November 4, 2012, Sunday, 308

The Peopling of New York City:About

From The Peopling of New York City

DON'T FORGET ABOUT US

If you were reading about us in a pamphlet for the Macaulay Honors College program, you might read something similar to the following:

We are Muslim, we are Jewish, we are Christian. We are American, Pakistani, Polish, and Indian. We are white and we are black. We are English majors, Political Science majors, and Pre-Med. We drive our own cars, and we take the bus and subway. We live in houses and apartments in Queens, Brooklyn, and Long Island. We've been living in America from anywhere from a few years to generations. We are the Spring 2008 Freshman Macaulay Honors College Peopling of NYC class, under the guidance of Professor Jeff Maskovsky and Tech Fellow Helen Davis.

Certainly, we are all these things: nothing in the above paragraph is inaccurate, and that is indeed the way many of us would have chosen to represent ourselves at the outset of doing this project. However, having critically analyzed Jackson Heights in terms of how the sale of cultural diversity ignores the inequalities of the political economy, it is clear that this is an inadequate way to represent ourselves. The real questions about our class stem from where certain differences arise. For example, why do some of us have our own cars; why are some of our neighborhoods linked directly to the subway system and others are not; and how did our families come to live in these neighborhoods? Further, what factors allowed all of us to wind up in Macaulay Honors at Queens College? What factors influenced our choice to come here? Could one of the factors possibly be the advertised diversity as displayed above? In an increasingly globalized world, being associated with multiculturalism is a benefit in the politico-economic sphere: in many ways, it helps our perceived status to be associated with cultural diversity. Yet, this shift up the ladder of status threatens to overshadow class differences within our class, which are less spoken about, but are still present. It is necessary to acknowledge those differences and raise these questions in order to represent ourselves holistically.

One thing that was true for most, if not all of us, however -- regardless of class differences -- was that we entered the class having more or less the idea that communities simply form randomly, and the images and symbols representing a neighborhood are arbitrarily assigned. However, through readings of expert social scientists, evidence gathered from walking tours and field research in Jackson Heights, and guidance from Professor Maskovsky and Helen, we realized how wrong a class of college freshmen could be. The exploration of Jackson Heights opened doors to a neighborhood where residential, government, and real estate forces interplay to create diversity and subsequently to destroy it. From our exploration, we started to question the real definition of diversity, ponder the ulterior motives of those who represent Jackson Heights in one way or another, and try to come to our own truths of what is happening in the neighborhood. The process of knowledge creation involved in creating this website was often rocky, and new insights weren't always easy to see: but we hope that we've made discoveries about the processes involved in neighborhood representations and development, which will interest you as much as it interests us.

We're done talking about ourselves now: go see what we've learned and what we did!

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