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| Meet the Wealth Gap
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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.
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| Unequal Protection
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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. |
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| The Good-Behavior Bribe
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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.
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| The United Nations of Brooklyn
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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!" |
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| Dark Hopes for Peace
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 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. |
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| Immigrants Push Western Union to Share the Wealth
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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.
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| A Bard from East New York: Martín Espada
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Brooklyn Rail - April 2007
Called "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors" by Sandra
Cisneros, Martín 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.
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| Alan, Alien
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 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.
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