As the sun beat down on Rockaway Avenue, the pulsating artery that cuts abruptly through the Brownsville, Mariana Gonzalez could be seen hauling her rickety wagon filled with ice-cream down the sidewalk.
It was 2 p.m. and she had already been working for eight hours, waking at 6 a.m. to cure the ice-cream, then setting it in the large tubs which sit at the bottom of her sizeable vehicle, and finally taking to the street to try to spike the interest of passing commuters.
She was dressed in a red baseball cap which acted to block the sun from her eyes and she had on a gray t-shirt with graffiti lettering daubed on the front, and some flapping white shorts.
Her face is pitted and sallow-brown, and her thin blue eyes stand encased in knots of tired-looking skin. Her sharp nose gives way to a diminutive mouth which when opened speaks in vernacular Spanish.
“I’ve been living in Brownsville for four months,” she said with the aid of a translator. “I am really not happy here at the moment. The work is too hard and I have nothing like what I had at home.”
Gonzalez, 23, moved from her native Ecuador to Brownsville four months ago, in June 2007. She has lived by herself since then and made a living by trooping around the neighbourhood with a battalion of cones and vats of the ice-cream.
“It’s better than Ecuardor just because of the money I can make” – she makes $50 a day – “but I don’t think I can settle because nothing is set up for people like me,” she said. “I miss my family and friends back at home and there is no community for me to get into here”
Gonzalez usually works a seven-day week, but refuses to say whether she is working legally or not. What about if she gets ill, I asked. “If it gets really bad I go straight to the hospital,” she said. “But otherwise I can go to the doctor and pay $80 for a check-up.”
For people like Gonzalez there is no safety-net in Brownsville to help them as they try to assimilate into the community. In terms of newly arrived immigrants the neighbourhood comes rock bottom for organisations set up to help ease the process of acclimatization. “I wish there was someone who could help me get used to living here,” said Gonzalez.
In every neighbourhood bordering Brownsville – from Bed-Stuy to East New York – there are organisations set up for different immigrant groups to help them get on their feet. According to Brownsville district manager, Viola Green-Walker, there is not one based in her own district.
“I don’t have concerns about it,” she said. “If something comes to our attention we can send them to, say, the Caribbean Women’s Health Association in East Flatbush, or the Bed-Stuy legal services.”
“It’s true that there is not one in Brownsville,” she continued. “For a short period the Caribbean Women’s Group would come here, but they had a small program reaching out to woman around the issue of infant mortality, but they had their funding cut.”
Immigration trends for Brownsville are striking. The Hispanic community increased 54% in the ten year period from 1990 to 2000. And in 2004, 50.9% of the population was on some form of income support. These two indexes together – a high immigration rate and extreme levels of deprivation – has made the need for immigrant support organisations even more acute.
Pastor Bob Gardner, of Sid Roth’s Messianic Mission, said: “Of course there is a lack of services for new immigrants. It’s why a lot of them aren’t coming here. There’s no-one to help them adjust to coming to live here.
The Thomas Boleyn Centre is supposed to be set up for people coming in and it doesn’t do anything. They are only around at election time and the rest of the time new immigrants are left to fight for themselves.
The Thomas Boleyn Centre is run by William F. Boyland, Jr., Member of Assembly 55th District in Brownsville. “It’s true there are no groups specifically set up to help immigrants,” he said when asked about Brownsville. “What usually happens is that when we don’t have anything here on site, we get people to come in from other places. 90% of the time it’s fine. The other 10%, we address that.”
At Brownsville Multi-Service Family Health Center the safety net for newly arrived immigrants, often without health insurance, is little better than the social provisions. “There are no special services available to newly arrived people,” said Janine Eustache, a social worker at the Health Center. “The only one I can think of that they qualify for is the PCAP, which is the Pre-natal Care Assistant Program, apart from that we have no programs.”
The situation gets worse if they have no official documents, as with Mariana Gonzalez. “If they don’t have any paper work then nothing pertain to them – at all,” said Eustache. “Even with housing they are often just sent to a shelter, there are no organisations set up to help them specifically. The only qualification is: If they have a US citizen child then they will be able to receive assistance. If not they don’t stand a chance.”
Into the void presented by the lack of a medical and social safety net in Brownsville has stepped the religious authorities in the region. Pastor Randolph Pemberton, of the Precious Stone Tabernacle Church, said: “The Church is a community so we have to help anyone who wants it and that often means immigrants. Even Muslims – they are people, if they come to us we have to help them.
“Sometimes it is a good way for us to be introduced to immigrants and welcome them to the Church. Often the community they find with us is exactly what they are looking for and they become a part of the Church in some way,” he said.
He points to the event convened by Rev. Pastor Terry M. Lee at the God’s Battalion of Prayer Church at 661 Linden Blvd on 15th November. It will be a meeting of 500 clergy and business owners and will inform immigrants how the visa lottery works, how the Church can sponsor an undocumented immigrant, and how undocumented immigrants can still get a bank account. All the kinds of information you would expect to be provided by an independent group or organisation.
Women like Ms. Gonzalez and Ms. Thomas are being sold short in Brownsville. An aberration in Brooklyn, the neighbourhood, by the admission of its own politicians and bureaucrats, has no groups or organisations which a newly arrived immigrant can approach in times of hardship. In fact, the best that they will get is a referral to travel long distances to other neighborhoods which have the adequate provisions. The Church is capitalizing on this vacuum to push itself into a role that should be performed by independent groups.
Brownsville is a community built on dynamic immigration from all around the world. If it is to continue to delight in its unparalleled diversity, there is an urgent need to devise better services for the lifeblood of the community – immigrants.
This post is tagged immigration, new york, poverty
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