Each day, migrant women and children sell candy on the train cars and platforms of the New York subway. What brought them to the city? JordanSalama19 reports for our latest cover story
I asked Gloria where she buys her candy. She wasn’t sure of the name of the store or the neighborhood where it was located. She was, however, able to tell me exactly how to get there, a journey she makes once every week or so. “I take the R train almost to the end. And then I take the Q59 bus,” she said, pausing to repeat this number as though she were passing along the meticulous instructions just as they had been told to her. “The Q59 bus, exactly 22 stops.
“We’ve all recently arrived, and we don’t have the money even to afford diapers,” Gloria said. On the best days, most candy sellers don’t earn much more than $80. “Some people are nice and tell you to keep the change, and some people will give you money without asking for anything in return.” On the worst days — hot or rainy days when fewer people are commuting — hardly anyone buys at all.
Individuals and families who work in the same areas tend to look out for one another — but they don’t always get along. There are, increasingly, disputes over territory as more take to the trains. “That guy over there,” one young candy-and-beverage seller from Ambato, Ecuador, said along the F train, pointing discreetly to a middle-aged man selling sodas from a cooler of ice farther down the platform. “He told us that bad things will happen to us if we keep selling here.
Multiple people, most of them Spanish speakers, stopped the candy sellers to tell them that what they were doing was wrong. “You can’t work like this. You have to be in school,” one older woman scolded a child in Spanish when he offered her candy on the Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue platform. “Where are your parents?” She was intent on speaking with the boy’s mother, but the boy’s mother was nowhere to be found.
When the family arrived in Manhattan, they were given a room in one of the many midtown hotels that had recently been repurposed as shelters. But the shelter didn’t have a kitchen, so the family set out in search of a place to rent near 103rd Street in Corona, where Manuel’s brother lives. About a week into their search, they found a house in the southern part of the neighborhood that was advertising a single room for rent, and they took it. “They’re charging us $1,100 a month,” Ana said.
Ana told me their first few months in New York had not been easy. “Everything has been a surprise. I didn’t know what it would be like to live here,” she said. She memorized her home address but still struggled to navigate through the city . At six o’clock each morning, Manuel set out on foot some 30 blocks to Woodside, where dozens of day laborers queue for jobs at construction sites.
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