Taped to a bus stop kiosk on fifth avenue a few blocks south of my apartment, I found an ad for a house for sale in New Haven. The house was clearly run down, and judging from the make and style of the arcvhitecture and the demographics of the neighborhood I live in, I'm guessing the house was either in Fair Haven or maybe the Hill, with the former more likely. I find it really interesting that someone would post a home for sale notice on a bus stop, let alone in a city eighty miles away. The flyer raises interesting questions about the connections and links between two working class latino neighborhoods in very different cities, something I might want to look into more if I were an ethnographer, which I am not. Of course, the fact that we are talking about buying and selling property (and because the flyer was in English) means we're talking about folks in the upper economic echelons of both neighborhoods - probably not the old women who stand on street corners here in the freezing cold every weekend and sell homemade churros outside of the clothing and shoe stores and taquerias that line fifth avenue between the park and 63rd (where Bay Ridge begins) but that doesn't meant there aren't circuits of exchange, communication, and community between these cities - whether of kinship, of common origin in the regions of central and southern Mexico from which a lot of migrants are coming to the Northeastern U.S., or other connections of which i remain ignorant. I'll stop here, since i do not want the gaze which i turn on my neighborhood to be that of the detatched and imperial social scientist...