I’ve never lived in Jackson Heights, but it was still a familiar part of my life growing up in NYC. My father spent a lot of time there because that was where his office was situated, and because he had so many friends there. He would take his family with him from time to time so that we could enjoy the delicious food served in the Indian restaurants, or watch the newest Tamil movie in a small theater there that, for most of my childhood, was the only theater nearby that showed Tamil and Hindi movies. I’ve grown attached to Jackson Heights without ever living there, because I saw the robust South Asian community that thrives there. So much like one of my interviewees, I developed an idea of Jackson Heights as an exclusively brown community, without realizing how narrow my perception of the neighborhood was.
One of my interviewees, Noshin, lives in Woodside but visits Jackson Heights often for grocery shopping or to simply be in the neighborhood. But although Jackson Heights was such a fundamental part of her life growing up in NYC, she didn’t realize there was more to Jackson Heights than just the brown community until after she had joined a Facebook group for the neighborhood. Shi Ting, another interviewee, acknowledged that she also had a limited perspective of Jackson Heights based on where she lived. Both recognized that the neighborhood was diverse yet separated, and that their narrow experiences were not enough to understand the broader community that exists within Jackson Heights.
Shi Ting and Noshin both touched upon the separation of ethnicities within Jackson Heights and why they think that might be. Both of them coming from immigrant backgrounds, they stressed the importance of finding a community that one feels accepted into and comfortable in to recent immigrants, citing that this may be the reason for the smaller ethnic communities that have been formed in Jackson Heights, which does have a primarily immigrant population. They express concern for this separation within the community, but are also optimistic that the coexistence of different ethnicities in the same neighborhoods will be more common in the future when the children of these immigrant families—who grew up in the US and are more likely to socialize with more people from different backgrounds—form their own families.
Through my interviews, I have learned a great deal more about the Jackson Heights that, without my own knowledge, has become a place of comfort and community for me. These interviews gave insight into a neighborhood that can be a safe haven for so many people and so rich with culture but also lack the integration of its different ethnicities to make it a truly diverse, multicultural neighborhood. I also really appreciate Shi Ting and Noshin’s optimism for the future of Jackson Heights and their faith in the younger generation to blur the lines between the different communities. Although I do not know if the neighborhood will ever be fully interspersed with its different ethnicities, I do believe that the strong sense of community that is found there will continue to keep the neighborhood alive.
