Why do we always talk about immigrants with a language of “difference”? Neighborhood change and conflicts in Queens, New York

ABSTRACT

The literature on planning in immigrant communities has been one based on the premise that immigrants are different from native-born people, and therefore planning for immigrant communities must therefore also be different. In this article, we challenge that premise through a discussion of a set of neighborhood developments and conflicts in Queens, New York, the most diverse county in the United States. We root those conflicts not in different cultural practices, but in the working of racial capitalism. The stories in Queens are stories not of conflicts of identity, they are conflicts of class; even if those class conflicts are inherently racialized.

Acknowledgment

The authors thank Tarry Hum, Bob Lake, Arturo Sanchez, Sam Stein, Laura Wolf-Powers, and the steering committee of the Western Queens CLT for ideas and thoughts on this manuscript. Any errors remain our own.

Notes

1. Appiah (2006, p. xxi).

2. Hall (1996, p. 55).

3. This is not counting two remote fishing counties along the Alaskan coast which have less than 5,000 people. Thus, technically it is the third most diverse county in the country, but we are discounting the top two because of their size, anomalousness, and remoteness.

4. We thank Sam Stein (personal communication) for pointing out that this was obviously a useful framing.

5. The same, of course, could be said about even this more nuanced depiction of the different populations. For instance, Pakistanis and Indians are obviously rather different people, and the lumping of them together into the category of “South Asian” is not problem-free.

6. Growing up there in the late 1970s and 1980s, it was very clear which neighborhoods you stayed away from if you weren’t White—or your group of friends was racially and/or ethnically mixed—and you wanted to avoid White violence.

7. There were several very detailed and important ethnographies of neighborhoods in Queens as they were becoming majority-immigrant or shortly after they had become majority-immigrant (see, for instance, Jones-Correa, 1998; Ricourt & Danta, 2003; Sanjek, 1998).

8. The yards are not empty but used by both the Long Island Railroad commuter trains, as well as Amtrak, the national rail system in the United States. But they are “empty” from the perspective of the real estate industry and the local state that often acts as though real estate development is the only goal (see Stein, 2019).

9. Astoria is the neighborhood due north of LIC.

10. This section leans heavily on the detailed case study conducted by Stein and Hum (2020).

11. It was, perhaps, this sense of a sidewalk ballet that brought filmmaker Frederick Wiseman to the area to film his documentary “In Jackson Heights” (Wiseman, 2015).

12. We cannot find a written record of the Councilmember saying that. Also, both of Ms. Ferreras’s (now Ferreras-Copeland) parents are Dominican, but she was born in New York City.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James DeFilippis

James DeFilippis is a professor of Urban Planning at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. He is the author or editor of six books, around 50 articles and book chapters, and many applied monographs and reports for practitioners and advocates.

Benjamin F. Teresa

Benjamin F. Teresa is an Assistant Professor in the Urban and Regional Studies and Planning program at Virginia Commonwealth University. He studies the role of finance and economic change in cities, focusing on how those most affected by urban political economic transformation develop political capacity and autonomy. He is the co-founder and co-director of the RVA Eviction Lab, which is an initiative that strategically uses data and research to support policy, advocacy, and community-based action to address housing instability.