Travel & Food

Sundays in Dover: Empanadas and Futbol in Suburban New Jersey

This Latin American enclave puts on a magnificent weekly flea market.

  meghuelsman@hotmail.com

The flea market in Dover, with its fresh, hand-salted pretzels and vegetable fried rice, runs down the center of town, blocking traffic and halting activity on a Sunday afternoon. The exotic bazaar opens after church lets out, giving children dressed in black patent leather shoes and white or pink flouncing lacy dresses an opportunity to buy old-fashioned licorice or lollypops from the vender strategically stationed 10 paces from the heavy oak iglesia doors.

“Niña, mira,” the merchant beckons to a little girl. “Look over here.”

They call him abuelo, grandfather. He sits on a stool, his face lined with deep wrinkles, waiting like statue for customers. His kind eyes and his white, fading hair recall a quieter time in a faraway country where the sun is hot. His hands are gnarled. He folds them gingerly in his lap. He has arthritis, which, he says, followed him from the plantation, the hacienda, where worked in his native country, Venezuela.

Sundays in this small turn-of-the-century city in northwestern New Jersey are hectic in a jostling, humorous, lazy way. Originally established by immigrant Dutch farmers, Irish miners and Polish ironworkers, Dover still has an old-Europe feel. In the early 20th century, wholesalers, merchants and vendors traveled here from as far away as Michigan and Minneapolis to receive goods arriving from New York City, Europe and further afield. Old pictures depict horse-drawn carriages and steam engines so large that one frame cannot entirely capture them.

But those days of hectic agricultural trade are long gone. Over the last 40 forty years, Latin Americans have washed over the business district in waves, and behind Victorian facades on Blackwell Street, they have created a small Latin American city. All of the signs, en español, make you feel as though you’re in a foreign country. But in fact Dover is nestled among prosperous white suburbs, some of the wealthiest in the nation.

Besides the flea market, soccer games (or futbol to the native Doverican) dominate Sunday afternoons. Barbeque grills blaze during summer, starting with the first nice days in April. And during the cold winter months when the streets are covered in white, clean snow, stovetops radiate the warm, fresh, yeasty smell of empanadas. Each family has a secret recipe, an extra spice, a different meat, a variation of oil, taken from their mother countries.

“The best place to buy Colombian empanadas is on the corner of Morris and Blackwell Streets,” said a young man of about 20, carrying a paper bag filled with the meaty snacks. “I mean, other than my mother’s.” He laughed. “They make them like I remember them in Bogotá.”

Satellite dishes jut from just about every other house, and some houses have two. “You have to watch the futbol game on Sunday,” said a man buying licorice from a vendor. Everyone knows — the women, the children, the men — that on Sunday, the family dresses to impress and gathers around the television to cheer for their home team. Soccer is deeply embedded in Latino culture and intertwined with family identity.

“It’s a way that we bond,” the man explained. “We not only watch a sport on the television. We spend time with our families, we cook big meals, we speak in our native language, and we laugh about past games in large arenas in South America.”

To spend time with the people of Dover is to have an experience that defies the stereotype of the town. “When I first moved here from the Hispanic community in Morristown, I was scared,” said Dover resident Carlos Caprioli. He had heard about knife fights and “dirty Puerto Ricans” who were rumored to steal cars and money and cause a general ruckus.

Despite Caprioli’s fears, though, and the generally standoffish sentiment of its neighboring towns, Dover is very welcoming.

“We all speak Spanish here, and that makes other people afraid of us because they don’t understand us,” said an older woman checking out at the local grocery. “We are very warm and friendly people.”

Dover is a little city, completely self-sufficient in most respects. One does not need to know or speak English to speak with the cable company, the phone company or the grocer. One can shop on Blackwell at the zapateria, a small, adorable custom shoe store displaying stilettos in bright hues of orange and green.

Even if one does not know Spanish fluently, the quaint town and its train station offer native New Jerseyans a splash of color and foreign culture.

“I love coming to Dover on Sundays, just to walk around, eat some wonderful, spicy Colombian and Puerto Rican food,” said a woman carrying several shopping bags down Blackwell Street. “The people are always so friendly, and the pocketbooks are to die for. I always wonder if they know how much they could really get for them.

“Plus, the women here are so beautiful. It must be the Latino culture or something, but they always are so put together. Their shoes match their pocketbooks, their faces are always painted, their hair is always perfect,” she added. “It’s like Europe, or how I would imagine a day in Santiago, Chile, or Lima, Peru, would be.”