Big Apple Takes On a Flavor of Mexico

Jerry Dominguez is a New Yorker now, a labor organizer with real chutzpah in his “magnificent” city. Yet not long ago he was Gerardo Dominguez, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, too timid to ride the rumbling subways alone.

Sergio Flores came about a year ago from Mexico, speaking no English and bearing no visa. He works 70 hours a week for $250--$3.57 an hour--at a grocery in a Brooklyn neighborhood overlooking the Statue of Liberty. Bewildered at first, “I felt lost,” said Flores, “no me hallaba.”

It’s better now, he says, but it will never be home.

Bakery owners Silvia and Mariano Torres are on the path to U.S. citizenship. “It’s beautiful being Mexican in New York, because now we own something in this land,” Silvia said. But together they work 190 hours a week, and it grieves her to spend only snatches of moments with their three young children.

Dominguez, Flores and the Torreses represent a vibrant new image in New York’s ethnic collage. Practically unheard of until the 1990s, Mexicans have become the city’s third-largest Latino group, behind Puerto Ricans and Dominicans.

Snapshots of mexicano New York reveal an experience much different from the one in Southern California, with its centuries of Mexican tradition and generations of Mexican Americans. In New York, all Mexicans are pioneers, facing jarring adjustments thousands of miles from home in a city that can be as treacherous as a February ice storm. Yet, increasingly, they are gaining their footing, and the sons and daughters of earlier immigrants are taking note.

At a time when California was discouraging illegal immigration with Prop. 187, New York barely reacted as its mainly undocumented Mexican-origin population swelled from 55,698 in 1990 to 306,283 in 1998, according to calculations by sociologist John Mollenkopf of the City University of New York (CUNY).

Mexicans became the low-wage brawn of thousands of restaurants, garment factories and corner groceries that sell fresh fruits and vegetables. Now, some are starting their own businesses.

Their rapid emergence in New York attests to the accelerating dispersal of Mexican migration beyond border states such as California, a phenomenon that is reshaping the face of Latino U.S.A.

“It’s going to be very dramatic in the 2000 census,” said Jorge del Pinal, a senior Census Bureau demographer. “Before, people would say the migration stream was largely to the Southwest and West, and now you’re going to see them spread out.”

New York now ranks sixth among U.S. metropolitan areas in Mexican-origin population, behind L.A., Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and Dallas/Fort Worth. Del Pinal’s prediction: Mexicans will one day outnumber other Latinos on the East Coast.

Mexicans in New York are unlikely to have been to Southern California or to have considered it as a destination. There are no hard numbers, but a majority is believed to be undocumented. They cross the border overland and keep traveling to New York by bus, van or airplane. More than half are from the state of Puebla in southern Mexico, and they preserve their small-town connections.

No Guarantee Dreams Will Become Reality

Weary of Mexico’s endless economic travail, they come for jobs. The new life is grueling, with no guarantee their immigrant dreams will become real. Summers in New York bring soccer matches and picnics, but winter stirs feelings of homesickness.

“You are closed in,” said Rosa Madrigal, a laundry worker. “In Mexico, you are outside more, you don’t have that closed-in feeling.”

Yet on a people-to-people level, the city has been largely receptive. The Puebla connection rings true to New York descendants of earlier immigrations, keepers of family tales about grandparents and great-uncles who came from strange-sounding places in Poland, Germany, Ireland or Italy and pinned their hopes on their willingness to work and a job that would get them ahead.

“Here, people see Mexicans as trying to live out the American Dream; employers know they are good workers,” said Rob Smith, a Barnard College sociologist.

Blanca Mendez, a native New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, is unfazed by the Mexicanization of her Brooklyn neighborhood, Sunset Park. “I’ve noticed the restaurants,” Mendez said. “It’s not just Taco Bell anymore!”

The fit isn’t always as smooth. Community workers tell stories of Mexican youths forming gangs for protection. Of bosses who cheat on wages. Of families split by deportations.

But conflict can also be less overt, more poignant. Eleventh-grader Yasenia Hernandez was disappointed after she and others asked to celebrate Mexican independence day at her school in the Bronx.

“The principal said no, that there were too many ethnic feasts already and he was going to cancel them all,” Hernandez said. “But the Puerto Rican and Dominican students kept their feasts and we didn’t get any Mexican ones. I don’t know whether to call it discrimination or what.”

Still, evidence abounds that Mexican traditions are being transplanted successfully.

Mexican Village Grows a Surrogate

On a raw, foggy Saturday in January, hundreds of immigrants from Chinantla, a small town in Puebla, were out on West 14th Street in Manhattan. Outside the chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the brown-skinned Mexican Virgin, the chinantecos were celebrating the feast of their patron saint, Padre Jesus. As flute and drum played, masked dancers evoked protective spirits from pre-Catholic antiquity. Tourists headed for nearby Greenwich Village stopped to shoot videos and police cars halted traffic.

Chinantla has sent more than half of its 5,000 to 7,000 population to New York, creating two societies that operate in tandem. Most of the workers are here, where they have raised money for a water system and schools back home and keep a hand in village government. The elderly and the very young remain in Chinantla, often in big houses built by immigrants. “The village is a vacation spot, nursery and nursing home,” said Smith, the Barnard sociologist, who has closely followed the town’s epic.

Whether from Chinantla or Mexico City, mexicanos are spreading a flavor of their land to all five boroughs of New York. Unlike in Los Angeles and Chicago, the Mexican community in New York isn’t concentrated in particular districts, it’s sown among existing Latino barrios from the South Bronx to Staten Island.

In Spanish Harlem, the call of mariachi trumpets now flows with salsa trombones and merengue saxophones; a local tortilla manufacturer has already been profiled in Forbes, and a Mexican immigrant athletic club ranks fifth among clubs that compete in the New York marathon.

After 58 years in the same midtown Manhattan location, the Mexican consulate had to move to a bigger place last fall. The old consulate had a narrow front--a feature that made no difference for decades. But in the last few years, so many people sought services that lines stretched out for more than a block.

Community Is ‘Here to Stay’

More than a place to renew Mexican passports, the consulate gets involved in immigrant life--sending officials to soccer league ceremonies, monitoring U.S. immigration enforcement, recovering back wages that deportees are legally entitled to.

“This community is very definitely here to stay,” said Consul Jorge Pinto.

But the price of admission is high, exacted in tens of thousands of hours of underpaid labor. Arrest and deportation by immigration authorities are a constant possibility. New arrivals are often easy targets for criminals and unscrupulous bosses who renege on wages.

The Spanish word many Mexicans use to describe their condition is esclavizante, enslaving. Even Silvia Torres, the proud bakery owner, says her 78-hour workweeks, and her husband’s 112-hour weeks, are “esclavizante.”

“Life is a kind of slavery that doesn’t permit them to enjoy the things New York has to offer,” said Brother Joel Magallan.

A Jesuit from Mexico, Brother Joel now leads Asociacion Tepeyac, a community organizing project sponsored by the Catholic church. The archdiocese sees Mexicans as a promising constituency, and the church functions as support structure and communications net for enclaves around the region.

“These people work to live and live to work,” said Brother Joel. “Most have incurred debt to come here. They have to work five or six months to pay off the passage, and once they finish, they start hearing from relatives who want help to come. It goes on and on.”

Enter Jerry Dominguez, the union man with a plan.

Dominguez, 32, picked tomatoes in Florida and cherries in South Carolina before coming to New York in the mid-’80s. He visited Los Angeles as a youth, “but New York always attracted my attention; it was what I didn’t know.”

He put himself through college working as a street vendor in Manhattan, became a legal U.S. resident and has applied for citizenship. Last year, he graduated from John Jay College with a degree in political science.

Now he is trying to organize Mexican grocery workers for local #169 of UNITE!, a garment workers union founded long ago by Jewish immigrants that has a legacy of championing new arrivals. (Immigration laws bar employers from hiring undocumented workers, but labor laws also guarantee all employees--including the undocumented--the right to a minimum wage, overtime and union membership.)

Dominguez calls the groceries “green sweatshops,” and the organizing campaign has been heated. His life has been threatened and an angry shopkeeper hit him in the head with a yam.

Last fall, elections were held at four Brooklyn groceries, but at only one did workers endorse the organizing effort. The union was kept out of the other three after employers raised wages and granted other benefits.

Dominguez now has a plan for organizing groceries in Greenwich Village, where politically liberal customers could give the union added leverage. “At the very least, we’re trying to educate the community with respect to their rights,” Dominguez said. “Even if they are undocumented, the labor laws protect them.”

But immigration enforcement is also on the rise, according to U.S. and Mexican government figures. Raids involving undocumented workers are up sharply in the late 1990s and so are deportations.

Calamity Can Mean Death

Being detained by the INS and returned to Mexico usually involves painful separation from family. But more than anything, it is viewed as a piece of bad luck. True calamity in New York can mean death.

Last year, the consulate helped ship 136 bodies to Mexico--mostly working men between the ages of 22 and 50. Fully half died of “natural causes,” including illnesses that went undetected or untreated.

Roberto, who gave only his first name, was in danger of becoming such a statistic. Early on a damp January morning, he waited outside Brother Joel’s Asociacion Tepeyac on West 14th Street, his face a study in pain and fatigue. He was on crutches, carrying a backpack.

Crisis worker Esperanza Morales invited Roberto into her chilly office. He came from Chiapas, he said, crossed the border around Christmas and got into a bad traffic accident in New Mexico. Two tendons in his left leg were severed. They gave him a brace and crutches at a hospital, but he didn’t have $7,000 for an operation.

Roberto pushed through to New York, but now he has no place to go. His leg has started trembling uncontrollably. “What I am afraid of is an infection,” he tells Morales. Left unsaid is what they both know, that a major untreated infection can kill.

The consulate has referred Roberto to a public hospital, but he also needs shelter while he waits for the operation and convalesces. “How am I going to manage with your case?” Morales muses out loud. “I know, there are some nuns who have space. . . . “ But they’re in the Bronx, an hour away by subway, and Roberto doesn’t look like he can take it. She offers the office couch for now.

“Look,” Roberto tells her, “I don’t want to be involved in an investigation. I just want to get better so I can go to work.”