A New Jersey town, a Brazilian deluge, diverging hopes

They hoped this old town would be rediscovered someday. That new life would course through the tired streets, revive the aging storefronts, fill the burnt-out, boarded-up buildings.

And when they learned that a new light-rail line was coming - the first passenger service in 40 years - their hope soared. Mark our words, community leaders said, the train will bring people back.

First, the developers would come. Then the young professionals and empty nesters, filing into new lofts and townhouses and restoring the lonely downtown to a vibrant business district.

And they got their wish. People are coming.

They're just not the ones anyone here was expecting.

They're immigrants from . And over the last five years, as many as 5,000 of them have flooded in and around Riverside's 1.5 square miles, catching off guard the town and its 8,000 souls.

Most of the newcomers are young men and have come here illegally to take jobs as carpenters. Many of the pioneers came on tourist visas and stayed. The most recent arrivals sneaked across the Mexican border.

In early-morning darkness, they camp on doorsteps with their lunch coolers, waiting for vans to take them to the latest construction frontier. At dusk, they return, trudging into rented dwellings next to the siding-clad homes their neighbors decorate with American flags. Downtown, they gather outside multiservice shops, entering to wire money home, peruse products with labels in Portuguese, banter with clerks who speak nothing but.

Their arrival, in such large numbers over such a short period, has engendered mixed feelings. Community leaders, who have been waiting years for a rebirth, are thrilled with the shops and restaurants that have sprung up, run by and for Brazilians. But the influx of so many people who don't speak the language and don't share the culture has also left residents reeling.

"They're everywhere. There's more of them than there are of us," lifelong resident Carolyn Chamberlain exclaims from behind the counter at Riverside News Agency. "Brazilians are taking over this whole town."

This town and others. Brazilians have become one of the fastest-growing groups of illegal immigrants to the . Farmhands and accountants, clerks and lawyers, they have been coming - as did generations of dreamers before them - for a decent wage and a better life.

And, as town leaders hoped it would, word has traveled - not to striving professionals working in New York and Philadelphia, but to struggling families in faraway states named Minas Gerais, Goias, and Rondonia - that little Riverside, New Jersey, is a good place to land.

Across , towns, cities and suburbs are experiencing an influx of foreigners for the first time. Or the first in a very long time.

Immigrant numbers are at a record high, and the newcomers are fanning out from the places where they have traditionally settled into new territory.

It's a tough adjustment all around.

"We didn't come here to the to fight," insists Ricardo Samartino, 25, who says he has working papers. "We came here to work. Our job is to build ."

Township Planning Board Chairman Gary Christopher believes the people who have trouble with the Brazilians are the same ones who belittle the town's redevelopment plans.

Like Christopher, Regina Collinsgru, a vice president of the Riverside Business Association and former publisher of the Riverside Positive Press, believes time will heal.

Germans settled here in 1851. Until the 1930s, minutes from the township meetings were kept in German.

Poles and Italians arrived in the early 1900s, so many that whole streets became known as Dago Row and Polack Row. They joined the Irish, who had fled their country's famine.

's boutiques.

"This place was truly popping," says Kenney, now in his 70s and leaning heavily on a cane.

But then the watchcase factory closed its doors in 1956. Suburban malls sprouted up, people started moving out. The trains stopped running, as people preferred their cars.

Finally, on Jan. 6, 1964, as Disney's The Incredible Journey was playing, the Fox Theater went up in flames. With it went an entire city block.

Gone were Milavasky's Home Furnishings, Brumberger's Confectionery, the Rendfrey & Siegfried Photo Studio, Jerry Merlino's Barber Shop, Bogg's Soda Store, and Capparelli's Shoe Repairs.

Kenney puts it this way: "It was bang, bang, bang, and the town went to its knees and didn't recover."

Townspeople remember their arrival well. They came with their families. They were clean, polite, legal. They were welcome.

"They didn't say that then," laughs Rezende, now 80. "The Portuguese kept to themselves, but everybody kept watching them through the curtains. Every move we made."

It's one of more than a dozen businesses that have sprung up over the last few years, about half of those just since last summer.

A lot, like Sergio's, are owned by Brazilians who've had success. Most cater to the new-immigrant market.

, advertising "International Products - Brazilian, Hispanic, Portuguese." A few doors down, a Portuguese bank, also from

Newark , has moved in.

Downtown, shops have sprung up selling brightly colored dresses, ruffled tops, funky jeans and flip-flops.

, women dish out pastries filled with chicken and cheese, heaping burgers called X-Tudos, frothy tropical drinks, and Guarana, the fruity national soda of .

Where the Palace used to be, an Ecuadorean named Franco Ordonez serves up rice and beans, stewed and grilled meats dusted with manioc flour. Down the street, men line up at his brother's store, G&I Amigos, clasping stacks of bills to wire home.

Luis Ordonez established this place in 2002. He has since opened a music shop next door, where customers can pick through a selection of South American CDs and e-mail or video-chat with family and friends, while a samba plays overhead.

"When I came here" - three years ago - "this town was dead," Ordonez says from the back office, where he's just finished interviewing a new manager for Lunchonette Brasil, which he's recently taken over. "I said, 'There's no way I'm ever gonna survive.' If it weren't for the Brazilians, I wouldn't be here."

At each stop different men ordered them around. Cindia didn't want to leave her mother's side. She'd heard about the "coyotes," what they did sometimes to the women they were smuggling.

She was scared. Sick with fever. And the worst was yet to come.

A coyote gripped her hand, but the water rose to her chest, then her neck. The current ripped at her clothes, so strong it could sweep her away.

Cindia kept looking for her mother. Marli couldn't swim.

How long did it take to wade across? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? A lifetime.

And then the coyote was gone, back across the river. They moved forward, toward a road he said would be there.

They squeezed through the thorny rungs of a barbed-wire fence, and there it was.

Within minutes, Border Patrol was on them. Everything was going according to plan.

Many interviews were conducted in Portuguese through an interpreter. The last names of some Brazilians have been omitted at their request to protect their identities or those of relatives.