Jackson Heights: The Most Diverse Neighborhood on Earth

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]There is a single square mile in Queens where you can hear more languages spoken in one afternoon than anywhere else on the surface of the planet. Linguists and demographers have measured it. Over 160 languages are in active [music] daily use inside fewer than 2 square kilometers. There is [music] no place on Earth that is denser ethnically than this one neighborhood.

[00:00:25]Most New Yorkers have never been there.

[00:00:28]Most tourists do not know it exists. The neighborhood is called Jackson Heights.

[00:00:33]The story of how it became the most diverse square mile on Earth is also the story of how American immigration law, a Supreme Court ruling, and four generations of refugees built a piece of the city that nobody put in the brochure.

[00:00:50]Jackson Heights was not built for [music] any of this.

[00:00:53]The neighborhood was created in 1909 by a real estate company called the Queensboro Corporation. [music] Their lead developer was a man named Edward Archibald MacDougall. He built Jackson Heights as a garden city.

[00:01:08]Six-story brick apartment buildings were arranged around interior gardens, and the development featured restricted access >> [music] >> and restricted residency. The covenants on every deed in the original development explicitly prohibited Jewish, Catholic, and black tenants.

[00:01:26]The advertising in the 1920s [music] promised in print a community of restricted clientele.

[00:01:32]For 35 years, it worked.

[00:01:35]Jackson Heights was a white [music] Protestant enclave walking distance to the Roosevelt Avenue elevated train designed for upper-middle-class commuters who wanted a suburban feel without leaving the borough.

[00:01:48]Then in 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley versus Kramer that racially restrictive housing covenants were not enforceable [music] in court.

[00:01:59]The legal architecture of the restricted neighborhood collapsed. The covenants stayed on the deeds, technically, but courts would not uphold them. Jackson Heights, on paper, was suddenly open.

[00:02:11]Then, in 1965, [music] Congress passed the Hart-Celler Immigration Act. It ended the 1890-based national origins quota system that had been in place since 1924.

[00:02:23]For the first time in over 40 years, large-scale immigration from outside northern Europe was legally possible.

[00:02:31]The covenant was dead. The quota was dead. Jackson Heights was about to be remade. The first wave came from Colombia.

[00:02:39]In the 1960s, Colombia was emerging from a 14-year period of political violence called La Violencia, during which roughly 200,000 Colombians had been killed in rural conflict between liberal and conservative paramilitaries.

[00:02:55]Many middle-class urban Colombians decided that the country was not going to stabilize, and they left.

[00:03:01]The largest concentration that came to New York settled in Jackson Heights.

[00:03:06]>> [music] >> They bought up apartments in buildings that had been losing white residents to the suburbs since the late '50s.

[00:03:13]They opened bakeries. They opened travel agencies. They opened restaurants on Roosevelt Avenue.

[00:03:19]By 1975, there were so many Colombians in the strip between 82nd and 94th streets [music] that the neighborhood acquired an informal Spanish nickname.

[00:03:29]That nickname was Chapinerito, after the Chapinero district of Bogota.

[00:03:35]The image Americans have of Colombian Jackson Heights from the '80s is shaped almost entirely by film and television that focused on cocaine cartels operating in the strip. That image [music] is a fabrication.

[00:03:50]The actual Colombian community in Jackson Heights in 1985 [music] was, like every immigrant community in the city, made up of restaurant workers and bakers and teachers and accountants.

[00:04:02]The cartel infrastructure that operated in the neighborhood was a tiny fraction of the population.

[00:04:09]The reputation that stuck was the version Hollywood needed for an '80s cop show. The community has spent 40 years living under a stereotype that the people who profited from telling it never had to share.

[00:04:23]The Ecuadorians came next, starting in the late 1970s.

[00:04:28]Most were from the Andean Highlands, from cities like Cuenca and Loja. They worked the construction trades. They settled around 90th Street. They opened up churches that held mass in Quechua as well as Spanish.

[00:04:41]The Mexicans arrived later, mostly from the state of Puebla, starting in the 1990s. They opened the taquerias that line Roosevelt Avenue today.

[00:04:51]The pollo asado places that line the side streets, the bakeries that sell pan dulce out of carts. And now, the Venezuelans.

[00:05:00]The Venezuelan diaspora began as a trickle in the early 2000s. It became a flood after 2017 [music] when the Maduro government's economic collapse turned hyperinflation into outright famine.

[00:05:13]The bolivar lost more than 99% of its value.

[00:05:17]Hospitals ran out of basic medicines, supermarket shelves emptied, people lost weight by the kilo.

[00:05:25]By 2023, around 7 million Venezuelans had left the country.

[00:05:32]That is the largest displacement crisis in the Western Hemisphere, larger in absolute numbers >> [music] >> than the Syrian refugee crisis at its peak.

[00:05:42]The largest concentration of those who reached New York settled in Jackson Heights >> [music] >> and the adjacent neighborhood of Corona.

[00:05:49]They arrived through every possible route, overland through Mexico, by air from Bogota, by bus from Texas.

[00:05:57]They opened arepa carts on Roosevelt Avenue within months of landing.

[00:06:01]>> [music] >> They sent remittances back to family in Caracas, where $100 a month meant the difference between eating and not eating.

[00:06:10]The arepa lady, a Colombian street vendor named Maria Piedad Cano, became famous on Roosevelt Avenue selling Colombian-style arepas through the '80s and the '90s.

[00:06:20]As the Venezuelan population in the neighborhood grew through the 2010s, Venezuelan arepa stands proliferated within blocks of her cart.

[00:06:29]The neighborhood went from one arepa style to two on the same corner.

[00:06:34]A single Latin American restaurant in Jackson Heights today might [music] list on one menu Colombian bandeja paisa, Ecuadorian lapingachos, Mexican mole poblano, and Venezuelan pabellón criollo.

[00:06:51]That menu is the demographic [music] history of the neighborhood in four dishes.

[00:06:57]And the Latin American story is only the loudest layer. Walk half a block east and the alphabet changes.

[00:07:05]In the 1970s, a wave of South Asian immigration, mostly Indian and Bangladeshi, began establishing itself along 74th Street between Roosevelt Avenue and 37th Avenue.

[00:07:18]The block became known as Little India.

[00:07:21]Today, it holds the densest concentration of Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani businesses anywhere outside the subcontinent.

[00:07:30]Sari shops, gold jewelry stores, sweet shops selling jalebi by the pound.

[00:07:36]Starting in the late 1990s, a third community arrived. Tibetans and Nepalese, [music] displaced by the Chinese occupation of Tibet and by economic collapse in Nepal, started concentrating around 37th Avenue and the side streets above it.

[00:07:53]The neighborhood today contains the largest Tibetan community in the United States.

[00:07:59]Buddhist monasteries in storefronts, restaurants serving momos and thukpa, a cultural festival every March that brings Tibetans from across the country.

[00:08:11]There are also Filipino, Chinese, Korean, Dominican, Egyptian, Yemeni, Russian, Polish, and Bukharan Jewish communities operating within the same square mile, each with its own commercial [music] corridor, its own community organizations, its own Sunday morning worship services.

[00:08:31]Researchers have documented over 160 languages in regular daily use. The actual number is probably higher because some communities speak languages that have no recognized status in the census.

[00:08:44][music] The 7 train, which runs through Jackson Heights on the elevated tracks above Roosevelt Avenue, was officially designated the International Express by the White House Millennium Council in 1999.

[00:09:01]The designation was based on the observation that a single ride from Times Square to Flushing passes through more distinct [music] ethnic neighborhoods than any other comparable stretch of public transit >> [music] >> in the United States.

[00:09:16]Long Island City to Sunnyside to [music] Woodside to Jackson Heights to Elmhurst to Corona to Flushing.

[00:09:24]Each stop is a separate world. The 7 train is the most reliable way to take an unofficial tour of 50 different countries in 50 minutes. Most New Yorkers have never done it.

[00:09:37]There is something off about the way Jackson Heights gets described in the press.

[00:09:42]The phrase most diverse square mile gets repeated over and over, but the framing is always for the rest of us.

[00:09:50]The implicit reader is somebody from outside who is impressed by the variety.

[00:09:56]Nobody asks the people who actually live there whether the diversity feels like a feature or like a feature wall. For a Venezuelan kid in a Colombian classroom in a building that used to be Italian taught by a teacher from Bangladesh, the experience is not a research [music] statistic. It is daily life. The labels we use for what makes the place special are mostly imposed by people who do not have to live with them. Jackson Heights also has the second [music] oldest pride parade in New York City after the Manhattan one.

[00:10:31]The parade started in 1993.

[00:10:34]It was the direct response to the murder three years earlier of a 29-year-old gay man named Julio Rivera. Rivera was a bartender. He lived a few blocks from 37th Avenue. On the night of July 2nd, 1990, three teenagers attacked him in a schoolyard on that Avenue and beat him to death.

[00:10:54]The Rivera murder politicized the Queens gay community and connected it to the immigrant Latin American community in a way that Manhattan activism had never had to do.

[00:11:06]The pride parade today is bilingual. The march route passes the corner where Rivera was killed. Nobody in Manhattan tells [music] this part of the city's gay history.

[00:11:19]Why does the rest of New York not know any of this?

[00:11:23]The answer is partly geography.

[00:11:27]Jackson Heights sits in central Queens, off the cultural map for tourists who never get past Times Square, the 7 train runs through it on an elevated track, and most Manhattan residents who take that train past Jackson Heights are going to a Mets game at Citi Field. They never get off.

[00:11:46]The answer is partly marketing.

[00:11:49]Jackson Heights has no waterfront, no skyline, no museum that pulls in a Saturday afternoon crowd. The cultural infrastructure is rotated through the homes and the storefronts [music] and the small restaurants of working-class immigrants, none of which are organized to be a tourist attraction.

[00:12:09]The answer is partly that Queens, the borough, [music] has been culturally invisible to the rest of America for most of its history.

[00:12:18]The city's image of itself is built around Manhattan first, Brooklyn second, and the other three boroughs are treated as residential suburbs of the first two.

[00:12:28]The most diverse place on Earth happens to sit in the borough >> [music] >> that gets the least coverage.

[00:12:34]And Jackson Heights is not the only place this is true.

[00:12:38]Sunset Park in Brooklyn has the largest Chinatown in the city and almost no national press coverage.

[00:12:46]Flushing has the largest Korean community in the country. The Bronx has the largest Garifuna community in the world outside Central America. The neighborhoods doing the most demographic work right now are the neighborhoods nobody is writing about.

[00:13:02]If your family came through Jackson Heights, name the country. Name the year you or your parents or your grandparents arrived. Name the street [music] they lived on.

[00:13:13]We are building the only archive of a neighborhood that, in the official New York imagination, is mostly [music] a stop on the way to a Mets game.

[00:13:22]On Roosevelt Avenue, under the 7 train tracks on a Wednesday evening in 2026.

[00:13:28][music] A Venezuelan woman in her 40s sells arepas out of a cart on the corner of 82nd Street.

[00:13:38]The arepas are stuffed with shredded beef cooked the way her mother cooked them in Maracay before they left in 2018.

[00:13:47]The corner used to have an Ecuadorian [music] woman selling humitas.

[00:13:52]The Ecuadorian woman moved to Astoria 3 years ago. The corner before that had a Colombian guy selling empanadas.

[00:14:01]He moved to Long Island in 2009.

[00:14:04]The Venezuelan woman has a daughter who is 14 and goes to school on 86th Street with a classmate from Bukhara and another from Kathmandu.

[00:14:15]The three of them speak to each other in English.

[00:14:18]The Venezuelan woman is going home in 2 hours. She does not know it yet, but the corner will belong to somebody else by 2030.

[00:14:27]The line is already starting to form for the 7 train.