Mom, a Bloomfield pioneer

A conversation with a friend about Milbank Park and the southern part of Bloomfield, New Jersey, recently brought back some fond memories of my mom, whose birthday it is today.

When I was in sixth grade, my mom and her new husband and three children, one of whom was just two months old, moved from our apartment in the Amsterdam Houses neighborhood of New York City to a two-family house in the southern part of Bloomfield, "the country" as I inaccurately described it to my Manhattan classmates.  Leaving our friends and familiar environment was challenging for my older brother and me, but was even more difficult for my mother.

After over a dozen years of living in in New York, where she was able to walk to Spanish grocery stores, ride a bus or subway to visit her mother who lived just a few miles uptown, go to Spanish-language theaters and interact regularly with Cubans, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics, my mom found herself in a completely different  environment.  While her husband worked a few miles away in Newark and her two oldest children attended schools in Bloomfield, my mom stayed home during the day with her infant son, missing her mother--frequent toll calls were beyond our economic means--and many of the things she took for granted in New York.

The neighborhood in southern Bloomfield's Carteret School district was predominantly Italian-American, and there were no Spanish grocery stores or other evidence of Hispanic culture to be found within walking distance for my mother, who didn't drive at the time although she was already bilingual.

One day in 1968, anxious to step out of the house, my mother placed her youngest son in a baby carriage and walked to Milbank Park, which had a small playground.  While there, to her surprise and delight, she heard a woman speaking Spanish with two young children. My mom approached the woman, and a friendship that lasted the remaining 44 years of my mother's life was born.

It turned out my mom's new friend, Herminia, was a Venezuelan who lived with her husband and their two children across Bloomfield Avenue from Milbank Park.  Elena and Herminia would meet often at the playground, speaking their native tongue and finding comfort with a kindred spirit far away from their homes, figuratively, near their homes, literally.

A year later, our family moved to a house off of Broughton Avenue in Bloomfield. Lo and behold, a Spanish family moved in across the street shortly afterwards, and my mother had yet more Spanish-speaking friends.

By the time I was a college freshman, there were just enough Hispanics in Bloomfield for the public library to host a Latin heritage event. My mom proudly brought a pot of arroz con pollo (yellow rice and chicken, a staple in Cuba) to the affair, and enjoyed speaking Spanish to some of the dozen or so other people there.

Times have changed.  According to the 2010 census, a quarter of Bloomfield's approximately 47,000 inhabitants are Hispanic. Many of them live in the southern part of town, in the area between Grove Street and the Newark border in which Milbank Park is located. A current town councilman is named Joseph Lopez, my surname before moving to Bloomfield and taking on my stepfather's last name.

I imagine Spanish is often heard in Milbank Park these days.  As I think of my mom on her birthday, I can almost hear her there excitedly speaking her native language, a pioneer of sorts in her new Bloomfield neighborhood.

Photo by Billy Mathias, a friend who inspired this writeup.