Guest Spot: At home on the North Fork
On a recent Saturday morning, I went to see Don Miguel on his two-acre Southold farm. We chatted about the problems he has had with an insect that laid waste to a row of beans and I admired the gleaming green chiles that will bear through September. This is only the first year of the North Fork Farmworkers Collective, which he created with two fellow Salvadorans, but they have big plans for 2025 and beyond. Perhaps they will have a CSA — starting small, with monthly deliveries to their friends in the local Hispanic community.
Anticipating house guests, I moved on to North Fork Flower Farm, where Emerita, the bright-eyed, Salvadoran farm manager, assembled a gorgeous bouquet of amaranth, strawflower and dahlia — several cuts above the plebeian daisies or zinnias that I might have provided from my backyard. As we spoke, we heard the hammer of her husband, a man-of-all-trades, who is building the farm’s permanent home. That building, with its nearby hoop houses, will become an instant landmark when it opens next year.
As I headed home, I considered the many possibilities for introducing my guests to the charms of Greenport, where I have lived for 16 years. It might be dinner at Casa Amigos, where drinking Elias’ superior margaritas would convince us that he was bringing us part of his Mexican heritage — even if we know that the cocktail’s true origin story is a mystery. And we might drop in at one of the two village shops owned by the Acero family. Perhaps for Sunday brunch we would have crêpes in Gustavo Acero’s Main Street café or content ourselves with alomojabanas, the Colombian cheese pastry that cannot be found elsewhere on the North Fork. Later, as my guests get ready to brave the Sunday night traffic home, they may enjoy a slice for the road at the pizzeria where the Guatemalan chefs toss the dough in the air — as though they learned it in Naples. Listening to one presidential candidate’s cry for mass deportation, you may remember my Saturday afternoon and the people who enriched it. You will also have your own memories — of the Guatemalan woman who cared for your aunt in her last years, the landscaper who mowed and pruned and weeded in the hot sun and the house cleaner who helped you deal with the room your teenager left behind when he went to college.
Our economy, our social life, our distinctive cultural appeal in 2024 — they all rely on the arrival, starting in the early 1990s from Mexico and Central America, of the people I met on that bright summer day. They now make up more than a quarter of the population in some of our census districts. Especially during Hispanic Heritage Month, it’s time to acknowledge and celebrate their contributions. We have had a mass immigration in recent decades — and we have gained immeasurably from it.
Diana Gordon lives in Greenport. She is the author of ‘Village of Immigrants,’ published in 2018.
