, it is not so very different from going to a Polish city to visit a friend and earn there some money.”3

  One of the families to follow Lotito was the Romeo family. Frank Romeo had met and fallen in love with Rose in Italy during one of her trips home. Because she was still so young, her parents regarded Frank’s interest as a premature infatuation. In 1902 Frank arrived in New York City with no money, family, or employment, but he quickly found a job as a contractor’s helper finishing sidewalks. After learning that Rose had returned to Patchogue with her family, Frank resumed his courtship, riding sixty miles on weekends on his bicycle from New York City to Patchogue and then sixty miles back. He soon moved to Patchogue, however, and started working as a mason and a bricklayer, crafts he had learned in Italy from his father. On January 16, 1910, when he was twenty-five and she was sixteen, Frank and Rose were married. Frank started a road construction business, Romeo Construction Company, and the couple went on to have seven children.4 One of them, Marguerite, would one day become the mother of Paul Pontieri, the town’s first Italian American mayor.

  For thousands of years Patchogue was inhabited by Native Americans who spoke an Algonquian dialect. The name “Patchogue” is derived from “Pochaug,” which means a turning place or “where two streams separate.” The area was first settled by the Dutch and eventually became part of New England, but it remained undeveloped by European settlers for decades. In the eighteenth century, because of its abundant lakes, rivers, and extensive shoreline, Patchogue became a mill town—producing paper, twine, cloth, wool, carpet, lumber, leather, and iron products—an irresistible draw for many immigrants, including Italians.5