STREETS OF NEW YORK - Mexican moms of Brooklyn

STREETS OF NEW YORK - Mexican moms of Brooklyn

Photographs by David Bacon

A friend once told me once that when she was growing up back east, if you wanted tortillas you had to buy them in a can from Old El Paso.  It was a big joke since she was from Las Cruces, which is right next to El Paso.  I can't imagine what they tasted like.  When my family left New York City in the 1950s there were hardly any Mexicans there, at least that we knew of.  Even when I went back to live for a while in the early 70s there weren't many. 

That's certainly not true anymore.  A few years ago I went to the Cinco de Mayo celebration in Flushing Meadows.  You can still see that huge strange earth globe there, leftover from the 1964 World's Fair, with hollow spaces crisscrossed by metal struts where all the oceans should be.  That year, under the globe lounged all these young cholos and cholas, styling like they were in East Oakland or East LA, their lowrider bikes with the front forks sticking out and chrome all over. 

That year they said there were 750,000 people from Mexico living in New York City - enough so their nickname for it was PueblaYork, the way California's become OaxaCalifornia.

One of the big centers of Mexican life today is Sunset Park in Brooklyn.  There Fourth and Fifth Avenues are lined with taquerias, although their idea of a quesadilla, with orange sauce and lettuce on it, is a little different from what I'm used to, being an Oakland boy.  But the stores have as many signs in Spanish as you see in Huntington Park in southeast LA.  I'm waiting to see if we'll start seeing signs in Mixteco or Nahuatl, the way you can in some places in the San Joaquin Valley.  And if you walk just a block over to Sixth Avenue, the language you hear is Chinese and the restaurants sell smoked duck.  And then a block or two over from that the voices speak Arabic.  New York was never really a melting pot -- just a lot of people from all over, living next to each other, but most fighting to keep ahold of their culture.

So of course in Sunset Park, at around three in the afternoon, you see Mexican moms down at the schoolyard picking up their kids.  Some of the moms are picking up other peoples' children too -- for the parents who work.  Then in the kitchen of the daycare mom, or on a table in the taqueria/pizza joint, or in the apartments in the brownstones along the avenue, moms and kids start doing homework.  It goes on into the evening - making dinner, getting out the calculator, eating, marking up the exercise books.  You realize right away how serious people are about their kids, their teachers and their schools.  To get a good job, you have to learn.

These photographs owe their existence to La Union, a group of Mexican women and mothers in Sunset Park.  They met in the Saint Jacobi Lutheran Church, and organized everything from school protests to training in the latest makeup styles.  The women here include Blandina Morales and her daughter Melissa, Carla Trujillo and Christian Cortez, Estelita Molina and her daughter, two moms out picking up their children, Estelita Molina and the children she cares for, some of Estelita's daycare kids, Lidia Cordoba and her daughter Pamela, Magdelena Gutierrez and Bruce, Margarita Sosa, and Veronica Fuentes at a meeting of La Union.  Thanks to Lety Alanis and Cynthia Santos for making these photographs possible.

STREETS OF NEW YORK -- Kids

STREETS OF NEW YORK -- Kids

Photographs by David Bacon

I was a little boy when we left New York City for Oakland.  My father always said we'd become transcontinental migrants so we could live in a better place to bring up a family. I knew there were other reasons too, even at the time.  He'd been blacklisted and couldn't get work.  Their friends were getting called up before the UnAmerican Activities Committee.  I guess my folks were a little scared, and who wouldn't be.

But I always wondered if I would have turned out different growing up in New York.  Now when I go back I look at the children I see in the street and think -- that could have been me.  I remember going to PS 125, and feeling abandoned when my mother left me there on what must have been my first day.  I remember her bundling me up in a snowsuit later that winter, before we left. 

Kids are kids.  But the ones I see in New York now have a combination of child aspect and adult aspect.  Maybe they grow up fast.  They seem happy enough, but not always.  I see them a lot with questions in their faces, not too sure about this adult world they're faced with.  Then they're funny and aggressive, trying to figure it all out.

Their schools are very urban - right on the street.  Kids seem to live a lot on the street here, from fire drills to ice cream trucks to just walking places with their moms.  These kids are the ones who will inherit this world.  Knowing New Yorkers, the kids here are going to have an outsize voice in saying what that world will be like.

These photographs are for them.

STREETS OF NEW YORK - Work and No Work

STREETS OF NEW YORK - Work and No Work

Photographs by David Bacon

From Chinatown to midtown, Manhattan is part of a city that works, and also that doesn't work.  That is, it's full of working people, but not everyone has a job.  Some people work on the street, while others live and sleep on it.  New York is not like the suburbs, or cities built around malls and cars.  Everything and anything can happen in the streets here. 

Mostly, people are divided into those on their way somewhere and those who have nowhere to go.  People walk fast.  You can tell the tourists simply because they're slow, they stop a lot, and they look at the sights -- the tall buildings, and even the ads on the buildings.  New Yorkers have this determined expression when they walk -- life is too serious to dawdle.

Then there are the New Yorkers who live out on the sidewalk.  The city has more than its share of the homeless.  One man sits and asks for money or a cigarette.  Another sleeps next to a drainpipe.  But even an old man pushing a shopping cart has look of someone on the way somewhere.  It's just that he's pushing it down the middle of 23rd Street, making the tourist busses detour around him.

STREETS OF NEW YORK - The Subway

STREETS OF NEW YORK - The Subway

Photographs by David Bacon

When I go to New York I ride the subway. I'm an Oakland boy, and we have our BART.  But that's not a real subway, even when it goes under the Bay or Market Street.  New York has a real subway.  It always seems like anywhere I want to go is walking distance from a station.  There are 421 of them, so it figures they're close to almost anywhere along its 656 miles of tracks in four boroughs. 

The subway is kind of old, that's true.  The first station opened in 1904.  It makes a lot of noise - not like the subway in Mexico City, which runs on rubber wheels.  When the train comes into the station, pushing a wall of air before it, a deafening roar bounces off the concrete and tiles. It's hard to talk in most of the cars, although some people don't seem to notice.  Even when it's cold outside, the cars can be sweltering, and the seats are hard - not like BART.

But the great thing about the subway is the people.  New York is so diverse - it feels like you're seeing people from everyplace on earth in just a few subway cars.  People who aren't from New York make a big deal about how dangerous it is. But I don't see it.  I see people tired from work, having trouble keeping their eyes open, or sometimes just asleep.  I wonder how they know when to wake up so they don't overshoot their stop. 

People read newspapers and talk to each other in a dozen languages.  When there aren't too many people, they spread out across the seats.  Mothers and fathers hold their children.  Lovers lean into each other while everyone else just looks away.  And looking away is so religiously observed that when someone actually meets your eyes it feels rare and strange.

After 9/11 the police tried to forbid taking photographs in the subway.  Luckily for me, they were overruled.  These photographs are the result, my love letter to the subway.