Flushing is a place that quite a few of us in the class are fairly familiar with, since our school is located in Flushing and we took the walking tour, everyone has some basic knowledge of Flushing. Although I’ve lived in Flushing for about nine years now, I never really knew about its history and truly how diverse it was until this class. So if I were to read this article last semester, I would have found a lot of things that would have surprised me. However, reading it now I recognized many points that we’ve either discussed in class or was told by our tour guide. The businesses, the religions, the history, and the continuous development of this area were all very interesting points of this essay.
As we all know, there are many different types of religion in Flushing, from Christianity to Judaism to Buddhism to Hinduism and many, many others. This not so big area has so many different types of people and they all have their religion that came with them when they moved. The most interesting thing about that to me is the fact that there could be a Christian church and a Buddhist temple two blocks away from each other and it would just fit. It isn’t out of place that different religions could be so close to one another in an area like this, all the people are walking on the same streets, eating in some of the same places, and it is not in conflict.
Another point in the essay that got my attention was in the conclusion. The part about the religious organization helping the new immigrants to cope with living in a new place and being in a new environment, it reminded me of the Guadalupe readings that we’ve done. The migration was such a difficult process that these religious institutions were able to ease some of that discomfort just as Our Lady of Guadalupe was able to do for the Mexicans. It echos the idea of no matter what race or ethnicity someone is, there is a lot immigrants have in common. For the Italians and Mexicans it was a different place, but to many Asian immigrants Flushing is very much like a “Promise Land”.
