The New Yorker:

In New York City, a shadow economy helps new arrivals find a place to sleep. Sometimes it’s just a bed and a curtain.

By Jordan Salama

In my neighborhood, everyone knows the corners where migrants wait for work. I live in Jackson Heights, Queens, where you can’t so much as step out the door without hearing a language other than English. Newcomers arrive in waves and settle like layers of sediment. On my block, there’s a contingent of elderly Polish ladies who have been living in their century-old co-ops for decades. A few blocks over in one direction is Calle Colombia, the official nickname for a corner of Eighty-second Street since 2009; countless times, I’ve walked past a street vender guarding tall stalks of sugarcane that she feeds through a machine to make juice. A few blocks over the other way, Bangladeshi men, their beards dyed orange, hawk prayer rugs and other religious goods from overturned milk crates on the sidewalk.

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.

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