GOLDEN GATE – The music plays from the rough speaker, it may only be heard in the sounds of a dozen moms on the corner of Evergreen and Ellendale, whispering in Spanish and Acatechute as they waited to pick up their children from school.
And I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free . . . and I won’t do it with the men who died, who gave me this rightArray. .
Cheryl Schwochert surrendered enthusiastically and turned off the speaker. “It’s my kind of music,” he says with his hoarse Wisconsin country accent.
Schwochert, a former snowbird and now a two-year-old resident of Martin County, looks through his flags: American, Confederate, Don’t Step on Me, Blue Lives Matter, and above his lawn panels: Trump 2020; More police, more peace; Defend yourself, don’t disassemble – to take a look at your network from your seat.
“Our freedoms are at stake right now,” he says, “they’re going to break our Constitution. “
“They” are the other people you read on the Internet when you go home. “They” are anti-traffic protesters and Black Lives Matter, who, he says, are violent 99% of the time.
As she sat down, Schwochert, as she does most of the time, talked about life with her friend, Darline Leavy, her next-door neighbor with a Biden-Harris sign. Contrary to the online world view, life from the porch is pleasant.
“Golden Gate, I know you may have a bad reputation, but I think it’s pretty good,” said Schwochert, 60. “Everyone takes care of each other, and that’s the way it is. “
In a polarized political climate, past interviews at the Golden Gate showed two distinct worlds: one in which other people lived and the other that other people saw on the Internet.
In a network that receives minimal attention from aspirants to all grades of politics, the citizens of Golden Gate have shown that disorders that maximize their daily lives can easily be set aside, leaving them feeling either wasted on formula as total or attracted to nationality. disorders that are largely unrelated to your daily life.
“You need that wonderful America as if they were promising,” said Leavy, a black woman who grew up in Moore Haven and remembers her integration when she was in 3rd grade. “As long as the two sides are fighting, it may not be wonderful. “
She and Schwochert agree on a few points: they like to see NClS together; they miss the days when the world, as they saw it, was not based on race and was as undeniable a fact as an encyclopedia entry; and that their neighbors, almost all Hispanic, are good, decent, hard-working people.
“If this guy here expelled, I’d feel bad, ” said Schwochert.
They communicate about helping Hope’s pantry space in the city. Schwochert says he doesn’t think he can just take a citizenship check if he had to take one, but he thinks it deserves to be mandatory. The road to citizenship, they said, is complicated. and makes life unnecessarily complicated for decent people.
“I work my neighbors for the world, ” said Leavy among Newports puffs. “Undocumented, documented, they paint hard. I still have no respect for them.
Schwochert and Leavy are two of approximately 900 registered voters in Golden Gate, the culturally immigrant enclave south of Stuart and north of Port Salerno.
Its census area, which the Yacht
Port Salerno Elementary School, the school zoned for the largest number of children in Golden Gate, was nearly 80% Hispanic and 100% thought to be economically disadvantaged in the 2019-2020 school year, according to the Department of Education. from Florida. It typically serves about 1,800 homes in the 34997 zip code, but that’s a 50% increase from the pandemic, according to Director Rob Raneri.
One in five adults under the age of 65 does not have fitness insurance, according to the U. S. Census. Golden Gate experienced one of the worst COVID-19 epidemics on the Treasury Coast. Its zip code, which includes nearby Port Salerno, reported the highest number of coronavirus cases on the Treasury Coast, about 1,400, just one densely populated component of Port St. Lucia.
The Golden Gate does not have its own polling station, it has its own network center and a network redevelopment agency. Among Golden Gate voters, most are registered Democrats and just over a quarter are Republicans, according to the election office supervisor.
Although it is an enigma for the politics and economy of one of South Florida’s redest counties, it is a network well known to locals. Strolling through the Taco truck on Dixie Highway, and seeing Mercedes after BMW after Tesla stopped for one of the most productive. tacos in the county.
The big red truck, an unofficial landmark at the Golden Gate, is covered in corporations with Trump accessories. A sign in an empty parking lot for the nearby hairdresser warns: “Not for Taco Truck customers. Private property. ” A navigation company and trinket on the other side of the truck carries a sign that says “Releer to Trump. “Look at the company, just under a hat with “Mexico” sewn in there’s a sign that says, “If you can’t respect our anthems and the American flag, get out of the country. “
While other people ordered tacos for $2. 50 a piece and burritos for $8 to $10 the comfortable drink, locals drove into an empty lot next to the church, Stuart’s Pentecostal Church of God through its pastor, distributed boxes of milk, butter, vegetables and chicken. You have a weekly occasion since the pandemic devastated the network this summer.
They load two hundred boxes into a U-Haul truck that they rent for $100 to $200, then pass by and eat, and many return for a prayer service every night.
“The Golden Gate has suffered a lot,” said Miriam Rodriguez. He continued to lift food boxes from the truck and into people’s cars, as he does every Thursday. “This year has been horrible, but thank God God it’s good. “
Rodriguez, unlike her husband, plans to vote for Joe Biden: “She worked with Obama, who is a wonderful president. “For Rodriguez, who came here three decades ago from Honduras, his main disorders were immigration reform, health care and COVID-19. She knew three families who were very sick with the virus and a pastor in Orlando who had died of it.
Her husband, who became a citizen in 2001 and a registered voter in 2004, supports President Trump with one problem: abortion; doesn’t trust a Democrat to be able to carry out immigration reform.
Elmer Tacam, who came to the United States from Guatemala in 1999, said none of the candidates had an intelligent immigration plan. Like other members of the community, you need to see a clear but easy path to citizenship, a viable path to hardship workers.
He is firmly convinced of the way the president handled COVID-19. Both parents contracted the virus but got no remedy because they don’t have health insurance.
“We thought we were going to lose them,” Tacam said in Spanish as her pastor translated.
Across the Golden Gate, there are stories about how COVID-19 has affected others. Diana Luviano, 23, one of Schwochert’s neighbors, said she knew several others with coronavirus.
The immigration factor, however, is paramount here.
During that presidency, he recalled moments when a circle of family friends walked away from Walmart due to known ice raids around the store. Things have been more complicated in the last four years.
“It’s a predominantly Hispanic community. Martin County is more commonly conservative,” said Luviano, a Democrat. “Many of us who can vote to pass and vote. “
She said she had never had any disorder with her neighbors, but the large number of Trump symptoms in the backyard made her think twice. She was surprised to be informed that her neighbor cared a lot about her and her family.
“I would have the idea otherwise, ” said Luviano.
Schwochert and Leavy hope that their candidate can help bring more peace to the country, but this peace can be subjective, as they see the global through other sets of facts, so they only seek to enjoy the friendship of others.
“After the election, what are we going to do?” Leavy asked. “Do you hate others?”
For some like Luviano and Tacam, they are highly unlikely to avoid politics, but unless they are invited, they rarely talk about politics, as campaigns rarely come to the city to woo them, leaving them out of the problems that outline their lives.
Instead, you can see the state of affairs in the park in the middle of this community. One recent night, the teens played volleyball, listening to Spanish music superstar Bad Bunny; the young people played soccer until nightfall; and the parents, dropping to the ground, on the side of the parking lot, took their children to the playground for some relief.
Three weeks before an election that some call the ultimate vitality of our lives, and just another night at the Golden Gate.
Joshua Solomon is a Treasure Coast political journalist. You can call 772-692-8935 or joshua. solomon@tcpalm. com.
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