Bergenline, the Avenue of Immigrants

Bergenline, the avenue of immigrants, where we bring all our hopes and our broken dreams. The first time I was in Bergenline avenue I still did not live in New Jersey. I had planned to meet up with cousin Maria Elena at the insurance agency where she worked and then go out to lunch. While I was walking down the avenue taking the occasional photo of its stained glass windows, a little old man approached me. As soon as he spoke I knew he was Cuban, and he told me, “Do you know that this is the largest commercial avenue in the United States?” The avenue seemed infinite to me, so what the man said could well have been true. I expressed as much astonishment as I could and of course we exchanged places of birth and number of years outside of Cuba. The man counted them in winters, “but luckily, it doesn’t snow here the way it used to.” I was a little surprised by the meeting because María Elena had told me that there were not as many Cubans living in New Jersey as when she arrived with her family in the late 1970s. According to my cousin, in past times most of the businesses on the avenue belonged to Cubans, but they went to Miami looking for the Cuban sun. When we arrived at the restaurant, I searched for information about what the man told me and found a longer avenue, Colfax Avenue in Colorado, more than 50 miles long. And the five-mile Bergenline, the longest in the state, with more than 300 retail stores and restaurants. Perhaps that was what the Cuban gentleman of forty winters meant, but a memory escaped him. A memory of when its Galiano street was larger than the largest in Italy. A memory of when Galiano Street was the largest in Havana, Cuba and the entire world. Five years later the avenue still seems infinite to me and I'm not talking about distances, beginning and end. I don't want to understand it; and if documenting is proving some truth, it would be impossible for me to do so, because in Bergenline truth is relative, and ephemeral like its autumns. Now that it no longer feels foreign to me, I walk through it more safely and the avenue has stopped looking at me like a stranger because it knows that I enjoy getting lost in it and thinking, I've gotten lost in this place before, even before arriving in New Jersey.