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Thursday, 28 August 2008

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Surviving a Weekend with White Supremacists

Alternet - July 4, 2007
In late June, two days after temporarily relocating to Alabama, I'm seated in the conference room of a hotel in the town of Sheffield, in the northwest section of the state. I've come to the region to do research for a book about Latino immigrants in the U.S. South -- where their population is growing fastest -- and how they are (or aren't) being welcomed.

Meet the Wealth Gap

The Nation - June 30, 2008
For a delivery worker, perched on a bicycle with plastic bags of food dangling from each handlebar, Manhattan's East Side offers many opportunities for a trip to the emergency room. I learn this one May afternoon as I trail 26-year-old Apolinar Perez, a chubby-faced Mexican immigrant who skillfully steers his black mountain bike through the chaos. A taxi switches lanes without warning, nearly clipping my front wheel.

Unequal Protection

ColorLines - November/December 2007
Early in the morning of January 24, 2004, Timothy Stansbury Jr. and his friend Terrence Fisher were enjoying a birthday party in a friend's apartment when they left to retrieve additional compact discs (Fisher was the party DJ). They took to the roof, a technically prohibited but commonly used shortcut for residents moving within the buildings of the Louis Armstrong Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. They picked up the CDs at Fisher's apartment, were joined by another companion and headed back up the stairs to return to the party.

The Good-Behavior Bribe

New York Magazine, October 28, 2007
At 5:30 in the morning, Ruddy Mieses, one of the first participants in Michael Bloomberg's radical new antipoverty plan, parks his rented white Crown Victoria in front of a forbidding brick complex in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and takes stock of his finances. The livery-cab driver's ten-and-a-half-hour shift has earned him $145. Not too bad.

The United Nations of Brooklyn

The New York Times, October 21, 2007
Hudoykul Hafizov, a soft-spoken, slightly built immigrant from Uzbekistan, works as inventory manager at Silver Rod Pharmacy in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and he has a favorite joke: "A person who knows three languages is trilingual. Someone who knows two languages is bilingual. But do you know what they call a person who speaks only one language?"

Pausing for a beat, Hafizov replied triumphantly to his own question: "American!"

Dark Hopes for Peace

Brooklyn Rail - July/August 2007
On a gorgeous late afternoon I follow an energetic boy through his father's desert garden on a hillside. It has been another sweltering day, but by now the weather is cooling off nicely out here in the country. As the orange sun hovers low the sky continues to turn darker shades of blue, and I stumble over rocks in order to keep up with the child and his dog.

Below us is a valley. In the distance one can make out two villages, to our left and right. "Do you ever go over there?" I ask, wiping a slight sweat from my forehead.

Immigrants Push Western Union to Share the Wealth

The Nation - May 11, 2007
For Mother's Day, Martha Ugarte sent $100 from Los Angeles to her 67-year-old mother in Oaxaca, Mexico. For this, she paid $14.95 to Western Union, and lost another $2 in the exchange rate commission. It's this 17 percent fee that has her outraged, and it explains why she decided to travel across the country to protest outside a midtown Manhattan skyscraper on May 10, where Western Union was holding its first shareholder meeting since spinning off from parent company First Data in 2006.

A Bard from East New York: Mart�n Espada

Brooklyn Rail - April 2007
Called "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors" by Sandra Cisneros, Mart�n Espada has published eight books of poetry, including Imagine the Angels of Bread, winner of an American Book Award, and Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002, which received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement. His newest book, published last year, is The Republic of Poetry.

Alan, Alien

New York Magazine - April 17, 2006
On Saturdays, when Alan's father works a twelve-hour shift as a cook at a nearby restaurant, his best friend, Daniel, comes over to play. If it's warm they run about, and if it's cold they sprawl out on the mattress in Alan's bedroom, which he shares with his parents and younger sister, and play video games. It is cold right now�two homeless men will be found frozen to death tomorrow in Brooklyn�so they are inside, and Alan's 9-year-old face, normally gentle and wrinkle-free, is stuck in a grimace. He's losing the fight.