ON THE JOB
Suburban Myth
Elizabeth Llorente's stories puncture our
preconceptions of the suburbs. And she's getting
others to take a closer look in their own backyards
Elizabeth Llorente is like a lot of suburban moms — a little bit over-protective of her eleven- and thirteen-year-olds; living on the cheaper end of a high-price-tag town for the school system; balancing a job with her husband’s career and the kids’ summer vacations. Her Toyota Camry is littered with Bazooka Joe wrappers and Dunkin’ Donuts napkins. She often pops in a cd to listen to while she’s driving — sometimes Mendelssohn, sometimes Freddie Mercury. But as she travels around northern New Jersey she is documenting an American suburbia that few others recognize, and she is reporting some of the most important race and ethnicity stories in this country.
Suburbs aren’t always the most promising place to find breaking news, but Llorente, who has worked at The Record, in Bergen County, New Jersey, for fifteen years (ten of them on the immigration beat) has built a reputation for seeing the stories others miss. American suburbs are changing. Once-homogeneous bedroom communities are now the destination of many new immigrants — a pattern that is altering the demographics of the country and broadening tensions previously confined to urban centers. Llorente looks underneath the roofs of these communities and explores the lives of immigrants as they settle in predominantly white neighborhoods, the fears of these communities as they grapple with change, and the relationships between different minority groups as they interact with, supplant, and, sometimes, compete with one another. She has transformed the immigration beat at The Record from a celebrating-diversity story in the lifestyle section to front-page news that reveals the true complexity of today’s race and ethnic relations. And she has gotten other journalists and newspapers to take a closer look at what’s happening in their own backyards.
Llorente is an astute observer, and her observations are informed by both a broad knowledge base and a keen intuition. “She’s able to spot things in a very unique way and get to the raw emotion of it,” says Mike Semel of The Washington Post, a former editor of Llorente’s at The Record. Her stories can be sparked by brief everyday encounters, like a man balancing bags of groceries on his bicycle in the relatively affluent suburb of Hillsdale. That image, and others like it, suggested the possibility of immigrants unable to meet New Jersey’s residency requirements for a driver’s license or too poor to afford a car. The observation turned into a 3,000-word story that ran in a series called “Hispanics in Suburbia: Poverty Amid Affluence” in December 2000. The man was part of a community of Latin Americans living in a town with a growing undocumented immigrant population. “She picks up on trends before demographers do,” says Susan DeSantis, her editor at The Record. A Spanish-speaking family playing in a suburban park on the weekend, a woman wheeling a grocery cart home from a store at night — these are some of the mundane details that tell Llorente that immigrants are bypassing the traditional gateways of urban centers and working-class cities and settling in the suburbs. “They are coming here for the same reason everyone else is, and they are willing to live in very crowded conditions to do it,” says Llorente, citing one extended family of nineteen living in a rented house in Hillsdale. “Many came initially for jobs in restaurants and car washes and dry cleaners, and then they started to get a sense of the quality of life here and they realized they could be a bigger part of the world they dream about and that their kids could go to school with the kids of the people whose homes they clean. This is a discovery they’ve made in the past few years.”
Immigration is no longer the urban-enclave story it was when Llorente’s parents arrived from Cuba in the 1950s. Her father commuted to a job at a factory in Manhattan, but otherwise her family rarely left their Cuban émigré community in Union City, New Jersey. Llorente spoke Spanish at home; most of her neighbors were Cuban, as were the majority of her classmates in high school. Her parents were doting and over-protective. When Llorente walked to school in the morning, her mother would disguise herself in sunglasses and follow behind her. “As if I wouldn’t recognize my own mother in sunglasses,” she says with a laugh.
When Llorente was fourteen, her mother died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage. The following year her father died of a heart attack. Llorente went to live with her brother in Lodi, New Jersey, for a school year and then to an aunt’s home in Miami before attending college at the University of Missouri, where she majored in journalism. The transitions were difficult. “It was a hard fall and it was on cement,” says Llorente. “To go from a house where you are the center, to all of a sudden being a guest in someone else’s house, just someone passing through.” The experience heightened the empathy Llorente brings to the stories she reports, and her understanding of the precarious and transitory situations many immigrants struggle with. “I appreciate what it takes to keep your spirit in a storm because you believe it is going to end at some point — and that is an immigrant’s view. I suppose it also contributed to my interest in people who are facing hardships and my impatience with those people and institutions that can alleviate hardship and don’t.”
In 1995 Llorente received a tip that an Algerian woman who had come to the United States seeking political asylum had been held in a detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in prison-like conditions, for about nine months. It was the beginning of an investigation that would take Llorente inside the Esmor detention center and expose the conditions that many asylum seekers were subjected to and the prolonged waits they endured before receiving an immigration hearing. Llorente broke the story, which launched an investigation by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. (After a riot by detainees, the center was shut down.) The series, “Shackled in the Land of Hope,” won a George Polk Award. It also won Llorente a national reputation. Since then she has been offered jobs at The Washington Post, the Lost Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal — offers that have tempted and flattered Llorente but offers she has turned down, in part because she didn’t want to pull her kids, who were very young at the time, out of their school system or ask her husband, an environmental engineer, to relocate the consulting business he had just launched. She is comfortable with her decisions. The changing tableau of New Jersey’s population — the sixth-largest immigrant population in the country and one of the most ethnically diverse — is a rich source of material. One of the biggest compliments she has received was from an editor who looked at her clips and said, “You’ve done all this from Hackensack?”
Keith Woods of The Poynter Institute says the value of Llorente’s stories is that they advance what we think we know. “She’s very good at getting ahead of a story, even as it’s developing, and revealing the complexity of it,” he said. “The Palisades Park story is a good example of that.” Palisades Park, a working-class suburb, had a predominantly Italian- and Irish-American population before Korean immigrants started settling there in the 1980s. Llorente’s three-part series, “A Tale of Two Cultures,” looked at the tensions between those two groups, added the component of a recent influx of Guatemalans, and examined the misunderstandings that separated the populations as they tried to move forward. “The series got a dialogue going,” says Vivian Waixel, executive editor of The Record. “It got other towns thinking about the inevitability of immigration to their suburb and how they were going to make that adjustment.”
In June, at the age of forty-three, Llorente received a career achievement award from the Let’s Do It Better! Workshop on Journalism, Race, and Ethnicity, run by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. “She’s made contributions to journalism that have really been unmatched,” says the program’s director, Arlene Morgan. “She was one of the first reporters to recognize the importance of reporting accurately and authentically about changing demographics and the impact those changes have on a community.”
Demographics is a word often associated with Llorente’s work. She pays attention to census figures, but she also understands that they don’t tell the whole story. “When the census showed that there was a growing number of Hispanics in the suburbs, it didn’t tell you that the majority of those Hispanics are white,” she says. “I know because I just don’t see a lot of dark-skinned Hispanics in the suburbs. So there is a real racial component to that trend that you can’t get from the numbers. If you simply say that there are X more Hispanics in a once exclusively white suburb, that is actually a distortion because then people will think, ‘Oh, we are becoming a more open society. Hispanics are now being welcomed in the suburbs.’”
One of the challenges Llorente faces in the suburbs is getting old-guard communities to speak openly about their opinions and prejudices. “In many of the more affluent towns you have people who measure what they say, and who have jobs and move in social circles where they have to measure what they say, no matter what they are thinking. You have to be just as clever and very psychological about how you ask things.” Racism may be camouflaged in the suburbs but it is felt — not only by recent immigrants but by many American-born Hispanics and non-whites. In her series “Diverse and Divided,” which ran this January and February, Llorente looked at the experiences of minorities who have moved to upper-middle-class communities in New Jersey. “Some people hoped that money would be the equalizer and that they could be accepted in this world. A lot of them are, but many will still experience that icy wind, that disapproving look. Someone might say something that makes them feel small, and then they are right back in that housing project.”
Llorente’s work is marked by a candor, however unpretty, about the fluctuating state of race relations. When, in “Diverse and Divided,” she looked at the harsh views some blacks and Hispanics have of one another in working-class Paterson, people questioned whether she should shine a spotlight on the bigotry of two groups who historically have been the victims of prejudice. “This is a new dimension in race relations,” Llorente says. “It’s no longer what the Kerner Commission described — two nations, one white, one black. It’s much more complicated than that. We need to hear the conversations people are having — in the beauty parlor, at the doctor’s office, playing poker, playing dominoes — because these are the conversations we aren’t hearing, and things will get worse if we don’t understand it.”
TThe suburbs no longer reflect the images of the television sitcoms that perpetuate their stereotypes. And they can no longer afford to remove themselves from the discussions of race and ethnic relations that have marked the evolution of this country. Nor can the journalists who cover them. “Too often,” says Llorente, “when journalists write about Hispanics and other minority groups, they head straight for the barrios, the enclaves, the ghettos, and totally miss what is happening beyond those tried-and-true places.” As immigration trends continue to shift and as first and second generations continue to move up the socioeconomic ladder, race and ethnicity stories won’t be found in their usual places, and they won’t be the usual story. Immigrants and minorities are transforming the suburbs in distinct ways as they are confronted with their own particular difficulties. “Minorities and immigrants are no longer the ‘others’ in northern New Jersey,” Llorente says. “They are northern New Jersey.”
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