On a hot summer day as a child, I wanted nothing more than kulfi: a South Asian creamy ice cream bar. While my parents spent hours buying minutes to call Bangladesh, shopping for groceries and cultural clothing, Jackson Heights to me meant the milky taste of mango on my tongue.
My lifeblood came in a small cone-shaped popsicle mold, the treat on a plastic stick I wielded as a lightsaber. Even as a child, I could sense the deep dangers that my community faced; the aftershocks of the 2008 recession, the record number of deportations under the Obama presidency, being Muslim in a post-9/11 world. In Jackson Heights, my true weapon was the crowd of people that swarmed the streets alongside us, the constant chatter of our mother tongue in a country where most people have never even heard of our ethnicity.
In the daily struggle to make rent, larger issues like registering to vote faded into the background. My parents weren’t even citizens in those early days, having only received a green card after years of being undocumented. It logically followed that the congressional representative for Jackson Heights, perhaps the most diverse place in the world, was a white man who did not even send his kids to school in New York. In the nineteen years that this virtual stranger held this congressional seat, he likely never had the magical experience of tasting the kulfi that was available at every street corner of our ethnic enclave.
Like city regulations that made rent increases or a lack of heating in the winter illegal, our community did not know anything about the democratic process of civic engagement. The concept of standing up to our landlord or engaging in advocacy was one of the many things lost in translation, a mystery in the same way I struggled to describe what exactly made kulfi different from regular American ice cream in my elementary school grasp of the English language.
The key to changing this sense of political powerlessness was another treasure found in Jackson Heights. The neighborhood has been home for organizations like Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), who have continued to show up for immigrant community members facing police violence, unsafe working conditions and other human rights abuses. These struggles are not just local, but international: Jackson Heights is also the epicenter of the Tibetan-American diaspora, who have been championing their home country’s fight for sovereignty for the past few decades. In the same way that kulfi has been my compass to freedom as a Bengali-American, momos have been an integral part of the Tibetan-American experience. In Jackson Heights, the Himalayan dumping is more than just a street food, but also the subject of a fierce debate, as attendees of the annual Momo Crawl decide which local restaurant has the best version. All proceeds from the event go to the nonprofit Students for a Free Tibet, yet another way in which food, culture, and politics intersect in Jackson Heights.
In a college anthropology class, I learned that immigrant communities often follow a pattern of behavior where the first generation primarily speaks in their ancestral language, their children are proficient in both the dominant and heritage language, but the third generation can only speak in the dominant tongue. This cycle, applicable to traditional knowledge and cultural traditions, is repeated all around the world, moved by the larger-than-life forces of assimilation and quests for a better life. But in Jackson Heights, where the streets are lined with tight networks of support and kin for migrants, endangered languages endure.
Many of these mother tongues are traced back to Nepal, where the deep disenfranchisement and poverty only serves to push Indigenous people further into assimilation. Deep political conflicts starting in the 1990s have been the big catalyst for Nepali immigration to the United States. In Jackson Heights, those from the same ethnic group find each other, forming communities and revitalizing endangered tongues like Seke or Gurung in the process. In this way, the culture is given a new life, thousands of miles away from their traditional homelands but still standing strong. This ancestral laughter, joy, and connection despite immense obstacles is what Jackson Heights is all about.
