Mexican immigrants living in Port Richmond, Staten Island, have proved themselves to be hard workers and skilled at running small businesses, despite the recent wave of hate crimes in the area. The neighborhood has a sizeable number of Latino residents. Over time, Mexicans have established a variety of small businesses that bring wealth to the local economy.

Omar Sánchez works at Mexican supermarket Monte Alban, one of the Hispanic-owned businesses vandalized on August 19th, 2008, when an individual perpetrator slammed his pickup truck into a string of locales. The incident was classified as a hate crime against Mexicans. Sánchez, who has been working in the area for 20 years, continues to work at the same supermarket.

Although Sánchez is “somewhat concerned” by the events of 2008, he remains steadfast. “We will continue to work. We Mexicans came here prepared to overcome many obstacles, and the violence isn’t going to deter us,” he said.

Los Potrillos Restaurant was also one of the businesses targeted in 2008. The owner, María Morales, reiterated what she said two years ago. “Nobody is going to make us move. This is our community and they aren’t going to scare us off,” Morales said, while attending to customers at her taco stand, located at 150th Avenue in Port Richmond.

“If they’re trying to scare us, they haven’t succeeded. These hate crimes won’t bring us down,” said Alejandro Morán, owner of Alexander Hair Style.

“In my view, the deed was done by a crazy person or a drunk, somebody who wasn’t quite right in the head,” said Carmen Castillo, referring to the incidents in 200, an employee at the gift shop Mexico City 2.

Julio Domínguez, who resides on the other side of Staten Island, explained that the first significant wave of Mexicans began arriving on Staten Island in the 1990s.

“The first Mexicans came to Port Richmond, and then moved on to Victory and soon lived all throughout Staten Island,” said Domínguez, as he toiled in the kitchen at Los Potrillos, located at 42 New Dorp Plaza, close to the beach.

“We work in all types of industries: bakeries; restaurants; floral shops; travel agencies; any type of business,” Domínguez added. He came to Staten Island in 1990. “At first it was rare to see a Mexican here. Everything was quiet, at work and at home, walking to the mall or en route to Manhattan. It was a ghost town,” he recalled.

According to Domínguez, Staten Island – and in particular Port Richmond – became more dynamic in 2000. “Different types of businesses started opening, including bars. Staten Island began to have a nightlife.”

When Domínguez first moved to the United States, he and his brother-in-law rented a bakery in Queens and were the first ones to sell pan de feria, or traditional Mexican bread, in New York City.

“We began to sell Mexican products on Staten Island, including tortillas; first from house to house and later on we started other businesses,” Domínguez said with pride. “Mexicans go through many ordeals, but making us leave Staten Island would be tough. This place has become our second home, and nobody is going to make us move.”

Mexicans settled on Staten Island affirm that they haven’t considered leaving, despite the violence that has claimed 11 victims since April and put local authorities on high alert to combat the problem of racial prejudice.

According to David Dyssegaard Kallick of the Fiscal Policy Institute, 43 percent of Mexicans in New York work primarily in the service sector, 16 percent work in construction, and 12 percent in production.

“Mexicans make up the largest immigrant population on Staten Island, with close to 9 percent in 2008, followed by Italians at close to 8 percent,” said Kallick, referring to the FPI report entitled Working for a Better Life.

In 2007, immigrants contributed a total of $229 billion to the New York economy, representing 22.4 percent of the gross domestic product in the state.

The study also showed that “immigrants played an important role in revitalizing neighborhoods in crisis during the ’70s” and concluded that “without immigrants, the city’s population would have declined, rather than expanded.”

“I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t because of the beating they were giving me,” said the 25-year-old baker. Nearly five months later, he is still taking pain medications for his head injuries.

Recorded by a store’s surveillance camera, the assault was the first of 11 suspected anti-Hispanic bias attacks in a Staten Island neighborhood, re-igniting years-old tensions between blacks and Hispanics in New York City’s most remote borough.

Residents of Port Richmond — where an influx of newcomers from Latin America over the past decade has transformed the community — alternately blame the attacks on the economy, unemployment and the debate over Arizona’s immigration law.

And although most of the suspects were described as young black men and investigated for bias crimes, a grand jury has indicted only one of seven people arrested on a hate-crime charge.

“They hate us because we’re Mexicans,” he said while sitting at El Centro del Inmigrante, a center for immigrant day workers. “They aren’t robbing just anybody.”

Across the United States, the immigration debate plays out in suspicion of outsiders and sometimes escalates into violence. Port Richmond, tucked in a corner of New York City that most visitors never see, is wrestling with the perennial question of how people from different backgrounds can live together and get along.

Some community leaders here blame the attacks on hoodlums preying on day laborers, who are perceived as easy targets because they often carry cash home from work. Others say the Arizona law is stirring up a climate of intolerance, even these thousands of miles away.

“It’s a cascading effect,” said the Rev. Terry Troia, a board member of El Centro del Inmigrante. “There are negative impulses being put out there both nationally and locally. People on the fringe catch a piece of that, and they are acting on it.”

Some of Port Richmond’s black residents assert that newcomers’ presence touches a nerve. Mike Mason, 47, a teacher who works in New Jersey, said the arrival of Mexican immigrants had changed the texture of the community.

“America has got to do something as far as immigration goes,” he said. “In the morning you can see the streets lined with undocumented workers … That’s always in the back of people’s minds.”

Staten Island is a relatively isolated, suburban-like borough of New York City. It is home to nearly 500,000 people, most of whom live in detached homes instead of apartments, need cars to get around and a ferry to get across New York Harbor to Manhattan.

Between 2000 and 2008, the number of Hispanics living on the island grew roughly 40 percent, according to Census bureau statistics analyzed by City University of New York’s Latino Data Project, with much of that growth coming from the Mexican community.

Many of those began to coalesce around the Port Richmond neighborhood, which had long been predominantly black and low-income. The neighborhood’s main commercial thoroughfare, once marked by empty storefronts, suddenly came alive with Mexican businesses selling pinatas, bars playing Spanish-language heavy metal, and grocers stocking chilies and tomatillos. The neighborhood developed a new nickname: “Little Mexico.”

Mexicans soon began reporting that they were attacked by their black neighbors.

One organization documented 21 assaults against day laborers one summer in 2003. When a day laborer was viciously stabbed and killed two years later, neighbors quickly blamed the black community, until reputed Latin Kings gang members were charged with the man’s death.

In recent months, police have deployed additional foot and mounted patrols, a command post and Mexican-born officers to distribute bilingual fliers with safety tips. The FBI joined in creating a task force to look into civil rights abuses in the neighborhood. Residents have aired grievances at numerous town hall meetings.

On a recent summer day, Nicomedes Rocha said she was afraid of being targeted by blacks while walking on the street.

“I have to watch on both sides,” said the 33-year-old dishwasher at a local taqueria, who was on her way to work carrying a shoulder bag. “They think I carry money.”

But some black residents said it was wrong to talk about bias as the main motive for the attacks.

David Johnson, an amateur boxer who has lived in the neighborhood for seven years, blamed the incidents on drug addicts looking to rob people for cash to feed their habits. “They would do that to anybody,” he said. “To jump toward bias issues is out of whack.”

Rodolfo Olmedo was beaten and robbed of his cell phone and wallet on April 5. Four suspects have been arrested and charged; police investigated it as a bias crime, but a grand jury indicted the suspects only on robbery and gang assault charges.

William Smith, a spokesman for the Staten Island district attorney’s office, said the attack on Olmedo was retaliatory. The suspects, he said, believed Olmedo had been involved in an earlier altercation.

Olmedo, who was hospitalized for five days and was briefly in a coma, contends he was targeted because of his ethnicity, not because he had been involved in a related incident or because the suspects wanted to steal his belongings.

After all, Olmedo said, they didn’t take an expensive watch that he was wearing.

“It was,” he said in Spanish, “a hate crime.”

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Associated Press Writers Ana Azpurua and Colleen Long contributed to this report..