On a chilly October evening, the members of Community Board 7 met as usual. They went through the day’s proceedings: an update on the attempted rapes in Sunset Park, sweeping schedules, the result of the lawsuit against local rezoning. Two blocks away, meanwhile, a prayer meeting was underway at Trinity Church. Both meetings were full.
Adriana, a Mexican woman who has lived in the area for more than ten years, was present at neither.
“I was working,” she says. Adriana—who declined to give her last name on account of her immigration status—spends seven days a week, from opening until closing, behind the counter of a local bakery.
She is one of the approximately 252,000 Mexican-born immigrants in New York City, according to the Census Bureau. Like Adriana, few of them participate politically or as active members in their local community.
At Community Board 7’s monthly meeting, about 30 of the attendees were white. There was a considerably smaller amount -between five and ten- of Asian participants. Less than five were Hispanic. Yet, Sunset Park’s population, according to the Census, is distributed the other way round: Hispanics make up almost half of the local population. They are the largest ethnic group.
So why are they not participating in local politics and community activities?
“I would expect that unauthorized immigrants generally have higher levels of expectations of returning to the country of origin, but this shouldn’t be surprising. Their status ensures that they are able to develop fewer or weaker connections to the U.S.,” says Professor Louis DeSipio, a specialist on Latino political assimilation at UC Irvine. This is what is called the “Myth of Return.”
But DeSipio also adds that “even in unauthorized communities, the ties to the U.S. relatively quickly become stronger than the ties to the country of origin.”
Adriana has not gone back to Mexico since first arriving in the United States. She can’t, because of the cost and the increasing difficulty to cross the border back. If she does return, then, it will be for good, and she says she is not ready to do so yet.
It could be argued that she has no need to. The enclave in Brooklyn, in which she works and lives, is similar to home. It is easy to obtain all kinds of goods from Mexico. Mexican flags hang outside of houses and stores. Local eateries have names of places south of the border, like Acapulco or Michoacán. Most importantly, the bulk of the Mexican population in Sunset Park comes from the state of Puebla, which is where Adriana was born. People in the neighborhood joke that they live in “Puebla York.”
Adriana has formed personal relationships in the United States. But only with other immigrants. Most of them Mexican, she says.
There is also the issue of language. Spanish, not English, is the main one in much of Sunset Park, used on store signs and as the primary form of social interaction on busy Fifth Avenue.
A 2003 study entitled “Reexamining the ‘Politics of In-Between’: Political Participation Among Mexican Immigrants in the United States” by Matt A. Barreto, now at the University of Washington, and José A. Muñoz, from SUNY Stony Brook, found that English fluency was an important determinant in political participation. “Those respondents with high levels of English proficiency were 13.5 percent more likely to take part in at least one political act,” concluded the report.
Even after spending 10 years in the U.S., Adriana is still far from proficient in English. When she speaks to English-language customers, she either avoids the language or doesn’t construct sentences, communicating instead through one-word questions and answers, using only the words or numbers that she actually needs. When she pours coffee, she asks, “Milk? Sugar?” When she rings up a customer, she says “$5.75.”
Despite her language skills, Adriana is still somewhat informed of what happens in her neighborhood. When the Sunset Park rape scare was at its height in early October, she knew about it. It was not through the flyers in Spanish that were tacked to local telephone poles. It was through her co-workers, who act as her main source of information.
Yet, she didn’t participate in any of the self-defense seminars that were offered (freely and in Spanish) to local women. In fact, she has never been involved in any locally-organized event, she says.
According to David L. Leal, a professor of Latino politics at the University of Texas, there are two key factors that could explain why Adriana doesn’t participate: the difference between American and Mexican political systems, as well as a continuing primary focus on politics back home.
In his 2002 study, ‘Political Participation by Latino Non-Citizens in the United States,’ Leal says that non-citizens may be “unaccustomed to a political system that allows meaningful participation.”
In Adriana’s case, this is somewhat true. Back home, the system did not allow her almost any participation, she says. There was little in the way of volunteer organizations, or what is called “civil society,” or open official meetings for local political participation. The only way she could influence what happened in her community, deep in the northern sierra of Puebla, was through voting. But she never did. She wasn’t even registered to vote. “It didn’t matter,” she says.
But contrary to Leal’s thesis, she doesn’t follow Mexican politics very closely. She knows that Enrique Peña Nieto, the candidate of the long-ruling PRI party, is on track to become the next president. But like 55 percent of Mexicans in the United States, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, she’s not sure when the elections will take place. She doesn’t even know that she’s allowed to vote from abroad.
That she is here illegally or she’s not a citizen is irrelevant from the point of view local political participation in New York. The state is one of the few that actually allows non-citizens to participate in local political activities such as planning councils. Most states once did. But it doesn’t make much difference, as Mexicans don’t participate in Sunset Park.
This is in contrast to the other important minority in District 7: the Chinese.
Through groups like the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, Chinese locals have opposed the rezoning in the neighborhood, for example. They have staged anti-zoning rallies, stormed a local Community Board meeting, and even brought a suit to court.
But interviews with many Mexicans in Sunset Park seemed almost always to end with the same refrain “We just want to get on with our lives.”
“I just want to support my family,” Adriana says. The Arizona and Alabama immigration laws, which have targeted people like herself, are not a concern for her. “I’ll see what I do when that happens here,” she says. She doesn’t want to join any organizations. Mostly, she doesn’t want to be noticed.
Adriana has even lapsed in her faith. According to the 2004 National Survey of Latinos, almost 90 percent say they practice some form of religion —66 percent say they are Catholic and many of the rest belong to growing Evangelical churches— but Adriana chuckles that she has become “an atheist by default.”
“I go to church about once a month,” she adds, but she says that she is never free to go more. So she goes to church, but not to mass, crosses herself and prays for her two children, who are back home in Mexico. She can’t remember the last time she went to confession.
Church involvement historically has been an important avenue for immigrants to become involved in local politics and community decisions. Adriana doesn’t even have this route.
What she has is her time behind the cash register, day after day, serving pan and licuados to people who come into the bakery. In her own words: “After I’m done with work, I just want to go home and rest.”
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