NEW YORK: Beneath flashing billboards and sparkling skyscrapers, Maria Bega moves through Times Square’s pulsating crowds, dressed as Princess Anna from animated Disney movie Frozen.
The 32-year-old Peruvian is one of dozens of men and women, mostly from Latin America, trying to eke out a living as costumed characters inside New York’s beating heart.
Dressed as Sesame Street fuzzballs Elmo and Cookie Monster and superheroes like Batman and Hulk, they pose for photos with tourists in exchange for tips, vying with topless women in body paint and a semi-naked guitar-playing cowboy.
For many visitors, the mascots are part of the frenetic entertainment district’s charm but to some New Yorkers they symbolize a crowded neon nightmare that is best avoided.
The characters are currently the subject of many complaints, proof of how much the area once known for peep shows, pornos and crack cocaine has been cleaned up in recent decades.
With its bright lights and giant branded stores, the famous intersection is a symbol of the city that never sleeps and its untold opportunities. Where dreams are made of, as the Alicia Keys and Jay-Z song goes.
But for Bega the reality is more of a nightmare. She says she sometimes makes just $20 a day.
“You come here to waste your time, to freeze to death, and sometimes you don’t even earn enough to eat,” Bega tells AFP in Spanish, her blue costume complete with ginger pigtails.
Bega got into the work through a friend and has colleagues from Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Ecuador.
Many bring their costumes from their home countries, where they can be purchased fairly cheaply, or buy them online in the United States where they commonly cost upwards of $200.
They require no permit to operate.
“Some are a little pushy but most of them are nice. They’re out here making a living like everybody else,” says 62-year-old Kentucky resident Dave Duke, who took a photo of his wife with a costumed Statue of Liberty.
The entertainers say making money has become more difficult following several harassment and groping allegations that sparked articles in local tabloids about “costumed creeps.”
In September, a man in an Elmo costume was arrested after being accused of groping a 14-year-old girl.
“Because of this the police came to bother us. They’re hardly letting us work,” says Bega, who does a second job in the evenings in order to care for her kids aged two and ten.
Jose from Mexico, a different Elmo to the one arrested, says one or two of the hucksters are spoiling it for everyone else.
“Children used to run to me but now they see headlines about Elmo being a child molester and they don’t,” he explains, declining to give his surname.
