“Winnie the Pooh, Winnie the Pooh!” shouts a six-year-old girl in New York’s Times Square to her bearded hero, whose bright yellow fur glows in the sun. Shortly afterwards, she and her siblings stick to Winnie like flies to a flycatcher. “Let him live”, her mother calls after them and pulls out the camera for a photo and another and another for Facebook with Mickey Mouse and the Cookie Monster. The woman tips the child heroes and the group moves on.
For many, the glittering boulevard is the epitome of New York, the Mecca of consumer capitalism. The area attracts 50 million tourists annually. Neon signs flash their advertising messages at them. Smugglers advertise their bus tours, street vendors advertise hot dogs and roasted nuts. A huge ticket box promises bargains for theater and musical tickets.
In the middle of it all, Mickey Mouse and the Statue of Liberty wave passers-by, Hello Kitty and Elmo from Sesame Street line up around the stroller for a family photo, Spiderman and Catwoman do a little dance. It’s the “Who’s Who” of pop culture: Spiderman, Captain America, Hulk, they stand for the great, the incredible, the heroic, in one word: America. What most visitors don’t know: Behind the masks, people fight for their own version of the American dream every day.
The heroes of Times Square don’t work for Disney or Marvel, not even for the city, they work for themselves, they are kind of entrepreneurs. Your earnings: “Tips”, that is, tips. “You are your own boss and you decide when you work,” says Joshua Estrada-Barillas. Here on the square, the 21-year-old Texan plays the silly, optimistic spaceman Buzz Lightyear from the movie ToyStory. Now he’s taken off the costume head. Slumped, he sits on a folding chair, does not speak much and watches as Spiderman and Co take care of the few tourists during their break. As the flow of visitors picks up, Buzz Lightyear plugs music into his ear, puts his head on, and jumps back into his role. He approaches tourists, holds out his arms, jokes, encourages them to participate. If a passerby lines up for the photo, Spiderman jumps over to maybe get something.
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Icons without work permit
One street further is William in his Ironman costume, whose mask is a bit cracked. He works twelve to fourteen hours a day. “I don’t have a day off,” he says, “sometimes I’m only here for six hours, that’s my vacation”. A man hands him his child and the three-year-old screams in the stranger’s arms, but William calms him down, makes him smile for the photo.
The 42-year-old from Peru came to New York on a tourist visa and stayed. The father of the family sends the tourists’ tips back to their old homeland. This is how he wants to pave the way for his children to a better future – his American dream. His son is studying engineering, his daughter will soon be finished school and want to study medicine. Many of the mask wearers are immigrants from Latin America who try their luck in New York. Like William, most of them speak little or no English and often lack valid papers, the prerequisite for an official job in the USA.
An apartment in the metropolis – where even a room can cost 1,000 dollars – William cannot afford. On particularly good days, he earns just under a hundred dollars, usually closer to 30 or 40 dollars. Like many others, he commutes daily by bus from the other side of the Hudson from New Jersey to Manhattan. There he pays $ 500 a month in rent.
Estrada-Barillas aka Buzz Lightyear and his girlfriend Virgilia Reyes also had to give up their apartment in Queens and move to New Jersey after the 19-year-old became pregnant and could no longer work as a waitress. Finally, like her boyfriend, she began to pose for tourists in Times Square in the red costume of Elmo from Sesame Street. Their son has just turned one year old. If the offspring is sick, it affects the young family twice, because Virgilia Reyes’ earnings are lost in addition to the medical expenses. “Every hour that we are not here, we lose money,” she says. The couple can make $ 200 on good days, and only $ 20 on bad days. In the past few months it has become less and less.
Superhero union
They see the blame for this in the signs from the police. Tourists are not obliged to tip, it says. “That’s true,” says Ruben, who works in a bakery during the day and as an Ironman in the evening, “but we are also not obliged to have ourselves photographed. It’s a give and take.”
The fact that America’s icons earn less today is probably also due to the competition. Since the city closed parts of Times Square to traffic in 2011, the number of visitors has increased and the 30 comic book heroes have grown to more than 215. Passers-by began to complain about their behavior. In early summer, a Spiderman fought with police officers. Since then, the situation between the American icons and the New York police has been tense. Many of the child heroes feel that the cops have treated them unfairly. José Vasquez plays the timid wind-up cowboy Woody from ToyStory, but usually wears the mask like a hat so that you can see his face. He was arrested in January for allegedly groping women in Times Square. He was arrested again in November for blocking traffic. “Instead of giving me a ticket, they locked me up overnight,” he says. He is represented by a public defender in the ongoing sexual harassment litigation, and there is no money for his own lawyer. The women themselves have not filed a complaint against him.
The friction has sparked the media, local politicians and the Times Square Alliance, an amalgamation of the merchants and shops in Times Square. You want to introduce a registration requirement for masked actors and a licensing system. “The unusual is ok, the uncanny is not,” explains a representative of the association. Times Square is a mirror of America and consumers should have a positive experience.
Lucia Gomez from the organization The fountain supports immigrant workers in the fight for their rights. “This is New York, if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere. Only now do we want to limit who can do it and where they can do it.” For Gomez, the artists’ tricks are nothing more than a sales strategy. Of course everyone wants to be in the picture in order to get a tip afterwards. How capitalist America can have a problem with sales strategists at the heart of its money machine, she does not understand.
A few weeks ago, arch enemies Batman and Joker stood at Gomez’s door and asked for help. Now, in the fight for the American dream, the superheroes have founded a union of all people. Up to 100 of them meet weekly. The “network of artists, united for a smile” aims to restore the reputation of the people behind the masks. With the obligation to have their own set of rules, they hope to get ahead of the city’s licensing system.
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