A Long Island Village Takes a Stand Against Hate Crimes

Last year I attended the National League of Cities conference here in Denver, where I watched an outstanding documentary called, “Welcome to Shelbyville.” It was about a small city in Tennessee that was coming to grips with a growing Somali population and how immigration was changing the community.

The film could easily have been made about Colorado towns such as Greeley or Fort Morgan, where many East Africans have arrived to take jobs in the local meat processing plants. In fact, throughout the South, the West and the Midwest, these new “gateway” communities are experiencing the challenges and opportunities associated with immigration that only large urban centers experienced in the past.

My organization, the National Civic League, was involved in a statewide project funded by the Colorado Trust to do community dialogues focused on immigrant integration in 2007 and 2008. Immigration was a hot topic in Colorado and nationally during that period, but it was an issue that cut in unexpected ways, dividing conservative against conservative and posing perplexing challenges to liberals as well.

The Bush Administration, for instance, tried and failed to pass a comprehensive immigration bill during its second term, but Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a non-comprehensive (and one-sided) immigration bill focused strictly on enforcement that alliented Latino voters.

---

Since the onslaught of the Great Recession, other debates seem to have eclipsed immigration as hot button issues

---

In 2007, Robert Putnam, a liberal political scientist at Harvard, published “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century,” which found that ethic diversity was associated with lower levels of social trust. Putnam wasn’t arguing against immigration, quite the contrary. He was exploring the complexity of the issue, and the challenges for democratic institutions in which levels of social trust are a key to success.

On September 21, PBS stations will air a new documentary called “Not in Our Town: Light in the Darkness.” The documentary explores how a town in Long Island, New York, came to grips with a series of hate crimes that culminated in the murder of Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero by a group of local teenagers. The documentary tracks efforts by local leaders to change the local atmosphere of fear and hate that led to the murder.

//
Patchogue Village Mayor Paul Pontieri held a series of meetings with Latino residents to understand the nature of the problem. New leaders emerged, including the victim’s brother, Joselo Lucero, who became a champion for justice and unity, and a local librarian-assistant named Gilda Ramos who had tried to warn people about the attacks. Thousands gathered at the local train station near the site of the attack for a candle light vigil in the rain.

The Suffolk County Police Department assigned Spanish-speaking officers to the village. The Patchogue-Medford Library began to serve as a link for the local immigrant population, providing a safe venue where people could meeting and discuss the issues. The schools got involved as well.

The film will be the center piece of a “Not in Our Town National Week of Action” from September 18-24. Public media outlets and other groups will hold screenings, events and discussions on hate crime prevention and ways to make communities safer.

Since the onslaught of the Great Recession, other debates seem to have eclipsed immigration as hot button issues—namely jobs, deficit and debt, which isn’t surprising in a way. In a faltering economy there are fewer jobs and immigration tends to slacken, but the recent horror in Norway, where an anti-immigrant fanatic attacked kids at a Labor Party youth camp, was a reminder that communities and countries ignore the issue of immigrant integration at their own peril.

---

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

The Story of a Neighborhood Grocery Store

On January 21st 2011, a newspaper in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain broke the story.  The 47-year old Hi Lo Hispanic grocery store would be closing, and a Whole Foods Market would be moving in. The news was polarizing.

City councillors spoke at town meetings, alliances formed, and one thing became clear.  Gentrification pits against each other two conflicting values, both at the heart of the American identity.

Produced by Emily Corwin, and with images by Kelly Creedon, this story was funded by the Knight News Challenge project Virtual Street Corners, and was created as multimedia content for the SOTRU website.

---

Emily Corwin works at the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) where she produces and curates for Public Radio Remix.  She also produces independently in Boston, MA and is the former producer and host of The Neighborhood at MIT’s WMBR 88.1FM in Cambridge.

Often comprised of a simple portrait, along with a name, birth and death year, and sometimes a message, memorial murals began to sprout up all over NYC in the 90s.  Today, it might be safe to say that there’s at least one memorial mural in every neighborhood in the city.

Using audio from a larger segment in our radio episode Brooklyn – Change Happens, this video explores the culture of memorial murals and the mourning, memories and art that comprise these tributes. Discover this unique part of the famed borough’s culture through the vantage point of family members and admirers.

This was a piece written by SOTRU Radio Producer, Tina Antolini, about her time in the human-occupied tunnels running under Las Vegas. It’s an incredibly fascinating concept if you were to think of it as a diorama; tourists from all over the world in and out of the monstrous casinos and other celebrated spots that you associate with The Strip directly above people making their homes in the dark, wet, flash flood tunnels that run under the city. It feels more like something from a movie. The episode is fascinating and explores this underground world. You can listen here. Tina’s piece below, originally appeared on our website December 23rd, 2010.

---

I’ve been thinking a lot about tunnels.

Entrances to an underground world, a place far away from sunlight, and, therefore, in our imaginations, they’re places that must incubate things that love the dark. Fearful things.

Culturally, we’re fascinated with the prospect of a subterranean world. Be it the hiding place of Jean Valjean, the hero of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” (“…Paris has another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is slime, minus the human form.”) or the home of monsters in “C.H.U.D.” (that would be for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller), a cult film about flesh-eating underground creatures who prey on the homeless, or, on the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum, the grain-hoarding raincoat-wearing vegans of “Delicatessen.”

The truth is less glamorous and/or frightening… but equally fascinating. Among the stories SOTRU is reporting on in Las Vegas is one of the underground world beneath the casinos, the miles of flood channels that lace their way under the Strip. These are home to hundreds of people.

Many of whom have surprisingly home-like homes.

But most of these tunnel residents are forced down here because of a variety of misfortunes, economic and otherwise. Usually, one does not choose to live 30+ feet underground for the heck of it.

We’ll tell you a lot more about life in the tunnels in our upcoming Las Vegas episode… But in the meantime, I wanted to know: what’s your favorite tunnel story, real or imagined?

Operation New Hope is such an incredible organization and has even become a national model for solving recidivism challenges. It was originally explored in our episode, Jacksonville – The Bold New City of the South? – and SOTRU guest contributor, Alina Kodatt, caught up with the organization’s founder, Kevin Gay, last December to see what had changed for them since the episode. We want to be sure that you didn’t miss it! Additionally, we will soon be starting a new feature on our website called Radio Re:Visit. It will highlight some of the people and organizations that were part of our radio episodes, so that we can get a sense for where they are now and if anything has changed since we last spoke.

Below is Alina’s conversation with Kevin that we originally published on 12.06.10:

---

In State of the Re:Union’s third pilot episode, Al Letson explored his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida. In that episode Al introduced readers to Operation New Hope (ONH), an organization located in the historic downtown neighborhood of Springfield. Focused on bringing hope to ex-offenders through employment and rebuilding dilapidated homes in the community, ONH has received national attention for their model of bringing help and hope to their community. We were so inspired by their story the first time around that we recently caught up with ONH director Kevin Gay to get an update on their efforts. (more…)

Today is the fourth anniversary of the tornado that devastated Greensburg, Kansas. In our radio episode, Greensburg – To the Starts through Difficulties, we discovered the resiliency of the residents there and that altruism is alive and well in the country. And beyond resiliency, we discovered the innovative spirit that guides Americans to build anew, in both financially and environmentally sound ways. Visit our Greensburg page to not only listen to the episode, but to discover some of the incredible organizations that we had the opportunity to learn about that are leading the way in rebuilding both the infrastructure and the culture of the area. Below you’ll find a post by Tina Antolini that she wrote shortly after leaving Greensburg, about the vast amount of historical artifacts lost in the storm, how residents came to terms with that, and then carried on.

State of the Re:Union: Greensburg, KS - To the Stars through Difficulties

---

There’s a red, white and blue sign in front window of the house where Ed Schoenberger lives in Greensburg, Kansas. It says “Rebuilding Greensburg with Pride.” This is certainly true for Ed, who has lived in this town for decades, and cared for its history with equivalent pride for just as long. Ed is the caretaker of the cemetery in Greensburg, and is also the curator of the town’s historical museum—that is, before the museum blew away, along with most of Main Street, in the tornado that hit Greensburg in May 2007. It took most of Ed’s treasured artifacts with it, whole rooms of lovingly assembled displays, depicting Greensburg in its early days, as frontier town. He’s managed to salvage bits and pieces from the wreckage of the museum, and some of it has now taken up residence in his home. Out on the front porch, he’s got a beautifully painted tin panel that was once part of the ceiling of the old art deco Twilight Theater. A ledger book filled with the names of Greensburg’s earliest leaders sits on his kitchen table. But, for all his fondness for this memorabilia, Ed has now lived through what’s arguably the most important even in Greensburg’s history: the tornado. He and his wife huddled in their basement, as the winds destroyed the house around them.

Today, more than two years later, he clearly grieves for what was lost—not only his home and those of most of his friends, but decades of history, written into the buildings, the landscape, as well as what was stored in the museum. When Ed and the rest of Greensburg chose to rebuild, they did so stripped of most of the evidence of what had come before. That’s especially hard to a man—and a region—that prizes roots and tradition, a part of the country that changes only gradually and with unease. But, for all his love of the past, Ed has done what much of his town has: mourned that loss, and made his peace with it. He lives in a different house now, one that’s newly fixed up. He talks with excitement about a group that’s just formed called “Greensburg 2020,” which aims to have the town’s population reaching 2020 by that year.  In some ways, Ed says, it’s like Greensburg has become the frontier all over again—this time, as it works to become a model green community.

“It started back in 1884;” he says. “We had basically nothing; Absolutely nothing no water tower, no city buildings, we had nothing. We had streets, but that’s about it. It’s just like starting all over again… But, you know, I can say I’m part of it. “