This music has become a very peculiar sound and recognized by the residents of Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park. A sound that has not been missing for a single day for more than 20 years, even in the midst of the pandemic.
“I go out to sing, to brighten up the street. Sometimes those who like the song tell me, ‘how good the song is’, ‘have a soda’. Go ahead,” said Santiago López.
López, better known as el charro, a Mexican migrant who loves this neighborhood too much even though he doesn’t live here. In fact, he doesn’t even have a home. Its objective, to cheer up the neighbors, especially the little ones.
“I look like measles, I just do it with children.”
But this requires a great sacrifice, traveling every day at 6 in the morning from lower Manhattan, where Santiago lives in a temporary shelter.
Santiago knows that all this is in danger because he is aware that he is losing his sight.
“The shadows no’mas, I just see the shadows. That’s why I tell him that my brother tells me, ‘how do you see it? ‘Black, I tell him.’
López.
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Santiago is the face of one of the more than 1,400 elderly people who live in shelters in the city, a figure that could triple in the coming years and who currently depend on the hotels hired for the homeless
“He is my brother, the oldest, nothing more than he is white. He is white and I am black.”
Santiago has no family in this city, but from time to time he receives a call from one of his 14 siblings who live in Mexico.
But he knows that his real family lives in Brooklyn, that’s why every day he takes the risk and this long subway trip to get to these streets, where in each neighbor he meets his brothers and his family.
“Because if there is for me, there is for him.”
-But if today he earned little?
“Well, that’s why, but little by little we all share ourselves.”
Because Santiago knows that these people care about him and they know how to value the effort he makes every day for this neighborhood.
“He is always happy here with his accordion in the fifth, with courage, as if giving us an example of life,” said Nohemi Garfias, a neighbor.
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