Michael Jones-Correa’s “Intimate Strangers: Immigration to Queens,” discusses the dichotomy between white ethnics and Latin Americans in Jackson Heights, Queens. Jones-Correra makes several points differentiating the mentalities and following actions of the disparate groups, but one specific point took hold of my attention: the idea of “community.”
The white ethics of Jackson Heights viewed community as a “neighborhood..with its boundaries…that are forever fixed, even as they feel ‘their’ neighborhoods changing.” The inhabitants of a true community personally know each other and interact on a regular basis. Further, the white ethics of Jackson Heights view community as an enclosure of space; they regard the “physical structure of the neighborhood…as the community.”
Latin-Americans, on the contrary, hold a different view of what a community encompasses. Jones-Correa uses the term “geography of memory” to explain the Latino’s relationship with the space in which they reside. It is almost as if Latin Americans have dual identities; one part of their identity resides in the community of their home countries, while another resides in the U.S. Simultaneously, it is their memory of the geography back home that shapes their experience of community in the U.S. Therefore, the identity of the Latin American is not inextricably linked to tangible space.
The two different definitions of “community” set out by the white ethics and Latin Americans of Jackson Heights prompted me to think about my own community, and, more specifically, my family. My parents are both immigrants, my mother from Guyana and my father from Turkey. We reside in College Point, Queens, which is not similar to Jackson Heights in terms of Latin American ethnic concentration. College Point, in the past few years, has increasingly become populated with Asian Americans, so my family is an outlier of sorts in the community in which we have lived in for nearly twenty years. Personally, I can relate to the Latin-American’s view of “community.” My parents have brought with them, from their home countries, ideas of their own communities. We cook food from both cultures, and shop at grocery stores that carry our specific brand of Chai tea that isn’t available in any of the mainstream American grocery stores, or the recently opened Korean Supermarket that’s a five minute drive away. My family’s sense of community lies largely in where our culture is–be it Richmond Hill or Astoria; it is in these two areas that Guyanese and Turkish culture are largely concentrated in. Simply residing in an area (geography) does not create a sense of community, especially if there are not people of similar descent nearby. “Community,” to me, is where one’s culture is.
