A Piece of Latin America in New Brunswick Downtown
The city of New Brunswick has a long history of immigration, and Latinos constitute the largest immigrant community today
Walking in the streets of New Brunswick is a multicultural experience, but you may be surprised by how different things look when you cross the boundaries of Rutgers and George Street and walk through a Latino community like that located in French Street.
About 57 percent of the population of New Brunswick is self-identified as Hispanic, according to recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Many residents come from Puerto Rico, others from Dominican Republic and there is an increasing population of immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador and Mexico.
Jorge Reina Schement, the vice president of diversity and inclusion at Rutgers, who is a Mexican-American that grew up in south Texas, explained the history of immigration in New Brunswick.
New Brunswick has a long history of immigration, he said.
“An African American community grew up in times of slavery, then there was a strong movement of Hungarian immigrants during Cold War times, and after World War II and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement the new residents have come mainly from Latin American countries,” Schement said.
One of the major Latino communities settled down in the surroundings of French Street. A different reality can be observed here.
Immigrant residents have carved out a space for themselves with small businesses like grocery stores, bakeries and restaurants. Loud tropical music sounds come out of cars or commercial places. Children play outside homes or in the street while neighbors catch up on the afternoon gossip. It is like a piece of a different culture.
However, not everything is rosy in this part of the Hub City and there are social problems such us unemployment, poverty and insecurity. When you walk along French Street there is an air of disorganization and insecurity that immediately permeates the environment.
Rocio Martinez, a resident of New Brunswick who came from Mexico with her family five months ago looking for better job opportunities, said that she feels unsafe in the neighborhood.
“I don’t feel really safe because there is a lot of crime here and sometimes one has to take caution to get out, especially at night due to so many things going on in French Street,” Martinez said.
Certainly, things are really different beyond the relatively safe area of Rutgers and George Street where police departments are constantly operating and the city looks more organized in some ways.
There are many organizations in New Brunswick that understand the importance of engaging with the community around them and in some cases, they are working to include community engagement activities in their agendas.
Rutgers is one of these organizations, in this sense. Schement talked about the project called “Rutgers Future Scholars,” which every year identifies first-generation, low-income and academically promising middle school students in order to work with them in a training program that helps students in their path to college education.
“This is a way to engage with parts of the society that would be isolated in other ways,” he said. “Our students can really grow when they learn from a multicultural experience.”
Sarah Beth Kaye, the community engagement director of New Brunswick Today, which is a hyperlocal community-focused bilingual newspaper, said that the content they generate is published both in English and in Spanish because “53 percent of people who live in New Brunswick speak Spanish as their primary language and there is a very large bilingual population.”
That constitutes another way to engage and have recognized a part of the population otherwise ignored.
“A large part of my job is trying to bridge the gap between the Latino community that speaks Spanish primarily and the community in other neighborhoods of New Brunswick that primarily speak English,” she said.
Kaye thinks that in areas like French Street, extra police presence is not a definite solution. Additional efforts are needed in order to tackle the different problems of the community.
“Having additional opportunities for people who live there to have extra jobs or to have job training … or to help people find something to do would be a lot better way of community investment,” she said.
