http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news ... 857038.htm

Posted on Sun, Oct. 09, 2005

A New Jersey town, a Brazilian deluge, diverging hopes

By Jennifer Moroz
Inquirer Staff Writer

First of three parts

They hoped this old town would be rediscovered someday. That new life would course through the tired streets, revive the aging storefronts, fill the burnt-out, boarded-up buildings.

And when they learned that a new light-rail line was coming - the first passenger service in 40 years - their hope soared. Mark our words, community leaders said, the train will bring people back.

In their dreams, this blue-collar burg on the Delaware's banks, a place the booming suburbs drained long ago, would be bypassed no longer. The town once called Progress would prosper yet again.

First, the developers would come. Then the young professionals and empty nesters, filing into new lofts and townhouses and restoring the lonely downtown to a vibrant business district.

Tiny Riverside, Burlington County - a destination. That's what they wanted.

And they got their wish. People are coming.

They're just not the ones anyone here was expecting.

They're immigrants from Brazil. And over the last five years, as many as 5,000 of them have flooded in and around Riverside's 1.5 square miles, catching off guard the town and its 8,000 souls.

Most of the newcomers are young men and have come here illegally to take jobs as carpenters. Many of the pioneers came on tourist visas and stayed. The most recent arrivals sneaked across the Mexican border.

In early-morning darkness, they camp on doorsteps with their lunch coolers, waiting for vans to take them to the latest construction frontier. At dusk, they return, trudging into rented dwellings next to the siding-clad homes their neighbors decorate with American flags. Downtown, they gather outside multiservice shops, entering to wire money home, peruse products with labels in Portuguese, banter with clerks who speak nothing but.

Their arrival, in such large numbers over such a short period, has engendered mixed feelings. Community leaders, who have been waiting years for a rebirth, are thrilled with the shops and restaurants that have sprung up, run by and for Brazilians. But the influx of so many people who don't speak the language and don't share the culture has also left residents reeling.

"They're everywhere. There's more of them than there are of us," lifelong resident Carolyn Chamberlain exclaims from behind the counter at Riverside News Agency. "Brazilians are taking over this whole town."

This town and others. Brazilians have become one of the fastest-growing groups of illegal immigrants to the United States. Farmhands and accountants, clerks and lawyers, they have been coming - as did generations of dreamers before them - for a decent wage and a better life.

And, as town leaders hoped it would, word has traveled - not to striving professionals working in New York and Philadelphia, but to struggling families in faraway states named Minas Gerais, Goias, and Rondonia - that little Riverside, New Jersey, is a good place to land.

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Across America, towns, cities and suburbs are experiencing an influx of foreigners for the first time. Or the first in a very long time.

Immigrant numbers are at a record high, and the newcomers are fanning out from the places where they have traditionally settled into new territory.

Thousands of Somalian refugees have relocated in Lewiston, Maine.

Latino day laborers have flocked to Long Island.

And Brazilians - who for years have migrated to Newark, South Florida and Boston, and whose numbers have been growing in Northeast Philadelphia - have discovered Riverside. Local police estimate that 2,000 live within township limits. Brazilians say thousands more live up and down the aging Route 130 corridor, regularly flowing into the town that has become their cultural and commercial center in South Jersey.

It's a tough adjustment all around.

The locals have many complaints: Most Brazilians don't speak English and don't pay taxes, they overcrowd the housing, and are noisy when they get together. They ogle the women, honk their horns early in the morning, and drive around with Pennsylvania license plates when everyone knows they live down the street.

"I'm not racist. I'm no Archie Bunker," says Sal Notte, who owns Lil Corner Deli in Riverside and lives in neighboring Delanco. But "if I went to Brazil, I would certainly abide by their rules."

The Brazilians have their own worries. They don't speak English, they're far from home, and they miss their families. Many are still paying off the smugglers who helped them get here. They can't get Jersey plates, so they make do with Pennsylvania tags, which are easier to acquire. People rip them off, and sometimes vandalize their homes and cars. But they're reluctant to go to the police. They live in fear that immigration agents will show up at their door. Being undocumented means being vulnerable.

"We didn't come here to the United States to fight," insists Ricardo Samartino, 25, who says he has working papers. "We came here to work. Our job is to build America."

Township Planning Board Chairman Gary Christopher believes the people who have trouble with the Brazilians are the same ones who belittle the town's redevelopment plans.

"They think, 'What? Change Riverside?' Well, times are changing, folks," Christopher says. "Do you want an empty, decrepit store or a nice Brazilian restaurant? The answer is clear to me. America is the land of opportunity. Riverside should be the land of opportunity."

Like Christopher, Regina Collinsgru, a vice president of the Riverside Business Association and former publisher of the Riverside Positive Press, believes time will heal.

After all, she says, Riverside was founded by Germans. "And boy, they must have been outraged when the Polish and Italians showed up. Every generation goes through this. We'll go through this."

Germans settled here in 1851. Until the 1930s, minutes from the township meetings were kept in German.

They started the great textile mills that made Riverside a leading manufacturer of men's hosiery. Swiss industrialist Theophilus Zurbrugg based his Philadelphia Watchcase Co. here and built the tower that symbolized the era's greatness.

Poles and Italians arrived in the early 1900s, so many that whole streets became known as Dago Row and Polack Row. They joined the Irish, who had fled their country's famine.

With this influx, Riverside became a thriving industrial center and cultural melting pot. During World War II, the metalworks churned out munitions instead of watchcases. And after the war, the town continued to flourish.

Bob Kenney, town historian and lifelong resident, remembers people streaming into the Palace Restaurant for an iced tea and BLT and homemade candy you ordered months in advance for the holidays. The stately Fox Theater was packed Friday nights. People from all over the region bought the latest fashions in Scott Street's boutiques.

Everything you needed, you could get in Riverside.

"This place was truly popping," says Kenney, now in his 70s and leaning heavily on a cane.

But then the watchcase factory closed its doors in 1956. Suburban malls sprouted up, people started moving out. The trains stopped running, as people preferred their cars.

Finally, on Jan. 6, 1964, as Disney's The Incredible Journey was playing, the Fox Theater went up in flames. With it went an entire city block.

Gone were Milavasky's Home Furnishings, Brumberger's Confectionery, the Rendfrey & Siegfried Photo Studio, Jerry Merlino's Barber Shop, Bogg's Soda Store, and Capparelli's Shoe Repairs.

Kenney puts it this way: "It was bang, bang, bang, and the town went to its knees and didn't recover."

Riverside has been hoping to ever since. And the Camden-to-Trenton River Line, which started running in March 2004, was going to be the engine of that revival.

Township leaders envisioned new residents hopping a train to jobs in Philadelphia and New York. Sure, it might be a long commute, and yeah, they'd have to switch trains for either destination. But they wouldn't be caught in traffic. And at day's end, they could return to their piece of small-town America.

Developers would see the potential and invest, starting with the old Watchcase Tower, now lifeless and foreboding. The entire "Golden Triangle" behind it - the 32-acre redevelopment zone that town leaders have been conjuring with for more than a decade - would finally live up to its name.

Township Administrator Eric Berry is certain the town's renaissance is just around the corner. In December, officials selected a developer and a proposal for the site: 200 condos, 66 townhouses facing the Rancocas Creek, and 120 two-story loft units in the Watchcase Tower, plus 24,000 square feet of retail space.

Once the Watchcase Tower is reborn, he predicts expansively, leaning back in his chair, "this whole town is going to be under construction."

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Outside Berry's window, a different sort of transformation has been taking place. It's not one of committees and proposals and thoughtful deliberation. No, this change is fast, informal, familial.

While the Riverside planners have been planning, the immigration chain - one person arrives and friends and relatives follow - has been at work changing the town.

The Portuguese were the first to come in any great numbers after Riverside's fall. Alfred Rezende, who arrived in 1966, was looking for more space for his frozen-dessert business. He recruited bakers, seamstresses, and cabinet makers to staff local businesses. About 400 Portuguese settled in all.

Townspeople remember their arrival well. They came with their families. They were clean, polite, legal. They were welcome.

"They didn't say that then," laughs Rezende, now 80. "The Portuguese kept to themselves, but everybody kept watching them through the curtains. Every move we made."

As they have in other parts of the country, Brazilians followed the Portuguese - and their language - to Riverside. Portuguese subcontractors hired Brazilians, some of whom in turn started their own companies. Growing demand for cheap construction labor has kept friends and relatives coming.

Sergio Nunes, 31, was trained as a lawyer in Brazil, where, had he stayed, he would have made $700 a month. As a carpenter in Riverside, he could earn that amount in a week.

Nunes, who followed an uncle to Riverside in 1996 so he could earn the fees for law school, said that about 30 Brazilians lived in the town back then. He settled with his family in 1999, just as the surge in immigration began.

Nunes went on to clean houses with his wife, working 16-hour days. He's saved enough to buy investment property in his native Goiana as well as a house in Riverside, and to open Sergio's Rancho Brasil Restaurante & Lanchonete, where customers choose from a buffet of homeland tastes and pay by the weight of their plates.

It's one of more than a dozen businesses that have sprung up over the last few years, about half of those just since last summer.

A lot, like Sergio's, are owned by Brazilians who've had success. Most cater to the new-immigrant market.

Seabra, a Newark-based Portuguese supermarket, has taken over the old Foodtown on Fairview Street, advertising "International Products - Brazilian, Hispanic, Portuguese." A few doors down, a Portuguese bank, also from Newark, has moved in.

Downtown, shops have sprung up selling brightly colored dresses, ruffled tops, funky jeans and flip-flops.

At Lunchonette Brasil on Scott Street, women dish out pastries filled with chicken and cheese, heaping burgers called X-Tudos, frothy tropical drinks, and Guarana, the fruity national soda of Brazil.

Where the Palace used to be, an Ecuadorean named Franco Ordonez serves up rice and beans, stewed and grilled meats dusted with manioc flour. Down the street, men line up at his brother's store, G&I Amigos, clasping stacks of bills to wire home.

Luis Ordonez established this place in 2002. He has since opened a music shop next door, where customers can pick through a selection of South American CDs and e-mail or video-chat with family and friends, while a samba plays overhead.

"When I came here" - three years ago - "this town was dead," Ordonez says from the back office, where he's just finished interviewing a new manager for Lunchonette Brasil, which he's recently taken over. "I said, 'There's no way I'm ever gonna survive.' If it weren't for the Brazilians, I wouldn't be here."

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Cindia never wanted to come to Riverside. She never wanted to leave Brazil. But her mother, Marli, insisted. She wanted to make money, buy a house, get Cindia, a giggling 13-year-old, a good education. Cindia's older sister, Fernanda, her husband, Emiliano, and his brother - Cindia's boyfriend - Deivisson were already in Riverside, making good money. And Emiliano was willing to pay the $11,000 the smugglers were asking to bring Cindia and Marli.

So in May 2004, mother and daughter set out from their native Minas Gerais. It was a whirlwind: Sao Paulo, Mexico City, then an 18-hour truck ride to a house near the border.

At each stop different men ordered them around. Cindia didn't want to leave her mother's side. She'd heard about the "coyotes," what they did sometimes to the women they were smuggling.

She was scared. Sick with fever. And the worst was yet to come.

The Rio Grande was so cold, and you couldn't see the bottom. You stumbled across the rocks below. Cindia worried about alligators.

A coyote gripped her hand, but the water rose to her chest, then her neck. The current ripped at her clothes, so strong it could sweep her away.

Cindia kept looking for her mother. Marli couldn't swim.

How long did it take to wade across? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? A lifetime.

And then the coyote was gone, back across the river. They moved forward, toward a road he said would be there.

They squeezed through the thorny rungs of a barbed-wire fence, and there it was.

Within minutes, Border Patrol was on them. Everything was going according to plan.


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Contact staff writer Jennifer Moroz at 609-989-8990 or jmoroz@phillynews.com. Tomorrow: Two cultures collide

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How This Story Was Reported
Reporter Jennifer Moroz made more than 50 trips to Riverside during 15 months of reporting. She interviewed more than 150 residents, about half Brazilians and half locals, including police and municipal and school officials. In May she traveled to Brazil, where over two weeks she interviewed about 50 people, including U.S. State Department and Brazilian officials. She has spoken with a dozen immigration officials and experts, including several specializing in Brazilian immigration, and read dozens of articles and books on the subject.

Many interviews were conducted in Portuguese through an interpreter. The last names of some Brazilians have been omitted at their request to protect their identities or those of relatives.