New to the Neighborhood

Home Brooklyn Life New to the Neighborhood

By Joe Proudman

Gabriela Alvarado brushes her daughter Giselle Florez' hair before a parent ambassador meeting at Bushwick Impact. (Joe Proudman/The Brooklyn Ink)
Gabriela Alvarado brushes her daughter Giselle Florez' hair before a parent ambassador meeting at Bushwick Impact. (Joe Proudman/The Brooklyn Ink)

Five years ago Gabriela Alvarado was in New York on vacation. She had just left her job in Puebla, Mexico, after the company she was working for changed owners.

She felt her life was due for a change after spending the previous 10 years engulfed in her career. She felt she really didn’t have much to show for it.  So her cousin, who was living in Brooklyn, told her to come visit, take some time to get her life in perspective.

She planned on staying for three months, but in mid-September a week before she was planning to leave, Alvarado attended a party for Mexican Independence Day. As she sat in one room, she began to listen to a conversation in the next room. A family member was asking a man if he cared if a woman made more than him. He said no. That’s really all Alvarado needed to know.

“At this time, at this party, I listened,” she said. “I never saw him. I only listened.”

Alvarado said at that moment she felt it—love. The only way she can explain falling for a man she hadn’t even seen, she says is that she just knew he was the man for her after he answered the question the right way.  She cancelled her flight back home. A few months later she and that same man were living together. Five years later, they’re married, with a soon-to-be three-year-old daughter.

When she fell in love, Gabriela Alvarado became a part of Bushwick’s burgeoning immigrant population. In 2008, nearly 38 percent of the neighborhood’s population was foreign born, according to State of the City’s Housing & Neighborhoods 2009 neighborhood profile. That means there are roughly 50,000 people in Bushwick who at one time were new to this country and, like Gabriela Alvarado, needed to learn to adjust to life in place far different than the one they left behind.

For Alvarado the transition to America was rough, but manageable, first the language, “I was a student of English in my country, but it’s not the same when you practice or listen,” she said. “Even now it’s sometimes difficult.”

But the hardest things for her were adjusting to the culture of the U.S. New York, she says, is less friendly, than Mexico, a reality that even today still makes the transition difficult. Going to the deli on the corner, or the grocery store or even just walking down the block people are just more cold than she was once used to, she says.

“I felt strange because for me it was the first time that I separated from my family,” she says. Alvarado was in a new home, “where I found different customs and lifestyles.”

Alvarado’s story is similar to that of the 50,000 immigrants in Brooklyn, all new to the country and facing similar issues with language and customs. Some, like Alvarado, have children. She says with children the pressure to provide and be successful in America becomes greater. “The most important thing for women with babies is to get an opportunity for a job, get an opportunity for health care for babies” she said.

One day, in 2009, Alvarado stopped by Bushwick Impact on Central Avenue. She doesn’t remember why she stopped in, but it eventually led to her transitioning from a person that just needed help to a person who was offering it through volunteering for Impact’s Parent Ambassador program.

Bushwick Impact in its fifth year, which is a hub for resources offered by the city and aimed at helping families with young children. Impact’s staff works with families to connect them with the various services available, such as food stamps and daycare, immigration or workshops on financial literacy. They don’t really complete any of that sort of social work in-house, but get families and people in touch with people and organizations that do. They’re a liaison to the community.

Impact does host several programs. Local artist hold classes for children and musicians stop in and play a few songs. The organization works with parents to improve their English not by holding classes, but by giving them a chance to practice by holding hour-long conversations. They also have a table outside their offices, with clothes for those who need them.

Bushwick Impact was launched in 2005 by the Agenda for Children of Tomorrow (ACT), which is a publicly and privately funded organization focused on serving children across the city. Impact was created to focus in on Bushwick and work with families of young children to get them connected with various resources.

Impact’s flagship community effort the past two years has been its Parent Ambassador program, in which it dispatches unpaid volunteers across the neighborhood to let new parents with young children know about what Impact does. Its most recent campaign sent out 12 women who, like Alvarado, at one time received help from Bushwick Impact, mostly with childcare, and were familiar with their services. They receive five weeks of training in public speaking, child development and financial literacy.

“They take the skills and go out into the community and engage parents,” said Nishanna Ramoutar, who works for Bushwick Impact. “When they’re out in the community, they don’t need to do any special outreach, they can be in the grocery store shopping for their own groceries.”

Simply due to the demographic makeup of Bushwick, most families Impact serves tend to be Spanish speaking and immigrants, just like the dozen women that serve as parent ambassadors. Impact feels that the community that it serves will be much more responsive to people that have been in or are in similar situations. The parent ambassadors target mothers of young children, using the fact that they themselves are parents as an icebreaker and a way to tell them about Impact’s services.

For immigrants with young families, “Shopping is hard. Paying your bills is hard. How do you find a job?” said Ramoutar. “There is this barrier between the services with the city. If they hear it from a mom they’re going to listen.

Immigrant life, Ramoutar explained, can be isolating: You don’t know the language. You don’t know many people. And if you’re here illegally – and two-thirds of those foreign born in Bushwick are according to Raul Rubio with the Family Services Network when he presented that figure to Community Board 4 on July 16, 2009 – you’re afraid to stand out because of your status. And if you have children, that experience becomes even more isolating.

“It helps our moms feel connected,” said Silvia Cruz, a parent advocate at Bushwick Impact. “In our population there is a lot of isolation. Having children is isolating and even more so being an immigrant is isolating.”

Because of her previous experience working as a safety coordinator in a factory in Mexico, Alvarado said she fit right in as a parent ambassador, chatting with people and passing on knowledge.

“I like to work with people,” she says. “In this case it wasn’t difficult for me.”

For example, this past Veterans Day in mid-November, Alvarado says that one morning while running errands, she stopped in the park in Bushwick with her daughter, who didn’t have school because of the holiday. While there she struck up a conversation with a woman who has a daughter similar in age to hers. They make small talk and eventually Alvarado told her about Impact and how it can help. It was a brief conversation, she says, and just like that, she was on her way. This is how the ambassadors work most of the time.

Cruz said the original goal was for the 12 women to sign up 250 families to come in and talk with Impact. But the women excelled that goal, signing up 382 families since May.

“It shows how important these mothers are in this community,” said Ramoutar.

On one October morning at Bushwick Impact’s Central Avenue office, 10 kids ran around while 15 parents squeezed into the back of the shoe-box shaped building for a meeting on financial literacy, which was being held in Spanish. All were women, except for the man who’d been sent by his wife because she couldn’t make it. This was a small slice of the results of the parent ambassador’s work over the summer and fall. From now until late spring, Impact will be holding classes such as this and working with those 382 families that were recruited. Then, come May the parent ambassadors will go out again. But in all reality, Ramoutar said, the women have become leaders, and are always pointing people towards Impact for assistance, and like Alvarado in the Park on Veteran’s Day, will continue even when they don’t have to.

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