ashley mungo

Salvadoran. Venezuelan. Colombian. Dominican. Mexican. Honduran. Peruvian. 

These are just a handful of the Latin restaurants you can find in Brentwood, New York, a suburb 40 miles east of Manhattan that 60,000 people call home, including myself. Even though I didn’t grow up in Brentwood (I grew up just outside the borders in Bay Shore), I graduated from Brentwood High School in 2008, proud of this hardscrabble town, proud of the diversity of people I grew up with.

But in recent years, Brentwood has been in a state of crisis with an increase in gang violence that has ignited a fierce debate on immigration within the town. Critics argue that the exponentially increasing Central American migrant population has led to an increase in violence in the neighborhood. Further, with the recent election of President Donald J. Trump, new legislation is being put into motion that would potentially deport many of those in Brentwood who are protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) programs.

I am a fierce protector of Brentwood, but I have not spent a considerable amount of time there in almost ten years. Using my background in academia and photography, I decided to go back to Brentwood and spend time with current and former residents, students, legislators, and activists who are fighting for the reputation of this town, and more importantly sometimes fighting to stay in this country. The story I am writing is far from complete, as it will take years to get a full picture that can grasp the complexity of the rich and complicated lives that live within this community. But for the time being, here is a story of a town, voices raised, unsuppressed, telling their true histories.

I met Laura on a cold and dreary February morning at her parent's house in Brentwood. She welcomed me into the living room, the back wall covered in family pictures. I quickly learned that Laura graduated around the same time I did, but we didn’t hang in the same circle, so I hardly knew her, though not surprising when the average graduating class size in Brentwood is over 1,000. She came to the United States from Colombia when she was nine with her brother and mother. When I asked her why, she said as almost all immigrants do, “for a better life.”

Growing up, Laura barely registered that she was undocumented. She became more aware of it in high school when she began applying to colleges and realized she couldn’t get financial aid or legally work, therefore limiting her choice in colleges because she had to pay for almost everything out of pocket or with student loans. Laura can’t leave the country, knowing that there is always a risk that she won’t be able to get back in. The one thing that gives her hope is the DREAM Act, a piece of legislation that has been introduced in Congress numerous times but has since stalemated, even though it has broad support. If this legislation passed, depending on the final contents of the bill, Laura would almost certainly gain legal status.

Laura, frustrated with the rhetoric around undocumented immigrants in Brentwood, argues that no one in her family has a criminal record and they all pay their fair share of taxes. Her brother was able to marry and get residency, but Laura is still waiting for the DREAM Act. In the meantime, she is still in college, trying to get her nursing degree but is on the waitlist because she cannot legally work in a hospital. Once she shows that she's in progress of getting her residency, she can do her first year but not her clinicals, constrained to the chains of her legal status.

Sandra grew up between two worlds. She was born in the United States, but her mother took her back to the Dominican Republic when she was seven years old, and they lived there until she was a teenager, at which point her mother decided to take them back the U.S. She has a big family in Brentwood and boasts about how proud she is of them.

While Sandra is a U.S. citizen who was born here, her parents were not and emigrated to the United States at a young age. Sandra’s mom married an older man at 13 to come to the U.S and struggled to maintain three jobs to take care of her family. Sandra states that “They didn't have to cross the border like a lot of people from Central America do. Thank God, they were both able to come in with visas because they both married. You know different people to be able to obtain their green cards. And I'm talking this was back early in the 70s it wasn't like it is today. But they still had this struggle, and they had to come here, and work very hard to be where we are today.” Sandra believes immigrating to Brentwood was the best decision her parents ever made.

When we start talking about violence in Brentwood, Sandra gets very defensive and disagrees with the idea that immigrants are causing the problems and that “everyone is bad [here].” She says that she “feels as if she is as a mentor for a lot of these young kids. The situation here is sometimes [about] not having the parental guidance because as immigrants you want to come here for a better life. So, you go out there, and you find two or three jobs which are what a lot of these parents do. And the kids, when they don't have that parental guidance in the house, they're out in the streets. They're out in the streets, and they hook up with the wrong people. And it's not that they're a bad person, it’s that they get it involved with the wrong person.” What she believes the community needs is more resources, and more support. She discusses a situation in which she went down to the police station with a mother who was distraught and looking for her child, but the police did nothing. 

Sandra also feels that the media has a lot to do with the way Brentwood is portrayed. She believes that not everyone is a gang member, or into violence. She argues that “Brentwood is a beautiful community if you know how to take it. But the media portrays us as something bad, and people are scared. And it's like when you go to another town if you hear you know it's bad so you be careful. You want to stay away, but it's not [bad]... It's how you work with people; it's how you treat people.” She has worked in Brentwood for all of her life, almost 25 years, and while she doesn’t live there anymore, it has been nothing but great.

Elva was born right behind the McDonald’s on the East side of Brentwood. She then moved to the Regis Park area, which is the North side of Brentwood. After that, she lived on the West Side of Brentwood, but that area was technically considered South side. She’s lived in pretty much every part of Brentwood and never noticed being surrounded by immigrants until she was much older.

Her parents came over separately and met in the United States. They came from El Salvador in the 1980's, at the height of the civil war. Her father came on what is called “La Bestia”, which means “the beast”, a freight train that as many as half a million Central American immigrants annually hop aboard.  Her mother went straight by land, through Guatemala and Mexico, and then got caught. But getting caught back then wasn’t what it's like now - someone just paid her bail, and she tried again and eventually made it up here. She’s still not sure if her father has legal status because he doesn’t like talking about it, but her mom has asylum because gangs in El Salvador killed members of her family.

Elva isn’t surprised much by the heightened prejudice against Latinos in Brentwood. In fact, she argues that “they’ve always blamed Latinos or like Latinx’s, whatever term you want to use, they’ve used this community... to blame for the gangs, to blame for the violence. I think the difference right now is that this is focusing in on Central Americans in particular. Because when I was in high school, Puerto Ricans were in gangs, and Dominicans were in gangs…. it’s also a super ugly stereotype. But I think just right now with the political climate; it’s centering in on Central Americans. Which, just makes it even more complicated, because there’s so much more to it. There’s so much more than just ‘people show up and want to kill people.’”

She also doesn’t think that many people believe residents of Brentwood are all hard-working people. “I think they think people want handouts,” she said. “But at the same time, you came into my country and Y'all fucked everything up, and now I’m coming here to try to get something, you know I just want to make a bit to feed my kids, and you think I’m not worthy of what you have… Why shouldn’t we have good jobs? Why shouldn’t our kids go to good schools? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to just live a safe life and not have to worry about a thing? Why, because you were born here and I wasn' born there?”

Elva believes the actual violence in Brentwood can be traced back to the U.S. military involvement in El Salvador and Central America. If we ask ourselves what the leading cause of undocumented kids is, she believes that the U.S. military arming the Salvadoran military is central to that. "[The U.S.] was really scared of communism for whatever reason… they saw Che, and they didn’t want communism to go into Central America. So they sent their military, and their military taught the Salvadoran military who took their conservative values, brought it up against the guerrilleros, the rebels, the communists, FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), and anyone they thought were sympathetic to those values. They were massacring people. So people said ‘I’m getting out of here.’” And for that, she believes the U.S. can only blame itself. 

But to address the violence, she believes we need resources. Brentwood is one of the largest school districts in the state and is severely underfunded. And with the funding it has, the schools are not equipped to deal with the almost 70% Hispanic population in which a large majority of those students come in not speaking English. She argues that “...It doesn't make sense to me how we don’t have the resources. And even if we move up, why are the administrators not speaking Spanish, why aren’t the teachers speaking Spanish? Parents don’t get involved because who is there to get involved with? Who’s going to hear them out? The one Spanish-speaking teacher in the whole school?”

Right now, Elva is working in the Brentwood community to help people understand the heightened risk of deportation under the Trump Administration. She hands out dozens of “know your rights” flyers in English and Spanish, which tell people what to do if ICE agents come to their door. She also believes dialogue is a big thing and talks to whomever she can about the issues surrounding Brentwood and the Latino community on Long Island.

The Law Office of Alexandra Mayen Rivera was bustling on the Sunday afternoon that visited. Located in a run of the mill office building in Huntington, Long Island, the law firm specializes in immigration, asylum, green cards and family petitions. This is where I met Erika, a 2009 graduate of Brentwood High School who is currently clerking there while studying for the bar.

Erika’s story is not so different from Elva, Sandra, and Lauras. Her parents immigrated to the United States in the 80’s during the Salvadoran civil war. She lived in Los Angeles and then moved to Brentwood when she was six, so every community she’s lived in has been, in her eyes, diverse.

Her parents fled El Salvador during the war because her mother witnessed a horrific massacre and her father was tortured. They know if they stayed they would have died. Her parents did not obtain protected status, and when I ask why, Erika goes into detail, criticizing the Reagan administration.

"My parents did not get protected status. Back then it was the Reagan era, and it’s so funny because even in our own culture, they misinterpret what was really going on in the Reagan era because they don’t realize the process of all that. During the Reagan era, the State Department came out and said every Salvadoran that is coming in is not coming because of the war or as a refugee, they are coming in because they want economic profit, and that cut off all the asylum opportunities that people had. People were dying left and right because the State Department said something that strongly, familiar to things going on now. There was a point when thousands and thousands of Salvadorans were just being denied, and they were truly afraid for their lives. What caused the shift into getting NACARA (Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act) passed was human rights activists, lawyers, people showing that there were really good cases that they were being denied anyway solely on the purpose that they were Salvadoran, and Nicaragua because NACARA is also Nicaraguan."

I can’t help but see the parallels between the Reagan administration and the Trump administration’s policy of limiting asylum seekers. According to the Pew Center for Research, The U.S. admitted 84,995 refugees in the fiscal year ending in September 2016, the most in any year during the Obama administration. In 2017, that number dropped to 33,000, some of the lowest on record since the adoption of the 1980 U.S. Refugee Act. President Trump is currently discussing a plan to reduce that number even further to 25,000. As a law clerk, Erika is one of the many people fighting to help get those refugees resettled in the United States.

If an immigrant is lucky enough to obtain asylum and resettles in Brentwood, Erika believes that sometimes a new battle is just beginning. “The immigrant community coming from Central America, living in Brentwood (and throughout Long Island) at the moment are very misunderstood. The community is very vulnerable and are targets of violence and discrimination everywhere. They are attempting to escape the very thing ICE officials, police officers, and public officials are accusing them of being. Out of desperation, they are willing to undergo a dangerous journey north where they are in great risk of harm. All in the hope to have a better life and to provide for their families. This is the bulk of the immigrant community in Brentwood. Hard working and dedicated human beings. Not ‘drug dealers, criminals, or rapists.’”

When I ask her what she believes the community can do better to make immigrants feel more at home, and address the increase in violence that so many blame on the immigrants, she says the most important thing is to stop alienating the community. “Police and school officials need to stop acting like ICE agents and have a more open dialogue with residents. It’s imperative that the community trusts its own police and local public officials, but that hasn’t been established like it should be.” Further, she believes a general lack of funding for education, parks, after-school programs, and programs to help at-risk youth amplifies the issues. Also, accountability from school officials is lacking. She thinks school officials should really get to know their students. “Research country conditions to understand where their students are coming from. Get more counselors in that school to help immigrant children deal with PTSD, to help at-risk youth, and honestly to just help students in general.”

For better or worse, a town that was once a haven for Latino immigrants residents is now at the center of a national immigration debate, with recent appearances by President Donald Trump and Gubernatorial hopeful Cynthia Nixon. Because, or despite of this, residents of Brentwood are demanding more of their government, continuing to fight for their unalienable rights. The revamping of ICE is sowing immigrant fears, adding to the distrust of police within the community. But Immigration activists are fighting back, handing out "Know Your Rights" cards to people who are at risk of getting stopped by ICE officials. Community Development Agency appointments are not reflective of the diversity within the town. But residents are fighting back, suing the town they claim has deprived them of political representation. Each time a negative story comes out about Brentwood, residents fight back, showcasing their resilience, never letting the negative stereotype of their town win. They are rewriting Brentwood's history and shaping its future, but this time, from their side.