In New York City, I see my hometown everywhere I go

WORDS BY NATALIA GEVARA
EDITED BY BRE GEORGES

I get off at 14th Street–Union Square almost every single day. It’s the station closest to my school and my place of work. Street vendors selling churros and cups of fruit are abundant, like in most stations in the city. More than once, I have seen the same little boy, hanging out by the stairs when I’m trying to catch the N train, selling gum and candy from a small box in his hands. He looks so much like my little brother did at that age—almost startlingly so—that I have to give him whatever cash I have on hand when I see him. I don’t need the chicle (gum) in return; I just need to take care of him in any way that I can. 

Since moving to New York City, I have become increasingly homesick for California, for authentic breakfast burritos and redwood trees, for year-round sunshine and my childhood friends. But even in these vulnerable moments of feeling alien to this side of the country, I still see my hometown everywhere. Despite being 3,000 miles away, everywhere I look, I see Stockton.

I know that transplants are the ire of most New York natives, and understandably so. Despite our best intentions, we unwittingly contribute to the ever-skyrocketing cost of living that threatens to push out New Yorkers who have lived here for generations. I understand the frustration of seeing “New York influencers” who are really from Wisconsin, claiming to rep the city despite not understanding what it really means to be from here. Income inequality, heavy policing, and gentrification are the realities for the average working-class New Yorker, as are underfunded public schools filled with students who have origins all over the globe. I would never claim to fully understand what it’s like to grow up in New York, but I do understand more than you would think—because the parts that make up NYC are what make up Stockton too.

You often hear disparaging comments about NYC from conservatives—usually thinly veiled racist dog whistles about crime, violence, and immigration. NYC isn’t loved by other parts of the country, like how Stockton isn’t loved by other parts of California. Stockton has a variety of accolades: “most miserable city in the country,” according to Forbes; tenth most dangerous city in America—and second in California, just behind Oakland; and third least literate city in the country, according to ABC News. People see disparity, and they see violence. In 2012, there was one homicide nearly every four days. One of them was my cousin, who was shot and killed at the age of twenty-one. In Stockton, almost everyone knows someone who has lost their life to gun violence. We all know the difference between the sound of a car backfiring and gunshots—a skill that I have continued to use while living in New York.

But I don’t claim to understand New York just because my hometown is a city with crime and violence too. I understand because the same fist that has tried to strangle my hometown has its other fist around New York. I understand because I also grew up in underfunded public schools, amongst the police who were always there, who would rifle through our backpacks for drugs and guns and chewing gum. I was scared of them. I knew that they bothered my brothers when they walked home from school. 

Yes, I understand, because Stockton is everywhere.

The San Joaquin Valley is the heart of California. And that is where Stockton is—in the heart. Stockton earned the nickname “Port City,” due to the port located there that leads to the Pacific Ocean. Ships from all over the world enter the delta, where the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers meet and cross. “All roads lead to Stockton,” writes Dawn Mabalon in her book Little Manila is in the Heart, which examines the history of the Filipinx American community in my hometown. Mabalon is referring to the location of Stockton, in the heart of the agricultural hub of the country—the golden land of opportunity. Immigrants from all over the globe have gone there, right to Stockton, from Cambodia and Laos and Palestine and the Philippines and India and Mexico. My grandparents, childhood sweethearts, found their home right by the port where my grandfather worked unloading ships: a pink bungalow, surrounded by roses grown by my grandmother, with a giant wooden heart built right onto the porch. 

Like most places in the country, NYC receives a healthy amount of its produce from California—namely the Central Valley. When I am at the grocery store, I look at the rows of grapes and garlic—and I am home again. Yes, all of the asparagus and grapes and almonds and blueberries and cucumbers and figs and onions and walnuts and strawberries you eat are grown near my house. It has been this way for a very long time. The vegetables your grandmother cooked in her kitchen on the East Coast were picked by my grandparents’ hands. When you sit down to eat your meals, we are not so far apart after all. 

I understand because, like NYC, Stockton is one of the most diverse cities in the country—according to the 2020 U.S. News & World Report. At my high school graduation, students delivered the welcome in multiple languages to accommodate the families who spoke Spanish and Tagalog and Ilocano and Visayan and Khmer and Vietnamese and Japanese and Punjabi and Hindi and Arabic and Mandarin. From kindergarten on, I was surrounded by peers who spoke different languages and practiced different religions. It wasn’t until college that I entered a room where I was the only non-white person there. I will never be used to it. I am glad that as long as I am in Stockton or NYC, I won’t have to be.

In NYC, I am likely indistinguishable from any other transplant. But when I am among my fellow transplants, I often feel very alone. Like many people from my generation in Stockton, I am the first in my family to graduate from college. My mom didn’t graduate high school, and my grandma only went to school until the fifth grade. They are the smartest people that I know. When my fellow transplants talk about their mothers with PhDs, their family ski trips, I know they can never understand. It wasn’t until one of my coworkers, who is from the Bronx, talked about how she has to Zelle her mother money every month to help with the rent that I felt like I belonged. We are not so different, because we are fighting the same fight, every single day. 

For so many immigrants, Stockton was Ellis Island. They were mainly made up of survivors—of war, colonization, and displacement. On Saturdays, you can go to Angel Cruz Park and purchase the best papaya salad from Lao women with warm smiles, who escaped the carpet bombing of their country. There were so many migrants as a result of U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia that, in 1978, a white supremacist massacred five children in a Stockton schoolyard—all of Cambodian and Vietnamese descent—in what was the deadliest school shooting at a non-college institution until Sandy Hook in 2012. Yet the Southeast Asian community in Stockton thrives, and many of them are my best friends. My childhood was indelibly marked by them welcoming me into their homes, showing me love through home cooking. I am fiercely protective of them.

To fill agricultural shortages during WWII, the U.S. government sponsored the bracero program, which involved importing Mexican farm and labor workers into the country. The program commenced in none other than Stockton, and continued for twenty years. Chicano history is nothing without Stockton. My identity, as a Stocktonian of Mexican descent, is inextricably linked to the Chicano movement. My parents and grandparents worked in the fields. My history is my backyard. On the rare occasion when my dad talks about his childhood, he tells me: “Mija, you know how much we made? A quarter per basket of ajo.” Caesar Chavez went into those fields and tried to pull men away in protest. When he tried to do this to my grandpa, he punched Chavez in the face in his confusion. Dolores Huerta fought for them too, though fewer people know her name. Of course she is less famous; she is from Stockton. But most people know Sí, se puede, the motto of the United Farm Workers, which Huerta herself created.  

I often think about the poem “The Rose That Grew From Concrete” by Tupac Shakur. People from Stockton most often do, because it feels so representative of our community. 

Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature’s law is wrong it
learned to walk without having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams,
it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared.

I think about this poem too, when I am in New York. I might have left Stockton, but Stockton can never leave me. It’s the reason why I want to cry when I see the eloteros in Union Square or when I see the little boy in the subway selling chicle. I know not everyone can understand, but I do. They are my family. Cities made up of survivors, of hundreds of different languages, of street vendors and refugees. In Stockton, Punjabi and Mexican neighbors dance in the street to each other’s cultural music on the Fourth of July.  It’s a scene that isn’t surprising for Stockton, and wouldn’t be out of place in NYC either. The immigrant communities of our cities, they are the ones who built this country, and yet most of them are in poverty. They call us illegals and thugs and a waste of tax dollars—but they are nothing without us. They look at our neighborhoods and call them “ghettos,” like they could ever know what that means. The poison of gentrification and a rapidly expanding police state threaten cities like Stockton and New York, so New Yorkers will always have my solidarity. We are birds of the same feather, tarred by the same brush. We come from the same roots, where concrete flowers grow.

---

Natalia Gevara is a Latinx writer from the Central Valley of California. She’s a triple Libra who loves hot chips, and she’s really good at geography. She hates when people wear shoes in the house.