Increased Attacks Against Mexicans in New York Area
Opinion Piece on Hate Crimes against Mexican Immigrants
GUEST POST BY Brad Powell
In New York City there have been no less than ten hate crimes committed against human beings of Mexican descent this year. Many of these vicious attacks took place in a neighborhood quaintly named Port Richmond in the borough of Staten Island. The most recent attack occurred over the weekend when a seventeen year old was beaten and subjected to racist slurs for $10 out of his wallet. The local media has continued to bow in deference to the NYPD classification of the attacks as "bias crimes" instead of "hate crimes;" the latter of course qualifies the perpetrators for harsher punishment.
New York City is largely off the radar in terms of the national discourse on immigration, especially in light of the inhumane laws being passed in more overtly racist places like Virginia (yes, Virginia), and of course most recently Arizona. New Yorkers have an obligation and a stake in protecting their Mexican brethren. The time has come to stand up for those who are duly oppressed because of their skin color and their legal status, which make them both targets for abuse by intolerant xenophobes and less likely to receive the full protection of the NYPD.
In one recent news account a citizen of Staten Island proffered an explanation for the attacks as grounded in the high unemployment of natives, "The average Mexican immigrant is working five days a week. There's young men here who can't get a job (http://wcbstv.com/topstories/staten.island.violence.2.1837529.html)." There is even a vernacular term for the attacks, "knockouts," defined as robbing a Mexican on their way home from work. The conflation of unemployment with immigration perpetuates the falsity that immigrants are stealing jobs out from under Americans. In fact, most immigrants are working long hours in below minimum wage jobs like dishwashing and meat packing that Americans brashly turn up their nose to.
In my own research for a class on immigration at Columbia University I have spoken with several immigrants of varying legal status. Time and again the story is one of very hard work with very little reward; many of these individuals work 11-12 hour days 6 days per week. These are hard workers often far from their families only searching for some way to improve their lot in life for both themselves and posterity. To blame them for our economic problems adds salt to untreated wounds. A more accurate account of high unemployment rates would look to the recent thieveries of Wall Street and the corporate downsizing justified in its wake, not to those at the absolute bottom of the capitalist hierarchy.
Perhaps it is a sad bit of irony that Port Richmond sits directly across from Wall Street, only obscured by one of our nation's most iconic monuments: the Statue of Liberty. This goddess of freedom stands ready to accept "the poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Nowhere is it inscribed either on the statue or in our collective consciousness that this freedom does not apply to Mexicans. All New Yorkers, indeed all Americans should be ashamed and outraged every time a hate crime is perpetrated against a human being, and that outrage should be doubled when the victim is a duly oppressed immigrant falsely blamed for our economic problems and lacking the full protection of the state.
Related notes:
3 NJ teens charged with videotaped immigrant death
By SAMANTHA HENRY, Associated Press Writer Samantha Henry, Associated Press Writer Wed Jul 28, 4:15 am ET SUMMIT, N.J. – Dusk fell around Salvadoran immigrant Abelino Mazaniego as he sat on a bench on a promenade in an upscale New York suburb after finishing his restaurant shift. As night encroached, so did a group of teenagers, including one with a cell phone videocamera at the ready.
Then, authorities say, they beat him unconscious, with the camera rolling.
Days later, the 47-year-old father of four was dead — but not before the video had been circulated among teenagers in Summit, N.J., authorities say. And not before a nurse in the emergency room where he was taken the night of July 17 was accused of pilfering several hundred dollars from his wallet.
The attacks on Mazaniego's body and dignity resulted in days of escalating court actions that culminated Tuesday in murder charges against three young men, ages 17, 18 and 19. A fourth teenager believed to have videotaped the attack hasn't been charged, but authorities weren't divulging details on the teen's involvement or potential culpability.
In Summit on Tuesday evening, a young girl sobbed, trembled, and clutched the waist of an older woman as they stood in a group of five people in front of a shrine of sunflowers, votive prayer candles, handwritten notes and a photo of Mazaniego that had been placed on the bench where he was attacked. Speaking quietly in Spanish, a woman with red-rimmed eyes said she was Mazaniego's wife of 29 years, and the rest were family members. She declined to give her name, saying she was too upset and scared to speak about the attack.
Mazaniego was "a hardworking, punctual, friendly employee," said Colin Crasto, manager and chef at Dabbawalla Indian restaurant, across the street from where the attack took place, and where the victim had worked for three years as a cook's assistant. A photo of Mazaniego was taped to the front window, with a message saying he had been the sole supporter of his family and asking patrons to donate money to help his family.
Along Summit's main thoroughfare, a place of upscale clothing and jewelry stores, real-estate brokerages advertising million-dollar homes, and luxury SUVS parked along the street, merchants and residents said the attack was an anomaly for the town, a vibrant mix of nationalities that considers itself welcoming of immigrants.
"I know bad things happen all the time, everywhere, but it's unusual here," said Neil Rodriguez, the manager of The Wine List, who knew Mazaniego, as he worked a few doors down. Recalling Mazaniego as a "genial, really nice gentlemen," Rodriguez said that, as a Hispanic, he was bothered that the incident was being portrayed by some as racially motivated.
"It's a random act of violence, there's not a lot of racial strife in this town," he said. "I'd like to see the parents that produced such monsters," he added, referring to the alleged attackers.
Khayri Williams-Clark, 18, and an unidentified 17-year-old, both of Summit, were arrested Wednesday on manslaughter charges. Williams-Clark pleaded not guilty to the charge Friday.
Now they're charged with murder, along with Nigel Dumas, 19, of Morristown. A spokesman for the public defender's office, which is representing Williams-Clark and the 17-year-old, declined to comment Tuesday and said the office hadn't yet received an application to represent Dumas.
The 17-year-old is being held in the Union County juvenile detention center, while Williams-Clark is being held at the Union County jail on $100,000 bail, prosecutors said. Bail for Dumas, at the same jail, has been set at $250,000. Authorities wouldn't say how many teens were in the group or whether there would be more charges. They also weren't discussing theories on the motive for the beating — whether it was Mazaniego's background, a thrill killing or some other reason.
But it apparently wasn't an attempt to get the $640 in cash that Mazaniego was carrying.
Police found the victim after the beating and took him to the hospital, where, officials say, nurse Stephan Randolph, 39, of Flemington, took the money out of the unconscious victim's wallet.
Family members noticed the missing money and told authorities, who charged Randolph with third-degree theft Monday, six days after Mazaniego died.
Randolph could not be reached for comment by The Associated Press this week; a phone listed in his name rang unanswered.
From the
New York TimesJuly 30, 2010
Attacks on Mexicans Leave Neighborhood in Turmoil
Police officers patrolling by foot, car and helicopter have turned Port Richmond Avenue, a busy commercial strip on Staten Island, into something like an armed encampment. Reporters have descended en masse. Community leaders dash from crisis meeting to crisis meeting.
A spate of attacks in the past four months on Mexican immigrants has upended Port Richmond, a working-class neighborhood on the borough’s north shore that is more accustomed to being ignored.
But amid the show of force by the Police Department, which deployed teams of officers to the area this week in what it described as a temporary move to protect residents and defuse tensions, local leaders are taking a longer view.
“The question is, what happens when everybody pulls up the tents and leaves?” said the Rev. Terry Troia, an activist and Staten Island native who has been at the center of the hour-by-hour civic response to the unrest.
This is not the first time Latinos in Port Richmond have been victimized in bias attacks. Ms. Troia, executive director of Project Hospitality, an interfaith organization that serves the poor of Staten Island, said the violence dates back to 2003. In one attack, a Mexican immigrant who worked as a cook at an IHOP restaurant was killed by three assailants in 2006, according to local activists and the Mexican Consulate in New York.
Some of those earlier episodes attracted news coverage, but then the neighborhood fell back into its usual fraught rhythms. Now its Mexican population, Ms. Troia said, is particularly concerned about what might happen next. “They’re worried that as soon as the police leave, they’re going to be set upon,” she said.
The Rev. Dr. Tony Baker, pastor of St. Philip’s Baptist Church in the neighborhood’s heart, said the attacks pointed to deep-seated problems. “I think we’ve gone to sleep on the conditions we find ourselves in,” he said. “And we woke up in the midst of a racial war.”
The police said Friday that nine men — all of them Mexican immigrants — had been attacked since early April, all by young black men. Six suspects have been arrested in connection with three of the beatings, but a grand jury turned down prosecutors’ requests to indict them on hate-crime charges. Two men have pleaded guilty to robbery in two of the cases; the third case is pending.
The most recent attack was on July 23. Fidel González, a 31-year-old Mexican immigrant walking home after playing soccer in a park, was set upon by several men yelling anti-Mexican epithets, the police said. The men punched Mr. González and hit him with a scooter, breaking his jaw and cutting open his head, then stole his backpack, which contained an iPod and two cellphones, the police said.
On Tuesday night, after appeals by the consulate and local leaders, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly announced he was sending an emergency contingent to Port Richmond, including about 130 additional officers, a 15-member hate crimes investigative team, horse patrols, helicopter flyovers and mobile observation towers at key intersections.
Mexico’s consul general, Rúben Beltrán, sent a representative on Monday to set up a neighborhood office and directly assist the Mexican population. The representative drives around in a car emblazoned with the phone number for a 24-hour, toll-free hot line and a message in Spanish that begins, “Mexican, know your rights.”
Since the representative arrived, several more Mexicans have told consulate officials that they, too, were victims of attacks but had been too fearful of deportation or retribution to come forward sooner, consulate officials said.
“There are all kinds of beatings that aren’t recorded,” Ms. Troia said. “People talk casually about this: ‘Oh, I got a dislocated shoulder’; ‘I lost my eye.’ ”
Civic leaders and police officials say they are exploring many possible reasons for the violence: anti-immigrant fervor, racism, gangs, the boredom of idle youth during the summer, joblessness, overcrowding and even the notion that attacking Latinos acquired a cachet in the neighborhood this year, prompting copycat assaults. But in the past few days, all conversations about motive have eventually turned to a dynamic familiar to many neighborhoods in New York: demographic change.
In the mid-20th century, Port Richmond was heavily populated with Eastern European Jews and Irish immigrants, who owned many of the businesses along Port Richmond Avenue. But after the Staten Island Mall opened in 1973, stores closed, property values fell and many longtime residents moved away.
Blacks became the dominant population in the 1980s and ’90s, but the number of Latinos also grew. After 9/11 and the imposition of tougher immigration and travel rules that impeded the flow of migrant laborers around the country and across borders, the Mexican population planted deeper roots in Port Richmond and grew quickly.
In 1990, according to census statistics, 950 people of Mexican descent lived in the 120th Police Precinct, which includes Port Richmond. By 2008, that number had grown to 8,400. Before 9/11, there were only three Mexican-owned businesses in Port Richmond, Ms. Troia said; now there are more than 50.
The student body of Public School 20, once mostly black, is now nearly all Latino and predominantly Mexican.
That growth among Mexicans has unsettled members of some other minority groups, including Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, and especially blacks, many residents say. Black religious leaders and community activists say they often hear constituents complain that Mexicans and other Latinos have taken jobs that should have been theirs. “That’s a conversation that’s been going on,” Dr. Baker said. But, he added, some who have complained “are not going out to get jobs.”
Rogelio Vasquez, 48, the victim in one case that has been resolved, said he feared that he might be attacked again for cooperating with the authorities. Still, he said he harbored no ill will toward his assailants; the attacks, he said, were “the errors of young people.”
Port Richmond’s leaders are searching for solutions. Some want to address the lack of community resources, including jobs, housing and recreation. Others are looking for ways to bridge racial, cultural and even generational divides through initiatives like a gathering of mothers from different ethnic groups, or a midnight basketball league.
“What it calls for is work,” Dr. Baker said. “The Latino community, the African-American community, the Caucasian community, coming together and saying, ‘Enough is enough.’ ”
Al Baker contributed reporting.
