Posted on 10/23/2004 9:26:01 PM PDT by neverdem
PLAINFIELD, N.J., Oct. 18 - Oscar Romero-Figueroa's right arm now hangs limp with paralysis - a constant reminder of the attackers who beat him with a baseball bat in June, a few feet from the apartment he shares with six relatives in North Plainfield.
Victor DeLeon suffered head wounds and a broken arm, which kept him out of work for a month, after he was beaten that same month in neighboring Plainfield while walking home from a local bar.
And Samuel Aguillar Jimenez was killed. His body was discovered in a Plainfield cemetery on May 17 with a fatal gash to the head.
They are among at least 17 Hispanic men who the local police suspect were severely beaten by young black men - and in the one case, killed - in and around Plainfield during the spring and summer. Whether the attacks were motivated by racial or ethnic hatred remains an open question, though black leaders say they do not believe bias has been the root. Only one suspect has been charged with a bias crime, and there is no consensus among the police about whether the men were attacked because of their ethnicity or the cash in their pockets.
But the string of attacks, first brought to public attention in June by a Hispanic advocate, have put a spotlight on longstanding tensions between blacks and Hispanics in the area. In local bars where Hispanic immigrants gather, they complain that blacks are jealous of their economic success and are out to get them. In the African-American community, there is grumbling that Hispanics are "taking over" - that they speak only Spanish and that Hispanic businesses rarely hire blacks.
"The attacks showed the separation between the two communities," said Ray Blanco, a Cuban immigrant who arrived 26 years ago and is expected to be elected as Plainfield's first Hispanic councilman in November. "Hispanics were in one corner and the rest were in another."
Plainfield, a city of about 50,000 people at the western edge of Union County, has faced racial problems before. The city's grand mansions were split into apartments during World War II to house local factory workers, and Southern blacks poured into Plainfield soon after that, competing with whites for housing and jobs. In 1967, several days of race riots broke out after a white police officer refused to intervene in an assault among black youths. White residents began moving out, and before long, Plainfield was an African-American enclave with a downtown of mostly empty storefronts.
Hispanics started trickling in during the 1960's, when a handful of Cuban immigrants arrived. The flow was small but steady until about 10 years ago, when a wave of immigrants, mostly from Colombia and Central America, began to arrive to work in factories like the one operated by Berkeley Contract Packaging, which boxes cosmetics and pharmaceuticals at a plant in nearby Kenilworth.
Between 1990 and 2000, the Hispanic population rose by 72 percent to about 12,000, according to the United States Census. By 2000, blacks numbered about 29,500; whites, about 10,000. And that count probably understates the actual growth in the Hispanic population because illegal immigrants are often undercounted, and the immigration seems to have continued.
"It's really been in the last five years that we've seen this 400 percent explosion in Plainfield," said Dr. Gerald Lamont Thomas, pastor of Shiloh Baptist, a local black church, of what he sees as the growth in the Hispanic population.
Most of the time everyone gets along, he said. But when local Hispanics began opening businesses selling phone cards, ethnic food or other items that seemed to cater only to Latinos, the city's African-Americans took notice. Malcolm Dunn, a black member of the City Council, raised the point at a 1998 Council meeting, and again in 2002. "I endured all-white stores," he said at the 2002 meeting. "Now I'm dealing with all-Hispanic stores."
In an interview this week, Mr. Dunn said his comments were meant to inspire black entrepreneurship, not to denigrate Hispanics.
Others in the black community have voiced similar sentiments about the burgeoning Hispanic presence.
"A lot of these young guys say that the Hispanics are taking over," said Colleen Fields, 50, a black activist who works closely with the homeless community.
"They work, they have money and they spend their money with their own," Dr. Thomas said. "If you live in America, you don't live in your own sect anymore. But they do; they stay together."
As a result, he said, many blacks feel slighted. "We see them and we don't know much about them," he said. "There's a sense of being threatened by their presence. And any time there's the sense of a threat, bad things happen."
Dr. Thomas and other prominent black leaders say the attacks were not an outgrowth of that tension. "The people who did the attacks were psychos," said Plainfield's mayor, Albert T. McWilliams, who is black. "They were not representative."
The police chief of Plainfield, Edward Santiago, said that he thought the attacks were caused by greed, not racial hatred. "If these immigrants walking the street were destitute without money, they would not have been assaulted," he said. "I don't think the primary factor was, 'I hate Spanish people.' "
But Michael Parenti, the chief of the North Plainfield Police Department in neighboring Somerset County, said that the violence immediately struck him as too extreme for a mugging. "To hit someone with a baseball bat, you have to hate someone," Chief Parenti said. "To beat a guy for a few dollars never made a lot of sense to me. It looked to me like a bias incident."
The two departments formed a task force in June to investigate the attacks. So far, there have been six arrests. The Plainfield police arrested two people in separate attacks; North Plainfield has arrested four, three for one attack and a fourth for another. Only one suspect, Dexter Perreira, 27, of Plainfield, has been charged with bias intimidation, which carries a maximum prison term of 30 years. Mr. Perreira was charged in September with the beating of Mr. Romero-Figueroa, and is being held in bail of $75,000. The others arrested have been charged with assault.
According to documents filed in the case, race played a significant role. Witnesses linked Mr. Perreira to the "Bajan Bad Boys," a group of young black men who often bragged about attacking "Ricans."
"It was racism," Mr. Romero-Figueroa said of the attack, which has left him able to speak out of only the left side of his mouth. Speaking in Spanish in an interview at his home, he pointed out his living room window to the front yard where the assault occurred. They didn't just want money, he said. "They beat me and left me to die."
It was the June 10 beating of Mr. Romero-Figueroa that led Carmen Salavarrieta, a local Hispanic advocate, to call the Spanish-language and local news media. She said she had already heard of several attacks when Mr. Romero-Figueroa's wife called her for help. She said that she felt that the police were not doing enough to protect Hispanics , including letting them know they were being singled out for attacks.
"They did not want people to know what was going on," she said.
Chief Santiago of Plainfield acknowledged in an interview that he tried to keep the cases under wraps. "We were cautious because we didn't want to let people know that there are all these Hispanic immigrants with lots of cash in their pockets," he said.
Many victims, Chief Santiago added, also refused to cooperate with the police. It is a problem that is common in communities with large numbers of undocumented immigrants who fear deportation, according to Hester Agudosi, chief of the New Jersey attorney general's Office of Bias Crime and Community Relations. She noted that during an investigation of six attacks in which bricks and rocks were used against Hispanics in Ocean County last year, the police discovered at least eight other incidents that had never been reported.
"It's very disturbing because that's why they are the targets more and more," she said. "The bad guys know they are perfect victims."
Ms. Salavarrieta said the police have never sufficiently reached out to the community. The Plainfield Police Department has 16 bilingual officers in its 151-member force, and though a service offers translation for 911 callers, there are no Spanish-speaking dispatchers.
As a result, people like Federico Manzilla Pineda - a 62-year-old laborer who stands no taller than a jockey - often end up frustrated. Mr. Pineda said in an interview that he had been attacked three times since arriving in Plainfield: once at gunpoint in July 2001; again in October 2002, when thieves took $2,500 in cash that he was carrying in a plastic bag; and finally, in January 2003.
He never filed a complaint, chiefly, he said, because the officers don't comprehend Spanish sufficiently. A Spanish-speaking officer he met through a local nonprofit agency gave him his business card, but he said he has been unable to reach him. "When I call," he said in Spanish, "they cut me off."
This past summer, Ms. Salavarrieta and other Hispanics encouraged the Guardian Angels to open a chapter in the city. Bilingual members of the group now patrol downtown Plainfield three nights a week, helping to bridge the language problem.
But they may not be enough to solve the problem in a city struggling with poverty and crime, many local residents say.
Tahean Barron and Robert Phillips, both 29, stood recently near a corner downtown while a Snoop Dogg song pumped from a minivan parked at the curb. They said the victims were just naïve, easy targets.
"They are drunk, walking by and they say something wrong," Mr. Phillips said. "Or they come to the project to buy drugs and these young cats rob them. You come to any rough neighborhood drinking in that kind of way and it will happen. That'll happen anywhere."
But at places like the Intercontinental, a three-story nightclub in downtown Plainfield where Hispanic immigrants congregate to play pool, the view is that racism is behind the attacks. Several patrons suggested that blacks were jealous of the new immigrants' economic success, and violent. Sipping a beer at the Intercontinental, Artemio Pérez, 34, a factory worker from Plainfield, said that it was common knowledge that walking alone at night is a bad idea. "They wait for you and as soon as you come around a corner," he said, "they'll jump and hit you."
Bishop George Benbow, the black pastor of Christian Fellowship Gospel Church in Plainfield, a racially mixed church with about 600 members, said that many of his Hispanic congregants were afraid to walk the streets at night. "It really concerns us," he said.
City leaders are working to alleviate such fears and point out that the attacks have subsided. Jiles H. Ship, Plainfield's public safety director, who oversees the Police and Fire Departments, said that he has met regularly with groups like the Latino Action Coalition, which focuses on academic achievement for Hispanics.
In response to the violence, he also said, he plans to hire a Spanish-speaking dispatcher, create Hispanic neighborhood watch groups, and distribute Spanish-language pamphlets explaining "that we're not Immigration; we're here to help."
Some are encouraged that the problems have been acknowledged.
"This was 20 years in the making," Mr. Blanco, the Plainfield Council candidate, said. "Now we need to do whatever we can to stop anyone else from getting hurt. I think we're on the right track."
You are right.
Here there is some tensions, mostly between black gangs and latino gangs though. If there is tension for any other reason it's because the latinos think they're better because they're not black, and blacks resent latinos because they network and get into self employment faster.
I used to live in Rochdale,Queens. From what I hear you need an armored tank to drive though there. I think that's where 50 cent grew up which would explain a lot.
Rochdale Village? A tough corner.
Now illegals have taken over an entire city, how nice.
That was the late Seventies. I lived in one of the high rise apartment buildings back when they were called co-ops :-) I was all about seven, and praying to get out of there. One day my father announced that we were leaving and thankfully when crack moved through Hempstead we weren't living by the bus terminal. God's honest truth.
That's me, shallow.
I owned a home in Washington Park, one of the mansions on the North Plainfield side. I never lived in a more wonderful neighborhood with more wonderful people in my life. I sold last fall to move to Washington, DC. I miss it like crazy.
However, that being said, I had to walk home from the New York train through Plainfield past the Intercontinental a few times at night. That was a tenuous experience at best.
Ouch. We just moved from N Plainfield to rural OH last April. For the most part, N Plainfield was great, never felt uneasy, although as a rule in suburban NJ, one should be a bit more careful than is necessary in, say, rural OH. But Plainfield - another story altogether.
Quite happy to be in OH, by the way. Love it.
The local Mex, Salvadoran and Guat populace here in Nashville has nary a drop of conquistador blood....most are pure amerindian....shirt and squat....quite unlike Plains or Woodland norteamerican indians.
My hometown sounds like that.
I went back and read it.
sounds like some serious bad blood....i would not underestimate those latinos just cause they are little sawed offs....I've seen em in action.
ask any Nam vet about those little charlies.
Unfortunately, what pretty much happened was that it got turned into a 'housing development complex'. There are good people living there though. Hats off to them, they can deal with the hardscrabble living and poverty mentality of their neighbors. I just like to have a nice green front lawn *LOL*
yep.....and no stray bullets either.
Yeah you're right.
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