Capturing Communities in Words and Images:

Author: Susi Gomez

Ecuadorians in the Streets of New York City

What do people in NYC picture when they hear about “Ecuadorians”? Whose images would I capture if I began to approach people that resembled my idea of Ecuadorians? Because of an economic crisis in the late 1990s, more than 600,000 Ecuadorians emigrated to the U.S. and Europe from 2000 to 2001 (5). Including undocumented migrants, it is unofficially estimated that there are approximately one million Ecuadorians currently residing in the U.S. (5). But even in Ecuador, a country whose officers adamantly call “multicultural,” citizens are not supposed to be easily categorized, and discussions about the right image to represent its population are endless.

Besides mestizos, in Ecuador there still remain over 1000 (1) indigenous cultures that have managed to preserve their own language, followed by smaller percentages of Afro-Ecuadorians and European descendent criollos. And after one has acknowledged the language and ethnic differences, one must consider the importance of yet another layer: Class.

Being an immigrant in Ecuador, although almost 15% (2) of the population has moved to the US and to European countries, is an open declaration that one is poor. Further than that, amongst the middle class that has not left the country, immigrants are stigmatized as uneducated, lower class citizens. A fact that statistics somewhat justify. More than half of the Ecuadorian immigrant community in the US and Spain have only finished grade school (3).

Among the people in power, immigration has been addressed trough a double discourse. On the one hand, immigration is referred to as a problem, and its decrease often has been one of the visible “goals” of the government. On the other hand, 6.9% (4) of Ecuador’s annual budget depends on the money that immigrants pump into the economy each year. This is, astonishingly, more or less half of the revenue that Ecuador obtains through oil drilling.

Although Ecuadorians were heavily concentrated in the mountainous central highland region a few decades ago, migration toward larger cities in all regions—coast, andes, amazon and Galapagos—has increased the urban population to over 60% (5). From migrating to big Ecuadorian cities to taking a further step and migrate to the US or Spain, there is a small distance. Continue reading “Ecuadorians in the Streets of New York City”

Some pictures you WILL NOT see in my final presentation

These images didn’t make it into the final 20. But, if you like some of them and think they’re great, i’d like to hear about it.

Working Ecuadorians No1: Guineapig sellers

I went to Flushing Meadows Park, looking for ecuadorian food stands. I had visited the park some years before during the summer, and remembered it cluttered with garbage, full of people and different kinds of traditional food.
This Sunday there were only three such stands. The first one i saw, i didn’t document because i think i scared the vendors. I introduced myself immediately and asked to take pictures. Only after i saw their faces, and knew i had done wrong. They were two middle-aged man and  woman. The man didn’t say which city he was from, but he said he was ecuadorian and I recognized his accent. The woman just hid behind the metallic stand as soon as she heard the word “picture.” They were very shy. If i had paid any more attention to the way they looked, the style of the heavy wool hats and sweaters they had on, i would have understood that being upfront was the thing that would have such shy, contained people not want to talk to me. Obviously they didn’t believe it was just for a class. They acted defensively. What did they think i’d do with the pictures?
After that, i walked all over the park. It was very cold, -1centigrades. People played soccer. I didn’t see any more stands around, but i did see some women pushing carts. At a certain point, i saw people approaching one of these carts, and the woman who pushed it stopped and opened the plastic bags in it. I realized she was selling food, but she didn’t want to be noticed. Perhaps people need permission to sell there, and she didn’t have it. I got closer to this woman, but then it was me who felt suspicious of her appearance. Her clothes were soiled, and whatever she was keeping in those bags made me feel some kind of repulsion. So i didn’t approach her.
I saw another metallic stand, the only one left in the park. I decided i wouldn’t ask them to let me take pictures as bluntly as I had done before. I approached the stand and asked if they had something hot to drink. I spoke in Spanish, and so did the woman who handed me a cup of coffee. Her accent was that of the people who live in the coast of Ecuador: Her “s” sounded like an english “h.” The coffee i got came out of an alluminum container. I was surprised to taste it; it was done the way some people drink it in Ecuador: They just pour dry coffee over a pot with boiling water. They use filters only after they have boiled the crushed coffee grains, so the liquid one drinks has little particles of coffee in it.
I told the woman i was from Quito. Since behind her there was a man roasting two guineapigs, i asked her how much they were. She said $35, “with everything:” potatoes, cooked white corn (mote) and salad. There were two other women besides the one i was talking two. One of them was pregnant, and helped selling the food. I don’t know who the other woman was. I went closer to the man who was holding the  guineapig sticks over the coals, and asked were he was from. He said he was from Deleg; that they were from Cañar, a province in the south of Ecuador. He said he had been in the US for twenty years. At this point, i felt like i was asking too much. It was a feeling that this man was talking about something sad for him. So i said my dad had been here for 10 years as well. Then the woman who had given me the coffee told me to get empanadas–she wanted me to buy more than a cup of coffee. She was frying them in a pan full of oil. I was surprised again when she asked if i wanted sugar on them–which is the way cheese empanadas are served in Ecuador. But i am not used ot that anymore, i noticed.
Finally, i askedabout photographing the guineapigs. Ok, said the man, but only the guineapigs.
When i got my camera out, i worked with the zoom so i could get him and the woman as well. The man seemed to enjoy having the guineapigs photographed: he moved the sticks on which the rodents were stuck so i could get their golden, crusty side.
I also took a picture of the name written in the metallic stand: “Restaurante Rosita. Hoy no fío, mañana sí.”   This is a kind of funny sticker popular (frecuented by the populace) places post in their businesses. It means something like ” You don’t have credit in my store today, you’ll have it tomorrow.”
 

Chance-generated writing

I got to talk to Maria Negroni about Buenos Aires Tour. One of her books of poems, CAGE UNDER COVER,  was being performed at NYU on November 7th, and i attended the reading with the intention of asking her personally about her fortune-dependent project.

As I believe I’ve previously mentioned, Buenos Aires Tour was a project that invited three artists to provide content for a book on Buenos Aires’ neighborhoods, on its life. The final product looked like a tourist guide, but it was not.  Negroni, who i think was quite overwhelmed after witnessing the performance piece that CAGE UNDER COVER had been turned into, told me that Jorge Macchi, a photographer, had proposed the idea.

 

Macchi invited a musician and Negroni to join him following the cracks of a piece of glass over a map of Buenos Aires. The lines were treated like a fictional subway line, and forty-six “stations” where invented.  They took photos, collected found objects, and recorded sounds, including the political protests of recent street demonstrations, and linked them.

 

According to Negroni, however, Macchi didn’t want the three of them going out together. Each one of them was supposed to go to the selected places by themselves, whenever they wanted, and write, compose or photograph whatever they wanted. The subsequent museum installation offered the visitors eight itineraries. Text that wasn’t specifically related to the pictures–except for the fact that it was inspired  by the same neighborhood–complemented them. People could activate the accompanying sounds only if they chose to, but, as everything else, those sounds didn’t attempt to represent the same information offered by images or words.

 

Why not related? I asked, but Negroni didn’t think about it twice. It was all about chance, she said. Things happen anew all the time. Besides, I understood, neither the photos nor the captions wanted to become a documentary, the kind that when including some things also exhiles other. The project didn’t aspire to cut a definitive pattern to define the city.  

So, Negroni went to the previoulsy agreed-upon sites and walked them, not exhaustively. She later worked on prose poems that were linked to various street corners of the city (not necesarilly all the ones she visited).

 

For me, it was surprising to find out that, after all, it was not a free-for-all. Because common themes emerged. They found similar images repeating themselves across the diferent points they visited. That was the emphasis of their finished piece. The common points served as entry places that gave the audience the chance to create their own itinerary, to go further than the eight already proposed ones.

 

 

Touring NYC with an Ecuadorian Map

I run across Argentinian poet Maria Negroni’s “Buenos Aires Tour.” The project behind this book encopassed photographs and audio as well, captured by other artists. All three dimensions were meant to reveal unespected details of the city. The authors were determined to create a route different from the traditional tourist guides, which meant that they would not be guided by significant places, buildings, or objects. FInally, they found their path by breaking a glass over a map of Buenos Aires, and using the fracture lines as the markers of their itinerary. 

My focus in this project will be the ecuadorian people living in NYC. I have thought of ways in which to incorporate the ideas behind Negroni’s project into mine, though there are some fundamental differences. For instance, In “Buenos Aires tour,” any place in the city worked fine in order to describe the argentinian dayly life.  In a city where ecuadorians are a minority, to randomly choose a place wouldn’t work out. However, i think that what moved Negroni to capture just whatever neighborhood chance dictated, was a need to move away from stereotypes. Something like a desire to see what happened once one stopped telling oneself what the Buenos Aires people, any people really, is like or does or inhabits.

So I have narrowed down my focus and have come up with an alternative to the broken glass over the map. First, i will focus only on ecuadorians who are working. The first people i will approach will be informal workers. I have seen them at Flushing park, at a Brooklyn subway station, and around Williamsburg. They do exactly what they could have been doing in the streets of Ecuador: selling cheap dvd’s, peeled oranges in plastic bags, or fried pork rinds and corn. I hope i can get to talk to at least three of them. This “interview” will be important, because i want to ask them to tell me what are the jobs and occupations they think haven’t been talked about yet. Is there an stereotypical story they disagree with? Who do they think should be photographed, interviewed, talked about amongst the ecuadorian workers in the city?  This will be my alternative to crushing a mirror over a NYC map: i’ll let my first interviewes help me shape my itinerary.  What i expect will happen is that i will know what is the sterotype they are fighting against, and will articulate profiles that challenge those assumptions.

Great things to have: Children at Medieval Festival

People like to dress up. How each person responds to her attire, however, is harder to generalize. The children in this essay all wear some kind of accessory that reminds one of the mainstream stereotypes of the Middle Ages. A paper crown, a sword, a vest. The Festival was in fact a long paved way with hundreds of stands at each side, one next to the other. At these tents things were sold: phosphorescent puppets, velvety dresses, real blades, turkey legs, canned pickles, palm readings. It was about selling; the Middle Ages were just the label under which all kinds of products were being pushed. The organizers’ imagination was limited to having the salespeople dress up like fairy tale characters, scattering a number of singers who chanted church-like tunes, and inviting a group of school children to dance to Celtic songs on an improvised court.

The main consumers, of course, were children. Unlike adults, every child at Tyron’s Park Medieval Festival carried something that signaled that they belonged in there. Snow-White was extremely popular, surpassed only by warriors who, if they lacked a shield or a helmet, held a plastic sword on their belts. But after wearing the costume, there comes a period of time in which people make decisions about how they will relate to the new weights they carry on their hips, or about the long dress that becomes entangled with the feet. This period, however, is uneven in length. Some kids behave as if carrying wings on their backs was just as carrying their backpack. To others, their attire is an invitation to play—to incarnate the soldier they wanted to look like. And yet other children, after exploring the new identity they assumed through their costume, take longer to return to their known behavior.

 

These pictures focus on children who exhibit these and other behaviors that are harder to figure out at once. Some titles are quotations from overheard conversations amongst the crowd.