Author: Gaiutra Bahadur

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

TORONTO _ Their white stretch limousine, punctuated by a “Just Married” sign, led the way.Newly anointed as the Scheuerman-Stallones, Brent and Steve waved at onlookers piled onto the sidewalks from their perch above the limo’s sunroof. Each tilted a glass of champagne against a bright Toronto sky and savored the moment: The Scheuerman-Stallones, riding at the front of a gay pride parade last month, were the embodiment of the successful move to legalize same-sex marriage here.

“He’s finally made an honest man out of me,” Steve shouted to the crowd. “It’s legal now.”

It’s legal in Toronto, but it isn’t clear how U.S. law will view the couple, jewelry store owners from Kansas City, Kan., who had married at Toronto City Hall the day before the parade.

They occupy new and uncertain terrain, with at least 53 other couples from 26 states. All the couples crossed the border to obtain marriage licenses in the month since an Ontario court made the Canadian province the third place in the world where same-sex nuptials are legal. (Belgium and the Netherlands are the others, and the Canadian province of British Columbia followed suit last week.)

The Scheuerman-Stallones soon will apply for a change in their driver’s licenses to reflect their new name. That and every other claim to married status made by bearers of Canadian licenses will be a closely monitored challenge to federal and state laws in the United States.

“We’re all watching what happens,” said Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, one of several gay-rights groups tracking the U.S. couples who marry in Toronto.

“But for us, it’s not a chess game,” he said. “This is not about test cases and tactics. This is about real families who are now legally married and seek the same respect that every other married couple has.”

The federal Defense of Marriage Act defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and 37 states bar same-sex marriages.

About 15 percent of the licenses issued in Toronto to same-sex couples have been to U.S. couples, and activists on both sides of the border hope those couples will, like the Scheuerman-Stallones, push for recognition once they return home.

“We encourage Americans to come up and to export the legal rights we now enjoy here,” said Kevin Bourassa. “Make no mistake. What you see happening here in Toronto is what the future looks like in the U.S.A.”

Bourassa’s wedding to his partner, Joe Varnell, at Toronto’s Metropolitan Community Church in 2001 sparked the legal fight for gay marriage in Canada. The gay-friendly church’s founder, Californian Troy Perry, plans to follow their example by marrying here Wednesday.

Already there are legal challenges pending in the United States. Same-sex couples in New Jersey and Massachusetts are suing those states for marriage licenses, and the Massachusetts Supreme Court may rule on the issue soon. But U.S. couples who marry in Canada could force the issue, because all states and the federal government have recognized licenses from other countries.

Despite the legal skirmishes, the Scheuerman-Stallones said they did not go to Toronto as activists.

“We didn’t do it for political purposes,” Brent Scheuerman-Stallone said. “If we can help in the struggle, we are willing to do that. But it was for ourselves.”

So it was for John Higgins and Niall Maloney, Bostonians who exchanged vows before a justice of the peace at Toronto City Hall as the June 29 parade ended a few subway stops away.

The wedding chapel, a sparse room with a heart-shaped briar on the wall, was still, except for a camera’s occasional click. Higgins and Maloney locked eyes.

“I, John, take you Niall,” Higgins said, “to be my wedded spouse, to have and to hold . . .”

They had done this before, two years ago in a Unitarian church outside Boston. Then, there had been an organist and a sanctuary full of friends and family. Now, a Handel march issued from a CD player. The only guests were the impromptu witnesses they had met in the lobby 15 minutes earlier.

“For better, for worse . . .”

Higgins’ voice was a whisper, cracking. He slid a gold band – engraved with their initials and their previous wedding date – on Maloney’s ring finger: “And thereto, I give you my love.”

Higgins’ eyes were now red and watery. He didn’t expect this ceremony, meant to give legal standing to an existing relationship, to be as emotional as the last. But it was.

“This is a very personal moment for us,” Maloney said. “It’s part of our saying to the world we are a couple and would like to be respected as such.”

For now, that respect is only symbolic. Maloney still has to pay taxes on health-care benefits for his partner. And relatives abroad still have more right to visit either man in the hospital than the other does.

That could change, however, as the cross-border nuptials force the legal contradictions to a crisis point.

“The U.S. is going to have to figure out how to handle this border,” said Robin Lee Pearson, a Philadelphia native who married her partner, Tracy, in Toronto last month. “Are they going to recognize a legal document from Canada? All of a sudden, is a marriage license going to be OK for some but not for others?”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

By Gaiutra Bahadur
Outlook Traveler

A memorial in Miami’s Little Havana bears the words of Cuban poet Jose Marti: “Las palmas son novias que esperan.” The palm trees are girlfriends who wait. And indeed there is something both sensuous and sad about the palm trees that line the beaches and boulevards of South Florida. Their lady-like fronds swish back and forth like a novia apart from her beloved during the tropical storms that descend like lesser monsoons on Miami. Even in a soft breeze, her sway is full of longing. It’s almost as if she knows. Knows that, this being Miami, where old guard Cubans have passed four decades dreaming of reunions in a Castro-free homeland, her own wait might be very long indeed.

Miami, as Marti’s palm tree conjures, is a city unwilling to let go of the past. A place where immigrants and exiles have turned loss — and their denial of it — into a kind of poetry of the everyday.

The fast food chain of choice there is not McDonald’s but Pollo Tropical, with its Cuban-style grilled chicken, yucca fries and side orders of rice and beans. Instead of a Coca-Colonized populace, you will find locals milling around stands from which Styrofoam cups of steaming cafecito issue. The syrupy injections of caffeine are perhaps best had this way—on the sidewalk, from one of the countless eateries with serving windows opening out onto the bustle of Calle Ocho, or SW Eighth Street, the famous artery of Little Havana.

More than half the residents in the Miami metro area were born abroad. And they hold on to pasts rooted in various elsewheres — not only with their palates, but also with the fully stocked arsenal of their senses. They hold on to the past, just as four years ago they held on to a shipwrecked child found bobbing in an inner tube in the Atlantic Ocean.

The city’s Cuban exiles set up camp — right next to the world’s media — outside the small stucco house in Little Havana where, for five televised months, Elian Gonzalez ate, slept and received remote-controlled race cars, a purple stuffed Barney the Dinosaur, bicycles and countless other toys. The gifts came from dozens of surrogate aunts and uncles, most of them anonymous players in a trans-Caribbean custody battle in which they refused to surrender the boy to a country they had all fled. The night before U.S. Border Patrol agents finally snatched the six-year-old from his Miami relatives, there was nothing to foreshadow the loss. The night passed like most others on NW Second Street, Elian’s Street, before the Clinton administration returned him to his father.

Wrinkled ladies in flower-print housedresses sat in lawn chairs in the middle of the road. Under the brims of cream-colored fedoras, men with ridged faces gathered in councils of three or four. And vendors gave away pastelitos, the flaky pastries with guava centers that had made the journey across the Florida Straits with most of the crowd outside the house. The ambience was almost carnival, as though nothing stranger than a sundown block party were taking place. But there was also an undercurrent of something else — something subversive, something electric that charges every nook of exile and immigrant Miami.

The nameless aunts and uncles keeping vigil were all participants in an uprising of sorts. They had tried to set up sandbags against loss — the loss of Elian to his father, to Castro, to Cuba, and the loss of their own continuing fantasies of a triumphant return to their homeland. They were in a standoff against the U.S. government. And what’s more, the city’s two highest elected leaders — one a Democrat, one a Republican, but both Cuban-Americans — were on their side. Where else would a mayor decide to oppose an order from the country’s chief law enforcement officer? Only in a metropolis so on the edge of America, it is almost no longer America.

I had gone to Miami as a girlfriend in waiting. There was a palm tree outside the bedroom window of the former love I was visiting, not far from some telephone lines and electric cables. When the wind caught the palm tree, its sway sometimes led it into that tangle, to crackle and be singed. Somehow, in the sentimentalism of that stage of our breakup and under the influence of Marti, I identified with that palm tree — and found in it a tragic allure. The city of Miami in the final stages of its grip on Elian (as the protestors chanted, “Miami esta que arde,” or Miami is on fire) seemed no different.

My ex-boyfriend and I circled the neighborhood only hours before the predawn raid by the rifle-bearing federales who took the boy away. We walked among the exiles, and we walked past a mural of a cherubic Elian in his inner tube surrounded by dolphins. (According to one apocryphal story, dolphins saved him from sharks by encircling him.) With every step, past every canary yellow house with red tropical flowers peeking over its walls, I felt that I belonged there. That Miami, too, was a thing of warped beauty in its unwillingness to loosen its grasp.

Camp Elian was perhaps the most publicized example of that impulse. But it is not the only one. Every day, the city takes thousands of stands against assimilation, remaking South Florida in the image of Caracas, Havana, Bogota, Port-au-Prince and Port of Spain.

The air near Biscayne Bay is scorched every summer by the Creole lyrics and the chords of musicians sparring in a style invented by a saxophonist for Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier. Voodoo drum-inspired, compas (pronounced kompa) blends elements of mambo, merengue and bolero with a frenetic percussive line. Miami, with its annual festival, recording studios and rival bands, is one of its epicenters.

This year was the first that Reggae Sunfest, the Himalayas of reggae competition, was held outside Jamaica. Its superstars jammed instead in downtown Miami. The corporate sponsor was not Budweiser but the island nation’s own Red Stripe — nostalgia fermented, bottled and capped.

In strip malls outside the city, there are nightclubs with names such as Tropics and Hibiscus that serve goat curry and roti and where disc jockeys spin ‘chutney’ for West Indian immigrants. The music is a hot-hot-hot hybrid, borrowing Congo drums and a Creole dialect from Africans in the Caribbean and mixing it with Hindi and the dholak and dandtal of their neighbors from India. Both groups worked the plantations of Trinidad and Guyana for the British.

Now Indo-Caribbeans in South Florida move under strobe lights to rhythms derived helter-skelter from the folk songs of their ancestors. (If chutney were a painting, it would be Picasso’s bawdy Demoiselles D’Avignon, or the prostitutes of Avignon, with noses turned the wrong way, unproportional eyes and upside-down heads.) The amplifiers regularly crank out the supercharged chutney standard, Lotay Lal: “Mommy a baylay (sic) roti, Daddy a chownke dal. Didi a make the choka, and buddy eat out all.” The club goers, pumped up by the synthesizers, swing their hips below a sinuous outstretch of arms that would do their great-great-grandparents from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madras proud. Their feet pound the floor like “Nani grinin’ masala,” as one song put it.

Just about thirty miles away in Miami proper, one of the many dance halls and bars that cater to gay men hosts Mariloli, a drag queen from Cuba. Every Sunday night, she brings the house down — with anything from a string of Spanish pop songs to her own rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s disco-diehard “I Will Survive.” The Latin American men who come to see her do “A Quien Le Importa” by Mexico’s Thalia also come to be in each other’s company. To wear shirts with red flowers and flaring sleeves, hit on each other in Spanish and writhe under disco lights to lyrics such as “Y le baila, y la canta, y la goza” (And he dances, and he sings, and he enjoys it) by bubblegum band Las Ketchup. And despite all that, perhaps, to deny they know each other on the street the next day, in the full light of machismo.

This might not be the (very Republican) Cuban exile leadership’s idea of a stubborn embrace of where you have come from, but the palm tree pose has many incarnations.

Clearly, Miami isn’t only about clinging to the past. It has become a mecca not only for people on the margins, but also for those who want to push their margins. The sun capital is also a sin capital. Still — in this land of anything goes and the glitzy makeover, of posh South Beach and the Gucci-tread Lincoln Road — the most seductive quality is the swish of its fronds, the sound and the taste and the texture of its romantic attachment to the places to which it used to belong.

© Outlook Traveler. All rights reserved.

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

The names by its buzzers hint at a Little Odessa within.

Outside this senior apartment complex in Northeast Philadelphia, the bus stops six times an hour – allowing Sofiya Pustelnik to visit her husband’s grave four stops away, near the Neshaminy Mall, as often as she likes.

When her daughter in Cherry Hill beseeches her to move in – to leave the room of her own, hung with Van Gogh and Renoir prints and crowded with books – it is the memory of Boris, her husband of 48 years, that tethers her here.

“I loved him, and he loved me,” said the 78-year-old Russian emigre. “I have here my husband’s grave. I won’t leave him.”

The Robert Saligman House, where she lives, is among a growing number of apartment complexes nationwide doubling as fortresses for elderly immigrants breaking with the customs of their native countries by living apart from their families.

In their homelands, culture and economic hardship dictated multigenerational households.

But the stresses of life in a foreign landscape – with children too busy pursuing the American dream to pay full attention and grandchildren who, sometimes literally, cannot understand them – are beginning to unravel that custom.

Many older immigrants are gravitating to places such as the Saligman House or a nearby complex, called “the Soviet Army” by its residents – ethnic enclaves with elevators and a front desk.

“It is becoming even more and more common,” said Ailee Moon, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “After a certain number of years living with their adult children, the pattern is many elderly immigrants want to move out, and they do move out.”

Foreign-born seniors remain more likely to live with their families than their American-born counterparts, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

And 20 percent of elderly immigrants live alone, compared with 30 percent of native-born seniors.

Still, the longer an immigrant lives in the United States, the more likely he or she is to live alone, said Jennifer Glick, a sociologist at Arizona State University.

The government benefits, such as Section 8 housing vouchers, that certain immigrants become eligible for after five years in the United States often make the move possible. Being stranded in a house far from public transportation makes it desirable.

The New World Association of Emigrants from Eastern Europe, a two-decade-old mutual-aid society in Philadelphia, serves about 400 elderly clients. Ninety-five percent live alone in a half-dozen subsidized apartment complexes in the city’s Northeast. They cluster together partly to ward off a sense of displacement.

“It’s like a tree,” said Janna Doudoukalova, one of the group’s directors. “You can’t cut it and try to plant it somewhere else. It will never grow. That’s how they feel in the United States.”

The complexes are alternatives to the disconnected sprawl of the suburbs, where many of the seniors’ adult children fled in search of bigger homes and better schools, she said.

The suburbs, too, have spawned their share of refuges.

A miniature Koreatown has sprung up amid the manicured lawns, flower beds and townhouse apartments of St. Mary’s Village in Cherry Hill.

About 35 of its residents, or 20 percent, are older Koreans. Nine years ago, there was none.

Donald Chang, 78, one of the first to settle there, said word of the senior apartments, run by the Camden Diocese, spread through the area’s churches.

The retired businessman lived with four generations of his family in Seoul, the South Korean capital. Here, he lives alone, although his children own homes in Cherry Hill.

“The world,” Chang said, “is changing.”

Jung Bun Oh, 74, and Nam Yi Noh, 68, discovered that soon after coming to the United States from Korea.

Both expected to live with the families who brought them here in the last decade.

“Our culture is to follow the first son,” Oh said, affectionately clapping her first son, the Rev. Barnabas Choi, on the knee and flashing a thumbs-up.

“Now something changed,” she said, with Choi translating for her. “But usually Father and Mother in the old age follow the son.”

That path brought the two widows to Maple Shade in Burlington County. It plopped them – homesick – in the midst of a workaholic culture that robbed them of their children for most of the day. With their tiny arsenal of English (“thank you,” “sorry,” “welcome”), they could not communicate with their grandchildren. And the suburban streets, for the two non-drivers from the big city of Seoul, were obstacles.

Those streets are still a problem. But now they have their own apartments in a high-rise near the Echelon Mall in Voorhees – and each other for company.

Their days uncoil with scheduled nostalgia. At dawn, a van from New Horizons, a nearby evangelical church, ferries Oh, Noh and eight others at the complex to a Korean-language prayer service. Eleven sharp finds them glued to WYBE-TV (Channel 35) for Emperor Wang Guhn, a drama set in 10th-century Korea.

In between and afterward, they chat about their grandchildren. They go “eye shopping” at the Echelon Mall. They walk to an aquatic aerobics class at Bally’s Fitness Center. And each makes sure the other takes her daily medication.

“If she was not here, I could not live here,” Noh said, smiling at Oh.

Their friendship is a survival strategy that has echoes in apartment complexes across the country, UCLA’s Moon said.

She surveyed hundreds of elderly Koreans in complexes in Minneapolis and Los Angeles. Many had lived with their children in suburbs – saddled with baby-sitting and housework – until they became eligible for government benefits.

That economic pull is sometimes accompanied by a push as the traditional notion of filial piety, or honor and respect for elders, gets lost in the cauldron of American assimilation.

“Their grandchildren don’t talk to them,” said Young Sim, founder of the Korean American Service Center of New Jersey and counselor to many disaffected seniors. “Whenever they see them, they just shut the door. They say, ‘Don’t open my letter. Don’t listen [to] my calls.’ ”

“American kids are different,” she said. “They are very independent.”

A survey by the New World Association found that many Russian and Ukrainian seniors were bewildered by new roles in their transplanted families.

“An opinion of older members [in the family] used to have great importance,” one participant said. “Our relationships have changed since moving here. There are often wide gaps in understanding and appreciating elders.”

Not everyone lives alone to escape such tensions. Some do so partly out of pride, seizing an opportunity that was not available in their homeland.

“In Russia? What was in Russia?” asked Pustelnik, a former teacher who is close to her daughter. “It was a big problem to get an apartment . . . . After the war, Russia was ruined. The buildings, they were not enough.”

Those housing shortages made an apartment of one’s own a status symbol.

“People live separately because they want to, not because they have to,” said Rose Goldenberg, 81, a Russian immigrant who lives in Longwood Manor in the Northeast. “It’s a miracle from God. You are the owner of your life. You do what you want and when you want.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.