Michael Jones-Correa published “Intimate Strangers: Immigration to Queens” in his book Between Two Nations: The Political Predicament of Latinos in New York City in 1998, but today you can still note many of the same truths that he wrote about 15 years ago. Northwestern Queens still attracts thousands of new immigrants every year from all over the world, especially Asians and Hispanics. His opening description of people on the 7 train sounds like it could have been written yesterday.
In my hometown, Elmhurst, I see the same pattern of immigrants on top of immigrants on top of immigrants. On my block alone, that I know of, there are people of Irish, Chinese, Korean, Argentinian, Italian, Ecuadorian, Mexican, African-American, Polish, Filipino, and Japanese heritage. I listen as all of these people work to learn English, and I watch as their children become more and more a part of a world that they will never fully belong to. I have all of these neighbors, all of us so close to one another, but our neighborhood is pretty much the only thing that we all share. This raises the question: how truthful is the geographic idea of a community?
Jones-Correa offers two opposing views of what “community” means by focusing on Jackson Heights. To the older white residents, who he calls “white ethnics,” communities are well-defined areas enclosed by recognized borders. They assign certain characteristics and values to each neighborhood.
To Hispanic immigrants, community refers to the social community shared between them. Even though they come from different countries, they bond through their shared language and experiences. To them, the borders between neighborhoods are not so important.
Jones-Correa cites Roosevelt Ave. as a recognized border between Jackson Heights and Elmhurst. This street, which runs under the 7 line, is a highly concentrated strip of Hispanic stores and restaurants. He writes that the entire reason that this street developed the way it did was because the white ethnics pushed the new immigrants to the edges of town, and they avoided it because they associated it with crime.
Since then, Roosevelt Ave. has commercialized somewhat, and is not regarded as being so “dirty” as it used to be. It is still a main street in the area for Hispanics merchants and businesses. The concentration of Hispanics along this street eventually pushed into the rest of Elmhurst and Jackson Heights as more and more white people left. In Jackson Heights, they now make up the plurality of the population.
The year after Jones-Correa’s book was published, a section of Jackson Heights was granted historical status. In this chapter, he wrote about how it was an attempt for the whites to hold onto some power over land usage. The next year, they succeeded. How successful was this move, however? Though the buildings granted historical status are typically controlled by whites, Hispanics have moved further into all other parts of the neighborhood and their numbers are still on the rise.
Overall, I believe that some of the tension between the white ethnics and Hispanics has calmed. It may either be that there are too few whites left to protest, or that they recognize that they are outnumbered, but within the past 15 years, the Hispanic push into Jackson Heights has been relentless and mostly uncontested. This has been true of the region for several decades now, and the dynamics we see in these neighborhoods are changing everyday. At the same time, we can recognize this as the normal story of Queens, the immigrant’s landing spot. Some things just don’t change.
