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liked Patchogue, Patchogue liked him back. Though he had a thriving business, he knew that his business depended entirely on the Ecuadorian population. No one who was not Hispanic had ever ventured into his shop out of curiosity or need. It was as if there was an invisible line separating the Ecuadorian immigrants from the rest of Patchogue.
    His children admitted that they experienced the same line running through the hallways of their local high school: those who spoke only English stayed on one side, while those who spoke only Spanish stayed on the other. Then there were the rumors Espinoza had heard of young people harassing and attacking immigrants late at night, particularly if they had had too much to drink, stealing their money and sometimes their bicycles, and calling them ugly names.
    Espinoza knew there was a name for that, racism, but he himself had not felt it. He was content in his small world, tending to his customers, paying the rent on his shops on time, and rushing home at night to share a meal with his family. In 2002, Espinoza and his wife bought their first home in the United States, a three-bedroom house on a busy road, built far enough from the street that it was possible for them to ignore the world outside, even the traffic.
    One of the Espinozas’ most loyal customers was a young man who had arrived in New York in 1993 and had moved to Patchogue soon after, just like Espinoza a decade earlier, looking for a better-paying, more stable job. His name was Marcelo Lucero and he was the son of a small, walnut-skinned woman who had a reputation for being the best cook in Gualaceo. On market days,people would line up to buy Doña Rosario’s home-cooked meals.
    Almost every day after work at a dry cleaner’s, Lucero would stop at Envios Espinoza and buy a $2 phone card so that he could call home and talk with his mother for about twenty-five minutes. Espinoza was fond of Lucero. He admired especially how often Lucero wanted to speak to his loved ones, but also understood what Lucero was feeling: he was homesick and alone, though surrounded by people he knew from childhood, people who were his neighbors in Gualaceo and who had become his neighbors in Patchogue as well.
    Between 1999 and 2000, four hundred thousand Ecuadorians joined their one million compatriots already in the United States. 9 Almost two-thirds of them were living in the greater New York area. 10 According to the 2000 US census, there were 2,842 Hispanics in Patchogue then, more than an 84 percent increase from the previous census in 1990. 11 Most of the Hispanics were from Ecuador; the majority of them were from Gualaceo and its surroundings. Yet for a while Ecuadorians in Patchogue remained under the radar—not because they weren’t visible but because most people didn’t want to see them.
    At first, immigrants were working menial jobs in the stately homes near the waters of the Great South Bay, in nurseries, and on construction sites. That was the case for years and the townsfolk had accepted and even welcomed the cheap labor of immigrants, as long as at the end of the day they left and went home—wherever that was. What was different with the Ecuadorians in Patchogue—and a little unsettling for those who noticed—was that at the end of the day they stayed, living in the small apartments behind Main Street and in the subdivided grand houses of absentee landlords who long ago had moved to Florida. Patchogue had become their home, not just the place where they worked.
    Suddenly, it seemed, there was a proliferation of signs in Spanish asking for dishwashers, ads for restaurants serving “Spanish”food, and even a bilingual teller at the bank on Main Street. Dark-haired delivery boys predominated, and men gathered on main roads looking for daily construction work.
    Ecuadorians had become a visible but quiet presence in the streets of the village, scurrying off Main Street whenever a police car approached or a large crowd gathered.