The article that most rang true for me was Ellick’s New York Times article, “In Queens: A Melting Pot, A Closed Book”. Maybe this article touched me the most because a different perspective about the neighborhood I grew up in intrigued me, or maybe it was because he experienced a feeling that I’ve felt before whenever I’ve ventured into different enclaves. Growing up, I always just accepted the fact that Whites were seen as outsiders amongst the hundreds of Asians, Hispanics, and Blacks. As a child, I never really distinguished people by their races but, I could never help but realize the way my neighbors would stare a little bit longer whenever there was a White person around. My father would complain about having to handle White customers as he would become self-conscious of his South-Asian accent and his lack of proper English grammar. My undocumented Hispanic neighbors would flee whenever they caught a White person looking at them and, in today’s day and age, I cannot help but sympathize.
Ellick did fail to properly penetrate and experience the full ethnic background of Jackson Heights and I do not think that there is anything he could have done to have better penetrated it than he already had. Perhaps it would have helped for him to have close friends within the community. However, as seen in his Korean pub example, this is not always the case. The fact that he physically stood out to others was enough to have the people of the neighborhood sitting at the edge of their seats. As Ellick states in his article, “Documenting the neighborhood’s colorful streets was like a lesson in intelligence gathering. When I raised the viewfinder to my eye, street vendors and pedestrians alike jumped out of sight, as if I were wielding an AK-47. Several men mumbled the words ‘snitching’ and ‘immigration’ under their breath.” I am not sure whether he was overreacting when he pictured this happening, but the imagery makes it look pretty bad.
There have been times in my life where I have been allowed a window into the everyday life of a group of people different from me, only to have the people react to me as those in Queens reacted to Ellick. In highschool, I had a group of East Asian friends that would often want to take me along on their adventures after-school to Flushing or Chinatown. These locations were enclaves for the East Asians and I couldn’t help but notice that I was the only South Asian person in the area every time I visited. My dark South-Asian complexion was one that wasn’t common among those parts and I noticed that shop owners would look at me more keenly than they would the other people. I felt like I was invading something that these people held precious. I felt judged for being nothing more than my curious self.
