Celebrating Immigrant Heritage Week
On April 17, 1907, the City of New York recorded its largest-ever immigrant arrivals on Ellis Island. In honor of the significance of this moment, since 2004 the City has set aside a week in April to commemorate Immigrant Heritage Week, celebrating the contributions immigrant New Yorkers like NYCHA employee Adetoun Adeyemo and NYCHA resident Maximina Duran make to the city.
Originally from the Dominican Republic, Ms. Duran has lived in New York since 1959. She moved here with her employer at the time, the Consul General of the Dominican Republic. But in 1961, when the Consul General was recalled to the Dominican Republic after the assassination of that country’s president, Ms. Duran decided to stay on in New York.
“I went to the immigration office [to get permission to stay], but they said I could not stay because I had a diplomatic passport,” Ms. Duran recalled. “But I told them that I didn’t want to go back to my country. So, they gave me a visa to stay in the U.S. for about three to five years, and during that time I applied for and got my Green Card.”
After leaving the employment of the Consul General, Ms. Duran moved from the Park Avenue residence where she worked to Flushing, Queens, and found herself living in the neighborhood where NYCHA’s Latimer Gardens is now situated.
“There were private houses in the area when I moved in, but the government bought all the houses to make way for public housing,” said Ms. Duran. “They wrote down the names of everyone who lived in a house in the designated area, and when the public housing was completed, they called us back and each of us was given an apartment.”
Ms. Duran moved into her Latimer Gardens apartment on September 8, 1970. Over the years, her apartment has been home to not only her two daughters but to other members of her family who emigrated to New York from the Dominican Republic. The former factory worker also helped raise some of her grandchildren in her apartment.
In 2009, Adetoun Adeyemo arrived in New York to visit her mother, who had been living in the city since Adetoun was 4 years old. A year later, Ms. Adeyemo relocated permanently from Nigeria to New York.
“Once I moved back here, I started schooling and working at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC),” said Ms. Adeyemo. After obtaining her associate degree at BMCC, she went to York College to study for a bachelor’s degree in human resources while still working at BMCC. In 2018, she left her job at BMCC.
“There comes a time once you finish your bachelor’s and you kind of wonder how to move forward,” said Ms. Adeyemo. “I didn’t really do internships when I was in college because I had two businesses, and also had a job.”
Within four months of leaving BMCC, Ms. Adeyemo got a call for an interview at NYCHA. “It was for a temp position,” she recalled, “but I was like, yeah, I’ll take it. I did the interview and before I even got downstairs, they called me back and told me that I got the job.”
Ms. Adeyemo’s NYCHA career started in April 2019 as a Field Technician training people on how to inspect mold in apartments. She soon moved on to become a Field Supervisor in charge of scheduling other members of her former team. In April 2020, she became a permanent NYCHA employee, working as a Community Coordinator in the Office of Mold Assessment and Remediation (OMAR). She was later promoted to Associate Project Manager, and in 2022 she was again promoted to her current title – Project Manager.
“It’s been an amazing ride,” said Ms. Adeyemo. “It’s been amazing to see how from when the Baez consent decree happened in 2018 till now, we’ve done so much work just helping residents sort out issues of mold, getting down to the root causes of mold, and finding effective remediation methods.”
As a Project Manager in the Healthy Homes Unit, Ms. Adeyemo’s job includes analyzing data from the field and providing solutions such as updating the mold standard procedure, rolling out the “Maintenance Worker Performing Mold Inspection” initiative, and finding better ways to remedy mold. She also works on implementing mold root cause training for over a thousand maintenance supervisory staff.
Ms. Duran, one of Latimer Gardens’ longest residents, said she feels “content, grounded, and secure” in her apartment of 53 years. “I’ve been paying my rent without issues since I moved here, and I’m happy that I still have my apartment,” she added.
As a long-time resident of Latimer Gardens, Ms. Duran has seen her neighborhood, and Latimer Gardens, change. Despite the changes happening around her, her apartment hasn’t changed much.
Ms. Adeyemo, on the other hand, has seen the “new NYCHA, which is different from the NYCHA that I knew before I even joined. And getting this job has helped me feel a bit settled. I feel like, yes, I can do things that I thought I could not do before, and it has opened doors of opportunity for me thanks to amazing supervisors here at NYCHA.”
