[music]

Announcer: Listener-supported WNYC Studios.

[music]

Brigid Bergin: This is All Of It. I'm Brigid Bergin in for Alison Stewart. Thanks for spending part of your day with us. I'm glad you're here. On today's show, we'll speak with a team behind the new documentary of the beloved political powerhouse, Bella Abzug, and the writers' strike continues. We'll check in with Washington Post reporter Samantha Chery, who's been following the talks and will update us on how things are going.

We'll have a little fun with our series, Small Stakes, Big Opinions, where we answer the burning question, "Where does upstate begin?" First, with the increase of migrants in the city has come an increase in the presence of migrant children on the subway selling candy. Writer Jordan Salama spent the summer speaking to some of the mothers and children about their experiences selling on the subway. We learned what it all means for our city's migrant crisis.

It was just a few weeks ago when New York City's migrant shelter system reached a breaking point. The city's run out of beds, leading some to have slept on the street. Tens of thousands of migrants have arrived seeking asylum in the last year. The Adams and Hochul administrations are clashing over whose responsibility it is to care for the migrants coming to the city. The Biden administration is resisting calls to step in while also criticizing the city and state's response.

Another consequence of this is a trend you've probably noticed while on your commute or travels around the city. More candy sellers on the subway. Often, these sellers are women with young children. In some cases, the children are sent into trains on their own. That can mean they miss out on school. A new school year starts next week for New York City students. The lifestyle can be dangerous, but many feel they have no other options to support their family.

Writer Jordan Salama spent the summer speaking to some of these migrants who are selling candy on the subway. He reports that a majority of the sellers he spoke to come from Ecuador, specifically Indigenous populations in the country's rural central highlands, where conditions have led to more residents trying to make it to the United States. His recent cover story for New York Magazine is all about his conversations with candy sellers and the problems they face and the consequences for New York's migrant crisis. The story is called From Ecuador to the 7 Train. Jordan Salama joins me in studio now. Hi, Jordan, thanks so much for being here.

Jordan Salama: Thank you so much for having me.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, we want to hear from you. What are you observing on your commute about migrant women and children selling candy on the subway? Give us a call. 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692, or you can reach us on social media @AllOfItWNYC, or maybe you know a migrant family, or maybe you yourself were once a migrant. What does seeing these young children selling candy make you feel? What do you think this says about the crisis in our city and what it comes to what we're doing to take care of this migrant population? What do you think the city needs to do more to take greater care of this population? Again, the number, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Jordan, many of the migrants you met selling candy on the subway come from Ecuador. Specifically, the country's rural central highlands where much of the Indigenous population lives. First, how did you learn enough information about this migrant community to make that conclusion? Is it the majority of people selling candy in the system or is it the majority of people that you spoke with?

Jordan Salama: The way that I learned principally of these groups of candy sellers, these migrants, when I started reporting the story in the beginning of June was just by spending hours and hours day after day in the subway system, on the platforms, on the trains, observing and trying to chat with people as much as they'd allow me to speak with them. As you can imagine, this is a very vulnerable community. It took time to gain trust. When I say that it's the majority of people selling candy on the subway are from Ecuador, those are the majority of the people who I spoke with. I crisscrossed the city and I can be hard-pressed to think of somebody who didn't tell me they were from Ecuador.

Brigid Bergin: So interesting. Why is it that we're seeing this huge wave of Indigenous people from Ecuador? Why are they coming to the US at this point?

Jordan Salama: There's a number of reasons and several of them have actually been in the news over the past couple of weeks. Ecuador is a country that has seen, in recent years, a huge spike in violence, especially in certain regions. A presidential candidate was assassinated on August 9th. People are struggling to survive. As in many of these cases, Indigenous communities are being affected disproportionately. A lot of people are in debt. People are being affected by things caused by climate change. There are all sorts of reasons. In the case of these families, they cite a lack of work and uptake in violence and they're leaving.

Brigid Bergin: When these people arrive in New York, of all the ways to try and make money as new arrivals, why has the first plan been for women and children to sell candy on the subway?

Jordan Salama: I'll preface this by saying that all of these, it may seem uniform to people who are taking the subway and seeing these families, but everybody's cases are different.

Brigid Bergin: Of course.

Jordan Salama: There are people who are selling all day every day because it's their principal source of income. Some of those people are selling with their children all day every day and those children are not going to school. There are some families who send their children to school and then they have no other option but to bring them with them after school while they work. Why are they choosing to sell candy in the subway in this way?

In a lot of cases, it's the result of they arrive in New York. They have no other way of making income because the informal labor economy is saturated. There are so many migrants as we know who are arriving and looking for work. A lot of times, it just takes one family member, one person who they know, a distant relative who's already here and who says, "I'm doing this. It's working for me. Maybe you should try it too."

Brigid Bergin: This seems like such a small question, but it's vital to their ability to do this, which is, where do they source this product? Where do they get the candy and how much are they typically charging so that they can actually make some income?

Jordan Salama: Everybody seems to sell for $2 a piece per Welch's Fruit Snacks, M&M's, Snickers bars, gum, all that sorts of thing. Where they source the candy was one of my principal questions starting out. I asked everybody and everybody seemed to have a different answer. It usually depends on where they live, but in most cases, people have a wholesale store, whether that's a BJ's or a Costco nearby. They go there.

One woman, young woman, a 16-year-old girl who had an infant child, who's one of the principal characters in our cover story, she told me that she didn't know the name of the store where she bought her candy, but she knew exactly how to get there. She said, "I take the R Train near to the end, and then I take the Q59 bus exactly 22 stops." She said that as if she was repeating to me the instructions that they'd been given to her. Exactly 22 stops. I retraced the path and I found this wholesaler in Maspeth, Queens that seems to cater mostly to convenience stores and bodegas and stationary stores, but there were also Ecuadorian families.

Brigid Bergin: It's such an amazing detail. The 22 stops, it gives you just a sense of both the precision that they need to have when they're trying to do these things, but also the vulnerability. You go 23 stops. You're in the wrong spot and you don't know necessarily how to get back where you came from.

Jordan Salama: Exactly.

Brigid Bergin: In terms of speaking with these migrants on the trains, you learned about some of the options they were faced when they came to the United States, specifically the different routes that they could take. What are those routes and how different are they from one another?

Jordan Salama: I spoke with several experts who study Ecuadorian migration trends to the United States. It seems right now that there are two routes that are the most popular. One is the more traditional route, which is paying through [foreign language], which is like the smuggling route to pay somebody to help you arrange all the steps, which is usually a plane ride to a Central American country that doesn't require visas for Ecuadorians, and then making one's way by foot or by bus to the US-Mexico border, and then crossing again through a smuggler as most people are doing now in the southern border, and then coming to New York again via a variety of ways.

The other route is via the treacherous Darién Gap, which is this roadless jungle on the border of Panama and Colombia, where this has exploded in popularity in recent years. Thousands of migrants are crossing every year and so people will literally walk or take buses from Ecuador through Colombia to these towns of Capurganá and others on the edge of the gap, and then start making their way by foot to Panama and then make their way by land to the border.

Brigid Bergin: If you're just joining us, you're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin. My guest is Jordan Salama. We're speaking about his recent cover story from New York Magazine called From Ecuador to the 7 Train about migrant children selling candy in our city subways. I want to go to our phones. Let's talk to Lena in Manhattan. Lena, thanks for calling WNYC.

Lena: Hi, thanks for having me. My point of view on this is I'm for immigrants. I myself, I'm an immigrant to this country. When I see five-year-olds, seven-year-olds by themselves offering candy, it really breaks my heart. If we have come here is to make it and that begins with education. That's the best opportunity we can give to children, putting them in school. We know school is available to all children in this city. For me, there's no excuse there. Aside from that, they're super vulnerable, right? People can prey on them, take them, say things to them. That's my two sets.

Brigid Bergin: Lena, thank you for your call. I think, Jordan, what we're hearing from Lena is something that you heard when you were out there reporting this idea that there's a real tension around how these kids should be spending their time. Should they be in this vulnerable position, potentially helping their families make money, or should they be in school? What did people tell you when you were out reporting the story?

Jordan Salama: I think that a lot of this is encapsulated by something that one woman who we call Anna in the story said, which is that nobody truly wants to bring their children onto the trains. They recognize that this is a super dangerous situation for their kids to be in. I spoke with people whose children were almost pushed onto the tracks. There's bad air quality in the subway on even a good day when it's good air quality outside.

Imagine those smoke-filled days in June. There were kids crying. When school was canceled, there were more kids out than I'd ever seen selling before. There's a whole number of threats and perils that kids can face on the subway. I think that people are doing this in large part out of desperation and feeling like they have no other option, and this is the key, even if there are some other options that do exist.

Brigid Bergin: We got a text from a listener who said, "Selling on public transportation in Central and South America is very, very common." Jordan, you're nodding. Talk a little bit about why this particular way of making money is a natural fit for some of these migrants who've arrived here in the city.

Jordan Salama: It goes back to one of your earlier questions, which is what leads somebody to think, "This is the first way I'm going to try to make money when I get to New York." In a lot of cases, it's what they did to make money when they were living in Ecuador. I spoke to people who would take buses from their Indigenous towns in a few hundred miles south of Quito to Quito to sell in the markets and at stoplights and on buses there.

The difference is, there, a lot of people would sell legumes and vegetables and things that they would grow in the campo where they used to live. Here, they're selling candy because, again, it's what's available to them. Yes, it's extraordinarily common in Central and South America. Actually, to a lot of Latin Americans living in New York, it's not surprising, except that it's happening here.

Brigid Bergin: Let's go back to the phones. Diana in New Rochelle, you're on the line. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Diana: Hi, thank you for taking my call. I am Colombian and I actually left Bogota because of this kind of informal economy that used to break my heart to see families with little kids selling things on the street. Even though it broke my heart, I never wanted to support it because some of these kids are not even the kids of the people who are selling.

They could even kidnap children or abuse children and force them not to go to school in order to-- They appeal to people's heart and then they take the kids with them, so you feel bad for them and you help them. I'm terrified to see this now happening in the streets of New York. Even though it still breaks my heart to see kids doing this, I want to tell everybody. It's not good to support them because, as the speaker said, if one family is making ends meet like this, then they're just going to continue doing it. I just don't want to see this in New York.

Brigid Bergin: Diana, thank you for your call. Jordan, do you want to react to that in terms of this idea of the tension that some people feel in terms of supporting these people selling candy?

Jordan Salama: Absolutely. I think that it's a very real fear, again, because these systems exist in Latin America that people are familiar with. Here, in my reporting, I did not find that this kind of trafficking type of situation was happening. Everybody who I spoke with, they were families. They were parents with their children. That's not to say that there aren't organizations in New York that are worried that this could happen if the situation gets worse. If people realize that they're making enough money, there's always a fear obviously out of desperation that these sorts of things can happen. It's not the case yet, it seems.

Brigid Bergin: Let's go to Adenah in New Jersey. Adenah, thanks for calling WNYC.

Adenah: Thanks for taking my call. I'm listening to this conversation. It just brought tears to my eyes because I was what you would consider a market kid in West Africa. My grandmother owned a vegetable stand and I would go around the market selling vegetables. There was some valuable skills that I learned in that. Today, I'm the owner of four IHOPs, founder of Cornbread Farm to Soul, and a vegan concept.

Whenever I encounter these kids, I try to pour into them. I teach them because I was one of those kids. The lessons I learned on the streets and in the marketplace has been more valuable than my four-year of college. I'm just kidding. This was very, very good years. My heart sinks, but I know and I support them. I teach them. I talk with them. It just warm me when I see kids that are engaging in that kind of entrepreneurship.

Brigid Bergin: Adenah, thanks for your call. We're so glad that you have a story of building your own businesses, managing your own franchises. You do raise and I think, Jordan, she raises an important point again with this idea of what services are actually available to these families, to these kids. Mayor Adams has repeatedly said, the city shelters are full. We've seen that migrants have been left to sleep outside. Resources are running thin. What do we know about the city's plans or maybe even opinions about this influx of migrants selling candy on the subway, particularly these children?

Jordan Salama: Selling candy on the subway. We reached out to the MTA for a comment on this story and they deferred us to the police department. When the police department responded, they said that they use a high level of discretion when deciding if they're going to give a fine because it is illegal. You're not allowed to sell anything in the subway. You're not allowed to do most things in the subway or on the transit system without a permit. These are people without a permit.

They said that they use a high level of discretion. To date of the article, they had given out in the year 415 summonses for this, which is a low number considering just how many people are selling every single day. That said, I have also seen police officers running people off the platforms telling them, "You can't sell here," without giving a fine. I've seen people get ticketed. I've also seen police officers buying candy and beverages from people selling on the subway.

There's a whole range of what's actually happening from what I've seen, but that seems to be the official response to the candy sellers. When it comes to the migrant crisis, we're seeing in the news what's happening. The Adams administration, Kathy Hochul, and the Biden administration, they're all going back and forth in deciding whose fault it is and what needs to be done. Yes, the city, it's full.

Brigid Bergin: Sure.

Jordan Salama: It's very complicated.

Brigid Bergin: It's safe to say we're very far from a clear plan at this point. What was clear in your story is that you spent a lot of time on the 7 Train. You point out that many of the sellers heavily populate certain subway lines. Why the 7 Train? What are some of the neighborhoods that this train runs through? Why would that be a place that these migrants are going to specifically?

Jordan Salama: It comes back to a point that we were talking about earlier, which is the difficulty to navigate New York. It's difficult enough for anybody to navigate New York City. Imagine somebody who's shown up in a very, very vulnerable situation. A lot of these migrants don't know how to read and write very well either, so that obviously complicates things even more. It's only natural that they stick to the subway lines that go towards the neighborhoods where they're living.

A lot of these people are living in shelters, but a lot are also living in neighborhoods that have very commonly been places where migrants go when they come to New York. Parts of Queens, Corona, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, and parts of Brooklyn for Ecuadorian specifically. You'll see a lot of people along the 7 Train, the N, Q, R lines, the B, D, F, M lines. People go where they see lots of commuters. This is a market-based situation. People go where they think that they can sell the most. That's why you also see people branching out further and further.

Brigid Bergin: Let's go to Beth in Brooklyn. Beth, thanks for calling WNYC.

Beth: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I wanted to start out by thanking Jordan for the article. I've been seeing a lot of these families on the F Train in Brooklyn for at least the past year. I've been very concerned and wondering what can be done. I was happy to see the research he did and see that there are some organizations working to help them. I'm very concerned because I've lived in South America. I've certainly seen child labor there. I know it's a reality. Without blaming the families or wanting to get them in trouble with the police or anything, I've been wishing something could be done to help support them.

I've definitely seen kids out selling during the school year last year during school hours. My fear is that when children grow up like this and they see other American kids with privileges and opportunities they don't have, they can start to feel like they're in part of a two-tier society and lose hope in their futures. I've worked with people in the criminal justice system, including young men who got involved in gang violence. I just feel like it's great if some kids learn values of hard work and stay together with their families, but I feel like there's other kids who are just going to feel like they don't have a shot in society and they're going to turn to destructive ways of life.

Brigid Bergin: Beth, thank you for that call. Clearly, the concern in her voice. One of the things you do explore in your article, Jordan, are some of the support systems, some of the nonprofit support systems that have tried to fill the gap because, as we said, the city services may not be where they need to be for this population at this point. Can you talk a little bit about the model of the Voces Latinas nonprofit? How do they reach out to these folks and establish a longer-term relationship so that they might be able to connect them with some more support?

Jordan Salama: Sure. Voces Latinas, a nonprofit based in Queens, a community-based organization helps migrants from Latin America in New York. I also relied on Voces Latinas in a lot of cases to help me build trust with some of these people to have them speak with me. They use this model called the promotora model. For people who've lived in Latin America or are from Latin America will know that these are people who help to make links, make connections with social services and healthcare services principally.

They apply this model here where they'll have people who were previously undocumented or in these kinds of situations to go out and do education and outreach to help people figure out what their best options are for their families when they've newly arrived. I went out with promotoras and Voces Latinas staff to speak with these women. At the same time, we were talking about their stories. They were also giving information about resources and education.

If somebody comes into the office of an organization like Voces Latinas, they can help their kids sign up for school. They can give them Reduced-Fare MetroCards. They can help them find health insurance, all sorts of things like that. There are organizations, Voces Latinas being just one of many in New York, that are helping people in these ways. They emphasize that the answer to this is education, not just in the school system but also educating the families about how to make the best way forward for themselves and for their kids.

Brigid Bergin: One of the things I think we heard in some of the callers was this anxiety around not wanting to reinforce this model is the best solution for this community. You talk about the role that social media plays, specifically TikTok. How do these many candy sellers use TikTok specifically when it comes to communicating with each other and to their families back in Ecuador?

Jordan Salama: It's really interesting. It was very, very surprising to find how important TikTok is in the lives of people in this community. Mostly, it has to do with the migrations from Ecuador to New York. In large part, if you see people selling candy on the subway in New York, you see that they're in very obviously difficult situations and projecting hardship. On TikTok, they're projecting the American dream.

A lot of their followers are obviously probably friends and family and people from Ecuador. There are people who are starting to think that this may be facilitating, if not accelerating migration from places because people may not know what to expect, but it's also a way for people to communicate and to learn how to go, what are the different routes, how much does it cost?

It's a whole world of not only seeing here, "Oh, people seem to be doing well," because they're not showing the hard part of their life as we all do on social media. We show a curated version of ourselves, but also people who are posting from the Darién Gap, people who are posting from the US border saying, "I'm making it," and people cheering them on in the comments. It's really interesting. It's a world that definitely needs to be studied more and explored more because it seems to be a pretty new trend.

Brigid Bergin: That was an interesting part of this story that it surprised me because part of this experience, I feel like, is very much something that we all see, that we all observe, but that was this other piece of it, this other thread of communication that I hadn't been exposed to before. How many of these TikTok videos did you come across as you were reporting the story?

Jordan Salama: Oh, I watched so many of them because it's a way of observing in another way, because you can suddenly see and reach so many more people than just by walking across the platforms. If you find one person who's willing to follow you on TikTok and you follow them back, suddenly, you can see who they're tagging because all this is public. It's just a very, very interesting way to learn about a community both in person and online.

Brigid Bergin: We have a listener who's curious about whether or not some of the kids you encountered, are they primarily communicating in Spanish? Are they reading and writing or do you know how they communicate?

Jordan Salama: Yes. This community speaks Spanish and they speak Kichwa, which is the Indigenous language of that part of Ecuador. It's a variant of Quechua, which is one of the most widely-spoken Indigenous languages of South America. You'll hear a lot of times the older relative, the older people in the family speaking in Kichwa, especially when they don't want other people to understand. The kids, the younger generations, always responding in Spanish. It's so interesting because my family came from Argentina in the '60s to the US.

My dad would always say my grandparents would speak to him in Spanish and he would respond in English. Now, Spanish has become the language that seems to be-- We're fitting in because so many people here speak Spanish. Now, it's Kichwa. That is the second-tier language. It's very, very interesting to see that interaction. I went out at one point with a Kichwa-speaking anthropologist from Ecuador in order to, again, help build trust and speak with communities in different ways in the languages that some people prefer as their first language.

Brigid Bergin: Jordan, after someone reads your story and learns more about who these migrant candy sellers are, what do you hope readers understand about this community, what it means for the crisis facing our city?

Jordan Salama: I hope that people understand that this is so much more nuanced than just a big indiscriminate mass of people coming here, that even within communities from specific countries, so many different people have so many different kinds of experiences. By understanding this very specific group of people and how they're making a new life for themselves in New York, hopefully, that will lead to more paths of support.

Brigid Bergin: We're going to have to leave it there for now. Jordan Salama wrote the recent cover story of New York Magazine called From Ecuador to the 7 Train about migrants selling candy in our city's subways. Thank you so much for joining me.

Jordan Salama: Thank you again for having me.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.