Walking down Roosevelt Ave. I passed the store near 89th Street that always has statues of the baby Jesus lined out in front, each one in a unique frilly outfit. Sometimes it's Baby Jesus as a jibaro with a straw hat; other times He's decked out in a red velvet robe.
This place is a font of Catholic/spiritualist tchotchkies. You have your prayer cards, your rosary beads, your dominoes, your tiny plastic vials of holy water. And what's this: a do-it-yourself pamphlet on how to construct a Santa Muerte shrine.
All manner of brujeria going on in this neighborhood...
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
Pacing Corona
Hello to all my loyal blog followers, unseen eyeballs flickering beyond the horizon of my computer screen. Hellooooooooo!
(Anyone out there?)
Enough of that. I wanted to write about my Thursday in Corona. I volunteer every Thursday morning at PS 19Q on Roosevelt Ave. and 98 St., a pleasant little reading program run by New York Cares. The children are bright, well-behaved, chatty, and most enticingly of all, they love to read.
So I did that, then came back to my apartment to try to work on a few story ideas. Around 11 my phone rang-- it was an editor at the metro desk of the NYT, where I'm registered as a stringer. They barely ever call me-- their list of underemployed young journos must run long. The assignment: see if I couldn't track down the brother of that poor young man whose particularly gruesome traffic death had piqued the city's interest.
They gave me the address. His house was one of those simple, mid-century brick family houses, divided into three apartments. A tremendous wind rattled the windows. On the front door, there was a red ribbon looped through where the doorknob would be.
I didn't find the brother. But I did run into one of his roommates, a middle aged Ecuadorian woman with a heart-shaped face and curly hair, who was on her way to a cleaning job at the airport. She invited me upstairs, where another roommate, a Dominican, was cooking lunch. ( I admit I noticed how cute he was.) A cat eyeballed me from the window. The Ecuadorian sat down with me and said that yes, she knew Guido. He was a good man, from a family of eleven children, always working to send money to his wife, daughter, and mother back home (the women in his life). These people, she said, they harm no one.
She gave me the address of a funeral home on the other side of Roosevelt Ave., where I might run into the brother. On the walk over, I passed a Mexican cheese factory, and a print shop whose windows were decorated with posters for strip clubs and announcements of festivals for the Virgen. On the stone lintel overhanging a taco shop, you could make out the last few letters of the original Italian sign: "---cchia."
I arrived at the Rivera Funeral Home, but the brother wasn't there, and the attendant told me he didn't want to speak with reporters. I left a note in case he changed his mind, and left.
One of the grotesque things about this story is the intense, fleeting attention surrounding it. If Guido Carabajo had died in a construction accident or a hit-and-run, that might merit a few lines in the paper. Now his name is made famous by his death-- only his family and maybe a few friends will have known him for anything else. But then I suppose those are the only people whose memories of Guido Carabajo matter.
(Anyone out there?)
Enough of that. I wanted to write about my Thursday in Corona. I volunteer every Thursday morning at PS 19Q on Roosevelt Ave. and 98 St., a pleasant little reading program run by New York Cares. The children are bright, well-behaved, chatty, and most enticingly of all, they love to read.
So I did that, then came back to my apartment to try to work on a few story ideas. Around 11 my phone rang-- it was an editor at the metro desk of the NYT, where I'm registered as a stringer. They barely ever call me-- their list of underemployed young journos must run long. The assignment: see if I couldn't track down the brother of that poor young man whose particularly gruesome traffic death had piqued the city's interest.
They gave me the address. His house was one of those simple, mid-century brick family houses, divided into three apartments. A tremendous wind rattled the windows. On the front door, there was a red ribbon looped through where the doorknob would be.
I didn't find the brother. But I did run into one of his roommates, a middle aged Ecuadorian woman with a heart-shaped face and curly hair, who was on her way to a cleaning job at the airport. She invited me upstairs, where another roommate, a Dominican, was cooking lunch. ( I admit I noticed how cute he was.) A cat eyeballed me from the window. The Ecuadorian sat down with me and said that yes, she knew Guido. He was a good man, from a family of eleven children, always working to send money to his wife, daughter, and mother back home (the women in his life). These people, she said, they harm no one.
She gave me the address of a funeral home on the other side of Roosevelt Ave., where I might run into the brother. On the walk over, I passed a Mexican cheese factory, and a print shop whose windows were decorated with posters for strip clubs and announcements of festivals for the Virgen. On the stone lintel overhanging a taco shop, you could make out the last few letters of the original Italian sign: "---cchia."
I arrived at the Rivera Funeral Home, but the brother wasn't there, and the attendant told me he didn't want to speak with reporters. I left a note in case he changed his mind, and left.
One of the grotesque things about this story is the intense, fleeting attention surrounding it. If Guido Carabajo had died in a construction accident or a hit-and-run, that might merit a few lines in the paper. Now his name is made famous by his death-- only his family and maybe a few friends will have known him for anything else. But then I suppose those are the only people whose memories of Guido Carabajo matter.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Here We Go
I've been thinking about starting a blog for a long time. Thinking, and then forgetting. On the internet, it's unlikely that any one thought can hold your attention for more than a minute.
See, I read a fair share of blogs, and I've read blogs about starting blogs, and they all recommend a tight focus, an area of expertise to give your blog the sparkle of credibility in a sea of info and self-referential hooey. So I've been waiting and thinking about what kind of blog I could start, stymied by the realization that I'm not an expert in anything, and all I really want to do is write about people and places that catch my eye. There's the neighborhood I live in, Jackson Heights, Queens, a buzzing multiethnic hive of creativity and dysfunction. There's most anything connected to Latin America, particularly Central America and the Andean region. There's my ongoing effort to not be naive about how New York City politics and social services really work. And there's learning how to loosen up and write pithy, juicy notes on the web without leaving myself open to identity fraud.
Etc. So let's see how this goes!
See, I read a fair share of blogs, and I've read blogs about starting blogs, and they all recommend a tight focus, an area of expertise to give your blog the sparkle of credibility in a sea of info and self-referential hooey. So I've been waiting and thinking about what kind of blog I could start, stymied by the realization that I'm not an expert in anything, and all I really want to do is write about people and places that catch my eye. There's the neighborhood I live in, Jackson Heights, Queens, a buzzing multiethnic hive of creativity and dysfunction. There's most anything connected to Latin America, particularly Central America and the Andean region. There's my ongoing effort to not be naive about how New York City politics and social services really work. And there's learning how to loosen up and write pithy, juicy notes on the web without leaving myself open to identity fraud.
Etc. So let's see how this goes!
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