Arlene Gottfried writes: “From my window on New York City’s Lower East Side I could look out and see the Puerto Rican culture I encountered over thirty years earlier, around the same time I began photographing. One night I heard a street vendor on the corner of Avenue C and East 3rd Street calling, “bacalaitos and fireworks”; bacalaitos, a fried cod fish indigenous to Puerto Rico, and fireworks, for the Fourth of July weekend. This juxtaposition became etched in my mind—representative of an immigrant population on the streets of America.”