Hunting Season by Mirta Ojito Read Free Book Online Page B

family tutoring older kids in English. By sixteen, she was translating for missionaries while going to school and continuing her training in English. The language school was far from her house, and it took her hours to navigate the city. At that time, the terrorist Maoist group Shining Path was keeping Lima alert and in fear with constant bombings. But nothing could deter Ramos in her drive to succeed.
    At twenty-two, secure in her knowledge of English, Ramos turned her attention to German, and moved to Stuttgart, Germany, to work as an au pair. Her plan was to stay for a year and then return home and find a job in a pharmaceutical lab or a German brewery, but she fell in love with an American soldier. When she returned home, the soldier followed her. On his third visit, the two married and he whisked her off to an apartment in Center Moriches, on Long Island. The couple had two children, but the marriage quickly soured.
    In 2000, just two years after she arrived in the country, Ramos started working for the Patchogue-Medford School District as a teacher of English for newcomers. Then her supervisor asked her to begin teaching citizenship classes at the Patchogue-Medford Library, and that’s how she found herself translating the mayor’s words in the village/library meeting in November 2004.
    Both Kaleda and Ramos started 2008 with great hopes. Kaleda was finally seeing the fruit of years of effort in trying to attract diverse patrons. Ramos, who still sees herself as the voice of the voiceless, translated all kinds of materials—from flyers to calendars—and the library truly became a hub for newly arrived English learners.
    But things began to change in the fall. Ramos and Kaleda noticed that the Spanish-language materials—dictionaries, films, and compact discs—were not being checked out as often as they had been just a few months earlier. The classes were packed, but when there were no classes, few Hispanics went to the library, especially at night.
    In late October, as Halloween approached, Ramos asked her students what was happening, and what she heard made her shiver with fear. The library had become such a magnet for immigrants that, at night, when they left classes walking or riding their bicycles, gangs of young men would follow them to harass and beat them or steal their money and bicycles. One had suffered a cut on his scalp from an attack, and a woman had been chased by a group of young men, who threw soda cans at her. The attacks were taking place all over Patchogue, not just near the library. That’s why some of them were staying away, they said. They were afraid to be targeted, but risked attending the classes because they were so hungry to learn.
    Ramos was horrified and immediately found Kaleda.
    “You won’t believe this,” she said, a little out of breath and resting against the doorframe in Kaleda’s office. “I want you to hear this with your own ears.”
    With Kaleda in the room, she asked her students to repeat their stories. Kaleda, who was aware that racism was rampant on Long Island and had heard stories of harassment and violence against immigrants elsewhere, immediately grasped the urgency of the matter. She was shocked that she hadn’t known what was happening at night in the streets of Patchogue, and she felt vulnerable, exposed, and, above all, scared.
    The year had not been kind to immigrants. Though 2008 was an election year, the candidates, US senators Barack Obama and John McCain, rarely talked about immigration. The issue was not raised at all during their three debates. 7 One of the few times McCain discussed immigration he was campaigning in Mexico City and yet stressing the need to secure the border. Few heard him because his talk in a helicopter hangar “was interrupted by the deafening sound of a heavy rainstorm that made his remarks unintelligible,” the New York Times reported. 8
    As it has happened with certain periodicity in the United States, immigration had become