Where the Heart is...

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A house is not a home…

[Editor's Note: The following piece comes from my good friend, and newest member of our writing team, Eddie Blue Eyes. His blog, [un]Common Sense, is highly recommended as daily food for the soul.]

My first morning here, a bright sunny Sunday morning, I was awakened by a hushed but insistent, not particularly good mariachi singing right outside my window. Annoyed, I got up to see who it was and to request they take their singing ass somewhere else. When I looked, I saw a short, older Latino, dressed in black, with black cowboy hat and boots. He wore dark wrap-around shades, and with the small accordion he held, he played the same three chords over and over again. He sang songs of heartbreak, of love lost and regained and lost again, in his hushed, not particularly good, but insistent voice.

Next to him, stood a large shopping cart full of roses for sale and young Latino/a families on their way from church would occasionally stop and purchase a few. I realize he is blind, his cane pressed up against his armpit. He comes here most mornings to sing of love lost in that same hushed, not particularly good, but insistent voice.

I have moved from the largely upscale, yuppie Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope to Sunset Park. It’s not that far away, and still somewhat upscale, but there is definitely more diversity. It's a neighborhood first colonized by a wave of Puerto Ricans in the 50s and 60s and later revived by an explosion of Latin American and Asian immigrants. One avenue block up, on 5^th Avenue, you can walk the main drag and see scores of businesses offering their goods and services to the many different Latino/as that live here. Young Salvadoran teen girls and Mexicans from Puebla pass by Dominican hair salons, Puerto Rican and Mexican restaurants, or buy treats from sidewalk vendors selling everything from aguacates to mangoes, caña, and piraguas.