CORONAVIRUS: THE BRONX CONNECTION

By Zoyla Candela

Okay, is New Rochelle still the epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak in the State of New York?
Things are changing so fast...

So far, these poor folks have been hit with a one-mile radius containment zone, temporary shutdown of large gathering places, and a visit from the National Guard, courtesy of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Never mind that these measures are a total exercise in futility.

 What does it matter if they shut down public gathering places? People can move in and out of the ”containment” zone at will, and the National Guard can’t be expected to shoot the virus. We’re
 told guardsmen are being called in to distribute food and clean up public spaces (both tasks easily manageable by a combination of soup kitchen and sanitation workers).  But from history, we know that governors summon the National Guard mostly when expecting some kind of catastrophe or

 civil unrest...sooo ...WTF?

Governor Cuomo, bless his two faces, has a tenuous relationship with the truth. No straight answers will issue from him (much less President Trump), so New Yorkers are trying to comfort themselves with the thought that New Rochelle is too far away to pose any danger to big city dwellers. It’s “upstate”, isn’t it?

Well, no, and no. For starters, NYC dwellers consider “upstate” anything north of the Zoo. But New Rochelle is just 20 miles north of Midtown Manhattan! All that separates that hapless, infected place from Gotham’s Five Boroughs is a slender piece of Westchester County. Get it? New Rochelle is less than one mile from the Bronx, which in turn, borders Manhattan directly, which in turn has bridges, tunnels and waterways leading to Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

There’s more. Years ago, my son attended a private elementary school in New Rochelle, 45 minutes away by school bus (from our apartment in Manhattan). I transferred him to a second school,  a little further north (Vermont!) when the first school  was overrun by students with a penchant for throwing chairs around.

Through word of mouth, I learned that Bronx families were moving into New Rochelle.

 I never saw it documented anywhere. “La Calle” (Street Hearsay) is the way we compile statistics in New York City. Anyway, that happened a while back, and I don’t know if the trend continues.

But even if it has stopped, I have to assume that by now there’s a large contingent of New Rochelle people with roots in the Bronx and that they’re probably moving back and forth for visits, shopping,
entertainment, etc. So that, even if all other NYC dwellers don’t ever go to New Rochelle, New Rochelle might end up coming to them via the Bronx.

Which is too bad, because you can declare all the States of Emergency you want, you can shut down Wall Street, Sports Events, colleges and Broadway.

But you can’t shut down the Bronx.

SORRY, NOT MY FAULT

By Zoyla Candela

I’ve reached an age that sometimes moves people to give me their seats on public transportation and I accept. So recently, on a crowded F train to Manhattan, when a European-looking teenager motioned for me to take his seat,  I hustled over and slid right in.

Then I realized, to my horror, that in calling me, he had bypassed this middle-aged black woman standing in front of him.  I looked up at her apologetically and she stared daggers of hatred right back into my eyes. All of my guilt instantly vanished. It wasn’t my fault! She could blame the kid, if she needed to assign blame. What could I have done? It had been a long day, I wanted to get off my feet,
and she looked younger and sturdier. She could handle it. Fuck her.

Would she have reacted differently had she known I was a fellow minority? ¿Quién sabe?  All she saw is that I have light skin, hair and eyes. I call it ”protective coloring”.

I’ve already experienced strangers favoring me over darker folks who perhaps had been waiting their turn longer. That always shocks me; I  find it appalling that such injustice could be a routine part of so many lives in this country.

But though I sympathize,  I’m only human: I always take the advantage being offered. Not many people of any color are willing to renounce a gift, however small,  in order to stand on principle. Life is too hard.

Besides, light skin sometimes works against you. Darker Hispanics may resent me on sight or stare as though I'm a circus freak if they hear me speaking Spanish. Once, when a Black man tried to mug me
on a subway stairs landing off Bryant Park, I remembered another light-skinned friend’s advice: “If you’re ever mugged, speak Spanish.” So I did. And the guy put away his knife, shook my hand, said: “Sorry, I thought you was a White girl’, and walked away.

Whites are astonished whenever I tell this story; Blacks just laugh.

Me, I’m only the storyteller. I don’t even know what race to claim because in this country, the concept of race varies according to location and who you’re talking to. In Miami, I’m White; in New York, Maybe not so much. To Blacks and Browns, I’m White, and to Whites, I’m Hispanic (euphemism for “definitely NOT White as we Whites understand Whiteness”). So I constantly find myself having to adjust my racial identity to the situation at hand. I don’t care; I know who I am. And I suspect most US Latinos do a similar dance when it’s for public consumption.

Fortunately, our own take on race is much less complicated. Hispanics believe that you are what the mirror tells you, no matter what the rest of your family looks like. Blacks get offended when you try to explain this; Whites think you’re being presumptuous.

 It almost seems as though people here refuse to understand that when your notions of race are formed in another culture, you tend to process things differently. That can be a bonus for your mental health. I, for example, have no sense of historical moral debt, no legacy of race-related guilt, and, above all, no feeling that I owe anybody else absolutely anything because my skin happens to be lighter than theirs.

 So whatever the problem, sorry,

I had nothing to do with it.