by Mirta Ojito
By the turn of the twentieth century, Patchogue, incorporated as a village since 1893, had a thriving fishing industry and had made a name for itself as a tourist town that attracted the moneyed class from New York City seeking a respite in the hot summers. A new railroad in 1869 had made it easier for city residents to reach Patchogue. Large hotels were built on or near the shoreline that could accommodate over 1,600 guests. The twenties—the golden age of the silent era of Hollywood movies—brought stars, including Gloria Swanson, to Patchogue’s theaters for opening nights. Because of its privileged location and buoyant economy, the town grew as a commercial and shopping hub for central and eastern Long Island. With the advent of the car, however, came greater choices for travel and shopping. The heyday of the grand resorts on Long Island started to fade as the automobile gave city dwellers a wider choice for travel.6
The proliferation of the car also made it easier for people to move to suburbia, even towns as far away from the city as Patchogue, which remained a good place to raise a family. In her book Gangs in Garden City, Sarah Garland explains how “by the 1940s, 17 percent of the country lived in the outer rings of cities.” Some suburbs of New York, where the growth was particularly notable, grew even more than the city.7
Those who moved to suburbia—a concept that originated in Great Britain and the United States around 1815—were not like the original residents of Patchogue.8 They were middle-class families who felt they had paid their dues after years of toiling in the city and were hoping to reach their own version of the American dream in the promised land of suburbia: a backyard with fragrant trees and an immaculate lawn with clipped grass, a barbecue with like-minded neighbors on the weekends, and good schools that children could walk to and where they would be shielded from the grittier dimensions of urban life.9
Despite the influx of newcomers, after the postwar baby boom Patchogue suffered another setback: strip malls began to pull shoppers away from the downtown area in the late 1960s, leading to several decades of decline on Main Street.10 The one theater left became a ruin, as the big department stores moved elsewhere and small shops struggled to survive in a changing economy and rapidly evolving demographics. It was precisely because of that decline that newly arrived immigrants were able to move from the city to Patchogue. They could afford the rents.
Mayor Pontieri’s life neatly fits the narrative of the 1950s and the growth and changes of suburbia in the postwar years. Born in 1947, he was the second child—and the only boy—of four children born to Marguerite Romeo and Paul Pontieri, who were high school sweethearts. (Paul was the president of his junior class and Marguerite was the secretary.) Paul, who didn’t attend college, worked a variety of jobs. For a while he was a salesman for Sunshine Biscuits, a company that manufactured and sold cookies, crackers, and biscuits. Then he opened and operated a luncheonette next to the movie theater on South Ocean Avenue. Later he drove an oil truck. His wife stayed home, taking care of the children.
The Patchogue that the mayor remembers, seemingly without nostalgia, was a great place to be a kid. From Cedar Avenue, where he grew up, a kid in possession of a bike could go anywhere, from the park to the movies, and from school to the shore. Everything was three to five blocks away—ball fields, theaters, and the bay. More important, they had what he calls “a real neighborhood,” one where parents didn’t have to make play dates for their children. The children simply stepped outside looking for company, and they would always find another child ready to play.
There were dozens of stores on Main Street, including J. C. Penney and Woolworth, and three movie theaters: Granada, Plaza, and Rialto. Pontieri and a friend would often steal posters of films such as Moby Dick, Davy Crockett, and The War of the Worlds and keep them inside the pages of a large Peter Pan book. (Pontieri still has some of the posters; at least two are framed in his home now.) Riding his bicycle down Main Street, it wasn’t difficult for young Pontieri to imagine that Patchogue was all his.
The Pontieris and the Romeos were large families. Growing up, Pontieri had seven aunts and uncles, all within a few blocks. He could have breakfast at home, lunch with an aunt, and dinner with an uncle. Christmas Eves were always huge events that would begin mid-afternoon and end with midnight Mass.
The idyll of Pontieri’s childhood was altered when his father died of a heart attack at forty-one while pulling a heavy oil hose down a driveway. Pontieri, who was coming downstairs from the second floor of the house when a police officer and a priest were delivering the terrible news to the family, sat on the steps, deaf and blind to the world. He was fourteen years old. Everything was a blur after that but Pontieri clearly remembers feeling a mantle of responsibility descending over his already broad shoulders: he was now the man of the house. Much would be expected from him.
Soon after the funeral, the mayor of Patchogue called the house offering the family not only his condolence but also jobs as lifeguards in the village pool for Pontieri and his oldest sister. It was a gesture that Pontieri treasured and that one day would put him on the path to the mayoral seat: politics, he thought then, was about taking care of people when they need it the most. His mother too went to work, as a secretary, but Pontieri remained pampered by the family. Aunts and uncles, particularly the uncles, looked after him. Each uncle took on a different role. One would take him fishing, one would lecture him on the importance of being a good man, and yet another would explain to him why he always needed to put family first. All kept him on the straight path.
When time came for college, Pontieri, at two hundred pounds and five foot ten, with a strong back and large hands, won a football scholarship to Hofstra University. But he was not sure what he would do with the rest of his life other than play football and protect and help his family.
Then, in the summer after his freshman year, fate intervened. One morning, on his way to work, he left the house in a rush, wearing only swimming trunks and flip-flops. Less than half a block from his house, he lost control of his motorcycle and crashed against a parked car, breaking his right leg. He stayed in the hospital for fifteen days while doctors pieced his leg together with pins and placed it in a full cast, then a brace that he had to wear for months. Because he now walked with a slight limp and always in pain, football was no longer an option. He transferred to the State University of New York at Buffalo and got serious about school.
In 1971, the former athlete graduated with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education, with a specialization in the education of physically disabled children. Three years later he got a master’s degree to work with children who have learning and behavioral disorders. Along the way Pontieri met and married Mary Bilan, who was from Ashland, Ohio, but visited Patchogue with a friend one summer and never left. They went on to have three children, while Pontieri developed a career working with emotionally disturbed children.
In 1984, Pontieri left the classroom and bought a courier business. He grew it to just over $5 million in sales annually and 125 employees, but he stayed as low-key as always, seldom leaving Patchogue, a place he found so enchanting that he took few vacations. He couldn’t imagine a better place to be in the summer than his own town, with its public pool, bay views, and easy access to the beaches on Fire Island.
He entered politics in 1986, when a neighbor who was chatting with him while he mowed the lawn suggested he run for village trustee. Pontieri, who had never forgotten the way the mayor had helped him after his father’s death, didn’t have to ponder the idea for long. He won that first election and continued in politics until he lost his seat in 1994.
Two years later he sold the business and returned to education, working as an assistant principal at Bellport High School. In 2001 he reclaimed his trustee seat, and three years later he ran for mayor and won, becoming the first Italian American mayor of Patchogue one hundred years after his grandfather Romeo came to America. In November 2008, when tragedy struck and the village became the focus of national attention, Pontieri had been mayor for exactly fou
r years.
Pontieri does not recall a day when he suddenly noticed that 30 percent of the residents were Latinos. To him Patchogue had always been a magnet for immigrants, and though technically Puerto Ricans are not immigrants, to him Ecuadorians did not look that different from the Puerto Ricans who had once been the only Latinos in the village. In fact, Ecuadorians, he thought, did not look that different from his grandfather Romeo and the men who had helped build his town.
Sure, they had different customs, they spoke a language he didn’t understand, and they ate different foods. But Pontieri saw no reason why they couldn’t coexist with the more established residents of the village. He valued their entrepreneurial spirit and was pleased to see that, along with the renovated theater on Main Street, their small businesses were breathing new life into the moribund downtown area. Where there had been boarded-up storefronts or nearly defunct, dusty stores, the new immigrants were opening up restaurants, cafés, travel agencies, boutiques, and video stores. One such businessman, José Bonilla, went to Pontieri’s office to ask for permits for a new supermarket that would sell the products Ecuadorian immigrants couldn’t get elsewhere.
Fine, Pontieri said, but he issued a warning: along with the Goya cans, keep the Progresso products.
Pontieri wanted to make sure that his mother wouldn’t be “intimidated” by products she did not recognize. He wanted her to feel that even if she didn’t understand the murmuring of the stock boys or the accent of the young women at the cashier, she wouldn’t feel like a stranger in her own town.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Pontieri was feeling good about life in his village. He took pride in Patchogue’s ordered civility, in its old stately homes and proximity to the sea, in the library, which was large and modern, and in the Italian bistros that coexisted with Greek eateries and Colombian and Peruvian restaurants. If there was turmoil and ill will, he didn’t know it. If Hispanics were being harassed, he hadn’t noticed. If teenagers were going around attacking men at night because they thought them to be “illegal Mexicans,” Pontieri hadn’t been told. He wasn’t even sure he knew the difference between an Ecuadorian and a Mexican. And he didn’t much care for legal status. The way he saw it, his job was to make sure the village worked for all. Immigration, as he likes to put it, was a few notches “above his pay rate.” It was a federal issue, not a village concern.
He was aware, though, that elsewhere, in towns that surrounded Patchogue like a string of pearls, trouble had been brewing for a long time.
Farmingville, a blue-collar hamlet of about fifteen thousand residents, is less than five miles north of Patchogue. In the late 1990s, Mexican laborers from the state of Hidalgo, west of Mexico City, settled there during a construction boom. Farmingville’s geographic location—seventy miles east of Manhattan, in the center of Suffolk County and just off the Long Island Expressway—attracted contractors and others looking for cheap labor from all over the county. Word of the abundant job opportunities spread, and even more immigrants, not all Mexicans, moved there looking for jobs in construction, roofing, masonry, lawn care, and landscaping.11
The day laborers in Farmingville—short and brown-skinned, with dingy worker’s clothing and the general demeanor of rural folks, people who want to be noticed by a patrón but ignored by everyone else—became an eyesore to those who looked at them and saw only one side of the story: large groups of desperate men who spoke no English standing outside two neighborhood 7-Eleven convenience stores. In spring and summer there could be as many as eighty men on one corner and forty on another.
Neighbors began to complain. They were also upset because their sleepy town had found its way to the front page of Newsday after police officers raided two homes and evicted forty day laborers on the charge of overcrowded housing. For people who are concerned about the value of their property, as most homeowners are, the story was unwelcome, but the raid was necessary. All of a sudden, concerned and angry residents began showing up at meetings of the Farmingville Civic Association, a nonpartisan community organization that dealt with town issues. The meetings often became shouting matches, and in 1998 about forty of the most vociferous and angry residents of Farmingville formed a group called Sachem Quality of Life, named after Farmingville’s school district.
Members of the group—working-class, nativist, and militant—accused undocumented Latino immigrants not only of harassing young women with catcalls and of urinating and defecating in public but also of being inherently prone to rape, armed robbery, and other violent crimes. They approached the media, demanding that public officials at local and federal levels act immediately. Specifically they wanted to get rid of the one hundred or so men in their midst who were standing on street corners daily in search of work. They organized protest rallies right across the streets from where the laborers waited, harassing and yelling epithets not only at the workers but also at the contractors who approached the pickup sites. Eventually the group even demanded that the US military occupy Farmingville so that immigrants could be effectively rounded up and deported.12
The arrival of the Mexican laborers in Farmingville—and the backlash against them—coincided with a global rising tide of xenophobia. In 1996, Paul J. Smith, director of the Pacific Forum’s project on migrant trafficking, wrote a piece for the International Herald Tribune, in which he described how 1995 had been “a critical turning point in an era of growing international migration.” It was the year, he said, “in which the backlash against immigrants, once believed to be a xenophobic reaction limited to rich, industrialized countries, went global.” He cited examples of countries—in Africa, the Middle East, East and South Asia, and the Americas, as well as western and eastern Europe—where immigrants had become the targets of fierce campaigns to “track, persecute and ultimately drive them away.”
The global backlash, Smith noted, “reflects the emergence of international migration as the most serious social and political crisis of the 1990s, one that is certain to worsen as population pressures, unemployment, and economic disparities between countries become even more acute.”13
If Farmingville were a country, what happened there could have easily bolstered Smith’s point. The members of Sachem Quality of Life lobbied hard against a bill authorizing the building of a day-laborer hiring center. County executive Bob Gaffney vetoed the bill, the site was never built, and incidents of harassment against immigrants continued, becoming almost daily occurrences. People threw rocks and bottles at the workers, fired BB guns at them, and broke the windows of houses where they suspected immigrants lived. Television cameras captured most of the action.14
With so much press and the potential for more, Farmingville came to the attention of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, that advocates for immigration control. The federation sent an organizer to step up recruiting efforts, organize street rallies, promote media outreach, and contribute to a propaganda campaign that, among other things, blamed laborers for a nonexistent rise in crimes such as burglary and rape. With the help of the organizer, Sachem gained four hundred members, who began referring to Latino laborers as “invaders” and labeled anyone who helped them as “traitors” to America. Together Sachem Quality of Life and FAIR heavily influenced the way immigrants were perceived in Suffolk County and helped set the tone for public discourse on immigration.15
Sachem Quality of Life also contacted American Patrol, a national nativist group associated with anti-immigrant vigilante activities on the US-Mexico border. With the intervention of outsiders and the heated rhetoric of many of its residents, Farmingville quickly became ground zero for the lingering national debate on immigration.16
All this tension finally culminated in a particularly vicious incident during the early Sunday morning hours of September 17, 2000. Two young men in a silver station wagon approached one of the 7-Eleven corners and picked up a Mexican laborer for a job. The laborer indicated that he already had work
for the day, but he directed the men to his house where two friends, Israel Pérez, nineteen, and Magdaleno Escamilla, twenty-eight, were staying and looking for jobs. The men with the station wagon, Ryan Wagner, eighteen, and Christopher Slavin, twenty-eight, said they needed help repairing a floor and took the workers to an abandoned warehouse in a nearby town.
They were asked to crawl into a basement—presumably the place where the floor needed repair. There Wagner and Slavin attacked the workers with a crowbar and a shovel, and stabbed them with a knife. Pérez and Escamilla fought back, wrestling a shovel from the attackers, who fled the warehouse. In pain and bleeding, the Mexican men stumbled out. They stood on the street, flagging down cars for help until someone stopped and, thinking the men had been in a car accident, called the police.
The police took them to Brookhaven Memorial Hospital, where a reporter from the New York Times interviewed them. They told the reporter that from the start they’d had an uneasy feeling about the white men who lured them to the abandoned building with the promise of work. Escamilla was treated and released. Pérez had to have surgery for a severed tendon in his left wrist. The attackers were eventually caught, tried, and convicted. Slavin was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, while Wagner got fifteen years.17
The reporter also interviewed Ray Wysolmierski, a leader of Sachem Quality of Life. Wysolmierski rejected the idea that his group had helped to inflame racial hatred in the community. “This was inevitably going to happen whether we existed or not,” he told the reporter. “People wait on the corner for people to hire them. Those who hire them aren’t going to win a Nobel Peace Prize. As far as I’m concerned, they are all criminals.”18
