A struggle to find common ground on unfamiliar turf

Within minutes, three Border Patrol cars had 13-year-old Cindia and her mother, Marli, surrounded.

A smuggler had just led the pair and three other Brazilians across the Rio Grande.

The "coyote" had turned back, telling his charges to keep moving until they reached the road. Border Patrol will find you, he said. He knew U.S. detention centers couldn't hold all the illegal immigrants flowing into the country.

As the coyote said, Cindia and Marli were processed and, after providing a false U.S. address, released with a notice to appear in court. They would ignore the notice, and like hordes of others, become fugitives in the eyes of Immigration officials.

What mattered most was that they were in the United States and, for now, free to go.

They boarded a bus somewhere in New Mexico, and three days later they arrived in New York. Cindia's sister, Fernanda, picked them up and drove them to where she, her husband, Emiliano, and his younger brother, Deivisson, Cindia's boyfriend, lived - in tiny Riverside, N.J.

Throngs of Brazilians were already here. Local police think 2,000 Brazilians have poured into this old industrial town of 8,000 over the last five or six years. Community members and outreach groups believe thousands more live in surrounding towns along the aging Route 130 corridor. Most are young men, who, like Emiliano and Deivisson, have taken jobs as carpenters. Women, who have been coming in growing numbers, clean houses.

A majority of these immigrants are illegal, and many say they're here only long enough to make the money for a better life back home.

But in just the five or six years they've been coming, they have changed the face of blocks and businesses in Riverside.

Community leaders, who have been nursing redevelopment dreams for years, are ecstatic over the new shops and restaurants that cater to the newcomers. But the rapid influx of strangers has also overwhelmed the small town.

It's a lot to swallow - and would be for any community.

The residents of Riverside, both old and new, are still adapting to each other. Through gestures, chance encounters, outbursts of anger and moments of sympathy, they're moving together to common ground and a new identity.

Cindia and Marli arrive in May 2004 and move into a small, one-bedroom apartment with Fernanda, Emiliano and Deivisson. Sundays, when everyone's home from work, they draw up a schedule to use the only bathroom.

Cindia doesn't like it here. She can't understand why her mother wanted to come. It's summer and it's still cold. And though she can't yet understand what the Americans are saying, she senses she's not welcome.

They're all here just to make money and send it back home, grumbles lifelong resident Carolyn Chamberlain, 37, on a hot June day. New ones are coming every day. "And they're crowding 20 people to a house meant for a family."

Chamberlain pulls out a petition from behind the counter at Riverside News Agency, where she's been a clerk for the last nine years. It's a cry to the township to crack down on overcrowding in rentals. Hundreds have signed.

People are getting ticked off. Customer Carol Horton, who has lived all of her 60 years in Riverside, sure is.

"I want them out and you can print that," she barks. "If you want to live here, you have to live like the rest of us."

The township, many here complain, doesn't want to touch Brazilians because they're opening up new shops and restaurants, and Lord knows this place needs those. The township maintains it is cracking down on the overcrowding, but code enforcement official Phil Gossredo says the situation has been exaggerated. He's never found 20 people to a house. More like eight to 10.

"But that's still an overcrowded situation."

In the absence of a local immigrant outreach group, St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church has become a de facto welcoming center for the Brazilians. The church has a priest from Minas Gerais, Masses in Portuguese, and bilingual services on holidays.

The Rev. Thomas Rittenhouse, the senior pastor, says his congregation has embraced the newcomers. Critics, he figures, just don't understand them yet. "They're very hardworking people. They're a very spiritual people. I think they'll do very well."

It may just take time for the town to come around, he says.

People like 28-year-old Claudio are helping to bridge the cultural chasm.

Muscled and mild-mannered, he came from a small city in the central Brazilian state of Mato Grosso in 2001. Unlike other Brazilians, he doesn't work every day, more than 12 hours a day. He wants a life here, to be part of the community.

He's been teaching capoeira, a dance-like Brazilian martial art, since 2002.

At first, he reports, his students were all Brazilians. But several Americans have since joined, including 20-year-old Jessie Loring, who got hooked after a friend urged her to try it.

"We're like a family here," she proclaims after class one June night, her face flushed from sparring.

The family ties are about to get stronger, Claudio pipes in, urging Jessie to show the ring sparkling on her finger. Claudio's best friend, Clodoaldo Silvestre, has recently proposed.

By August, local residents are furious about the cars the Brazilians drive. Complaints have flooded into Township Administrator Eric Berry's office. Delran and Delanco, too, have reported hundreds of vehicles, mostly work vans, with Pennsylvania plates parked overnight.

The Brazilians need to drive to work, and they can't get New Jersey driver's licenses or tags. In Pennsylvania, they say, they can get insurance and tags with an international driver's license.

Frustrated, the township shoots a letter off to the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, asking for help in "the elimination of illegally registered motor vehicles in our township."

There's little help to be had. Proving residency is a difficult thing, police say. Besides, many of the vans in question are legally registered - to the Pennsylvania contractors the Brazilians work for.

There's been another incident, this time a brawl.

It breaks out in the wee hours of a Sunday in early September in front of the Pavilion Inn, a local go-go bar. Rocks and bricks are thrown. Two Americans and two Brazilians are hit.

There are a lot of run-ins over girls. Brazilians say they are simply showing their admiration, but many local teens say they're sick of them catcalling their girlfriends.

This time, the youths involved tell police simply: "The Brazilian guys did it." A Brazilian involved maintains the Americans started it. One local youth approached him, he says, and asked for cigarettes; when he said he didn't have any, the youth attacked. It's a story the officers have heard before.

Too often, though, they say they hear about such incidents after the fact; Brazilian victims are reluctant to come forward. When they do, the language barrier impedes investigation.

Maggie Stayton gripes that the township always takes the side of the Brazilians. Her son was hurt in the brawl.

"They say it's racial. It's not racial," she insists. "It's a problem. They don't understand how we live and they don't bother learning it. And no one's teaching them."

Soon, she won't have to worry about it anymore. The family's picking up and moving to Cinnaminson.

Stayton's husband, Pete, acknowledges he's leaving because the Brazilians next door gave him a good offer on his house.

"My reason," says Stayton, "is I can't stand it anymore."

A lot of locals think the police are easy on the Brazilians.

Lt. Lou Fisher says the department is, instead, fair.

"They're here and they deserve the same respect and treatment under the law as anyone else," he says. "The locals think literally that because 'I live here, I'm from here, I deserve special treatment.' "

The Brazilians aren't causing that many problems, he says. Not serious ones, anyway. They get picked up for erratic driving, ladders hanging precariously off the top of vans, not knowing traffic rules.

"They're not hurting anyone, like our stupid little juvenile delinquents out on the street," Fisher says.

Municipal Judge Dennis P. McInerney estimates that 30 percent of defendants who come before him these days are Brazilian. About a third, he says, have been involved in domestic disputes - including those with neighbors. Most others land in court for driving-related offenses, often driving without a valid license.

"They'll come in and say, 'I have a valid license.' And it'll be a license issued by International Driver's License Ltd.," McInerney says, chuckling in disbelief.

It weighs heavily on court interpreter Leonor Morais, herself an immigrant who came from Portugal in the 1970s.

"People are taking advantage of them," she clucks. "They charge $500 or more for licenses, and these people think they're real. I feel sorry for them. Some people have no scruples."

A "legitimate" state license can cost $1,000 or more. Brazilians in the know will set it up and lead newcomers to other parts of the country - as far away as Florida and Michigan - to get one.

Their day starts early, 5 a.m. typically. There are houses to be framed and cleaned in a lot of places. Delaware. Valley Forge. Montgomery County. North Jersey. The Jersey Shore.

The Brazilians who have access to a car or van do the driving and honk their horns (to the annoyance of neighbors) if no one is waiting when they pull up.

For the next 10 hours or so, while the women dust and vacuum and scrub grout, the men saw and hammer, haul planks of wood, and inch along beams and unfinished floors. They start at $7 or $8 an hour, learning on the job. If they pick it up quickly, they can move up, make maybe $20 an hour.

But the job offers few protections. They just pray they don't fall. Nobody wants to be like Sebastian. He used to be a carpenter. Now he's a quadriplegic in some rehab center, while his wife and daughter sit at home in Brazil.

A few good bosses might help their workers out. The bad bosses won't. They also don't always pay on time, and they gouge the Brazilians in little ways.

But without papers, there's little room to complain.

The men just head home for a few hours' sleep before beginning another day in America.

People give him grief for it, but Ed Robins finds the Brazilians "delightful."

"This town has always been an immigrant town," he says. "The Brazilians are just looking for a chance, like everyone else."

An old hippie at heart, Robins, 51, used to work in transport and security for top-name musical acts. In September, he realized his dream of owning his own music store and recording studio.

Riverside Arts Guild on Scott Street is a work in progress, Robins explains, but already the place has become a hangout for local teens. Brazilians come in, too.

"I love it," Robins says. "I'm learning Portuguese."

He can't understand why people complain. Grandparents spoke Polish and Italian at home all the time. Don't they remember when they were growing up? And like the Poles and Italians, some Brazilians are settling in.

"How many pregnant women do I see on this street every day?" he says. "They're going to raise these kids here, put them in schools here."

Cindia is now 14 and has moved with her mother and boyfriend Deivisson to a two-bedroom apartment in Delanco. She's in eighth grade at Riverside Middle School. Her mother wants her to get a good education.

But she still doesn't speak English, and schoolmates write nasty things in her notebook. She comes home crying, not wanting to go back. Her mother makes her.

Cindia is one of a small but growing group of Brazilians in the local school system. The high school only has about a dozen. But about 25 Brazilians are now enrolled in the elementary school, making up about 80 percent of English as a Second Language students.

Adults who want to learn English can attend class in the old Watchcase Tower. The hulking building, and the 32-acre "Golden Triangle" redevelopment area behind it, are supposed to be transformed into a thriving housing and retail community that will turn this weary town around.

For now, part of the tower houses a Burlington County engineering firm. It also hosts an English school affiliated with the Newark-based Harvest Institute.

About 150 students, most of them Brazilian, are taught by people like Ronaldo Empke.

A towering man with perfect posture and a sly smile, Empke came to the United States three years ago from Sao Paulo state and ended up marrying an American. Most of his students are here to stay, he says.

They don't just get language lessons from Empke. They get lessons in how to be a good citizen.

"We're trying to integrate and socialize them," he says.

So no loud barbecues, no public drunkenness.

"I have problems with my neighbors, too," Empke explains, "but they're American."

The rules are different for them.

Here for more than a year, 32-year-old Edelail, who has a slow smile and bright eyes and speaks Portuguese in a way that betrays his second-grade education, already has a firm grasp of the way things work in Riverside. Before coming here, Edelail had always lived in the country, worked on a farm. He'd never left his home state of Rondonia, a swath of deforested Amazon hugging the Bolivian border.

"You can't go anywhere alone here," Edelail says from the two-bedroom apartment he shares with three other men from Rondonia. "If you are alone, you are going to get punched. The kids like to provoke you and ask you for your money."

The older Americans seem nicer, offers his brother-in-law, Silvenei, who has come over to visit on a rainy Sunday in December. "Some," he says through an interpreter, "even want to teach us English."

Silvenei, a spritely figure, would like to learn. It would make life a lot easier. "But it's so difficult. I don't have the time. I work all day, and when I get home, I'm tired."

For most Brazilians, making money is the priority. But at first, you're not making the big bucks everybody said you would. You have to learn the ropes.

The expenses add up. Food, rent and utilities. The more people you can live with, the better. There's the cell phone bill, phone cards for calling home. English lessons, if you want to fit in; interpreters, if you need a doctor or lawyer. Satellite TV, if you want programs from back home. Clothes. Money for a car, gas. If you don't know any better, there's always someone - often a fellow countryman - who is ready to rip you off on something.

Money has to go home.

Maybe you're paying for wives or brothers to join you, or you owe the friends and family who helped you come here. You may owe loan sharks or smugglers. Interest can be more than 5 percent. Monthly.

It can take years to pay it all off. You've got to work like a dog, save everything you can if you want to succeed: Do what you said you'd do when you decided to come here.

The ones who get "lost," go wild with their money, drive fast and party hard, give everyone else a bad name.

Immigration has found them. Agents have been hitting Hunter's Glen, a large apartment complex off Route 130 in neighboring Delran, for a while now. Their activity in Riverside is picking up. And the Brazilians are scared.

By February, Cindia and her relatives have moved to Northeast Philadelphia. There, a growing number of Brazilian stores and restaurants have cropped up along Castor Avenue near Cottman, in between Jerusalem Gift Shop, Lucy's Indian Restaurant, Ham Heung Noodles. It's easier to blend in. Pennsylvania license plates look normal. And the police leave people alone, Cindia reports in quick English.

She's in a new school, and much happier. This one has lots of immigrants, people like herself who know what it's like.

Back in Riverside, Silvenei has moved into Edelail's apartment. For now, they and their roommates have decided to stay in New Jersey. But they worry. Silvenei still owes the smuggler who brought him here $3,500.

"If Immigration catches us now, how are we going to pay back our debts?"

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Reporter Jennifer Moroz made more than 50 trips to Riverside during 15 months of reporting. She interviewed more than 150 residents, about half Brazilians and half locals, including police and municipal and school officials. In May she traveled to Brazil, where over two weeks she interviewed about 50 people, including U.S. State Department and Brazilian officials. She has spoken with a dozen immigration officials and experts, including several specializing in Brazilian immigration, and read dozens of articles and books on the subject.

Many interviews were conducted in Portuguese through an interpreter. The last names of some Brazilians have been omitted at their request to protect their identities or those of relatives.