What is “Community”?: Latino Immigrant Perspectives

One of the most difficult parts of my research was defining terms with my narrators. Not only is the concept of community rather abstract (as observed by Nelson Salazar) but I was often attempting to derive definitions through interviews in Spanish. Thus, not only was I speaking across possible cultural differences, but language differences as well. However, the consensus seemed to be that definitions of community are entirely personal. Here are the definitions and/or descriptions of personal community several narrators provided.

A young El Salvadoran (age sixteen) who has been in the States for only a year, had significant trouble deciding how to define community. He finally said that school is part of the community, where different people come together. However when asked who his community consisted of, he said his family, friends, and neighbors – those either close to him in physical vicinity or as social supports.

Another young El Salvadoran male (age twenty), who also helped translate the informal interview with the sixteen-year-old, defined community partly in terms of racial or cultural communities and said his community consists of his family, friends, and also colleagues (referring to those with whom he works) .

A middle-aged Nicaraguan woman saw her street here in Somerville as a community (where there is a “SLOW” traffic sign and her children can play safely) but also, upon my questioning, defined all of Somerville as a community. She reported a stronger sense of community back at home in Nicaragua, which she attributes partly to language. In Central America everyone speaks Spanish and she was able to have meaningful friendships and full conversations with people, while here, her limited English ability leaves her somewhat isolated on her street where she mostly only smiles to and greets her American, Haitian, and Brazilian neighbors - for they share no common language. However, despite language differences, she does feel a strong sense of community in her immediate neighborhood. As an example she offered that if there is a stranger prowling around the houses on her street, her neighbors will call her to alert and warn her to be careful opening her house. Thus, although her sense of local community is challenged by her inability to speak English, she still feels a sense of neighborhood friendliness and care that leads her to define her street as a community within the larger city of Somerville.

An El Salvadoran woman (forty-one years old), also the mother of one of the AHORA students, said that she feels a good sense of community where she lives in the Mystic Ave housing development (she has lived there for six years). She spoke highly of her neighbors and said that when she first moved to Massachusetts she had a harder time and felt more isolated. She now lives near family, where as when she first came to Massachusetts, although she lived with El Salvadorans, she did not know them personally and it was harder to feel a strong sense of community. About the Latino community's interaction with non-Latinos, she says that she does not feel any interracial tension, and says that the problems she has heard of have been within Latino male youth (especially in the summer) as oppose to between races. Overall she described her community as consisting of her family and a few close neighbors.

Another El Salvadoran woman who lives in the Mystic Ave housing development said that she definitely feels a strong sense of community within the development. She positively cited her many friends and neighbors who help her take care of her children in case she is sick, or has an appointment, and who generally are like “family” to her. For example, after she had her second child here in the States, a friend who lives in the development took care of her children during the afternoons so that she could work. People from the community also sent her new baby clothes for her most recent baby daughter. This narrator (unlike the previously mentioned) was also enthusiastic about programs in the Mystic Ave community and says she goes whenever she can afford to (temporally and monetarily).

Perspective of a Latino Community Leader

For both an El Salvadoran immigrant perspective, and also the outlook of a community leader and organizer in the housing development where several of my narrators, and also many of the AHORA students, live, I interviewed Nelson Salazar. Several of my previous narrators mentioned the community-building work of The Welcome Project, and since Salazar is both the coordinator and an El Salvadoran native himself, I concluded his insights would be valuable. Salazar had experience with the development's communities, and his own personal experiences from El Salvador to draw from. In combination with these assets, he has also attended college here in the States and has used this academic framework to further his understanding of definitions and constructions of community.

About definitions of community in El Salvador, Nelson and I had the following conversation:

Narrator: I think that it's a concept that you don't really need to get to talk about, partly it's because you live in it, and you deal with it, so you don't really see the community in yourself, you see within the community. So the concept of it, you don't really think about it - not until you go to college, and then you start saying, “ the community .” I think that community for me is anything that is around you. There isn't a definition of community, because community is just defining what community is. It's not what people define for you what community is - you define it. I mean my community can be my family, and that's about it, but that's my community. And there is nothing wrong with that because that is MY community. But people will say, “oh no no no, community is also you neighbor, or community…” well what if I don't want my neighbor? you know, as my community… but they want to enforce you to believe that community is the combination of all the people, the different components around you. But in reality, it is what YOU, as an individual… you think what is it. So there isn't, such a...

Interviewer: set definition…

Narrator: No, I don't think that there is. Sometimes we look at it from the terminology perspective, the meaning of it, but I think that it is more about what is it that you as the person define for yourself. For me community is what is around me. I think that there are other components outside that effect that community, but that doesn't mean they are part of that community, they are more like outsiders.

Interviewer: So, are you saying then that here that you would mostly consider your family your community, or…

Narrator: No, I think my community, at least for me, my community is my family, the people that I work with, the people I deal with, those are the community. People that I don't know …the governor, you know, that's not my community. I think it is the people that I am around that are my community.

Thus, Nelson Salazar sees community as a fluid term that everyone defines, and should be able to define, for him or herself. For him, his community is composed of his family and the people he directly interacts with, but not does necessarily include people in his town with whom he has no personal connection. In response to his idea that there is no one definition of community, I offered that in my interviews I should then make sure to ask narrators to define community . However he said,

Uh, you probably wouldn't get much response… It is like, “what?” I mean if you talk about “ familia ”… what does “ familia ” mean to you… “oh my kids, my aunt, my cousins, my grandparent,” and you know they start going with my gran-gran-grandfather, and my gran-gran-grandfather, and they start extending the whole family. Because it is not as abstract. It is actually there for them. They can relate to it.

Both my AHORA students' experiences with narrators and my own have shown this to be true. How does one define community? It is a hard question to answer and responses may often be relative. As Salazar points out, how we identify ourselves (and our communities) is dependant on who we are with, where we are, and who is asking about our identity.

If I am around Latinos and they ask, what are you, I say I am Salvadoran. If I am with other ethnic groups and they say, “what are you,” I say, “I am Latino.” Then when I am with Latinos, you know, “what are you,” “I am from El Salvador.” If I am with Salvadorans, “what are you,” I am from, lets say for example, San Salvador, and in San Salvador they say “where are you,” you identify yourself with your neighborhood. Then in the neighborhood if they ask you “where are you,” you identify with the street. Then on the street, you identify with your house. So how do you identify yourself depends on where you are.

He continues that he thinks it is harder for immigrants to define community here in the States than back in their countries of origin, because although they find themselves defined as “Latinos,” like so many other people from some part of Latin America, this social designation does not mean that they share a common cultural identity or sense of community with other Latinos. To paraphrase Repak, author of Waiting on Washington the experiences of Latin American migrants can hardly be viewed as homogenous. Salazar illustrates,

just because you are Latino doesn't mean that you know the person. You might be talking to a Colombian person and the only thing that you have in common with them is that Christopher Columbus came and raped our ancestors. People tend to say, “what unites us as Latinos is the language,” the language that we speak. But what people speak in Argentina and the language that we speak in El Salvador is different. It is not even the language (that unites us), it is just the history about our ancestors having been raped and killed, tortured, by the Europeans… that's the only thing…

That Latinos are not a uniform racial group is an important fact that challenges the stereotypes that attempt to encompass diverse peoples from all across the Americas. Salazar points out that immigrants often have a common history of oppression that unifies them. This was also voiced by Elena Letona, the Executive of Centro Presente, who said that the oppression many Central Americans have faced both leads to mistrust (barriers to community-building) but also creates common experiences from which to bond. That Latino immigrants see themselves as distinct from one another, by country, region, and community of origin, is important to keep in mind while researching community-building among “Latinos” in Somerville. As both Nelson Salazar and one of my female El Salvadoran narrators mentioned, even when you are living in a “community” of people from your country of origin, it does not mean that you know them or feel community connection.

The Mystic Ave Housing Development as a “Community”

As Salazar explained in our formal interview, The Welcome Project where he works functions as is the epicenter of a definable “community” that can be physically located by the buildings of the 530 Mystic Ave housing developments. Salazar observes that the development seems to be a community unto itself (although it also contains within it, the “Latino” community, “Haitian” community, “Vietnamese” community, etc). I asked Salazar if he thought people who live in the development see the development as their community:

Interviewer: Do you think it is that wide - it's not just “my family and my neighbors,” but do people have that kind of sense?

Narrator: I think so. It is again, the fact that they are within the development.

Nelson goes on to say that even if a person lives just across the street from the housing development, they are not part of the community in the same way. The physical clustering of buildings, along with The Welcome Project's programs, services, and events, really seem to foster a sense of the development as a community.

Nelson supports this assertion with a series of anecdotes about the informal social networks of support that he observes uniting members of the development. He says people bring their children to the community center and help drive one another's kids to school in the mornings. People take care of each other when sick, tenants help other members of the development (even those who are not close friends and family) in planning parties, weddings, baby showers, etc, and if someone has not been seen for a while, Salazar says people will ask him about one another's whereabouts, showing general care and concern for one another. According to Salazar, this sense of community to some extent spans interethnic groups within the development. As a touching example, Salazar describes the Chinese New Year/Valentine's Day celebration in February and how his attempt to have a solely Vietnamese event turned out to be a mistake – they wanted everyone to be included.

Narrator: Before I came there was Christmas, then they changed the name for those who don't celebrate Christmas, but then I realized that with the Vietnamese group they celebrate the Chinese New Year. So I decided that we should celebrate the Chinese New Year - as a Welcome Project. So we celebrated it, and we had everybody come. Because it is in February, we call it the Chinese New Year/Valentines Day kind of thing. So we combine it, like the day of the friends - like a friendship day. So we have this party, the second year, after I started getting to know more people, I was told by some Vietnamese that the Chinese New Year - it was nice that we celebrate it, it's a good way that we acknowledge them - but some of them like to spend it with their family and friends. So the second year, we celebrated it but we decided that we should just do it within the Vietnamese community. So Vietnamese came and they brought the food, and we had everything there, and they were waiting and I said, “it is time to eat, and they said, “well, where's the other people?” I said “what other people?” They said, “the Latinos, the Haitians, where are they?” I go, “Oh my God, what a mistake!” I didn't tell them because I thought they wanted to have their own kind of party – “no,” they said, “you go and call them.” So I came to the office and I had to call some of them - some of them came - but they didn't feel good about it because they didn't have any food made. But it is interesting because…the fact that they are asking, ok, wait a minute, “where's the other people?” - so they do interact. They come here and you see Haitian and Vietnamese and Latina, “hi, how are you?” it's like the Welcome Project is the connection between all of them.

Certainly then, there is a sense of community even between immigrants from very different backgrounds who speak very different native languages. As Salazar points out, even though many immigrants living in the development speak only basic English, they do not expect one another to speak English well and communication, even with very limited common language, is possible. This is another example of how immigrants, regardless of their different histories, share similar struggles here in the States and can bond despite, and perhaps because of, their hardships.

So although Latinos may be limited by their English abilities, and may at times feel little common identity even with other Latinos, simultaneously community is being built as diverse peoples face some of the same struggles in immigrating to, and living in, the United States.

Nelson Salazar, Transcribed (Interview #4), 10/17/03.

Repak, Waiting on Washington , 6.

Nelson Salazar, Transcribed (Interview #4), 10/17/03.

What is “Community”?: A Puerto Rican/Italian American Couple's Perspective

In addition to these Central American immigrant personal definitions and experiences of community here in Somerville, I interviewed a Puerto Rican woman who was born in Florida (and her Somerville-born Italian husband, both who are in their fifties). She lived in Florida for the first half of her life (where she met her husband) and has since been living here in Somerville with him and their two children. She described her community in terms of extended family. She and her husband said that in Florida, their community largely consisted of her Puerto Rican family members (about eighty of them are scattered throughout Florida and the East coast), while here in Somerville, their community is mostly composed of his large Italian family. For this couple, who have been in the restaurant business for years, food is also an important ingredient in defining community. They raved about the Puerto Rican and Italian food of their families/communities as strong markers of cultural identity.

About immigrant Latino communities in Somerville, this couple says that their only interactions with Latino immigrant populations are through work (for her she works with the Tufts University SPELL program, teaching many children of immigrants, and for him he has contact with Latino immigrants through his work in his deli and at Delta airlines). However, the Italian husband did believe that Latino communities support themselves through loyalty to Latino businesses. He cited the opening of a Latino butcher shop and his early doubts that it would stay in business. Yet, he says, because of the faithfulness of the Latino community in supporting businesses of “their kind,” it has flourished (despite its proximity to a Brazilian butcher shop).

What is “Community”?: AHORA Youth Perspectives

I also found that my two AHORA students were eager to comment on their concepts of community. They noted how, especially after conducting two unrecorded interviews on their own, there seems to be no universal definition of community. They found themselves asking, “how do you define community?” and then when their narrators seemed confused and unsure how to answer the question, they, the interviewers, proceeded to give examples and define community, to which the narrators responded, “yeah, sure, that's it.” Bich and Jessica both learned, as I have been learning, that defining the term “community” is not simple, and that how one asks the question can very much affect a narrator's response.

As for their personal definitions of community, they emphasized that community is produced when different types of people join together for a common goal. Having just attended St Benedict's Mass that day, Bich and Jessica discussed how they feel a strong sense of community at Church. Bich, who is Vietnamese and does not come from a Christian household, enjoys attending the Spanish Mass even though she does not understand much of the language. She says that the energy and feeling of community is unlike anything she experiences as part of her cultural heritage. Both Bich and Jessica expressed how Mass produced a great sense of community because people were all coming together for the same purpose. Everyone becomes part of the same thing, clapping and singing, and jointly focused. They said that they liked Mass because they can forget anything else in their lives and truly be present – they can just be there. I asked if there were any other instances of “coming together” that produced similar feelings. Jessica responded, “teams.” They agreed that sports were another situation where many different kinds of people, all of whom you may not like, come together for a common reason and the result is a strong sense of community.

Personal Communication, 11/09/03.