American dreamers

Alex Goya left Mexico in debt but today owns a restaurant and a newspaper and is the Spanish voice of the Columbus Crew. Tens of thousands like him have streamed into the city. Not all are as fortunate.

Photo by Dan Trittschuh

This story appeared in the May 2002 issue of Columbus Monthly.

Three years ago, Alex Goya was sorting clothes at the Eddie Bauer warehouse on the west side. Tonight, he’s driving his Eddie Bauer edition Ford Expedition down West Broad Street. You sit high in a truck like this, and from up here the landscape feels like one big horizon. Asphalt lots roam up to low-slung car dealerships and one-story strip malls, and the road ahead is seven lanes wide and looks as though it might never stop. Goya’s from Mexico City, the second largest city in the world, where he says his densely packed neighborhood of Villa Coapa is home to as many people as the entire city of Columbus. But tonight, guiding his big truck through the light evening traffic with one finger on the wheel, Goya is obviously quite comfortable with the wide streets and open opportunities of his new home.

“In Mexico we have a nice culture. If my mom is sick, people make soup for her, or the neighbor’s son takes out her trash,” Goya says. “But in Mexico you have to worry about being kidnapped and held for ransom, you have to pay bribes. If you’re middle-class in Mexico, you live behind bars. Here, there’s more security, more freedom.”

Goya just picked up his daughter from gymnastics class, and now, at 9 pm, he’s headed back for more work at Viva Zapata, his Mexican grocery store and restaurant. Viva Zapata takes up one half of a rather decrepit, two-store strip mall on a side street off Georgesville Road. The business has no sign by the street, but the one over the door has a handpainted portrait of Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary, with his famous walrus mustache, angry eyes and bullet belt slung over his right shoulder. It’s an easy place for gringos to miss.

If you’re from Latin America, however, and you live on the west side, chances are that you know exactly how to find Viva Zapata. It’s one of only a few places where members of Columbus’s burgeoning Latino community can take care of so many basic necessities of life: buy tortillas and cheese, meet friends and watch Mexican TV, cash paychecks and send big chunks of money to family back home. Viva Zapata sits next door to Lincoln Park West, the biggest apartment complex in Central Ohio, whose owner, Tom Fortin, says Hispanics occupy 60 percent of his 1,700 units. Which makes Viva Zapata, however diminutive it may appear, a landmark.

“Ask a guy who just got here from Mexico how to find his house and he’ll say, ‘I live right across the street from that really fat lady.’ Well, which fat lady? He doesn’t know English and he doesn’t know his way around,” Goya says. “So then you ask him which Mexican store is closest to him. And he says, ‘Oh! Viva Zapata!’ And so that’s where you meet him.”

Goya is the owner of two businesses, each of which by itself would be enough to place him at the heart of the Columbus Latino community. The first one he started was La Voz Hispana, or The Hispanic Voice, a Spanish language newspaper that began as a monthly in 1998 and now is published every two weeks. When he started the paper in his basement, Goya was its only writer, editor, photographer, ad salesman, layout designer and delivery boy. “I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” he says.

He soon got into more. Six months after he founded the newspaper, Goya borrowed $3,000 from his friends to lease the space for Viva Zapata. His parents flew from Mexico to help; his mom designed the menu while his dad helped remodel the space. Until recently, Goya also ran a Spanish-language radio show on 1580 AM, WVKO. Latinos from all over Columbus called seven nights a week to request songs and say hello to friends and family. Now, WVKO pays Goya and his friend and business partner Alex Flores to broadcast every Columbus Crew home game in Spanish.

“Alex is the American dream,” says Erika Shell Castro, a longtime Latino advocate who now coordinates interpretive services for Grant and Riverside hospitals. “What I like about Alex is that he doesn’t forget where his roots are. He has such a sense for the struggle of the typical Hispanic immigrant.”

In some ways, Goya’s story is not typical. His family was middle-class, he learned English as a child and he entered the United States with a valid visa. In other ways, though, Goya’s journey followed the same pattern of most Hispanics who’ve come to Columbus looking for a better life. Like almost every Latino immigrant, Goya was an economic refugee; at age 30, he came to the US $10,000 in debt, after a bottled-water company he owned in Mexico City went belly up during Mexico’s economic crisis in 1994. Like many Latinos, Goya’s first job in the US was in agriculture—he sorted potatoes in Idaho for $4.25 an hour. He moved to North Carolina to make more money as a construction worker and finally came to Columbus because a friend told him that jobs here were plentiful.

Goya’s first night in Columbus, he and his wife, Leticia, slept on the floor of a two-bedroom apartment with six other immigrants. Goya found work the next day and began a three-year stint of 80-hour weeks during which he cooked at McDonald’s and Bob Evans, worked in a warehouse for UPS and Eddie Bauer, drove delivery trucks for Krispy Kreme and the New York Times. He started at Sam’s Club stocking the freezer on the night shift and wound up managing half the store. He took a free computer class at the downtown library and got a job providing Internet support services for the CallTech company. He quickly paid off his $10,000 debt and began opening businesses.

In three years, Goya went from sleeping on a friend’s floor to being a member of the American middle class. He bought a three-bedroom house in Galloway. His daughter attends ballet classes and is a member of a bilingual Girl Scout troop. Goya’s workweek hasn’t gotten any shorter, however. Managing three businesses and raising three children still keeps him working long hours, seven days a week. “I love Alex,” says Anna Costello, a friend of Goya’s who moved to Columbus from Mexico 22 years ago. “But just in the last couple years, I’ve really seen him age a lot. He works so much!”

Often arriving tired, bewildered, thousands of dollars in debt and speaking little or no English, Latin Americans have poured into Columbus since 1995. The 2000 Census says that Columbus is home to 17,471 Latinos, a 259 percent increase over 1990. Given most Hispanics’ fear of government officials, from cops to Census takers, that figure is undoubtedly low. Most Latino leaders put the number in the 80,000 range. “We all know the Census is wrong,” says Humberto Gonzales, director of the board for the Latino Empowerment and Outreach Network (LEON).

In any community that size, there are bound to be differences. The majority of Latinos in Columbus are from Mexico, but some come from as far away as Argentina and Ecuador. Many grew up in poor rural areas, while others are from cities that dwarf Columbus in size. The largest concentration of Latinos is on the west side, but many live scattered near Northland Mall, and still others live on the east side near Hamilton Road. “There’s a big difference between the north side and west side. Most of the folks on the west side are families,” says Julia Arbini Carbonell, president of the Ohio Hispanic Coalition. “The folks on the north side are generally men who are here without their families.”

Despite their differences, many Latinos in Columbus share common experiences. The most important is that they all moved here because they heard that Columbus has everything they’re looking for—plentiful jobs, high wages, low cost of living and safe neighborhoods. “I came to Columbus because there’s more work here,” says Santiago Pablo, a landscaper and painter who moved to Columbus five years ago. “In areas like Chicago and New York there are more Hispanics, so the jobs don’t pay very much. Also, I’ve got three kids, and Columbus just feels much safer for them.”

The majority of Hispanics in Columbus entered this country illegally. “It’s impossible to know for sure how many, but it’s definitely true that most people who come to the United States from Latin America do so without documents,” says the Rev. José Pérez, a native of Colombia who administers mass in Spanish every Sunday to hundreds of people at the Holy Name Church in Clintonville. Once they get here, most Latinos use connections with family or friends to find apartments and jobs. Few speak English when they arrive, and since many Hispanics live and work entirely surrounded by other Spanish speakers, they may have limited opportunities to learn.

It’s in this insular community that an underground economy flourishes and opportunities for abuse abound. The community is rife with stories of employers who do not pay Latino employees for their work, of used-car dealers who charge Latinos exorbitant prices, of Latino women afraid to call the authorities when they become the victims of domestic violence, all due to the ever-present fear of deportation.

A growing number of advocates and social-service agencies are trying to penetrate this little world, to prevent the worst abuses and bring the problems of Columbus Latinos to the eyes of political leaders. But the highest barricades between the Hispanic community and everyone else remain: the language barrier and simple fear.

There’s an area of about two square blocks in Lincoln Park West that becomes a ghost town during the second half of August. That’s when hundreds of people pile into pickups to make the five-day pilgrimage to San Bernardo, a little town in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico’s second poorest state. They arrive for the town’s annual festival to reunite with relatives and to dance, attend weddings, ride bulls in a makeshift rodeo and whirl around the town’s dirt-covered central plaza in spinning carnival rides.

“Each year, a different man sponsors the festival. He has to hold a huge party at his house with enough food and drinks for everybody in town for the entire three days. He has to buy the fireworks, and then he has to buy white flowers for the church for a whole year after the festival,” says Alma Santos, a San Bernardo native who works as a translator for St. Vincent Family Services in Lincoln Park West. “It costs 7,000 to 15,000 dollars to sponsor the party. The men who do it, they all live here in Columbus.”

There are virtually no jobs in San Bernardo; the largest industry, after subsistence farming, is a small factory that makes concrete blocks. So almost everyone between the ages of 17 and 50 leaves town to find jobs in the US. Many people in Columbus save money all year to make the trek to San Bernardo, and as gifts to their families back home they give Nike shoes and Tommy Hilfiger T-shirts. They also give away their pickups; they can’t enter the United States at the legal border crossings, so they can’t bring their trucks back with them. When the party ends on Aug. 21, everyone climbs onto buses and flatbed trucks for the long drive to the border. San Bernardo sinks back into the sleepy doldrums of poverty for the next 51 weeks, a deserted town of children and senior citizens. It’s as if a conquering army has stolen three-quarters of the population and left behind its fleet of personnel carriers, all with Ohio license plates.

“People come to Columbus because they don’t have the resources to survive in San Bernardo,” Santos says. “I’d say 60 percent of the people I see here are from Oaxaca.”

Once they arrive in Columbus, people from Latin America try to maintain what they can of their cultural traditions, often with an American twist. Santiago Pablo painted his first portrait in San Bernardo when he was 10. It was to be his last year of education—after the sixth grade, his parents wanted him to work on their small farm. The plan changed when his classmates began asking him to paint their pictures. “My teacher took me aside and said, ‘Pablo, you’re good at this. Don’t hold yourself back. Do it,’ ” he says.

Pablo’s parents sent him to live in Mexico City, where he attended school and became an illustrator for La Prensa, one of Mexico’s largest newspapers. He says he lived comfortably for 15 years, but then decided to come to the United States. Now he works full time as a landscaper for Lincoln Park West and paints during the evenings; his work is sold at the Civilization art gallery in Clintonville.

“There were no opportunities [in Mexico] to exhibit my work,” says Pablo. He continues to paint the stylized portraits of Aztec rulers and gods that are traditional fodder for art in San Bernardo, but Pablo also branched out—his best works are his surrealist paintings reminiscent of Salvador Dali. “I’m much happier here than I was in Mexico City. I make more money here as a landscaper than I did there at a newspaper, and that makes it easier to do my art.”

Others find different ways to maintain their culture. Maria Bolivar (not her real name) arrived in Columbus from San Bernardo three years ago. On a cold Monday evening in March, she meets with 22 other Mexicans as they walk across a parking lot in Lincoln Park West. Some are holding potted flowers while two men carry a portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the preeminent saint of Catholicism in Mexico. The procession enters a small apartment, and the followers place the painting and flowers on a makeshift altar—a low dresser draped with white lace tablecloths, framed by Christmas lights hung on the wall in the shape of a star. The participants pray and sing songs for an hour and a half as two men play guitars. The virgin will stay in this apartment for a week, until the group returns next Monday to carry her off to someone else’s house.

In Mexico, processions like this happen only in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Here in Columbus, Latinos change their traditions in order to keep them. “We do processions year-round here because lots of people work on Sundays and can’t make it to church,” says a man who helps organize this procession. “Plus, in Mexico, we always walk. But this is the United States! If it’s too cold or raining or if it’s too far to walk, we do the procession by car.”

Like a lot of things in the Latino community, the processions of the Virgin of Guadalupe happen quietly, almost underground. Bolivar had to work one Monday, and it took her two weeks to find the procession again. That frustrated her, but then again she has her own hidden life to attend to. In addition to her job in the kitchen at Dave & Buster’s, Bolivar is a businesswoman. She has 20 different brands of phone cards hanging from nails just inside the front door of her apartment, sorted by denominations of $5, $10, $25 and $50. Bolivar sat on her couch watching Mexican TV one recent Tuesday night, and every five minutes for an hour and a half came the quiet knock of another person who wanted to buy a phone card to call home.

Bolivar does not advertise—thousands of people drive the busy street in front of her apartment every day, oblivious to her little cottage industry. Secrecy is a form of protection to Latinos who live in the US without proper documents. Denied the keys to a stable life in this country, many Latinos become adept at avoiding the government, at subterfuge, at hiding in plain sight.

“No. I feel good here. I don’t really miss my family that much,” says a 20-year old man from Oaxaca who’s worked in Columbus for three years as a landscaper. He sits uncomfortably on a tall stool, answering the questions in Spanish as quickly as possible. He wants this interview to end. “I go wherever I want, do whatever I want and I’m not afraid of the police.”

“He’s lying,” says the man’s friend Christina, after he leaves the room. “He’s told me that he cries in his room some nights because he misses his mom so much. He was in a car accident a few months ago, and what did he do? He left his car on the freeway and ran. He was scared the police would find him because he doesn’t have a green card, a license or any insurance.”

Immigrants may give the police and the Immigration and Naturalization Service too much credit. “We have our priorities. We focus first on criminal aliens, people who came here and committed a felony,” says Mark Hansen, director of the INS in Ohio. “The reality is that our resources in Central Ohio consist of three special agents and a supervisor. That makes things rather difficult.”

The problem for many undocumented immigrants, however, is they don’t have to come face to face with an INS agent to get into serious trouble. It’s the little things most of us take for granted that can jeopardize an entire family’s livelihood. “I cannot overemphasize the importance of having a driver’s license,” says LEON leader Gonzales. “If you cannot get a driver’s license, every little problem gets compounded. The policies that keep Latinos from obtaining driver’s licenses are causing a new black market to open.”

Without a driver’s license it becomes enormously difficult to do the most basic tasks in American society: find a job, rent an apartment, open a bank account, buy a car, get insurance. The black market Gonzales mentions provides Latinos the things that the legal market won’t, but since this underground economy is by definition illegal, the law is helpless to protect those whom the black market abuses. The underground economy starts with the traffic of people themselves. Most Hispanics in Columbus got here with the help of coyotes, people who make a business of smuggling human cargo. Coyotes don’t simply ferry people across the Rio Grande, however. They often meet people in their hometowns and escort them all the way to Ohio.

“We were passed between 20 different coyotes,” says a 32-year-old woman who emigrated from Ecuador a year ago. She borrowed $9,000 from her aunt for the trip, which she’s now paying back at 5 percent monthly interest. She and her husband hid in the bottom of a cargo ship for the 15-day voyage from Ecuador to Guatemala, sneaked across a river at night into Mexico and then spent a month traveling north to the US border, mostly on foot. Only then did they cross into the US, walking three days through the desert. Why risk such a long, dangerous and expensive journey? “My husband made five dollars a day in Ecuador, and I made less,” she says. “In Ecuador, one chicken costs five dollars. One chicken! I have four daughters. How am I going to send them to school making money like that? So I left them with my mother and came here to work.”

The woman and her husband both found work with the same landscaping company, and for a while they sent money home to their daughters as they struggled to pay their debts and cover the rent. She recently injured her foot on the job, so now the couple depends solely on her husband’s income. Their debts must be paid, however, so for the moment they cannot afford to send their daughters to school.

During her entire trip, she says the coyotes were never violent and they never abandoned the people in their care. She was lucky. Stories abound in the Hispanic community of coyotes who rob, rape or desert their charges. “We have a serious problem in the Latino community where women were raped by coyotes as they came across the border, and then they get here and discover they have AIDS,” says Latino advocate Shell Castro.

Once it delivers them here, the black market provides Latinos the documents they need to get started. One man from San Bernardo says he bought a fake green card and social security card in Los Angeles for $40. A woman who came from the Mexican state of Nayarit nine months ago says she paid $70 for a social security card alone. Fake identification is useless if a person gets pulled over by the police, but it’s essential to getting a job with a legitimate company.

Once a Latino lands a job using a fake card, however, she instantly starts losing money. “The stereotype is, ‘Oh, these Mexicans are coming to our country, taking our jobs, stealing all our services and they don’t pay taxes.’ That’s just not true,” Fortin says. “What actually happens is they’re giving their employers fake social security numbers, but their employers are deducting real money from their paychecks. These people are paying taxes but not getting any services in return.”

Many employers treat their Latino workers well. Some don’t. “I’ve met people who are working construction and getting paid 50 dollars a day, and it doesn’t matter how long the day is. Ten hours? Twelve hours?” says Beatriz Ramirez, a longtime Hispanic advocate. “I told them that they were being exploited, but if they’re undocumented, who can they go to for help? If they complain, the employer threatens to call INS.”

Come payday, whatever the amount of their checks, immigrants are stuck with another problem: What to do with their money? Many Latinos who just arrived here, who may live in cramped apartments with lots of people they barely know, are reluctant to leave their money lying around the house, so many carry it with them. This makes them easy targets. “They’ve got these huge bulges in their pockets,” Goya says. “They get robbed all the time because people figured out that if you see some Mexican guy walking down the road, chances are pretty good that he’s got 2,000 or 3,000 dollars on him.”

Some financial institutions are beginning to learn about Latinos’ banking problems, and they’re realizing that Hispanics constitute a vast, virtually untapped market. “The growing number of Latinos in Columbus . . . quite frankly took us by surprise,” says Tom Furrey, president and CEO of Columbus-based Western Credit Union. To reach out to these potential customers, the credit union now accepts voters’ registration cards from Mexico as identification to open a bank account.

A similar learning process is taking place across Columbus as government, hospitals and social-service agencies reach out to Hispanics. The South-Western City Schools district is hiring more bilingual tutors to work with its Spanish-speaking students, says Jeff Warner, the district’s spokesperson. Carina Castellanos started doing outreach two months ago to help Hispanics weatherproof their homes through the Columbus Metropolitan Area Community Action Organization. Every month, social-service providers meet at Lincoln Park West; the March meeting drew representatives from 20 organizations. “We’ve made some progress in Columbus,” says Arbini Carbonell. “There are many services being provided on the west side, but very few anywhere else. The law states that every public service must be accessible to non-English-speaking communities. We still have a long way to go.”

As a growing number of nonprofits try to meet the day-to-day needs of Columbus Latinos, many in the community grumble about the need for systematic change. Latino leaders say their first target for political action will be the issue of driver’s licenses.

According to Ohio Revised Code 4507.06, the only requirement to receive a license is to fill out a Bureau of Motor Vehicles form; providing a social security number is optional. It’s only the BMV’s administrative rules that require Latinos to provide additional immigration documents that prove they entered the US legally. Hispanic leaders say the agency is overstepping its bounds. “Why is the Bureau of Motor Vehicles getting involved in immigration? That’s not its job. We should let the INS handle immigration and let the BMV do its job, which is to give driver’s licenses,” says Joseph Mas, a lawyer and native of Cuba. Mas, a Democrat, is running against Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge Dan Hogan in the November election. “The governor has the power to change this without introducing any new legislation. He wouldn’t even have to sign anything.”

At a March 13 meeting between Gov. Bob Taft and Eleazar Benjamin Ruiz y Avila, the former Mexican consulate to Ohio and Michigan, Ruiz y Avila says he pressed Taft to consider changing the BMV rules. “I think [the governor] told him he would just look into it,” says Joe Andrews, spokesperson for the governor.

Bagging groceries behind the counter, Alex Goya sees everyone who passes through Viva Zapata. He sees the construction workers and landscapers, all sweaty and smudged, walk in holding crisp white envelopes containing their paychecks and looking to send money home. He sees vanloads of people rubbing their eyes and legs, road-weary after the long drive from the Texas border. He sees the drug dealers, fake-document peddlers and coyotes; these he asks to leave, quietly but firmly. He sees the young guys who just got here from little farming villages in Mexico, terrified and silent, and he sees those same guys a few months later. “It’s funny because they get here and they’re all afraid. They won’t talk to nobody,” Goya says. “Then once they’ve been working for a while and have some money, they come in well dressed, they’ve got these big gold chains, they’re loud and boisterous. People really change here.”

Goya also meets families who are struggling. Maybe the father was injured on a construction site or Mom just lost her job. He helps as he can, giving them tortillas, beans and eggs. He tells them to pay him back when they can; the vast majority of them do. “The people who come here are good people,” Goya says. “All they want to do is work hard and provide for their families.”

Chris Maag is a staff writer for Columbus Monthly.