Upwardly mobile Hispanics discover the suburbs

Sunday, December 3, 2000

• Barriers are falling

By ELIZABETH LLORENTE
Staff Writer

Jackie Cornella, with pooch Tessa at her feet, whips up her popular Italian meat sauce in her country-style kitchen.

The honey-blond Westwood resident rattles off a list of chores that await her: Taking Tessa to the groomer, power-washing her home, checking on her luxury condo in South Jersey, and planting kale in her fall garden.

Several miles south, Bert Merzeau pulls his gleaming Audi TT Roadster into the parking lot of the Haworth Country Club to indulge in his passion: golf.

"Golf is like therapy," says Merzeau, a dentist who, in golf parlance, carries a 12 handicap -- exceptional for an amateur. "I love the serenity, tranquility. You can totally relax."

Suburban pastimes, suburban faces -- with a twist.

Cornella and Merzeau are among a growing number of upwardly mobile Hispanics in the suburbs of New Jersey and across the nation.

Increasingly, the names on the mailboxes of handsome abodes in leafy neighborhoods are Perez, Diego, Colon. More and more, it's a Martinez or Hernandez guiding the wheel of a BMW or Lexus on the streets of suburbia. Demographic data underscore the trend.

In the most well-to-do North Jersey towns, the overall population grew 5 percent between 1990 and 1998. But in the same period, the Hispanic population surged 40 percent. Of posh Ridgewood's 409 new residents, for instance, 274 were Hispanic. Chatham Township's 468 new residents included 113 Hispanics.

"It used to be hard to find a handful -- or even one single -- Hispanic in these suburbs," says Emilio Fandino, a Ridgewood resident and executive director of the Paramus-based Hispanic Institute for Research & Development. "But every day, Hispanics are less on the outside looking in. Hispanics have been in New Jersey for a good 35 years or so, and now there are the second and third generations that can afford these towns."

The arrival of the nation's largest ethnic minority in the middle and upper classes marks an important milestone. For these Hispanics, home is the place Hispanics before them entered mostly to wait on tables or scrub floors.

But look for their presence on Main Street, Suburbia, and it's virtually imperceptible. The majority of Hispanics in the suburbs are indistinguishable from their non-Hispanic neighbors.

Far from the long-held stereotype of Hispanics, many are free of the accents and cultural barriers that limited their ancestors. English is their language. Spanish comes second. Some can't speak it at all. Like Cornella and Merzeau, many have names that give no hint of Hispanic roots. And unlike other minority groups, such as Asian-Americans -- whose arrival in various North Jersey towns has been obvious, literally changing the face of many communities -- Hispanics may be of any race. Of the state's 1.03 million Hispanics, a vast majority are classified as white in census reports.

With nothing pegging them as different, the Hispanic integration in the suburbs doesn't stop at living and shopping next to non-Hispanics. They are joining, and sometimes leading, community groups. Many of them are marrying non-Hispanic whites. More so than other minority groups -- including Hispanics who are not white, or who speak accented English -- these Hispanics express a strong sense of being part of their predominantly non-Hispanic white communities.

"We travel incognito," says Cornella, laughing as she slipped her Shih-Tsu a biscuit. "I mean, look at me. I don't think of myself as a minority."

"I feel I belong in this neighborhood," says Cornella, whose mother and both sets of grandparents were born in Puerto Rico. "Like a lot of people here, I went to college, I work, I take care of my family, my house, my lawn. I've never felt different and have never encountered prejudice."

The sentiment, a recent national poll shows, is shared by many Hispanics. Four of five said they had not experienced discrimination in the last five years -- in jobs, school admission, or housing.

Yet, the "West Side Story" or "East L.A." image of Hispanics dies hard. Many Americans still view Hispanics as low-income, indigenous, or brown-skinned. They believe Hispanics are concentrated in inner cities and speak broken English.

To be sure, major problems do persist. About 22 percent of Hispanics live in poverty, and many drop out of high school. In New Jersey, darker-skinned Hispanics, along with African-Americans, complain that they are regularly stopped by police officers based on skin color. Hispanics remain under-represented in politics, boardrooms, and other corridors of power.

Unlike the more established, affluent Hispanics, many poor immigrants live alienated from other residents, including assimilated Hispanics. Many say they feel self-conscious in the North Jersey suburbs because of their swarthy complexion, meager existence amidst affluence, and in some cases, their illegal status.

Beyond those problems, Hispanics are undergoing important transformations that are often missed by the narrow lens usually trained upon them.

The steady, and largely seamless, establishment of upwardly mobile Hispanics in the suburbs is defying age-old notions. The increasing ease with which they live in the non-Hispanic white world is expected to reshape racial and ethnic boundaries.

"Their presence is more ubiquitous than anyone, including Hispanics themselves, realizes," says Jesus Galvis, director of the Bergen County Hispanic American Advisory Commission and a de-facto historian on Hispanics in North Jersey. "I walked into an upscale shoe store at Riverside Square mall to buy shoes and found out that the owners are Hispanics. Now that's an expensive mall. There was no indication that Hispanics owned it. I thought, 'We've even made it here.' "

Visually, Bert Merzeau blended in with his childhood friends in the Jackson Heights section of Queens, N.Y. His skin is light olive. His hair and eyes are brown.

In countless other ways, he was more like them than not.

He spoke English tinged with a New York accent. He and his friends idolized Yankees legend Mickey Mantle, laughed at knock-knock jokes, gorged on burgers, sang (badly) along with Beatles albums, and faithfully watched the TV comedy "McHale's Navy."

Theoretically, Merzeau was the only minority. He was born in Cuba, and migrated to the United States with his parents in 1962, when he was 6. The other boys in the neighborhood were of Greek, Italian, and Irish descent.

Merzeau, though, never felt like a minority, an outsider.

"My childhood was very American," Merzeau, 44, says. "I had GI Joe dolls, played stickball, all the typical things. And I'm white, like them."

He even introduced himself as Robert, because he thought it described him better than his birth name, Humberto.

Though schoolyard mockery -- over race, weight, or nerdiness -- is a staple of childhood, Merzeau says his predominantly white classmates never belittled him.

But if his room and interests mirrored those of most other American boys, his home was decidedly Cuban.

His father, a commodities broker who handled European accounts for Prudential, and his mother, a hairdresser, stressed Cuban customs. They struggled mightily to keep Humberto from becoming Robert. They insisted that he speak only Spanish at home, and enrolled him in after-school Spanish lessons. They introduced him to Cuban girls.

When his mother opened the door to the knock of kids asking for "Robert," she informed them: "There's no 'Robert' in this house."

Merzeau seethed over this effort to emphasize his Cubanness. Part of his resistance was typical childhood rebellion. But much of it, he says, was refusal to be put in a box in which he did not neatly fit.

Across the Hudson, Jackie Cornella -- who was then Jackie Montero -- also straddled two cultures.

Her mother, Modesta, came from Puerto Rico at 20; her father, John, was born to native Puerto Ricans and raised on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Two generations removed from the island of their ancestry, Cornella and her older brother identified most strongly with Bergenfield's non-Hispanic community.

When her relatives addressed her in Spanish, she answered in English.

"My Spanish is not so good," Cornella, 46, says. "I understand things, but I can't really speak it."

Her brother's Spanish is better, but still labored.

That is typical of descendants of native Spanish-speakers and earlier immigrants. A recent national study of Hispanics by Miami-based Strategy Research Corp. shows that 44 percent of first-generation English-speakers felt most comfortable speaking English, 26 percent chose Spanish, and 29 percent spoke both equally. By the third generation, 70 percent said they were most comfortable speaking English, 17 percent spoke both with ease, and only 8 percent preferred Spanish.

Unlike the majority of Hispanics interviewed, Cornella's brother, John Montero Jr., says he felt self-conscious growing up. Compared with everyone else in town, his hair seemed darker, curlier, and his skin a bit too olive.

He cringed when, walking up to his house with friends, he heard the pulsating beat of Salsa.

"It didn't fit in, I was embarrassed by it," says Montero, a scientist at a plastics research company. "My friends would ask 'What's that?' I'd say, 'Nothing, let's just go to your house.' All my friends had Uncle Joes. I had Uncle Titos."

Cornella cavorted mostly with Elisa Nesnay Sakosits, of Italian and Hungarian descent. They shopped, and shopped some more. Saturday nights were a big deal: they trekked to McDonald's for fries.

Nesnay, now a fifth-grade teacher in Sparta, found a lot to relate to in the Montero home. Jokes, music, and the aroma of food filled the air.

"The stereotype of all Hispanics," Nesnay says, "was that 12 live in one house, their cars have a huge dice hanging from the rearview mirror, families are dysfunctional, they're illiterate -- everything that family was not."

Unlike Merzeau and the Montero kids, Tom Padilla, who arrived in Paterson from Colombia at the age of 5, had Hispanic and non-Hispanic friends.

Padilla hooked up with a group of Hispanic and Italian-American friends when he and his parents moved to Hackensack.

The youths, who numbered about 15, did everything together. They called themselves the Idols -- which, minus the s, is the backward spelling of Lodi, the street where they lived.

Among the things the two groups of friends had in common were immigrant families, and the eminence of a foreign culture at home. The Idols, however, preferred to speak English and listen to rock-and-roll.

"We weren't rejecting our heritage," says Padilla, who is 36 and a Hackensack police sergeant, "We just liked rock-and-roll better. The customs in school and in the discos and everywhere else we went were American, and everything was English. That's what was always around us."

A tight affinity existed between the two ethnic groups, who remain close to this day.

"I always felt closer to Italians, and so did other Hispanics, than I felt to other minority groups in Hackensack," says Padilla, whom people often mistake for Italian.

Interestingly, many of the non-Hispanics married to Hispanics in New Jersey apparently are Italian-Americans. Padilla, whose wife, Christine, is Italian-American, says both groups share common qualities.

"They had the family unity, the extended family. Our cultures are so similar. Even the language is similar. Our relatives and their relatives could understand each other by speaking Spanish and Italian."

Only a generation ago, Hispanics in New York and New Jersey lived primarily in urban enclaves.

The enclaves offered a sense of security, of belonging. Spanish drove life at home, work, and social events. The cashier at the bodega, the teller at the bank, and the receptionist at the doctor's office usually spoke Spanish. When the immigrants waxed nostalgic over their native homelands, or expressed confusion about "los Americanos," those around them nodded knowingly.

The suburbs seemed forbidding, culturally and geographically, to many Hispanics.

Merzeau's drives from Queens, N.Y., to Oradell, where his Italian-American college sweetheart lived, felt endless. The suburbs appeared dull and elusive. "I would think, on those trips, 'My God, this is so far, so out there. It's el campo [the boondocks],' " Merzeau says. "That's how a lot of us [Hispanics] at that time felt. Bergen County was like another world."

The 1980s saw a new layer of established Hispanics -- Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and others -- who had been on the U.S. mainland for at least two decades. Their children viewed ethnic enclaves as too Old World. The suburbs, with their better schools and bigger back yards, seemed ideal.

Since 1980, the Hispanic population doubled to 20,000 in Morris County, and tripled to 73,000 in Bergen County. Now, Hispanics, along with Asians, account for the biggest percentage population growth in areas that typically were not associated with ethnic minorities.

All the while, new immigrant waves kept Hispanic populations growing in the traditional enclaves. The waves created new enclaves, as well, in places such as Hackensack, Englewood, and Bergenfield.

The community's upward mobility reflects itself in more than its arrival in middle-class and affluent neighborhoods. Hispanics, along with Asians, have seen their median income rise. And both ethnic groups account for most of the new small businesses in New Jersey.

"Everyone is doing better in this economy, and Hispanics are sharing in that prosperity," says Fandino, of the Hispanic Institute for Research & Development. "A lot of Hispanics I know did well with stocks. And you have people with small businesses that have grown because the economy is good."

Galvis, of the Hispanic American Advisory Commission, increasingly pencils in higher and higher incomes on the tax forms of Hispanic clients.

"In the last few years, I've seen more Hispanics in the higher income brackets," says Galvis, a Hackensack businessman who came from Colombia more than 30 years ago. "Of course, I see many very poor people, too. But there's the other end -- this year I had couples with incomes of more than $100,000."

They love their Starbucks latte, their bagel and cream cheese. They're Girl Scout troop leaders and Little League coaches. They belong to golf and tennis clubs. Between piano and lacrosse lessons, their kids go on "play dates."

They're even joining the Junior League, once an organization for high-society WASP women who would not let Rose Kennedy join. The Junior League's Montclair chapter elected a Hispanic president a few years ago. And in 1998, for the first time, the 99-year-old Junior League -- still more than 90 percent non-Hispanic white -- selected a Hispanic, Clotilde Perez-Bode Dedecker, as its worldwide president.

Yet, many Hispanics who live suburbia to the hilt keep some connection to their roots.

For some, the connection is nominal -- just an occasional trip to an enclave to visit relatives, or to savor authentic black bean soup. For others, it is stronger. Their friends include other assimilated Hispanics; they belong to Hispanic organizations.

"They can fit in in different settings," says Fandino, the Ridgewood attorney who was born in Argentina and is married to a Cuban-American. "One day they're enjoying cafe con leche and speaking Spanish on Bergenline Avenue, and the next day they're attending some coffee with the town council in Ridgewood."

Which describes Tom Padilla.

Padilla spent a recent Sunday at a brunch for the mayor of Park Ridge, where he schmoozed with town officials, learning what the issues are, how the town works.

"I found out some interesting things about the town," says Padilla, who moved to Park Ridge two years ago. "I had some nice chats."

He and his wife, a corporate training manager, have an 8-month-old daughter, whom Padilla likes to take for walks in a nearby county park.

"This is a good, quiet town," Padilla says. "I wanted a good community, good schools."

One suburban ritual he will not adopt is raking leaves. For that, he turns to a suburban solution -- hiring people. The men who clear his leaves are immigrants. Padilla believes they are from Central America.

It is a telltale picture of how Hispanics have come full circle.

Increasingly, the homes recent immigrants clean and the lawns they manicure belong to other Hispanics. Each day, the circle begins anew, as more Latin Americans arrive, hoping that someday they -- or, more likely, their children -- will achieve success and acceptance.

The immigrant aspiration makes Padilla think of his parents. His father is a man of humble means who worked two jobs -- at a paint factory during the day, pushing department store carts at night -- to give his family a better life. His mother worked in a factory in Ridgefield Park.

Like a lot of Hispanics born or bred in North Jersey, Padilla can only imagine the struggles of newly arrived immigrants.

"I don't know how he did it," Padilla says. "He came to a new country, into a different culture, a new language, had two jobs. I don't think I could have done it."

In his dental office in Hudson County, with the Manhattan skyline beyond, Merzeau laughs at how alien Bergen County suburbs once seemed.

Now, Merzeau cannot fathom living anywhere else.

He lives in Waldwick, and has owned homes in Upper Saddle River and Washington Township. He spends much of the golf season at the Haworth Country Club, where about 130 of the 800 members are Hispanic. He serves on the boards of various county institutions, including Bergen Community College. And invitations for county affairs -- fundraisers, luncheons, dinners, and dances -- arrive in far greater numbers than he can accept.

"Today, I'm all over Bergen County all the time," says Merzeau, clad in laurel green suspenders. "It's home."

He has not, however, forsaken his roots.

One of his favorite groups is the Fukawis, a golf club of mostly first-generation Cuban-Americans. They are successful and affluent, and live in Bergen County suburbs. Recently, they took a weeklong golf trip to Jamaica. The Fukawis, who used to be a secret society, include top executives of Coca-Cola, Heineken, and Verizon. Small Spanish-language newspapers have published stories about them.

"Our purpose is to let loose," Merzeau says, "just poke fun at ourselves. We spend a lot of time in business meetings, black-tie affairs. Life's too short to be pompous."

Merzeau acknowledges the irony -- the boy who downplayed his Cuban side, to gain acceptance as an American, now revels in all things Hispanic.

Indeed, many Hispanics develop an interest in their roots after indifference in their youth. Padilla balked at Latin music as a teenager, now he lives by it. He vacations in Colombia, where he still has relatives. Like Merzeau, he is active in mainstream organizations and those that cater to Hispanics.

Says Padilla: "Knowing two languages has opened up so many doors. I can help so many people who need police help but can't speak English."

Merzeau, who loathed sitting in Spanish classes as a child, agrees.

"Today I thank my parents a thousand times for making sure I was bilingual," says Merzeau, whose surname is French. "I realized how much of an asset I had having a second language and heritage. I realized it didn't mean that I had to give up my American side. I didn't have to choose."

Hispanics say they feel comfortable in their predominantly non-Hispanic white neighborhoods. Their professional and economic achievements, they say, make them as entitled as anyone to live wherever they like.

In Westwood, Jackie Cornella has a good rapport with her neighbors. Recently, she invited them to her spacious wooden deck for coffee and conversation. "When the cold weather starts, we joke and say, 'See you next year,' because you mostly stay indoors until it gets warm again," Cornella says.

Cornella married her longtime sweetheart, Ron Cornella, who is of Italian descent and grew up in Tenafly.

His family, he says, has embraced his wife. Her ethnicity never was an issue.

"No one ever said a thing about it," he says. "I said to them: 'I met a great girl, I like her a lot,' and that was it."

Mindful that this continues to be a color-conscious society, white Hispanics concede that their lighter complexion lowers barriers that automatically rise for other minorities.

They are not followed in department stores. They don't have a hard time flagging down a taxi in Manhattan. They don't get pulled over on the road because of racial profiling.

"There's no doubt that blacks, and those who stand out as Hispanics, see more of the prejudice," says Merzeau, who has lived in non-Hispanic white neighborhoods for the last 15 years. "If the person on the other end gets to know you before they realize there's something different about you, there's no problem because by the time ethnicity comes up, you've already broken a stereotype and come across as a peer."

Other minorities have their difficult moments in predominantly white suburbs. Some live in their own sections of town, feeling unaccepted in all-white settings. Asian-Americans say that, despite receiving praise for being hardworking and reviving various downtowns, their reception in North Jersey has been mixed.

Darker-skinned Hispanics, or those who speak accented English, relate to such experiences.

They speak of drawing icy side glances from other parents when they pick their children up from school. A Ridgewood apartment superintendent, who speaks broken English, described the time an elderly tenant bluntly told him: "I don't like Hispanics." The owners of a Mexican deli in Hillsdale spoke of how neighbors in suburban New York called police with suspicions that they were selling drugs. And their cousins, who live in Fair Lawn, say a neighbor tried circulating a petition calling for their eviction.

Ron Cornella doubts that his relatives would have accepted his wife as completely if she had a much darker complexion.

"If she looked like the stereotype of Hispanics, I don't think my family might have accepted her, unfortunately," he says.

Even while many Hispanics in the suburbs find acceptance, they are well aware that stereotypes of Hispanics remain strong, and can entrap them like quicksand.

At a barbecue, John Montero Jr. overhead two non-Hispanic white men use an ethnic slur to describe Hispanics who live in Paterson.

With Cornella, it begins with curiosity over her surname. Then, they pop the question: "Cornella -- hmm -- are you Italian?"

"I used to say no, and not offer anything more," Cornella says. "Or if I said Spanish, the conversation just moved on. If you said Puerto Rican, you would have to deal with all the stuff -- negative, usually -- that people associate with it."

Now, when someone gets curious, she cuts to the chase.

"I say my heritage is Puerto Rican," she says. "I don't hide it, because it's not a big deal. I don't wake up every day thinking that I'm Puerto Rican, or Hispanic, like someone with German roots doesn't go around thinking and saying, 'I'm German,' all the time."

People express surprise that she is Puerto Rican.

"They say, 'You don't look Puerto Rican,"' she says. "I say, 'What does a Puerto Rican look like?' "

Standing before her quaint milky gray, plum-shuttered home, Cornella adds: "Hispanics are not just 'West Side Story.' "

Staff Writer Elizabeth Llorente's e-mail address is llorente@NorthJersey.com

Dramatic changes -->

Hispanics, along with Asians, account for the biggest percentage population growth in areas that typically were not associated with ethnic minorities.

Bergen County's Hispanic population soared from 28,514, or 3 percent of the population, in 1980 to 73,000, or nearly 10 percent, according to recent Census Bureau estimates. At the same time, the population grew in Morris County from 10,000, or 2.6 percent of county residents to nearly 20,000, or about 10 percent, Census Bureau reports show.

More important, between 1990 and 1998, Hispanics accounted for a significant population growth in several of North Jersey's more well-to-do towns, according to Claritas Inc., a Virginia-based marketing research firm. For instance, Hispanics were 107 of Washington Township's 336 new residents, 122 of Oakland's 342 new residents, 79 of Englewood Cliffs' 198 new residents and, in Morris County, 51 of Harding's 193 new residents.

At the state level, the Hispanic population also grew dramatically, from 491,867 residents in 1980, to 1.03 million. It is the nation's seventh-largest Hispanic population -- behind such states as California, Texas, Florida, and New York -- and one of its most diverse.

Like other groups, Hispanics have seen income gains, despite ever-present new immigrants who disproportionately take low-skill, low-paying jobs. Nationally, Hispanics have median earnings between $30,735 and $34,000 -- compared with $28,000 in 1998, according to Census Bureau and marketing data.

They're clearly making strides in business, too.

Small business agencies say Hispanics and Asians account for the largest growth in entrepreneurship in New Jersey. In a speech recently, Governor Whitman said the state boasts more than 30,000 Hispanic-owned businesses that support 128,000 jobs and generate $7.5 billion in revenue. In fact, she noted, the Statewide Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey is the largest chamber in the state , and the third-largest Hispanic chamber in the nation.

-- ELIZABETH LLORENTE