Posted on 07/31/2005 1:34:36 PM PDT by Happy2BMe
Associated Press
NEWBURGH, N.Y. - Sunday morning in this small, Hudson Valley city: More than 1,000 parishioners, most from Mexico, pack Spanish-language Masses at St. Patrick's Catholic Church. Afterward, many families flock to El Azteca for its authentic tacos. If somebody needs a ride home, there are at least a dozen local taxi companies catering to newcomers born in the Mexican states of Puebla and Jalisco.
New residents from Mexico have, in the last four years, opened dozens of businesses that have begun to reinvigorate the ailing downtown district; they are the region's fastest growing community. It's the same story elsewhere in the Northeast.
Like the other parts of the country before it, the region is finally starting to see the impact of Mexican migration.
New communities of Mexicans have arrived to fill farm, construction and domestic jobs, government data show. Population growth in states such as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Connecticut would be considerably slower if not for the newcomers, who are steadily bringing about the region's biggest demographic shift in generations. And while the change has brought new vitality to some places, it's also created tension.
Rodolfo O. de la Garza, a sociologist at Columbia University, says it's natural that Mexico is - and will be - the main source of Hispanic migration to the United States.
"Mexico is right there and Mexico is so big," he said. "They're not going to become the dominant group in the Northeast, but they're going to be increasing important numerically."
Sixty miles north of New York City, Newburgh has historically had a small Puerto Rican community. But these days Mexicans drawn to farm work in area apple orchards, dairy farms and factories far outnumber Puerto Ricans, demographers say.
In 2000, the city's 4,500 Mexicans represented half of all its Latinos; today, Mexicans are two-thirds of that group, demographers estimate.
"I've seen (Mexicans) grow from a very small quiet-type community to a very large population, and it continues to grow," said Richard Rivera, president of Latinos Unidos, a local advocacy group.
Nationally, most Mexican-born residents have long been concentrated in California and Texas, said Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington D.C. "If you go back 15 or 20 years, there weren't very many Mexicans outside of core settlement areas of the Southwestern states and the Chicago area," he said.
In the early 1990s, he said, California's ailing economy and rising anti-immigrant sentiments pushed some Mexican immigrants into new places with abundant jobs such as North Carolina, Georgia and New York City.
As new immigrants kept arriving - peaking at more than 600,000 a year around 1999 or 2000 - many joined friends or family resettled in the new areas. Tens of thousands went straight from the Mexican state of Michoacan to meatpacking jobs in Tar Heel, N.C., and from Puebla to work in restaurants and private homes in Manhattan.
Another factor fueling the influx was the nation's widespread real-estate boom, which drove steady growth in construction jobs. Last year, nearly one in five foreign-born Hispanics was a construction worker, and only 38 percent of the nation's Mexican immigrants lived in California, Pew data show. That's down from 58 percent in 1990.
Roberto Calderin moved to Orange County, which includes Newburgh, in 1996 and has seen the changes. "I went to a restaurant, an Italian restaurant, the other day, and I started horsing around with one of the busboys. I said, 'How many Mexicanos you got back there cooking?' He said, 'They're all Mexicans.'"
Small but rapidly expanding Mexican communities also are now in East Boston, Burlington, Vt., Central Falls, R.I., and Providence, said Martha Montero-Seiburth, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
In Maine, where most immigrants pick apples or blueberries or work on dairy farms, Census estimates counted 4,419 Mexicans in 2003, up 48 percent from 2000.
Some have felt a backlash. In Farmingville, on Long Island, residents have repeatedly complained about Central American day laborers, and there have been several attacks on Latinos in recent years. In a move that some residents cheered but immigration advocates condemned, local officials recently closed down three homes crowded with migrant renters.
Mexico's consul general for the New York region said the town reflects national immigration tensions. Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy said the Mexican government should re-examine why so many of its residents are leaving.
Meanwhile, in New York's Finger Lakes region, "there are tensions between Mexican immigrants and the Puerto Ricans," said Alejandra Molina, a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva. "You go to (the Spanish-language) Mass and the Puerto Ricans will sit on one side and the Mexican families will sit on the other side."
Longtime residents are generally welcoming in Newburgh, a city of about 28,000, but there remain challenges: a shortage of affordable housing, inadequate health care and nearly nonexistent public transportation. It is not unusual, said Carmen Vazqueztell, director of bilingual education in Newburgh schools, to see Mexican immigrants walking or riding bicycles along country roads at night.
Some see the lack of services as business opportunities to sell Oaxacan groceries, soccer supplies and airfare to Mexico City.
"You drive up and down Broadway and say, 'Wow, look at this new business, and this one and this one and this one,'" Vazqueztell said. "They've really made a mark in this community."
"They've really made a mark in this community."
They've made a mark on every building in our community too.
Steve Levy is my hero. He takes an enormous amount of heat from Newsday and the local media but refuses to back down.
Racist ba$tards...oh wait, ahhhh, normal???
This article goes directly to the response on another illegal immigrant article that illegal immigration is "strictly restricted to the southwestern US".
Honestly, though, it kind of makes me happy to see these "hard-working" illegal immigrants spread to liberal elite, politically correct cities in the northeast.
There are more than enough undocumented illegal Mexicans to go around. I think every state should get their fair share. Why should Mexifornia, New Mexico, Colomexico, Texico and a few others have all the fun!!! Enjoy!!!
-They've made a mark on every building in our community too.-
That's no joke. I noticed this when I lived in FL, 'cept it was the Cubans doing the marking. Ick, that's what you get when you "invite" the plumbing-less masses to live with you.
I was actually refering to graphiti, but what you touched on is also a problem. If you don't provide facilities to those hanging out for jobs, you're going to have problems.
Yes. So many on this board from that area keep saying "what's the problem?" Maybe they'll find out soon enough.
In 2000, Cuban Americans constituted only 31% of Florida's total Latin population.
In South Florida in 1997, 55.1 percent of second-generation Cubans had an income greater than $30,000 versus 44.1 percent of Anglo Americans, 36.9 percent of second-generation Cubans had an income greater than $50,000 versus 18.1 percent of Anglo Americans and 11 percent of Cuban Americans had incomes greater than $100,000 versus 9 percent of Anglo Americans and less than 2 percent of other "Hispanics".
How, exactly, did you determine that these were "Cuban" marks.
It seems as if Cubans have done the best job as a whole at assimilating and becoming productive additions to U.S. society.
Well, actually, we may be productive but we are extremely resistant to assimilation.
By the time Castro took power in 1959, Cubans were pretty much Americanized as there had been so much American contact since the mid-1800's. However, by 1959, that Americanization had assumed the character of 1940's and 1950's America.
When the Cuban exiles came to the U.S. in the 1960's, the Cuban American elders and their kids stubbornly maintained their Old Country values as America's Baby Boomers marched off to the Left and left the values of 1940's America behind.
Thus, growing up in Miami, the calendar may have said that we were in 1968 but I was growing up in 1940's America.
When my Green Beret uncle came back from each Vietnam combat tour with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, he was never treated as anything other than a war hero by other Cuban Americans. The very day I received my U.S. citizenship in 1973, I registered as a Republican as did all the other Cuban Americans I knew when they got their citizenship.
Now that I live on the Left Coast in a town filled to the brim with Birkenstock-wearing, tofu-eating, mantra-chanting, Michael Moore-adoring, Republican-hating, blame-America-first bleeding-heart liberals, I still absolutely refuse to assimilate.
Assimilate into Left Coast America?
NEVER!!!
"They've made a mark on every building in our community too."
Just marking THEIR territory.
Have they seen the impact of MS13 yet?
An entire article on these illegal immigrants and not a single mention of "illegal aliens" or even the sympathetic moniker, "undocumented workers".
One would think they lately arrived on the boat at Ellis Island, got their proper medical examinations, were issued a green card, hooked up with their legal sponsors, and are learning English and American History even as we speak!
Agreed. There is the perception, which I am sure you are aware of, that Cubans are the "Whitest" Hispanic group in America. I think that in many ways this perception, true or not I don't know, has helped Cubans be as productive as they are in this nation. Do you agree?
The native Indian population of the island of Cuba was too small and too confined within the island to survive the onslaught of European diseases and the Conquest and was wiped out in the 1500's just as it was wiped out in all the other Caribbean islands. So, unlike, say, Mexicans and Central Americans that had a high percentage of Meso-American Indian ancestry, the population of Cuba was much like the population of the American South: white, black and mixed.
Out here in the Pacific Northwest Coast, people think I have an accent but, when they try to place it, they call it an "East Coast" accent and most frequently ask me if I'm from Massachusetts. (I guess some of the accent from all those New Yorkers living in Miami must have rubbed off on me.) Three of my Cuban-born grandparents were blond and blue eyed as their parents were all of northern Spanish stock from Galicia and Asturias that had come to Cuba prior the 1870's. My father was so blond as a child that he was tow-headed.
So, yeah, up here in the Pacific Northwest, I'm just as pasty-white as my Danish-American wife and all my sunshine-starved neighbors, I have blond, blue-eyed, pasty-white kids (one tans up a bit when we visit Miami and the other one doesn't) and I could claim to be a Mayflower Descendant and nobody would think twice about it.
Be that as it may, white skin only takes you so far in life.
Our Pacific Northwest county is over 95% lilly-white and it has one of the highest unwed pregnancy rates in the State and drug use is rampant. Along with that comes all the derived social problems from low educational levels to poverty and welfare dependence.
My Cuban-born first cousins and I are all multi-millionaires now after having arrived in the U.S. in 1960 with nothing but our parents and the clothes in our suitcases not because we have white skin but because of the way our parents raised us.
We had our parents teach us that no honest job is "beneath you" and we saw them bring home the money by driving taxis, pumping gas or taking on newspaper delivery routes during the hard early years even though they may have been "Big Shot" lawyers or company owners back in Cuba.
We were taught that life can take away your riches but that it cannot take away your education. We were not encouraged to graduate from high school and then to go on to college....we were expected to.
In later years, one of my cousin's kids announced to her and her husband that he was dropping out of high school at the beginning of his Junior year. His father did not say a single word. The next morning, Dad drove his son to the airport, boarded a plane with him from Miami to Philadelphia, drove out into the Pennsylvania countryside with his totally perplexed son and then dropped him off at Valley Forge Military Academy with the words, "Your mother and I love you, son. We will UPS your things to you."
That kid is now also a multi-millionaire with his own company.
We were taught that you had kids with your wife and not with your girlfriend and we were taught that your brain was too precious to fry with drugs.
We were taught that a great education and a quarter will only get you a pack of chewing gum unless you also worked your butt off after you earned your degrees.
We were taught that, if we failed, it was not because somebody did not like Cubans but because we did not do what it took to succeed.
Did white skin help us?
I never gave it a second thought. I was too busy working my butt off.
All I know is that the color of my skin had absolutely nothing to do with scoring the highest score in my Radiology residency class when we took our Radiology specialty Board exam.......Working my butt off did.
If my kids follow in my footsteps and are true to the values taught to me as a child, they will succeed even if the Race Fairy took away their whiteness tomorrow.
If they follow the path of so many poorly raised and messed up kids in our lilly-white county, they will fail in spite of their blond hair, blue eyes and white skin.
Right, I actually agree with you. What I was referring to is that Cubans have the perception as being "White" by many other Hispanics, specifically within the Mexican community. I have seen various articles in which Mexican nationals living in the US are under the impression that Cubans living in Miami are all rich, act "white", and don't share much in common with them. I'm not saying I agree with it, nor do I know if it is true.
Many non-Cuban Latinos feel that way. That's their problem, not ours.
We Cubans did not arrive in Miami "rich". We arrived with the clothes in our suitcases. We made ourselves rich.
I could not afford my first car until I was a Junior in college and that first car was a used Chevy Vega that must have been made out of compressed rust. I managed to keep the Vega on life support until the start of my Senior year in medical school. When the Vega died, I could not afford another car until I was an M.D. and started my internship. I had to use the public bus to get to and from the Hospital during my Senior year in med school.
As far as "acting white", we act as we have always acted which is precisely why we got rich after arriving here with nothing. If they perceive success as "acting white", that says more about their failure than about our success.
I have a Mexican-born medical colleague who is a damn good surgeon and he did not gain his success by wasting time whining about the percentage of European DNA in his cells as compared to the percentage of European DNA in my cells.
In the book Latinos: A Biography of the People, the author talks about how other so-called Latinos think that Cubans are arrogant.
What they see as "arrogance" is the Cuban's total lack of sympathy for the Victim Card.
The author relates one anecdote about how a Mexican complains to a Cuban about how he was turned down for a loan by the bank because the bank is prejudiced against Latinos.
The Cuban replied that when he first came to the U.S., that same bank refused him a loan, not because he was Cuban, but because he had zero collateral.
"Now that I own seven stores", the Cuban went on, "every bank in town including that one keeps trying to lend me money and I'm still Cuban!"
The same book tells of a Cuban joke where a skinny and bedraggled little dog newly arrived from Cuba is ridiculed for his pitiful appearance by the large, well-fed Anglo dogs.
Rather than wallowing in self-pity, the little dog got right in the largest dog's face and announced.
"I may look like this now, but, back in Cuba I was a German Sheppard and, in short order, I will become a German Sheppard again!"
Successful people do not waste their time in Pity Parties whining about whether or not they are white enough or whether society likes or does not like Jews or Asians or Cubans or Mexicans or bald people or fat people or whatever it is that they are.
Successful people just suck it up and get the job done.
For individuals who are into excuses and the Victim Card, however, that is the last thing they want to hear.
I'm glad you cleared that up. Like you said, I had also heard stories of non-Cuban Latinos thinking that Cubans are arrogant, and feeling some sort of resentment towards them. I never really understood it, or knew what it was about.
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