Mott Haven Herald

Mexican children find place to learn in Mott Haven

Posted on 07. Dec, 2009 by Christina Herrera.

Guadalupe Herrera breathed a sigh of relief as she looked at the walls filled with children’s paintings in the basement of St. Pius V Church on East 145th Street.

Finally, she can help her son Victor, a first-grader at P.S. 179 at 140th Street, with his schoolwork, she said in her native Spanish.

“I used to pay $25 dollars a week to have someone translate my kid’s homework from English to Spanish in order for me to help him,” she said.

Mexicans are the fastest-growing immigrant group in New York City, and many parents who speak only Spanish face the same dilemma of how to help their children succeed in English-speaking classrooms.

The Mott Haven church has become the headquarters for an organization that works to help these families. MASA, the Mexican-American Students Alliance, provides mentors who help children with homework and school work and helps parents build bridges to their children’s schools.

In the program, children get help with homework and take art classes. For older students, there are workshops to help them prepare for college. Parents have access to ESL classes.

Although MASA welcomes students from any ethnic background, its focus from the beginning has been helping children who are either immigrants from Mexico or the U.S.-born children of Mexican immigrants.

Mexicans have the highest high school drop-out rate in the city, according to Francisco Rivera Batiz, a professor at Columbia Teachers College. Close to 60 percent of Mexican New Yorkers aged 25 years or older had not completed high school in 2000, more than double the percentage of New Yorkers generally.

The school system itself is partly to blame, believes Angelo Cabrera, a founder of MASA. “Our guess is because they have a Spanish surname or because their parents don’t speak the language, they are put in schools with very limited resources,” he said.

“We cannot change their legal status or change their financial situation, but we change their education,” said Cabrera. “We are not looking for outstanding students; we are trying to help out those who are flunking out.”

Martha Castellanos’ 8-year-old son Rony was one of those children. Last year Castellanos got a call from Rony’s teacher telling her he was going to be left back. That spring, at the Cinco de Mayo Festival, she heard an announcement about MASA. She’s been bringing Rony and his 4-year-old brother David to St. Pius V ever since. Now Rony participates actively in spelling bees and has won many achievement awards, which are displayed on the walls of MASA.

All the classes and workshops are conducted by volunteers who serve as mentors.

The program looks for “college students or high school students who are college bound, interested in the well-being of the community” says Gregory Tull, 23, the coordinator of volunteers.

Margarita Verastegui teaches art. Originally from Spain, she has been a volunteer for a year and a half. Through art, she says, “Kids develop a different type of skill sets. They are more confident as well.” Mothers joined Verastegui in art class last Christmas to teach their children how to make piñatas.

Parents also work to help the program as a whole succeed. Last September 15, MASA parents celebrated Mexico’s Independence Day by putting together a sale of typical Mexican food to help raise funds for arts and crafts materials.

Fernanda Rico, a psychology student from Iberoamericana University in Mexico City who is currently doing a four-month internship with MASA, believes the parents’ involvement is a mark of success.

“They come here and you see them put up the tables, tidy up and clean. That is a testament of them wanting to be here,” she said.

“Something is working here. Part is the help with school work, part of it is a sense of belonging to MASA, and that’s something very valuable.”

A version of this story appeared in the Winter 2009 edition of the Mott Haven Herald.

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Alliance is an organization born in protest

Posted on 07. Dec, 2009 by Christina Herrera.

By Cristina Herrera Borquez
Cristina@motthavenherald.com

MASA was unofficially born in 2001, in response to the drastic changes in immigration policy after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11. When the City University of New York and the State University of New York declared that undocumented immigrant students would have to pay out-of state-tuition, even if they had lived in New York for years, students launched protests.

One of their leaders was Angelo Cabrera, an undocumented student who immigrated to the United States when he was 15 years old from Puebla, Mexico. After meetings, rallies and a hunger strike that lasted four days, in August 2002, Gov. George Pataki signed a law revoking the tuition provision.

From that protest grew MASA. Realizing that the number of Mexican students enrolling in college was disproportionately low, its founders decided to create a support system for struggling students.

A version of this story appeared in the Winter 2009 edition of the Mott Haven Herald.

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Searching for work on a Mott Haven street corner

Posted on 28. Nov, 2009 by editor.

By Carla Candia
carla.candia@journalism.cuny.edu

Dozens of day laborers dressed in ripped jeans and worn t-shirts stood on the corner of East 141st Street and Jackson Avenue in the Bronx one morning this Fall.

The wind was blowing, and many workers wore sweaters and had their hands tucked in their pockets. They were eating sandwiches and drinking coffee provided by an evangelical group called Together in Misericordia.

“We see their needs and want to help them,” Ramon Mendez, a member of the religious organization, speaking in Spanish, as did all those interviewed for this story.

These days the men who wait for contractors to hire them for the day need all the help they can get. Things have been slow at “La Parada,” which means “The Stop.” (more…)

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African Muslims sink roots in Mott Haven

Posted on 04. Nov, 2009 by Sergey Kadinsky.

In the midst of the Ramadan fast in September, a small group of men sat on the floor in an empty store that used to be a pharmacy. They were clustered around a small laptop computer, watching Anthony Quinn’s classic film The Message, about the birth of Islam.

A green awning outside the storefront announces Mott Haven’s newest outpost of Islam, the Masjid Ebun Abass on the quiet corner of Alexander Avenue and 141st Street, buffered from the traffic of Third Avenue by a Greenstreet triangle.

A symbol of the Bronx’s newest immigrant group, the mosque “is one of the biggest, and it’s in Mott Haven,” said Mamadou Kamara. Kamara is an assistant imam, the Muslim term for a spiritual leader.

Before the congregation leased its quarters, Kamara would travel to a mosque in Harlem to worship, and sometimes found himself praying in unlikely places. “When I do it on the street, I don’t care who cares,” said Kamara. “I once prayed in the Times Square Church.”

Most of the members of the congregation are West African. Their place of worship is a simple affair. A stepped podium for sermons, a bookshelf, and a poster of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca are the only physical signs of Islam in the mosque’s interior. Painted parallel lines on the carpet indicate the direction of Islam’s holiest city.

Brothers Ali and Habib Trawaly, who are respectively its imam and president, founded Ebun Abass a year ago.

“It was a considerable effort to bring about the mosque,” said Ali Trawaly. At the time, the only other mosque in Mott Haven was at 369 E. 145th Street, an anonymous century-old townhouse, where the only outward sign of Islam is a heavily barred green and white metal fence.

Starting a new congregation “was all about the kids,” said assistant imam Abdurahman Juwara. “They did not fit into the other masjid,” he said, using the Arabic term for mosque.

“We have over 160 kids here,” said Banusi Maha, 45, another of the founding members of the mosque. “We teach them to respect people.”

If it weren’t for the mosque, Maha fears, the children would instead be watching television and learning nothing.  Instead, behind a makeshift curtain, children work on their school assignments and study the Quran.

Maha works an early morning shift as a cook at the Jekyll and Hyde Club, a theme restaurant in Midtown. Having worked as a chef in his homeland, he simply walked into the restaurant and asked for the job.

Like Maha, most members of the congregation hold blue-collar jobs, working long hours for little pay.

“Financially, it is difficult,” said Juwara, who emigrated from Gambia and has lived in the Bronx for 15 years.  “We have a basement, but we don’t have the money to develop it,” said Kamara.

In contrast to the imposing, domed Islamic Cultural Center on the Upper East Side, which was largely financed by Kuwait, Masjid Ebun Abass did not receive funding from any foreign government. “If we had that kind of money, we’d buy the building,” Juwara said.

“This is us: we work in car washes, factories, and drive taxis,” said Degumeh Sillah, 60, an African art dealer.  A Bronx resident since 1972, Sillah expressed pride at the religious transformation of the area. “The mosque on 166th Street,” he said, “that’s a former nightclub.”

Still, his mosque struggles to pay its $5,500 monthly rent. “With electricity, water, and teacher’s salary, that comes to $8,000,” said Sillah.

But the leaders of the congregation remain confident and determined.

“We are looking for a place to buy,” says Omar Trawaly, a cousin of the imam whose  three sons attend classes at the mosque. He said that the landlord has given the mosque two months to consider buying the space. “For sure, we don’t want to be renting,” Trawaly said.

Local Africans often speak of making money and returning to their homelands, but months turn to years. Where it was once acceptable to pray anywhere, there is now a growing need for permanent institutions, including mosques.

“Before, we didn’t think of establishing masjids,” said Soulemane Konate, secretary general of the Council of African Imams. “It’s not easy for Africans to survive in this country, but we’re not leaving.”

A version of this article appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

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Mosque focuses on Muslim unity

Posted on 04. Nov, 2009 by Sergey Kadinsky.

In contrast to its quick early growth in the Middle East, the spread of Islam in West Africa was gradual, members of the Ebun Abass mosque point out. Merchants and traveling scholars brought the religion with them.

“They first asked people to accept that there is no god except Allah,” said Djounedou Titikpina, founder of the African People Alliance. “It was very flexible, and little by little, they upgraded their Islam.” Titikpina immigrated from Togo, a country where Christians, Muslims, and adherents of native faiths, generally maintain peaceful relations.

Islam acts as a uniting force for a variety of ethnic groups in West Africa, where everyone prays in Arabic and observes the same fasts, viewing themselves as a single ummah, or community.

To promote local Muslim unity, Soulemane Konate, secretary general of the Council of African Imams founded the Harlem Shura, a council that acts as a bridge between African immigrants and African American Muslims.

The theme of Muslim unity is reflected at Masjid Ebun Abass. Among its non-African members is Adbul Rauf, a Puerto Rican convert who works at the nearby Lincoln Hospital. “Everything you see here is created by Allah,” Rauf said, adding that in his heart, “I was always a Muslim.”

An Islamic lifestyle is a far cry from the Latino cuisine he grew up with, in which pork is abundant and alcohol is permitted.  Habib Trawaly praised the few converts. “When they enter Islam, their hearts are pure,” he says.

The mosque’s attitude towards converts hearkens back to the gradual spread of Islam in West Africa.

This attitude is also evident in the rejection by the local congregation of terrorism. “Islam does not teach force,” said Musa Pokum, a decorative painter. “We know in Africa; we teach to respect people.”

A version of this article appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

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Mott Haven immigrants tend their roots

Posted on 18. Oct, 2009 by Christina Herrera.

Casa Yurumein is a house that looks like a home. The walls of its living room are covered with friendly family pictures. But though the people in the sepia photos bear a family resemblance, they are not mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins.

Instead, the people who frequent Casa Yurumein are related by heritage.

The house on Fulton Avenue between 167th and 168th streets is a center for Garifunas–descendants of a particular group of Caribbean people, who have preserved their own language and developed their own culture for centuries.

Born of the union of slaves who became free when the ships carrying them from Africa were wrecked and who then intermarried with the natives of Central America, the Garifunas originally settled on St. Vincent (Yurumein is the Garifuna name for the island), then spread to other Central American nations.

Garifuna society is unique: although the Garifunas are descended from slaves, they were born free.

Casa Yurumein’s mission is to pass on the Garifuna culture to those who live in the New York area, where the pressures of assimilation are strong. The center offers courses in Garifuna language, history, art, Garifuna spirituality, cooking, and needlework. It seeks to help these expatriates to “own their roots,” said Mirtha Colon, the organization’s director.

Although Garifunas live in all five boroughs and New Jersey, the largest community outside Central America is in the Bronx, according to the Garifuna Coalition USA, a Mott Haven-based organization with headquarters on E. 149 Street.

The coalition, which is dedicated to cross-cultural understanding of Garifuna culture, estimates that more than 100,000 Garifunas live in the metropolitian area.

“Garifunas were fishermen, so it’s logical that when we migrated we looked for ports,” Arturo Martinez, the secretary of Casa Yuremein’s youth group, explained.

Casa Yuremein opened its doors in November, 2008. “We work reaching many, one by one,” said Martinez.

Jackie Palacios 22, who was crowned Miss Garifuna last April, provides an example. “I learned that drums have many names, I learned the difference in all the Garifuna dances, the history of where Garifunas came from, how they were in ships for 30 days, how our leaders fought for us. I learned the language, and that our background is African, Carib, and Arab,” she said.

Among the teachers are long-time New Yorkers who learned their own lessons in taking pride in their heritage.

Art teacher Rene Moreira arrived in the U.S. from Honduras 29 years ago at age 15. “I learned to say, ‘I am Garifuna.’ I learned the value of being from St. Vincent. Before I would say I am from Honduras. I would give any type of description except that one,” she said. Now, she declares, “I have black roots and I am a black Garifuna.”

She finds the same lesson resonates with young people. “Four years ago I had three students. Today I have groups of up to 18 at a time,” she said. Some are as young as 5 years old. They learn drawing, ceramics and painting by making typical Garifuna masks, which are displayed all over Casa Yuremein.

Dona Tola has been in the United States even longer than Moreira. She emigrated in the 1970s when she was 17. Now, she explains, she is a “Buyei– a person who maintains the mysticism of a tradition.” At Casa Yuremein she is in charge of the spirituality workshops and events.

“I am here because I give myself to my community and I want our children to be able to identify and know themselves, because your culture defines you as a human being,” she says.

Inside the Fulton Street house, flowered plastic tablecloths, typical of many Latin American homes, cover the kitchen and dining room tables. The tables can be used both by those who attend classes and to prepare “barbacoa” (a beef dish with garlic and seasonings) and “machucada” (a typical banana puree used as a dip to eat with fish soup). To help sustain it, the community center sells the food.

“No one works here for a salary. Everyone is a volunteer, and we work with the donations of our community,” says Colon.

The house is filled with pictures of present and past events, in the South Bronx and throughout Latin America. Their distance from their homeland hasn’t stopped the New York Garifunas from dealing with issues in Central America, where they regularly create workshops linking homeland and diaspora.

Still, the ongoing work in Casa Yurumein is to educate those who are here. As Arturo Martinez says: “We are not only a Garifuna face: we are culture, food, art, language. How am I going to go to the outside world and show them my community if I don’t know those basic things?”

A version of this article appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

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