In recent years, the newest residents have come mostly from Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. Such migrants line up each day at dawn at paradas—“stops”—hoping to get picked up for day jobs, like tiling, roofing, or painting. At least among Spanish speakers, paradas across New York are known by names that describe either their location or their purpose, such as “La de Limpieza” (“the Housecleaning One”) or “Home Depot.” How these spring up is less complicated than one might think—people learn to do whatever work is immediately available in the area. The main housecleaning parada is in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where women regularly find jobs in the homes of Hasidic Jews. In the leafy suburbs, there are more landscapers. In Flushing, close to a blocks-long stretch of Chinese-run kitchen-and-bathroom showrooms, there’s a street corner where the waiting Chinese men know how to install kitchens and bathrooms. These word-of-mouth spots exist all over the city and in the surrounding suburbs, but nowhere are they more crowded than in Queens. The most popular construction parada near my apartment is technically in Woodside: “La 69” is a section of Sixty-ninth Street between Roosevelt Avenue and Broadway. For years, it was normal to see a few dozen men milling around there, but since 2022 hundreds of workers have been lining up in the mornings, including more women than ever. In the winter, nonprofits and church groups hand out jackets and hot breakfasts, and during the warmer months, at one end of La 69, some people sleep in a tiny plaza called Pigeon Paradise. Earlier this year, after the Trump Administration took power and began what it called the “largest deportation effort in U.S. history,” the numbers lessened for a while—people are terrified of ICE. A regular told me that, at least twice, an unmarked car pulled up to the parada, sending everyone running. But attendance at the parada has since returned to pre-Trump levels, despite the obvious risks. People have to work. New York: A Centenary Issue Subscribers get full access. Read the issue » At La 69, there is hardly a system, but people are known to wait in certain areas according to their nationality: Mexicans and Guatemalans near the plaza, Ecuadorians and Colombians closer to Roosevelt Avenue. This could be because contractors prefer workers who hail from their home countries. One day last summer, a car pulled up to La 69. It was 10 a.m., which is around the time when people at the parada who haven’t been picked up yet think about going home. A crowd of Central Americans who were still waiting by Pigeon Paradise sized up the car as it slowed to a stop. When they realized that this meant a potential job, they swarmed. More than twenty men tapped on the windshield and called out day rates in Spanish: “Hundred fifty!” “Hundred forty!” “Hundred twenty!” One man agreed on a rate and jumped in. “Please,” the other men pleaded, as they do every day. “Just take one more.” “Don’t worry too much about that,” the day worker said, in Spanish, as he took his seat and cracked open a can of Coke. He went by Pato, and he was twenty-seven. “I’ve been here eight years, but it’s never been as bad as this,” he said. There were just too many migrants, Pato said, and not enough jobs. Guys would work for anything nowadays. We went to an apartment building nearby, where Pato spent several hours unscrewing shelves, pulling down old panelling, and organizing piles of debris. During a lunch break, Pato called his family back home—his parents still lived where he’d grown up, in the mountainous region of Chimaltenango, Guatemala. He spoke with them in Kaqchikel, his first language. Later, Pato told me that he was building a home there with the money he’d earned here. “Not even renovating—from scratch,” he said. Construction was coming along, and he hoped that in two or three years it might be ready, and that he could go back to finally start a family. “I’ll have my little house and my little land,” he said. “Now that’s what you call a dream. Here, there’s no life, only work.” He shook his head. “Work every day for eight years.” As Pato kept on through the afternoon, he told me that he lived in a shared house in Corona, some forty blocks from La 69, with other migrants from Guatemala, Mexico, and Ecuador. He considered himself lucky: you can never be entirely sure about living with anyone besides your own family, he said, but he got along fairly well with the other tenants. I’d heard about migrant houses like the one Pato described. Jackson Heights, Corona, and Elmhurst are full of them—you can identify them, in many cases, from the black garbage bags of personal belongings that have been stuffed onto metal balconies, for lack of interior space. These dwellings range from crowded but legitimate sublets to dangerous and unlawful boarding houses. At worst, they resemble modern-day tenements: entire families crammed into single bedrooms, with any common spaces subdivided by curtains or sheets or partition walls to allow for as many additional beds as possible. They are often dark, cramped, and poorly ventilated, with barely any privacy. When the pandemic began, it quickly became clear which New York neighborhoods suffered the most from overcrowding, because of their overwhelmingly high rates of infection. (Central Queens became known as the “epicenter of the epicenter.”) In 2021, during Hurricane Ida, ten people living in unregulated basement apartments drowned in floodwaters. Last month, three men died when a fire broke out in an overcrowded home in Jamaica Estates where immigrant tenants lived; according to reports, the landlord lived in the back of the house and had long been renting out beds in small makeshift rooms divided by partition walls. Migrants in New York also whisper about an even cheaper arrangement: renting beds by the hour, alternating with others on a schedule. This is sometimes known in Spanish as a cama caliente, because the bed is still warm when a night-shift worker comes home in the morning to sleep. The first floor had four bedrooms, each occupied by a young couple paying eight hundred to eleven hundred dollars a month; one of the couples shared their room with their five-year-old daughter, the only child in the house, and her uncle. In the narrow hallway, brown and red shower curtains cordoned off a fifth “room” that had twin beds (about seven hundred dollars each) placed so close together that they were almost touching; two single men slept there. Everyone shared a tiny bathroom, where a handwritten sign over the toilet read, in Spanish, “Gentlemen, aim well into the bowl. Thank you.” A small kitchen was the sole common area. On one side, there were stained-wood cabinets, sticky from years of grease; along the other wall stretched a peeling bar counter with three chairs. There wasn’t enough space in the fridge and the cabinets for a dozen people’s food, so a lot of it stayed out in the open. On the bar counter sat three giant plastic tubs of rice. In some cupboards, unrefrigerated leftovers, such as grilled fish or cooked rice speckled with peas and carrots, were kept in covered pots and pans. Large bags of sugar sat unsealed on the tile floor, where cockroaches scurried around day and night. On a freezing afternoon in mid-February, the entire house reeked of nail-polish remover. I entered the kitchen to find one of the residents, Lilia, getting a manicure. Supplies were strewn across the counter: brushes, cotton balls, bottles of acetone, various colors of polish. Two of Lilia’s housemates, Elisa and Mercy, were doing the nail painting—one woman on each hand. “We didn’t find work at the parada today, so we’re doing this,” Mercy told me, in Spanish, without taking her eyes off of the smooth coat of violet polish she was applying. “We have to pass the time somehow.” “How fun,” I said, tentatively. Lilia, a twenty-six-year-old, had long black hair and wore a T-shirt printed with the word “Hatteras”—the North Carolina beach town. (She’d never been there.) She had an air of confidence that set her apart from the other housemates. She slipped more English words into her Spanish sentences, even if incorrectly, and she’d been in the country for a year or two longer than most of the others. I was impressed that she had enlisted the two women to work feverishly on her nails. For a moment, I wondered if Lilia might actually be paying them. Then I realized that, whenever Elisa or Mercy finished a coat, they immediately scrubbed off the polish with acetone and started again. This was a training session. “I work in a spa, and the girls are hoping to get jobs there this summer,” Lilia explained. “I’m teaching them.” This past winter, the housemates seldom went out. Day jobs were scarce, and it was too cold for volleyball and soccer, their favorite pastimes. Perhaps more important, the Trump Administration had them terrified. Nobody had any kind of legal status, and although none of them personally knew anyone who had been deported, rumors of mass arrests were enough to restrict their behavior. Throughout January and February, the neighborhood’s streets were hushed, the Latin American restaurants emptier. Even before Trump’s Inauguration, a city campaign named Operation Restore Roosevelt had forced the removal of many unlicensed street venders from the area, compounding the eerie quiet. “We just stay at home,” Matías told me. They passed the time in their bedrooms, where they ate most of their meals and scrolled TikTok or watched TV. A bilingual sign hanging in the front entrance read “NOTICE: Door must remain locked at all times.” Even Yuri, Mercy’s five-year-old, played mainly inside now, running in and out of the room that she shared with her parents and her uncle. On the day of the nail-painting marathon, Elisa and Mercy kept at it until well after dark, becoming dizzy from the pungent chemical odor that hung in the stale kitchen air. When they finally stopped, Lilia’s cuticles were stained black. Some signs, taped over one another, specify if rooms are exclusively for women or couples, and if children are allowed. In recent years, real-estate agents and landlords have begun posting versions of these signs on Facebook groups and TikTok accounts, accompanied by photographs of bare mattresses in empty rooms. Migrants try to avoid real-estate agents—who typically charge three times one month’s rent for the first payment—and landlords who require documentation, especially income verification. (It’s illegal in New York City for landlords to require proof of immigration status when selecting tenants.) Among migrants who post online in search of housing, one of the most common phrases is “No Real State.” The best way to find housing, everyone said, is to hunt with people you already know. Plenty of migrants have no choice but to depend on the ads. I recently came across a Facebook page called “Cuartos en renta Queens New York.” An affiliated website advertised apartments and single rooms for sublet in Queens. I messaged a number on WhatsApp and soon began texting with a broker named Renata, who wrote to me in Spanish, in all caps, and immediately began trying to persuade me to rent a room in a shared apartment in Woodside, two blocks from the 7 train. “THEY ARE ASKING WHAT YOU DO FOR WORK AND WHAT COUNTRY YOU ARE FROM,” Renata texted. Just like some of the contractors hiring day workers, people frequently prefer to live with housemates from their own countries. Migrant communities in Queens have their own prejudices and stereotypes about one another. I’ve learned that many Ecuadorians think that Mexicans are drunks and Venezuelans are criminals; Mexicans and Guatemalans, in turn, often think of Ecuadorians as vagrants. In the days and weeks that followed, Renata sent me photographs of small but neat-looking bedrooms across central Queens—mainly in Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, and Woodside. If I didn’t respond instantly, she called and texted multiple times. “YOU DON’T ANSWER,” she wrote. Finally, one night, we spoke on the phone. Renata told me that, for her clients, the ideal roommate spends most of his time out of the house and doesn’t cook much. Derechos a la cocina—rights to the kitchen—are a negotiated “amenity” in a shared house. You pay lower rent if you eat all your meals elsewhere. In New York, one of the most expensive rental markets in the U.S., the reasons for sharing a space with so many others are almost always financial. Non-immigrants in New York may not understand how widespread and varied these arrangements are, especially in the outer boroughs. I met a Peruvian couple who were renting out their second bedroom, originally meant for their baby, to a single man. I visited a Mexican family in their Corona apartment, where a young relative who was new to the city slept on the couch. Janeth, an Ecuadorian woman living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, told me that ten people were staying in her three-bedroom apartment. The landlord had recently raised the rent because of the number of tenants, Janeth told me, but otherwise didn’t bother them. (A landlord who allows overcrowding can be subject to fines, but the penalties per violation are relatively low.) Plenty of these roommate arrangements are cordial. Everyone living at Janeth’s place ate dinner together at night. “There’s one gentleman from El Salvador living with us, and he’s gotten used to Ecuadorian food,” she said, adding that she sometimes lets fresh arrivals sleep in the living room for free. Nevertheless, living in such tight quarters with so many other people can create severe tensions, particularly when everyone’s financial condition is precarious. Emperatriz Carpio, who manages the domestic-violence program at Voces Latinas, a nonprofit that serves migrants in the Jackson Heights area, told me that some of her most complicated cases arise in shared living spaces where victims lack the financial stability to move out. “I had one client who had been experiencing emotional and psychological abuse, and she still lived in the same house with her ex and his new partner,” Carpio said. “I believe the house had three rooms. She was in one room with her two kids, and the ex and his new partner were in another room.” Eventually, the new partner also brought her family into the third room. The client “mostly just stayed in her own room.” Alcohol abuse, Carpio added, was another common problem. I thought of Pato, the Guatemalan man I’d met at La 69. After that work was done, he offered to return the next day with a companion to help haul out debris that he’d arranged in dusty heaps. The following afternoon, Pato showed up with one of his housemates, María, a short Ecuadorian woman who wore leggings and a long-sleeved shirt. “Don’t worry, she’s strong,” Pato grinned, and María nodded. “Works harder than any man I’ve seen. She’s the strongest woman in Ecuador!” For the next two hours, they trudged up and down three flights of stairs, lugging hundreds of pounds of trash. María lifted the heaviest loads, navigating the stairs in determined silence. Later, on the drive back from the dump, the strongest woman in Ecuador spoke about the three children she’d left behind, more than a year earlier, in a coastal community overrun by drug cartels. “I’m doing this for them,” María said. Pato opened his backpack and began drinking from a tall can in a brown paper bag. I smelled beer. He spoke longingly about Guatemala and the home he was building there. I eventually learned that, however lucky Pato felt about his housing situation in Corona, his housemates saw things differently. Not long after the dump run, his phone number went out of service, and María told me that she and the other tenants had kicked Pato out because he was drinking too much. When I finally tracked him down, six months later, he told me only that he’d had “personal problems” and was now living in another shared house in Elmhurst. I tried on several occasions to meet him again, but he always cancelled. He sometimes called me randomly; twice, he rang in the middle of the night. One morning at ten, I answered, and Pato’s speech was so slurred that I could hardly understand him. From public records, I learned that the landlord of one crowded Corona migrant house—some of whose renters I’ve known for a while—owned at least four other properties across Queens and the Bronx. I couldn’t reach him directly, but one of his tenants told me that he was kind. He went by Jack, but she referred to him as El Chino. “El Chino treats us well,” she told me. “When he comes to the house, he asks us what’s bad, what’s not bad, and fixes things. At Christmas, he gives a toy to each of the kids.” Jack spoke only Chinese and English, she said, so her eldest daughter, who is eleven, translated his instructions—“how to put the bottles where the bottles go, the plastic where the plastic goes, the cardboard where it’s cardboard, the food where it’s food.” The tenant added that her daughter has a protocol for translating. “Mami, first I’ll listen, and then I’ll talk,” the girl likes to say. Small landlords often know about overcrowding or other irregularities in their units, but they tend to ignore such matters as long as the rent is paid on time. Sometimes they just want to avoid conflict. Roy Ho, the president of the Property Owners Association of Greater New York, an organization that he founded, in 2020, to support Chinese small landlords, told me, “Landlords are aware that this problem exists. They trade stories. Their tenants might come in and say, ‘I’m renting for me, my wife, and my kid.’ Then, two months later, they go to fix the water or the plumbing and realize it’s so many more people.” Attempting to resolve the issue in court is a long, costly process that can end up being more of a financial risk than accommodating such renters. “They are reluctant to address the problem, even if they want to,” Ho said. Hongyao Chen, a forty-one-year-old hospital worker based in Bayside, Queens, manages a two-family rental property in Maspeth for his elderly parents. He told me, “We were tenants ourselves in the beginning.” After the family of four moved to New York City from Fujian, China, in 2001, they shared a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown for nearly seven years. “We were never late paying rent,” he said. “My parents worked super hard, and they encouraged us to finish school. Luckily, my sister and I were able to go to college.” In 2008, during the housing bubble, Chen’s parents bought the home in Maspeth for nine hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars. To afford the mortgage, they rented out the second unit to the employees of a company based in Poland. Nine years later, they moved into a five-bedroom home in Bayside, along with Hongyao, his wife, and his children, and started renting out the entire Maspeth property to supplement their monthly Social Security income of about eight hundred dollars. Chen told me that he and other small landlords he knew used to be quite content to accept tenants on the margins of the economy. “Some people maybe had a cash job, or didn’t have a stable job, but we had no problem renting to them,” he said. Chen also acknowledged that it was a common practice to rent out basement apartments at lower rates, mainly to undocumented tenants. Small landlords often consider undocumented renters to be among the most reliable tenants—because they don’t want to attract any legal trouble. “I know landlords who prefer undocumented tenants, for this reason,” Ho said. “The renters might not have a pay stub, but you know they will pay on time.” For Chen’s family, everything changed during the pandemic. In New York State, eviction moratoriums lasted until early 2022, and in 2024 the state passed the Good Cause Eviction Law, which solidified eviction protections for renters. At the time, Chen’s father, who speaks no English, was still in charge of managing the Maspeth property. “He got scammed by a real-estate agent,” Hongyao Chen said. The agent, who he says was unlicensed, presented false proof-of-income documents, saying that a man would occupy a three-bedroom unit with his wife and two children. Nine people ended up living there, and they all stopped paying rent after the first month. “They slept in the living room—everywhere,” Chen said. The utility bills were extremely high. Chen felt that he had no recourse but to contact the police. The tenants eventually left. “My parents are talking about to transfer the ownership to me,” Chen texted me recently. “But I don’t want it. I hate being a landlord. That is more than a full time job and too much problem to be a landlord in nyc now. One day I want to sell it. Life is too short, I want a peaceful life.” (Chen’s sister, who is now married, at one point owned two rental properties of her own, on Staten Island. She has since sold them, he said.) Such stories led Ho, a small landlord himself, to found his group as a way of organizing Chinese landlords in the city. Asian households have the highest rate of homeownership in New York City, partly because in immigrant communities there can be a lack of knowledge about securities such as stocks and bonds; a dearth of legal status can sometimes make utilizing such options difficult. “They may have a nail salon, a restaurant, retail, even a cash business—and a 401(k) is not accessible to them,” Ho told me. “Real estate is one of the only assets that they understand.” Several activist groups in the Asian American community have since embraced the landlords’ cause, as part of organizing campaigns that often include unrelated issues popular with conservatives, such as opposition to affirmative action in college admissions. Ho told me, “The impression that you get is that Chinese landlords have become more vocal than they used to be, and they have become more vocal than other ethnic landlords.” He said that in New York the issue was a major driver of the community’s rightward shift in recent elections. The resentments of immigrant landlords illustrate a broader paradox of current city politics: older immigrant communities, often inherently sympathetic to the challenges faced by new arrivals, are increasingly voting for politicians who espouse broadly anti-immigrant policies. Thomas Yu, the executive director of Asian Americans for Equality, a community-development organization with an office in Jackson Heights, told me, “There is a lot of anger at the city for how they feel like the legislators have left them behind.” For more than twenty years, Yu has been looking to find solutions that work for both landlords and tenants in immigrant neighborhoods. In 2022, his group launched a pilot project providing grants for small landlords to renovate their units, thus allowing them to participate in a federal program in which tenants experiencing homelessness or abuse pay part of their rent with vouchers. (Although federal housing vouchers are generally unavailable to undocumented tenants, a new bill that has been introduced in the legislature in Albany would establish a housing-subsidy program for all renters across New York State, regardless of their immigration status.) Yu found that, especially in the outer boroughs, small landlords were eager to accept the grants. “They needed that economic stability themselves,” he said. “There’s a sort of dogma in this world that all landlords are bad, and all tenants are free from fault. It’s very hard for people to be nuanced about it.” He worries that the pressures on small landlords will have a long-term impact on what he calls New York’s “cultural enclaves”—neighborhoods such as Jackson Heights, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. “It forces a lot of these small owners to cash out. They’re, like, ‘I give up. I cannot sustain this.’ So they sell to bigger and bigger, and fewer and fewer, property owners.” All the immigrant homeowners I spoke with emphasized that they did not want to make things harder for new migrants. But they insisted that the current system is failing, making it more difficult for small landlords to turn a profit and for tenants to find decent, affordable housing. An Iranian American landlord, whose family, seeking asylum during the Iran-Iraq War, brought him to New York as an infant, told me, “People have to do what they can to get by, just like my family did when we came to America.” Today, he manages six rental units in Queens. He lives in the basement of one of his multifamily properties in Astoria, where he has noticed issues of overcrowding in other homes nearby—including one multifamily dwelling that seems to house a phalanx of delivery drivers, who speed around the neighborhood on electric scooters. “I’m not here to pull up the ladder after making it off the lifeboat,” he noted, in an e-mail. “Still, it’s tough to see how this plays out for landlords and neighbors.” They found the East Elmhurst house after a few weeks. They didn’t know to check the Department of Buildings website, where they would have learned that there were no certificates of occupancy registered for the property, and that there had been numerous complaints, filed over the past ten years, alluding to overcrowding and illegal conversions. (One complaint, filed in 2015, reads, “The house is subdivided in many rooms and is renting the rooms like a hotel.”) The place was certainly tight, but the housemates were glad to keep costs down, even if it meant piling up on top of one another. Over time, more family members and friends arrived from Ecuador and occupied the remaining rooms. The two couples had learned some useful lessons in their first apartment together, where the landlord had lived in the same unit and enforced strict rules about kitchen rights and cleaning responsibilities. “It’s not good to live with strangers,” Lilia’s husband, Adolfo, told me. There were small things that they came to like about the new house, such as its proximity to a bus that took them to the parada La 69. Between the house and a neighboring one, there was a light well, and the housemates realized that in the winter they could use it as a second refrigerator, storing cartons of milk on the windowsill. They set house rules; no outside shoes were allowed indoors. Everyone wore black Nike or Adidas slides inside—or, in Mercy’s case, fluffy Teddy-bear slippers. Every day, a housemate was assigned to clean the kitchen and the bathroom and to empty the garbage. They called one another “neighbor,” and soon gave out nicknames. Adolfo, who constantly used sad-face emojis in the house group chat, was Tristito. Eduardo was lean and strong, and he wore tight-fitting shirts that showed off his muscles, so his nickname was Músculo. The house’s eldest resident, a thirty-seven-year-old single man named Efer, liked to play soccer, so he was called Messi. But for the most part the house was uncomfortable. The absence of privacy was maddening, and the tenants were constantly smashing the cockroaches in the kitchen with their slides. “We have to live like this,” Matías told me. “This is the reality of being a migrant.” Everyone had kitchen rights—eleven adults to one four-burner stove—and this meant that they cooked meals in shifts beginning at 3 a.m. One of the residents had heard that New York City tap water was unsafe to drink, so for nearly two years they had needlessly bought cases of plastic water bottles from a market down the street. Frustratingly, the house came unfurnished. On Junction Boulevard, the tenants found the basics—mattresses, bed frames, kitchenware—but the items cost them a relative fortune. They learned to be wary of Facebook Marketplace, where sellers frequently asked for payment up front and then disappeared; they were surprised that things like that happened in America. The tenants began to trust only one another as they established a routine that marked the beginning of their American Dream. We talked a lot about dreams during the days I spent there. Most of the housemates had left everything behind; some had parted with their kids without knowing when, or if, they would see them again. Some wanted to leave the U.S. as soon as they had enough money to take substantial savings back with them. A few were considering staying for good. Mercy, whose daughter barely remembered Ecuador, said, “Ultimately, God will decide.” One day, in the kitchen, the tenants discussed the infamous case of a social-media personality who’d offered to help transport the body of a dead migrant back to Ecuador—and then allegedly ran off with all the money. I told the residents that a business near my apartment offered a similar service: funeral transports to Latin American countries. They looked horrified, and I sensed the years flashing before their eyes. Since they’d come to New York, many of their dreams had begun to feel more abstract, as they focussed on the day-to-day difficulties of surviving. Músculo still had a vision, though: he wanted to become a licensed plumber, so that he could start his own business and work for himself. Some friends had recommended a vocational school in New Jersey. But the tuition—about four thousand dollars—was prohibitive. Mercy, his wife, told me that she was hoping to find an affordable after-school program for Yuri when she enrolled in kindergarten; currently, the couple was paying two hundred dollars a week for day care. Mercy didn’t realize that many public schools in the city provide after-school care for free. All Matías wanted was to get a tax I.D. number, so that he could find a regular job and stop waiting for contractors at the parada every day at dawn. He was trying to figure out how to do the necessary paperwork. Lilia was determined to learn enough English to be able to communicate with her clients at the spa. Indeed, all the housemates had the goal of mastering basic English. Some showed me notebooks that they had filled up at free classes around the city; Lilia told me that she had trekked all the way to Long Island City for her first such class. Inside the notebooks, they had carefully written out Spanish phrases and their English equivalents, translated phonetically so that they could more easily pronounce the words. (“Uan mor taim pliz” for “One more time please”; “Si iu tumorou” for “See you tomorrow.”) But, for the most part, they had found these classes “boring” and far too advanced. They needed to focus on the basics (“I,” “you,” “we”) and the essentials (“room,” “bed,” “job”). The few words that they already knew were entirely trade-related: “roofing,” “plumbing,” “nails.” Sometimes, late at night in the kitchen, when the housemates had returned from work, or from looking for work, and were cooking in shifts—two people at a time using the four burners, reheating rabbit or potato stew—they asked me to hold casual English lessons. They wanted to learn how to ask very specific questions. Matías’s request: “Will you pay now, or later?” Mercy’s: “Why are you discounting more from my paycheck than from hers?” The only person who understood everything I said was Yuri, Mercy’s daughter. But the five-year-old, like so many immigrant children her age, was too shy to speak English in front of her parents. Of the adults, Lilia was the most engaged student. She said that her bosses at the spa spoke mainly Korean but some English—and that she would be grateful for any chance to communicate with them, even if her own English were limited to halting sentences. After a few days of lessons, she coined my house nickname: I became Profe, as in “teacher.” The housemates didn’t know anything about the prior residents. A migrant dwelling doesn’t tend to break up all at once, unless something happens with the landlord—an eviction notice, say, or the sale of a property. More often, people gradually trickle out, their rooms or beds given to new occupants, until the home’s population looks nothing like it did a year or two earlier. A tenant could become financially secure enough to rent on their own, or a job offer could lead them to another city or state. Perhaps, as with Pato, a dispute or a vice churns up enough trouble to warrant a less amicable departure. Now another possibility loomed large: ICE might pick someone up at work, and they’d never be heard from again. Even though the East Elmhurst housemates lived in such intimate quarters, and some of them had been well acquainted back home, they kept a great deal from one another, especially when it came to matters such as money and their plans for the future. Why were some of the housemates unsure about exactly how much the group paid in total rent? (Adolfo collected the money, individually, at the start of each month.) At one point, Matías mentioned to me that he might be moving to another state. Through “some contacts” from La 69, he’d heard about a potential long-term job at a building in Kansas—or maybe it was Minnesota. “It would be for two years, wherever it is,” he told me. When I brought this up in the presence of some of the other housemates, he winced. “I didn’t tell them,” he revealed afterward. The out-of-state opportunity fizzled, but Matías still contemplated leaving and finding a proper room that he could have to himself, instead of paying some seven hundred dollars a month to sleep in a bed inches from another tenant. He began an active search in mid-March, after his roommate, Messi, drank too much one Saturday morning and caused an altercation, breaking the front door of the house before passing out in his bed. A housemate called the police, but the officers didn’t come inside. Messi ended up paying about a thousand dollars to repair the door. As with every dispute in the house, alliances formed over whether to kick Messi out. Some were vocal about wanting to expel him. Mercy, for her part, was upset that the incident had happened while Yuri’s cousin was visiting. The little girls had been scared. To my surprise, Matías was more willing to let Messi try to redeem himself. He noted that he and Messi had both left their wives and kids behind when they came to New York. “I understand that people are lonely. I really get it,” Matías told me. I thought, again, of Pato—the Guatemalan migrant whose own removal had seemingly led him to spiral—and considered how lonely he must have been, too. Living with many others was no antidote to emotional solitude. Things blew over, and Messi stayed. Still, Matías said, the episode had made him intent on improving his own situation. He’d called numbers he’d seen on “For Rent” signs, and was considering some rooms a few blocks away. The only thing stopping him from moving out was that he didn’t want to leave his sister Elisa—the only family member he had nearby. “It’s a very, very difficult decision,” he told me. “I’m thinking about it a lot.” As Matías considered his options, spring nudged Queens back to life, even if many people remained fearful of the intensifying deportation efforts. People have been flocking back to Thirty-fourth Avenue—the longest pedestrian street in the city. Children play in the shade of budding oak trees, and women from Mexico and Ecuador ring handbells and scoop ice cream from red carts. The remaining members of the neighborhood’s old Argentine and Uruguayan communities—who were prominent here before they moved out to the suburbs—share sips of mate on park benches. A group of older Bangladeshi and Nepalese residents gather for tea. In the evenings, an elderly husband and wife from Eastern Europe, who must be in their nineties, are wheeled out by their Caribbean aides to watch people stroll past. I’ve never seen the couple say a word to each other, but sometimes his finger grazes the side of her hand and, staring straight ahead, she smiles. Everything in New York City is touched and shaped by these waves of people, not only those who came earlier but those who continue to arrive now. The idea of “making it” in the new country is inextricably linked to memories of the old country and those who remain there. In Queens, it’s virtually never a mistake to ask someone where they are originally from. People’s eyes will widen—with happiness or with sadness, depending on how long they’ve been away, but always with longing. “Everyone has their own way to cope,” Matías told me in late March, in Corona. “I play volleyball.” He led me to three houses on the same block whose residents had constructed elaborate volleyball courts in their back yards, complete with spectator bleachers, floodlights, and tall mesh fences around the courts’ perimeters. At least one of the homes had been a “volleyball house” for more than twenty years, I learned, and had hosted generations of Ecuadorian and other Latin American migrants who gathered to play or watch anytime the weather was good. The people who lived there worked the courts, renting them out. Elderly Spanish-speaking women grilled chicken and pork off to the side, which they served in abundant portions alongside potatoes and rice; others sold hot and cold beverages and loose cigarettes, or worked as referees. The matches continued into the night, even when gusts of wind left us shivering in our windbreakers. The most competitive courts had dozens of onlookers. There, Matías and I ran into familiar faces: Iván, Hernán, and even Messi also hung out at the volleyball houses. The others, they told us, were still at work. ♦