Leandro Castro was seven when he arrived in the United States in the 1990s from the Dominican Republic. He bounced between New York and Rhode Island before landing here at Prospect Heights, a public housing complex in Pawtucket.
Castro shared an apartment with his family during high school, in one of the dozens of two-story red brick row-houses, where lots of immigrants start out in Pawtucket – construction on more is underway.
“It was great as far as there was a lot of other Dominicans here, made a lot of Cape Verdean friends,” Castro said. “Seeing people that looked exactly like Dominicans was awesome, and learning about their culture was really cool here in Pawtucket.”
Castro and his mother have since moved out of Prospect Heights. Like so many immigrants, they followed family.
“And then my cousin who came two years ago, she came because we were here,” Kufa said. Like many Dominicans, she was driven by a hope that this country would offer better job prospects.
“In the DR, especially if you don’t have that many opportunities as far as work or money, you don’t have any connections,” Kufa said. “The dream is to come to the U.S. Those who are left behind and help provide them with opportunities and the money that you make here.”
“She couldn’t believe how much money she made here compared to how much money she made in the Dominican Republic. She went from earning, I would say, a hundred dollars a month, to earning $27,000”
She’s now working at a butcher shop in Pawtucket, but steady jobs like hers can be few and far between here. As factories have shuttered, the city offers starkly different opportunities for new immigrants, especially for those who may have limited English or education.
“Because this is the thing, in the past with no English, I found jobs,” said Maria Christina Betancur who came to the U.S. from Colombia. She worked in factories at first, in jobs that didn’t used to require strong English skills.
“Right now, they require a least, certain amount of English. Because they have no supervisors to train people, they don’t have people who can work as interpreters,” said Betancur.
Now she works at Progreso Latino, a nonprofit social service agency in Central Falls, where she tries to connect people with employers. Betancur says these days many new immigrants are forced to piece together work doing manual labor, cleaning, and working in restaurants. Jobs which may offer minimum wage, but not enough hours to make a living. Even many factory jobs now require some computer skills.
Education is the key Betancur says. And she tries to convince people, most of who have come here for the singular purpose of working, to take time out of their day for English or GED classes.
“Imagine,” Betancur said. “It’s so stressful, because we see the need. They need the money to survive, they need the money to pay rent, to pay for the food. And you hear a person telling you come over here take the classes, who’s going to pay for those bills?”
Those she can convince come to a cramped classroom on the fourth floor of the former Catholic School, where Progreso Latino is housed.
On a recent weekday morning about a dozen students, mostly women, work on plotting points on graphs, as part of the math GED prep.
One of the students, Adele Alvarez came to this country twelve years ago from Guatemala City, and has worked as a house cleaner since.
“I finish my high school in the other country, but when I came to the United States, it was difficult to find another work,” Alvarez said. “Because maybe you have English, but you don’t have your studies. And this is the reason I came here.”
This is first time she’d stepped back into a classroom since she’d left Guatemala. She’s proudly explains how well she’s doing in math, and is already thinking about the work she’d like to do when she completes her GED.
“Maybe in a secretary office or something like that,” Alvarez said. “I love working with a social worker maybe one day, this is my goal.”
For some new immigrants to the U.S. improving education was once reserved for the second or third generation. But as jobs demand new skills and language ability, classes like have become necessary to find steady, stable work.
For some students in the class, they say this is the first time they’ve had since coming to America to take a moment for themselves, and think about what they’d like to do.
“Every day you need to go to sleep, you need to say ‘what happened today?’” said GED teacher Ester Acevedo. “A lot of learning. Today is good.”
That’s why Esther stays in touch with her students, and tries to get those who’ve dropped classes to go to work to come back to school.
