With Little to Spare

QUEENS, October 14 — Fifteen years ago, Hugo Calle came to America from Ecuador in search of the American dream. He left his mother, father, sister and brothers behind in the hope of earning enough money to support them. When he came to New York, he got a job in a salon and jewelry store on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, and worked his way up to the managerial post he holds today.

Calle was living the dream because he could send $500 a month back to Ecuador to help his family. Today, he sends less. The dream is slowly turning into a nightmare.

Signs of the Wall Street collapse are already being felt among the working-class immigrant population in Jackson Heights. They are wiring less money to their home countries because of the ripple effect of the credit crunch that is resulting in job loss down the economic line.

“Now we don’t have the dream, we have a headache,” said Calle, inside his office at Cosmelli Corp. “Seven years ago we used to make much more money,”

Before the economic downturn, Calle said on a “good day” he would make $4,000. Now, a good day means $1,500 — a more than 60 percent decline in profit for the company.

“Roughly, we send $200 to $300 a month now,” he said of the money he wires to Ecuador. “I used to send more. I have two kids now, but I have to support my family back home. That’s the way we come to know before I came to America.”

Calle is worried about his store’s rent that is 55 percent more today than it was two years ago.

“The rent came this month, and we can’t pay it,” he said. “We have to tell the owner to bear with us. We hope it will get better.”

Alex Vidal has been living in New York for six months, working as a janitor. From Mexico, he first came to California, where he worked in a Chinese restaurant. He used to make $120 to $160 a day and sometimes $1,000 a week at the restaurant. Now he makes $68 a day as a janitor in Jackson Heights, and $340 a week if he works a 40-hour work week.

At the end of every month he sends $300 back home to Mexico to assist his wife and three children; two of them are in college there. He used to send that sum every month. Now it is every two or three months. He said he always wanted to come to New York and thought it would have been better than California.

“My pay hardly covers my basic needs,” Vidal said. “I came here to look for more money. It was better in California.”

For Gloria Cavaliere, losing a day from her regular 40-hour work week not only means a huge cut in her family expenditure, but puts a limit on the amount of assistance she can give to distant relatives. Cavaliere, who came from Colombia, said she was surprised to have her workweek cut to 32 hours. She works at LaGuardia Airport in a store and was coming from Western Union with her grandmother, sister and niece.

“My job gets affected, and so they get less,” Cavaliere said of her family. “They [the managers] took one day from everybody.

“I have children and grandchildren. We are really suffering. I have a brother there who really needs the help.”

Each time the Dow drops, Catalino de Jesus, a 45-year-old contractor from Mexico said he gets nervous.

He repairs and shines shoes for many people on Wall Street.

“I have two people who work with me, and I have to pay them. One of them told me, ‘I don’t want to get laid off,’ and I know he has his expenses. And I don’t want to say ‘take this day off and come back that day,” he said.

To cut grocery expenses, de Jesus uses the small plot of land under his window to grow peppers and tomatoes.

“You can’t imagine how much it helps,” he said, adding that because he has no children it is a little easier for him to make ends meet.

The immigrants’ main method of sending money abroad is through Western Union. Two hundred million customers worldwide use Western Union services, with Mexico, India, China and the Philippines at the top of the market for remittances.

A press release from the institution about their financial education and service program noted that:

“Western Union’s effort is targeted at the estimated 200 million people who live and work outside their countries of origin, equipping them and the communities they leave behind with the skills, knowledge and resources essential to breaking the cycle of poverty.”

Western Union refused to offer information on whether they have seen a decrease in transfers this year.

“Right now we are in a quiet period,” said Daniel Diaz, vice president of corporate communications at Western Union Company Media.

According to Diaz, the public company is restricted from giving any financial information to the public before they present their financial earnings to Wall Street on Oct. 22.