December 15, 2008
Killing Haunts Ecuadoreans’ Rise in New York
By KAREEM FAHIM and KAREN ZRAICK
Always crowded and often perilous, the twisting road that brought the Sucuzhañay family from Ecuador to New York City has transformed the city, first neighborhoods in Queens and more recently parts of Brooklyn where surging numbers of newcomers have made Ecuadoreans one of New York’s largest Hispanic communities.

The father came first. In the early 1990s, unable to support his family as a farmer in southern Ecuador, Florentino Hidalgo Sucuzhañay made his way to New York — his family refused to say how he got here — and found work as a dishwasher. Over the next decade, six of his children made the same journey.

His son Jose was among the most successful. Starting as a waiter, he became an owner of a Brooklyn real estate firm and bought several buildings. He sent money home to his family in Ecuador, where his two children live.

But on Dec. 7, a familiar story of immigrant striving took an awful turn. As Jose walked with his older brother Romel home from a bar in Bushwick, Brooklyn, their arms around each other, three men attacked them, shouting anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs and beating Mr. Sucuzhañay with a bat, the police said. He died on Friday night at a Queens hospital, one day before his mother, who had been awaiting a visa, arrived from Ecuador to see him.

Though the murderous attack has provoked widespread anger, it has been particularly poignant for Ecuadoreans, who not only shared a homeland with the victim, but saw in the Sucuzhañay brothers (pronounced suh-KOO-shen-y’eye) the kind of success they were reaching for. And there was outrage because of the assault’s setting in a neighborhood where Ecuadoreans had begun to carve out a niche.

The Sucuzhañay family — there are 12 siblings, 6 of whom live in the United States — joined thousands of their neighbors who, starting in the late 1970s, left Ecuador’s impoverished southern highlands and made New York City home to the largest community of Ecuadoreans in the country.

In later years, as border security tightened, many Ecuadoreans paid enormous sums to migrant smugglers, or coyotes, who secreted them into the country on unsteady boats, or through safe houses and across the Mexican desert.

Most immigrants settled in Corona and Jackson Heights, two neighborhoods in Queens that have long been home to concentrations of Ecuadoreans. Some spent their first nights on camas calientes — warm beds in cramped boarding houses — before the lucky ones found their own places. The No. 7 subway line carried them to jobs in Manhattan.

In 1990, there were about 76,000 Ecuadoreans in New York. Today, there are about 170,000 Ecuadoreans, the fourth-largest Hispanic group in the city after Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Mexicans, according to census figures analyzed by demographers at Queens College. The community’s growth has been fed by a succession of economic crises in Ecuador, and by people like Jose O. Sucuzhañay, whose accomplishments seemed to signal what was possible.

His younger brother Diego said Jose “was ambitious.â€