Absara Hassan
Response 3: Kirk Semple, New York Times, “Take the A Train to Little Guyana” and Vivek Bald, “’Lost’ in the City, Spaces and stories of South Asian New York, 1917-1965”
The waves of immigration that have passed over the decades have led to the formation of immigrant enclaves across all five boroughs of New York City. In the article, “Take the A Train to Little Guyana”, Kirk Semple organizes the formation of enclaves into different sections, giving details of anecdotes, historical facts, specific locations, and the changes that these locations have undergone with respect to population for each immigrant group. Initially starting out as Kleindeutschland, also known as Little Germany, the area of lower Manhattan has been transformed throughout the years, drastically changing in ethnic composition with the addition of several immigrant populations such as those from Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa after 1965’s immigration reform legislation. The New York Times article expands on this change in ethnic composition by giving examples of ten relatively new immigrant enclaves that have settled throughout New York City.
Semple mentions various immigrant populations, such as Arab, Chinese, Ecuadorean, Ghanaian, Guyanese, Korean, Mexican, Polish, and Sri Lankan. As a Bengali, learning about Bangladeshi enclaves that have settled throughout Brooklyn, as well as those that are still developing in other boroughs, was intriguing. Semple mentions a personal account of a Bangladeshi immigrant named Ansar Lovlu, and how he started his new life in the southern part of Brooklyn. The community of that specific area (Church/McDonald Ave) has drastically changed since Lovlu’s arrival, going from only a few to more than eighty businesses being owned by a person from Bangladesh. The article states, “More than 74,000 Bangladeshi immigrants live in New York City, according to the latest figures from the Census Bureau, a 20 percent increase since 2009, making them the 11th-largest foreign born population in the city.” (Semple). Nowadays, many Bengali immigrants are settling in other places throughout the city, such as the Bronx, and from my personal experience, Queens.
Vivek Bald, in his piece “’Lost in the City, Spaces and stories of South Asian New York, 1917-1965” mentions the assimilation of South Asian immigrants into Harlem, northern Manhattan. Bald ties together the many communities that came to comprise Harlem, unlike Semple, who separates each immigrant group into their own locations. Bald focuses on spaces, and says that Harlem is where interaction between various communities, such as Bengali Muslims, African Americans, and Latino immigrants takes place in a series of spaces. Like Semple, Bald includes personal accounts, one of which is of Habib Ullah Sr, who says of his experience in Harlem, “Walking here is a means of forging new human relationships, often across racial, ethnic, linguistic and gender difference, and maintaining those relationships through daily encounter and exchange.” (Bald, 13). Both articles shed light onto the concepts of space, location, and neighborhoods, where the places in which these fascinating groups of people have settled play a part in their history and experience.
Questions:
- Do you think immigrant groups prefer the formation of enclaves, or the integration of other cultures into theirs/vice versa?
- How does the formation of enclaves impact our economy?
