[RP TownTalk] Post article today on Riverdale Park's Mexican community

[Dwight Holmes]

Impact Resonates With Mexican Enclave in Md.

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 3, 2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/02/AR2009050202108.html

Turn onto a quiet side street called Edmonston Road in the Prince
George's County town of Riverdale Park and you could almost be in
Mexico.

Shopkeepers have festooned the slightly shabby brick bungalows lining
the street with exuberant signs painted in the red, green and white of
Mexico's flag. The Discocentro Mexicano offers cowboy boots from
northern Mexico alongside racks of CDs by Mexican bands. At the San
Jose Grocery, three-foot statues of Catholic saints are stacked above
the produce aisle.

And perhaps nowhere in the Washington region has the impact of the
swine flu originating in Mexico reverberated with greater force this
week than along this half-mile stretch.

At Comunicar Travel and Tax Services, in a small house painted
electric blue and decorated with posters of airplanes, requests from
Mexican immigrants seeking to book summer trips home have nearly
ceased over the past several days. Instead, the agency's two travel
consultants have been fielding calls from clients who already bought
tickets and want to postpone their flights without incurring fees.

"This is the time of year when we sell families their summer travel
packages," said the agency's manager, Ruddy Hernandez, standing with a
worried look in the empty office one recent morning. "If this
continues much longer it will be a big problem."

Branching out to other customers is not an easy option, Hernandez
said. Although many of the region's estimated 47,000 Mexican
immigrants are scattered among other, larger immigrant communities,
Riverdale Park has emerged over the past two decades as a rare Mexican
enclave. So almost all of Comunicar's clients are Mexican immigrants.

At least one business does appear to be booming along Edmonston Road:
the sale of phone cards to Mexicans anxious to check on relatives back
home.

"Aha, aha. ¿Y como esta la niña?" -- "And how's the little girl?" --
Fernando Andrades, 25, a welder on a lunch break, shouted tensely into
his cellphone on a recent afternoon. He was standing in the parking
lot of Discocentro, where he'd just bought a $25 phone card so he
could call his brother in Mexico's Tabasco state.

Andrades's expression relaxed. "My brother says his daughter is fine,"
he said, flipping the phone shut.

But the sense of relief came at a price. "Normally I spend about $50
to call my relatives twice a week," said Andrades as he walked into
the Sirenita Mexican Restaurant next door. "Now I'm spending $100 a
week to call them daily."

Still, compared with Jesus Joel, 40, one of the prep cooks at the
restaurant, Andrades seemed almost neglectful of his family: Joel said
he was calling his wife and three children in Mexico City about four
times a day. "It's so hard to be away from them at a time like this,"
said Joel as he chopped beef for a fajita.

Although Joel's family remains healthy, he said there were other
reasons for concern. "My son works at a bank, and they've closed it,
so he's missing a lot of work, and my daughters are missing their
classes at school," he said. "Also, they tell me that there's been a
run on the shops, so there's a shortage of everything -- vegetables,
medicine and worst of all, face masks. Just imagine. My wife hasn't
been able to find face masks!"

Elizabeth Mejia, 36, the cook, clucked her tongue sympathetically.

"This is all we talk about these days," she said with a grim smile.

A few blocks down, the conversation in the kitchen of El Taco Azteca
was even more alarming.

"I just heard my little niece has that flu," Mariella Jacome, 23, told
Rosalba Vazquez, 31, as the waitresses piled takeout food into
Styrofoam containers.

"Really?" said Vazquez, her eyes widening.

Jacome's 9-month-old niece lives in Guatemala, where there have been
no official reports of swine flu infections. But she was certain that
was the diagnosis.

"She's been sick for 15 days and in the hospital for eight days,"
Jacome said. "At first they thought it was asthma. Now they know it's
that flu. . . . But thank God she's doing better. They've just taken
her off the oxygen."

Like others on Edmonston Road, Jacome and Vazquez also worried that it
was only a matter of time before swine flu reached Riverdale Park,
given how many Mexican immigrants live there.

A few in town have started looking for face masks. Andrades, the
welder, is one of about two dozen people who spent $30 to get a flu
vaccination this week at a private clinic that mostly serves Mexican
immigrants -- even though the medical assistant there said she
repeatedly warns patients that the vaccine does not protect against
swine flu.

However, most denizens of the street seemed to adopt the fatalistic
view of Jacome and Vazquez.

"You never know when the virus will reach you. So there's nothing to
do," Jacome said with a resigned sigh.

"Yes. Nothing but to wait," Vazquez agreed.