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buying fake visas. Everyone seemed to be migrating north or knew someone who had already left on the perilous and costly journey.
    In a 1990 survey conducted by the University of Cuenca, 45.5 percent of the respondents reported having at least one family member living in the United States. By 1991 the New York Department of City Planning estimated that there were approximately one hundred thousand Ecuadorian migrants in the New York City area (this figure did not account for undocumented immigrants, which would likely have doubled that number). 5 The Azuayan branch of the Central Bank estimated that remittances from migrants abroad amounted to $120 million in 1991, equivalent to sixteen years of straw-hat exports. 6
    Espinoza himself helped at least twenty Gualaceños find jobs. On one day alone he placed seven men in a flower shop. At times it seemed as if every Gualaceño who came to Long Island went to see him first. As a building superintendent, he either had a space to rent or knew who had it and was willing to rent to newly arrived immigrants, often men who shared a room.
    In this way, Espinoza quickly became what those who study migration patterns have called a “pioneer migrant”—immigrants who have a “decisive influence on later migrants,” who are guided not by job ads or recruiting agents but “by spontaneous individual and family decisions, usually based on the presence in certain places of kin and friends who can provide shelter and assistance,” as Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut note in their classic Immigrant America: A Portrait. 7 After a group settles in a certain place, an enclave is established and others from the same town or nationality follow. “Migration is a network-driven process, and the operation of kin and friendship ties is nowhere more effective than in guiding new arrivals toward preexisting ethnic communities,” Portes and Rumbaut wrote. 8 Once this process is well established, the authors conclude, “migration becomes self-perpetuating through the operation of ethnic networks.” In theory, they explain, “this process may continue indefinitely.”
    In 1993, twelve years after his arrival in New York, Espinoza, who by then had had two other children with Ana, a son and a fourth daughter, realized that practically everybody he knew from Gualaceo had at least one family member in Patchogue, which gave him an idea for a business. Most immigrants he knew, himself included, had to travel to Queens whenever they wanted to send a package or wire money to relatives at home. Wouldn’t it be great if they could do it right here in Patchogue? Espinoza described this idea to his wife, who was hesitant about leaving their stable jobs but knew enough not to stand between her husband and his unwavering optimism.
    With their savings and a loan of $5,000 from a relative, Espinoza rented a seven-hundred-square-foot space on Patchogue’s Main Street and called it Envios Espinoza. Failure was not an option, but, just in case, the ever-careful Espinoza team kept working at the restaurant on the weekends. By the time they opened a second store, a few blocks away and also on Main Street, Espinoza decided to stop working for others and focus on his own thriving business. Eight years after he opened the first store, Espinoza opened a third store in 2001. Every day he shuttled from one counter to another, where he sold products—such as manichos (chocolates) and galletas (crackers)—that Gualaceños yearned for. He offered immigration advice, rented Spanish-language movies, wired money home, and sold phone cards. Gualaceños would stop by after work or on their lunch break and greet him as they wouldback home, respectfully and in Spanish. Buenos días, Don Julio, they would say, and Espinoza felt right at home.
    Yet Espinoza was aware that Patchogue was not home. It was where he lived and where he had settled and where he hoped to stay, but he was not naive enough to assume that just because he