In Holyoke, a home of her own: One woman’s struggle to build a life in the state’s poorest place - The Boston Globe (2024)

She was ready to move up — quite literally.

Up from Holyoke’s downtown neighborhoods, where the city’s large and growing Latino community has long been concentrated, held in place by poverty and prejudice. Up to higher, greener ground where mill owners who employed new immigrants by the thousands lived back in the day when this was a manufacturing hub.

Her journey, and her family’s, has been a long one, and rarely easy. In its hardships and also its present promise, her story, in many ways, is Holyoke’s story. And she knows it.

“I love Holyoke,” she said. “I am Holyoke.”

The story of the city, in turn, provides a window into what has held back so many people: how rules are written and by whom, where people come from and where they settle, what color their skin is and how that can limit opportunity.

Badillo, 45, spent years getting to this point: enrolling in a program for first-time home buyers in disadvantaged communities to qualify for financial assistance, improving her credit score, and saving her stimulus checks. The stability that had eluded her family for decades, and still eludes many of her Latino neighbors, felt within reach.

Before they left the yellow house that day, Badillo — dressed for her job as a personal care aide in surgical scrubs and Crocs, her long curly hair secured in a head wrap — told the real estate agent she wanted it.

The agent warned her not to fall in love with it. Someone could outbid her.

But Badillo was determined. This was her chance.

‘The further up the hill you go, the better off you are’

The struggle to climb into the middle class is all too common in many of the state’s Latino communities. From Boston to Worcester to Western Massachusetts, Latinos lag far behind non-Hispanic whites in virtually every measure of economic and social well-being, resulting in some of the widest divides in the country.

Progress has been made. Poverty rates among Latinos have fallen in recent years. Education levels, entrepreneurship, and homeownership are rising. In many of the places they call home, Latinos are gaining political power. In Holyoke, Joshua Garcia, whose mother had come from Puerto Rico as a child to have surgery, was elected mayor in 2021, the first Latino to lead the city in its roughly 150-year history.

But the inequities are still vast.

Latinos, primarily from Puerto Rico, account for 53 percent of the 38,000 residents of Holyoke. It’s one of three majority-Hispanic cities in Massachusetts, along with Lawrence and Chelsea. Planned in the mid-19th century to manufacture textiles, and later paper, Holyoke was once home to dozens of factories powered by a series of canals.

White and wealthy residents lived up the hill, while immigrant workers – first Irish, then French Canadian, German, Italian, and Polish – lived near the mills below. With time, and hard work, immigrants would climb from the lower-income neighborhoods of the Flats, South Holyoke, and Downtown, known as the lower wards, to nicer areas such as the Highlands.

“The further up the hill you go, the better off you are economically,” said Michael Moriarty, executive director of the affordable housing nonprofit OneHolyoke Community Development Corp.

Puerto Ricans, the biggest subset of the state’s Latino population, barely got the chance. Many started leaving the US territory in the Caribbean for the mainland in the 1950s and ‘60s as the industrialization of parts of the island — promoted by federal policies — displaced agricultural workers. Employers in Massachusetts recruited them for low-paying jobs in factories and tobacco fields, but those jobs didn’t last, echoing the situation in other fading New England mill towns.

As they arrived, manufacturing continued moving south or overseas, wiping out some 5,800 jobs in Holyoke between 1970 and 2021, according to state data. During that time, the share of residents working in manufacturing plunged from nearly 40 percent to just over 10 percent.

Still, people kept coming from Puerto Rico, many in need of jobs or medical care.

Building a life

The first of Badillo’s family to arrive was her great-uncle, Angel Colon, who came from the tobacco-producing municipality of Comerio, south of San Juan. Colon came to work in the tobacco fields in the Connecticut River Valley in the 1950s and later worked in Holyoke’s paper mills.

Three decades later, Colon’s death made the front page of the Transcript-Telegram after a church refused to allow his body to be buried in a cemetery it said was reserved for French Canadians. Many funeral directors wouldn’t take Puerto Ricans at the time, according to a news account, in part because their ceremonies disrupted “white people who were waking their dead.”

More relatives from Comerio followed, including Badillo’s grandparents and her mother, Virgen, who was 12 when her family arrived. They lived in the Flats, and Virgen said she and other Puerto Rican children were told to stay away from the Highlands: “They used to kick us out.”

Badillo’s father, Nelson, who quit school after sixth grade, came to Holyoke in the early ‘70s. He worked on tobacco farms, and later got a $5-an-hour job packing notebooks at a paper mill. Virgen worked in the same mill for a time. They had twins, Nereida and Carmen, and a younger daughter, Marisol.

Money was tight, and the family moved frequently in search of cheaper rent. After high school, Badillo had a baby and became a certified nursing assistant, then earned her medical billing and coding certificate – the highest level of education anyone in her family had achieved to that point.

But her oldest son had developmental and emotional disabilities, making it difficult to hold down a job and take care of him on her own. Her own disabilities — including fibromyalgia, which causes chronic pain — further limited her earnings.

At one point, Badillo — a tough, caring single mother who once fired off a letter to the school superintendent when her youngest son was bullied — could only afford to feed her kids hot dogs.

A city divided

Badillo was at home when her real estate agent called. I’m sorry, the offer was too low.

She sobbed as she hung up the phone.

Badillo worries constantly about her children — now 24, 19, and 7. She doesn’t want them to grow up in the neighborhoods around downtown, where one of her sons once watched someone shoot heroin in the parking lot behind their apartment.

In addition to her part-time work as a personal care aide, Badillo gets disability payments for her chronic health problems. She receives a state subsidy for adopting her youngest child, who is her oldest son’s cousin and has autism, but has had little financial help from her ex-husband. All told, including making occasional deliveries for Instacart, her income is roughly $30,000 a year.

For Badillo, the obstacles to owning a home felt, and were, formidable.

Only a third of the state’s 900,000 Latinos own a home, compared to 70 percent of non-Latino white residents. The disparity in household income is also stark.

These divides add up to the largest wealth gap between Latinos and whites in the country, according to Census data analyzed for the Globe by the Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Puerto Ricans, many of whom arrived in desperate straits, including thousands who fled after Hurricane Maria in 2017, have the highest poverty rate of any group of Hispanics in the state.

The fact that many Latinos settled in affordable but aging New England mill towns with depressed economies plays a major role in their struggle. The high cost of living is also a factor, as is a lack of English-language skills and the large numbers of Latinos in low-wage jobs.

In Holyoke, which has the highest poverty rate of any city in Massachusetts, the gulf is especially wide and plain to see.

White residents, many descended from Irish immigrants who came to work in the mills, ran Holyoke for years. As the demographics and the economy shifted, Puerto Ricans became convenient scapegoats for the city’s decline, especially for those who resented their growing presence, said Ginetta E.B. Candelario, a sociologist at Smith College in Northampton who has researched and taught about Holyoke’s Latino community for more than 20 years.

Alex Morse, who served as Holyoke mayor from 2012 to 2021, said when his administration tried to invest in the lower wards, he encountered resistance from wealthier residents.

The old Holyoke is evolving. The city is slowly being revitalized as mills are refurbished for the burgeoning cannabis industry and affordable and market-rate housing. Boutiques and restaurants are popping up. But boarded-up shops and empty mills with broken windows remain — in sharp contrast to neighborhoods up the hill.

A number of residents with Puerto Rican roots have risen into leadership roles throughout the community. But change hasn’t come easily.

In 1992, a group of Latino residents sued Holyoke over their lack of representation in City Council, claiming the way it was structured gave more power to white voters. Ultimately, however, the city prevailed.

“There’s a lot of tension,” said the city’s planning and economic development director, Aaron Vega, whose father, Carlos, came to Holyoke from Ecuador and was a well-known community activist. “Division is built in our DNA.”

‘These communities were given up on a long time ago’

Months after the yellow house slipped through Badillo’s fingers, the sound of a fist pounding on the door of the apartment below woke her with a start. Her new landlord had moved into the first-floor residence the year before, and chaos ensued: fights, drugs, gang members coming and going.

Then, in the dark of night while her children were sleeping, she heard her landlord threaten to shoot the person at the door.

Badillo’s housing search had been disheartening. The only places she could afford were in poor, high-crime neighborhoods around downtown or were in terrible shape, with torn-down walls or crumbling ceilings. But with her rent about to rise and violence escalating below, she knew she needed to act fast.

“I gotta get out of here,” she told herself.

It’s something people in this part of Holyoke have been telling themselves for a long time. But it’s a hard road.

The city has some of the highest levels of violent crime in Massachusetts and an opioid overdose rate that is double the state average — some of it concentrated in the largely Puerto Rican lower wards.

The troubles go back decades, so long that a Boston research organization studying opioid overdoses in these neighborhoods is investigating whether a lack of investment — due to banks refusing to write mortgages for low-income people of color decades ago — contributed to the impoverished conditions in which drugs thrive today.

Rafael Rodriguez participated in that study. But the 46-year-old South Holyoke native — today an advocate for people struggling with substance abuse and board member at Holyoke Health Center — doesn’t need data to know what he has lived.

“These communities,” he said, “were given up on a long time ago.”

‘Are you sure?’

Setting aside her dream of moving up the hill, Badillo pounced on a listing on a downtown block. It was the site of some fond childhood memories: Her aunt once lived on that block, and Badillo and her cousin rode their bikes in the alley.

It was also, she knew, a hotspot for drugs.

She took her youngest son, Alex, and her father to see the brick row house on a Saturday afternoon. Most of the houses on the block had been there since the late 1800s. Some, built for workers of an old paper mill, were boarded up and marked with a red “X” to indicate they were unsafe.

When Badillo walked up the steps of the three-bedroom home with a small enclosed porch, she again imagined Christmastime, with lights twinkling in the front entrance and a “winter wonderland” in the fenced-in area out back. It was clean and homey and open, with high ceilings and a long, narrow layout.

Outside the house, she told her agent to offer $130,000 — the highest she could go. A week later, on Thanksgiving, the agent called.

I have some good news.

Badillo locked herself in the bathroom and wept tears of joy. She had worked so hard to get here. With the help of a federal loan, she only had to come up with $1,000 for the down payment. Her mortgage would be less than $700 a month — half the amount of her rent. And it would be hers.

And yet.

This was the part of town she had been determined to avoid. When she shared the news at Christmas, her younger sister — the only family member who had ever owned a home – questioned her decision: Are you sure?

‘People want to get out’

Within days of moving into her new home in early 2023, Badillo noticed syringes in the alley. She saw people selling drugs out front. A few weeks later, she heard gunshots down the street.

Her heart sank. Badillo had hung signs saying “Hope” and “Bless this House” around her living room and put up colorful butterfly decorations, creating a homey oasis.

But she rarely ventured outside if she didn’t have to, and soon wondered if she had made a mistake.

“No matter how hard you try, it’s like gravitating back to the places where we have no choice but to stay because it’s the only place we can afford,” Badillo said. “People want to get out, but they can’t.”

In July, shortly after her middle son, Jacoby, graduated from high school, the police found an unlicensed gun on him during a traffic stop. Jacoby wouldn’t tell his mother why he had the gun, or where he got it. She feared it had something to do with the neighborhood. Did he feel unsafe? Was he trying to protect himself? Or his family?

Earlier this month, he was picked up on another charge and sent to jail.

Over the years, Badillo’s sons witnessed her struggles. They went with her to the “free restaurant” they later learned was a soup kitchen. They had been briefly homeless after their apartment flooded.

More than anything, she wants their lives to be easier than hers.

And the house — her house — has helped put that plan in motion. According to Zillow, it’s worth nearly $10,000 more than when she bought it just over a year ago.

Badillo does what she can to give back to her community. She votes in every election. She helped sign up players for her older sons’ football leagues and cooked empanadillas for wrestling fund-raisers. She donated bottled water after a storm, gives toys to families in need, and helps coordinate a group for parents of bilingual children with disabilities.

She can’t imagine living anywhere else.

Last summer, at the city’s annual Fiestas Patronales de Holyoke festival, Badillo donned earrings that spelled “angel” and let her hair flow around her shoulders. She couldn’t go 10 steps without seeing someone she knew: a cousin, one of Alex’s teachers, her best friend’s sister, another cousin, a city councilor. “Hi honey, how are you?” she called out.

On stage, Puerto Rican pop star George Lamond started playing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,”: “Born and raised in Holy-oke,” he crooned.

Bubbles floated through the air. Tiny Puerto Rican flags waved throughout the crowd.

Badillo wasn’t sure what would happen to her sons, or if she would ever have enough money to take them on vacation. She didn’t know if her block would ever feel safe. But by owning a home, no matter where, she had climbed a hill of her own: “I accomplished something people thought I couldn’t.”

And in that moment, she let loose, threw her arms in the air, and danced.

Katie Johnston can be reached at katie.johnston@globe.com. Follow her @ktkjohnston. Jessica Rinaldi can be reached at jessica.rinaldi@globe.com.