The City's "New Immigrants"

...In examining the role these groups play in New York, we should not forget the importance of immigrant communities for their home countries...

...As "minorities" become the numerical majority, they are also becoming vastly more diverse internally...

...On the island of St...

...The range of cultural diversity among the immigrant groups is probably greater than it has ever been...

...As Paule Marshall has recently written, a walk along Brooklyn's Fulton Street today brings one in contact with . . . the sights and sounds, colors, smells, and textures of the entire Caribbean archipelago . . . Fulton Street today is the aroma of our kitchen long ago . . . it's the sound of reggae and calypso and ska and the newest rage, soca, erupting from a hundred speakers outside the record stores...

...today Asian leaders worry that positive stereotypes may cloud reality as much as negative ones did...

...Blacks frequently complain that Korean merchants won't hire blacks in their own neighborhoods and drain capital from the area...

...The Mighty Sparrow, Trinidad's leading calypso singer, now records exclusively in Brooklyn...

...Hampered by poverty and often yearning to return home, they have only recently begun to make any inroads into the city's political life...

...At the same time they represent distinct cultural and political traditions...

...In 1976 the U.S...

...The ambivalence with which New York's "native" Hispanics and the new immigrants view each other is reflected in the recent evolution of that grand old New York tradition, the ethnic parade...

...1° Ernest Preeg, "Migration and Development in Hispaniola" in Robert Pastor ed., Migration and Development in the Caribbean (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1985...

...8 Linda Basch, "The Politics of Caribbeanization: Vincentians and Grenadians in New York City," in Sutton and Chaney, op...

...Soviet émigrés had scarcely begun to settle in Brooklyn before they were being referred to as the "last white hope" by the area's real estate dealers, and some Asians seem to pick up American racial attitudes so quickly that one is reminded of a very bitter routine by Richard Pryor about Vietnamese refugees at citizenship class being taught the proper pronunciation of the word "nigger...

...and are slowly beginning to participate in U. S . politics...

...This ideal has seldom been achieved in practice, particularly where nonwhite people are concerned...

...In an automotive, decentralized, sprawling city with a minimum of public life, contacts between natives and immigrants and among immigrants themselves are kept to a minimum...

...Such conflicts are perhaps inevitable...

...When it comes to political action, however, such unity is much harder to find...

...The largest segment of New York's Hispanic population, Puerto Ricans are also the poorest and, according to Angelo Falcon of the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy Studies, the most likely to see themselves as a racial minority akin to blacks, rather than as an ethnic group analogous to the descendants of European immigrants...

...That may sound hopelessly idealistic, but organizations such as East Brooklyn Churches have, in a modest way, made considerable progress in that direction...

...Although the overwhelming majority of the participants were Puerto Rican, the European elements of Hispanic culture were emphasized and floats representing various Latin American nations and Spain were prominently displayed...

...33, New York University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, June 1982...

...Living principally in upper Manhattan, Dominicans are the largest single nationality group among the post-1965 immigrants in the city...

...Hispanic" Diversity Hispanics, the largest of New York's new immigrant populations, generally receive much less favorable press than do Asians...

...At its best, New York has historically shown the potential for a public life that emphasizes equality without requiring conformity...

...This has cost the community many of its more distinctive institutions as well as its political power bases...

...The Koreans respond that they have revitalized dying commercial strips with incredibly hard work and, for the most part, family labor, which if paid in hourly salaries would not come to minimum, much less union wages...

...New York's contributions to the nation's high and low culture, as well as its occasional unease with the rest of America, reflect this fact...

...It is a model of politics in which diversity is welcome and perhaps even rewarded...

...9 Sheri Grasmuck, "The Impact of Emigration on National Development...

...The Cultural Center's annual festival has little trouble selling out large halls with four concerts that feature eclectic mixtures of Puerto Rican, Brazilian, West Indian, Dominican, and Afro-American performers...

...Not surprisingly, they are poorer than other major immigrant groups: their median family income in 1980 was only $9,681...

...Yet this does not bode well for the future of the civic culture...

...a unionsponsored day care center and college scholarship program now play an important role in 498 • DISSENT CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES community life...

...Demographics dictate that in the future coalition will be even more important, yet for many reasons it may be difficult to achieve...

...Generally entering the country on tourist visas, these young people fill many of the underpaid service positions in Manhattan's chic restaurants, bars, and boutiques, where white faces and "cultured" accents may add the requisite touch of atmosphere...

...attacks on "clannish" small merchants in black and white working-class areas...

...45, New York University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, April 1984...

...Still the idea of different people coming together in the public sphere is a central part of the city's cultural history...

...They have revitalized many older white ethnic communities, and have founded their own enclaves...

...They include millionaires fleeing the uncertain future of Hong Kong and the penniless, traumatized survivors of the Cambodian holocaust...

...many are third- and even fourth-generation "New Yoricans...

...Their own diversity further complicates the landscape...

...their median income is higher than that of native blacks, although far lower than that of Asians and native whites...

...Concentrated in Queens, these groups are pulled politically in various directions...

...West Indians often share a feeling of kinship with American blacks and express resentment at being used by conservative academics like economist Thomas Sowell as a living refutation of the devastating effects of American racism...

...Sociologist Peter Rose, making the now standard comparison between Asians and Jews, maintains that while many Asians have benefited from affirmative action programs, most remain committed to private enterprise rather than power politics or the welfare state as the vehicle of upward mobility, a fact that neoconservatives find particularly admirable...

...Yet in 1985, when it sought to add a panel discussion on political empowerment to the series of events, the panelists far outnumbered the audience...

...The economy of 1987—apart from the resurgence of the sweatshop—is not the economy of 1907...

...On a practical level, one can hardly blame them...

...The mixing of folk elements from throughout the world is today's most distinctive "New York" sound: a sound that has started to spill out of the nightclubs and into the more rarefied world of the theater, as evidenced in the recent work of Lee Breuer and Bob Telson...

...Far from proof of having "made it," the small business is merely a way for newcomers with some capital but little English and no American credentials to make enough money to move into easier lines of work and to educate their children, who will then regain for the family the professional status the parents have lost...

...Already New York is the world center for Caribbean music, theater, and intellectual life, as institutions such as the City University of New York Caribbean Studies Association and its new journal, Cimarron, strive to bring together the various strains of West Indian culture with Hispanic, Caribbean, and AfroAmerican elements...

...Occasional Paper No...

...the latter soon died from lack of interest...

...5 For a more detailed description of these events, see Philip Kasinitz and Judith Freidenberg-Herbstein, "Caribbean Cultural Celebrations in New York City: The Puerto Rican Parade and the West Indian Carnival" in Constance Sutton and Elsa Chaney eds., Caribbean Life in New York City: Social and Cultural Dimensions (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1987...

...Rumors (always officially denied) of exclusionary quotas at elite colleges...

...Cleo or John John In New York, all that done They don't have to know who is who New York equalize you...

...New York institutions reaching out to these communities report widely differing experiences...

...Like Puerto Ricans, Dominicans are concentrated in blue-collar employment and as such have borne the brunt of the recent economic transformation of New York...

...In the early 1960s the parade split into an exclusively Puerto Rican parade and a general "Hispanic" event...

...This coming together is as filled with FALL • 1987 • 503 CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES creative possibilities for West Indians today as it was for immigrants in the early years of the century...

...In an increasingly privatized city, diversity may matter less than it once did...

...For one thing, it has widened the cultural gap between New York and the rest of the United States...

...How do they relate to the native black population...

...New York is also a contributor to the popular culture of the immigrants' home countries...

...There is a large element of truth in that...

...q Notes I Katherine Davis Fishman, "American High," New York, March 2, 1987, p. 78...

...In the last several years some West Indian leaders have complained bitterly that Afro-American politicians take them too much for granted...

...Occasional Paper No...

...Small wonder, then, that some Asian students seem driven, and that they often focus their abundant energies in the certainties of mathematics and the hard sciences...

...The face of Asian immigration most familiar to New Yorkers has been that of the small business entrepreneur...

...By mid-decade the City Planning Department estimated the city's immigrant population at 30 percent, and it will most likely top one third by 1990...

...Political refugees from Vietnam and Laos have different outlooks than those fleeing poverty in the Philippines...

...More than one journalist has suggested that "LAX" airport is the new Ellis Island...

...It is impossible to watch the recent explosion in the foreign-language press (New York is now FALL • 1987 • 497 CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES home to four Haitian, three Korean, and several Chinese, Indian, and Russian papers), the fights in the Dominican community over the relative importance of local politics here versus the struggles back home, the academic success of the children of Chinese garment workers, the tentative steps being made by West Indians in Brooklyn Democratic party politics, or the role of recent immigrants in the intellectual life at the City University, without being struck by the resemblance to earlier periods...

...The 1980 census, even with its alleged undercount of undocumented aliens, found that 24 percent of New York's population were foreign-born...

...Fusion across these broad categories is, of course, even more problematic...

...Hispanics," a synthetic category if ever there was one, are sowing the seeds of a corporate identity despite their deep internal divisions...

...They are as varied as the nations they come from—Greece, Poland, Ireland, Great Britain, Albania— although high rates of self-employment are common across the board...

...It is deeply disturbing that the public schools, once an arena that brought various groups together, may be losing this function, as many immigrants, like many natives, establish private FALL • 1987 • 505 CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES schools along ethnic lines...

...It's Jamaican meat patties . . . and fast food pulori, a Trinidadian East Indian pancake doused in pepper sauce . . . Fulton Street is Haitian Creole heard amid any number of highly inventive, musically accented versions of English...

...It is true that in the two other cities most affected by the latest "new" immigration, Miami and Los Angeles, an even higher percentage of the populace is foreign-born...

...New immigrants are concentrated in a few metropolitan areas and nowhere does the range of different nationalities equal that of New York...

...Not only do the public schools now give instruction in seven languages (eight if you count Mandarin and Cantonese separately), but programs to serve eight additional language groups with instruction primarily in English are now in place...

...13 The unspoken truth that lies behind the calls for nonwhite unity in New York today is that relations between native blacks and immigrants, including black immigrants, while increasingly robust in the cultural realm, are often badly strained in the political one...

...For the most part these immigrants are concentrated in the low-wage but rapidly expanding service sector, especially in nursing, clerical work, and child care.' European Groups Finally, there are at least 200,000 recent immigrants from Europe in New York today, the largest number of whom are Russian Jews and Southern Italians...

...2 What those who celebrate this process often miss is the psychological toll it takes on the children, particularly if they cannot "achieve" at a level that justifies the parents' sacrifice...

...Hard work, communitybased credit-generating mechanisms, and ethnic ties have allowed recent immigrants to virtually monopolize several of the small business sectors: Koreans in the fruit and vegetable trade, Indians in the newsstand business, and, increasingly, Arabs in neighborhood grocery stores...

...In some ways it is a familiar question...

...The Dominican community undertook its own event in Washington Heights and the annual "Hispanic" parade was revived...

...One institution that has tried to bring together Hispanic, West Indian, Afro-American, and African cultural actors is the Caribbean Cultural Center, whose lectures, concerts, exhibitions, and conferences all put forward a self-consciously pan-ethnic vision based on the shared West African roots of the groups in question...

...For many such immigrants, the question of where they will fit in the city's racial division of power will depend largely on circumstances and on leadership...

...The dismal economic situation in the Dominican Republic means that many long-time activists are now resigning themselves to staying in the U.S...

...The celebration of the new immigrants reflects in part a dissatisfaction with the American present: because they are different from other Americans, immigrants embody what is best in New York's (if not necessarily in America's) cultural traditions...

...On the other hand, the City University continues to play a vital part in the intellectual life of immigrants...

...In fact, for Hispanic as for black immigrants, the pressure for social status discourages intraracial assimilation and encourages ethnic separation...

...For many recent immigrants, particularly those from the Caribbean, the fact that home is only a low-cost air fare away also makes for different attitudes about home and host countries...

...11 Quoted in Robert Pastor, "Introduction: The Policy Challenge," in Pastor, op...

...In the 1950s there was an "Hispanic Parade...

...Vincent, anthropologist Linda Basch notes, New York community leaders frequently return home to work for candidates in national elections...

...New York has brought them together, and as a result the city is increasingly the center of an international Afro-Caribbean culture...

...Yet Puerto Ricans remain a distinct and remarkably unassimilated population in New York despite their long history here...

...The New York Haitian press, long the main voice of the opposition, played a major role in the overthrow of the Duvalier regime...

...Asians, of course, do not even share that, and only time will tell whether "Asian" will ever become a meaningful category to those within it...

...In these intersections, new possibilities are created and new syntheses are born...

...Angelo Falcon, Black and Latino Politics in New York City: Race and Ethnicity in a Changing Urban Context (NY: Institute for Puerto Rican Policy Studies, Inc., 1985...

...One anthropologist studying three communities in the Dominican Republic estimates that one third of all families there receive money from relatives in New York...

...For at least a century and a half, New York has been the port of arrival for large numbers of immigrants and the point of departure for their ambivalently American children...

...Maurice Bishop frequently said that the most important Grenadian constituency was in Brooklyn, and several long-time Brooklynites held positions in his government, while others have been important sources of financial support for the party that eventually replaced it...

...and the bitter disappointments faced by those merchant's children when they discover that top grades from a top school do not guarantee a top job in corporate America—these kinds of discrimination are more like those faced in the past by white ethnic groups than like systematic racial segregation...

...Yet this progress seems less the result of entrepreneurial activity (as Sowell would have it) than of high labor-force participation, particularly by women...

...On the other hand, alignment with these larger groups could bring significant political clout...

...In the pages of New York magazine and the New York Times Magazine's quarterly "Worlds of New York" section, the new immigrants are now seen as a continuation of New York's most distinctive tradition...

...In the context of this public life the haphazard bringing together of people from everywhere in the world cannot help but be a creative force...

...FALL • 1987 • 499 CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES citizens by birth, and most of them were born right here in New York...

...6 Eugenia Georges, "New Immigrants and the Political Process: Dominicans in New York...

...4 In addition, the social bases of Puerto Rican ethnic identity may well be eroding...

...Over the years, Puerto Ricans have lost most of their geographical enclaves to urban renewal, arson, abandonment and, most recently, gentrification...

...By contrast, in Korean-owned garment factories, kinship ties between employer and employee, as well as barriers of language and distrust of outsiders, have stifled unionization efforts almost completely...

...It's Rastas with their hennaed dreadlocks and the impassioned political debates of the rum shops back home brought out onto the street corners...

...For all of CUNY's problems, it remains as good a model of a pluralist institution as we have...

...In Brooklyn one can now take the test to operate an automobile in Russian, and in lower Manhattan my Citibank automatic teller will "speak" to me in Spanish or Chinese...

...Whether the new Latin immigrants maintain their national identities, or make "Hispanic" a self-conscious group rather than a mere demographer's category, will depend, in large part, on the extent to which they share common institutions...

...Major Taiwanese entertainers now travel frequently between Taipei and Queens, and one of the most popular Merengue bands in Latin America is based in the northern New Jersey suburbs...

...Even Tocqueville paused in his account of American voluntarism and community to warn that New York was different: the sizable "rabble" of free blacks and immigrants that had formed by the 1830s would, he warned, soon make the city ungovernable, save by force of arms...

...Numbering at least 500,000 (twice that much if the most liberal estimates of the undocumented population are to be believed), these immigrants from 500 • DISSENT CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES FALL • 1987 . 501 CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES the West Indies, Haiti, and increasingly Africa, hail from historically interrelated but often insular and generally small countries...

...504 • DISSENT CONFLICTS AND COIISTITOISICUS For Hispanic and black immigrants who make up the majority of the new New Yorkers, relations with native blacks are deeply ambivalent, and matters are not helped when scholars use the relative gains of dark-skinned immigrants to point up the alleged failures of native blacks and native ("New Yorican") Hispanics...

...See Philip Kasinitz, "New York's West Indian Community," in New York Affairs, Spring 1987...

...Yet nostalgia should not be allowed to obscure reality...

...12 Paule Marshall, "The Rising Islanders of Bed-Stuy," New York Times Magazine, "The Worlds of New York," November 3, 1985...

...In this way the immigrant 502 • DISSENT CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES communities serve as bridges between their homelands and New York, bridges across which money, political ideology, and both high and popular culture flow both ways...

...Several years ago the Mighty Sparrow summed it up in a calypso which became a theme for the Labor Day Carnival celebration on Eastern Parkway: You can be from St...

...The language of white ethnicity, if often tinged with regret for lost ties and traditions, has largely been a language of hope for collective upward mobility...

...and, as Kim himself attests, even the social sciences...

...It also contains the danger that the various component parts will seal themselves off in opposition to the whole, the results of which might, at best, be something akin to Los Angeles and, at worst, Beirut...

...Cities, Louis Wirth observed half a century ago, are the natural breeding ground of hybrids, and New York remains the kind of city he had in mind...

...For an increasing number of the students in the public school system identified as "Hispanic," English is their first language...

...Despite the legendary insularity of Chinatown, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union has made significant inroads in the Chinese garment industry...

...Today these immigrants in New York find the meanings of racial categories in flux...

...Maintaining their distinctiveness from other Hispanics may mean higher status in the eyes of whites...

...State Department estimated that the number of people from tiny Belize working in the U.S., mostly in New York, was larger than the entire Belizean labor force, and that money they sent home exceeded the earnings from sugar exports, Belize's other major source of foreign exchange...

...12 Thus, what at first seems the preservation of something old is in fact the creation of something quite new...

...This has not been as true for Hispanics or Asians, to say nothing of the rejection and segregation generally experienced by blacks...

...For all of the discrimination that white immigrants have suffered, groups considered to be "white" have long been seen as at least potentially assimilable into American life...

...5 Estimates of New York's Dominican population now range from 300,000 to 600,000, the variance due to the large number of undocumented residents...

...Immigrant and black interests have often been in conflict in this country, but the current immigration has sharpened these tensions...

...Yet like Asians, "Hispanics" do not really constitute a coherent category at all, much less an "ethnic group...

...Yesterday they were the only racial category to suffer complete exclusion from immigration and were for many years barred from naturalization...

...Yet despite n more private schools, more automobiles, and a more individualistic culture, New York continues to have a vibrant public realm compared to most American cities...

...We are the majority culture in this city," asserts Center director Marta Moreno Vega, and she would be right if her broad concept of "we" were shared by more people...

...In New York, common interests and common media are bringing together people previously (to borrow an old quip) divided by a common language...

...Like the earlier "Hispanic" event, this Columbus Day parade emphasizes things Spanish, yet unlike its predecessor, its organization is dominated by South American immigrants, with few Puerto Ricans involved...

...There is also a new European undocumented-immigrant population, perhaps the least-known immigrant group in the city today...

...Asian Immigrants In their journey from "yellow peril" to "model minority," New York's approximately 350,000 Asians have come the furthest in terms of acceptance...

...9 Such remittances account for at least 10 percent of that nation's foreign exchange earnings...

...and fund raising in New York has played a part in every Colombian and Dominican presidential campaign in recent years...

...Friendlier observers have seen New York's immigrant diversity as the key to its vitality and today many look hopefully at the most recent arrivals...

...In New York, by contrast, we cannot help but rub shoulders with the newcomers, and they must rub shoulders with each other...

...Others are found elsewhere in small numbers, but New York's size permits the sort of critical mass needed for selfconscious ethnic communities...

...The politics of post-fiscalcrisis New York is not the politics of the early twentieth century...

...The problem is that both are right...

...Most important is that the overwhelming majority of New York's recent immigrants are nonwhite...

...Yet many young Asian New Yorkers are also moving into the more esoteric (and less lucrative) fields of the arts, particularly classical music (look at any recent graduating class at Juilliard...

...Whether or not common experiences and a common language can bind them into such a group during the next decade will be one of the most interesting political and cultural questions for the New York of tomorrow...

...We are not always aware of these developments, because they often take place in what to the outsider may seem unified ethnic communities...

...Yet Asians remain the victims of prejudice and discrimination...

...Whether the newcomers will embrace such a politics remains to be seen...

...Katherine Davis Fishman, in a recent New York feature on the Lower East Side's Seward Park High School, where four fifths of the students come from non-English-speaking homes, sums up the attitude: "The more things change, the more they remain the same...

...This is not necessarily because New Yorkers are more tolerant, but because the physical conditions of daily life make it impossible to avoid...

...Asian New Yorkers are too diverse to constitute a unified group...

...complaints that their obsessive hard work is destroying the cultured atmosphere of educational institutions and that they have "taken over" New York's best high schools...

...506 • DISSENT...

...3 That, however, is precisely the point...

...More than earlier immigrant waves, the post-1965 immigration is not really a national phenomenon...

...It ignores the real problems many immigrants face and often serves as a not-so-subtle criticism of America's "other" minorities...

...Perhaps even more than in earlier times, New York today teems with exiles, critics, reformers, and students who will go on to shape the future of nations around the world...

...It is not hermetically sealed "urban villages," no matter how appealing that idea of community is, that make New York such a creative place...

...The entrepreneurial skills of these immigrants seem to have catapulted them into the middle class...

...Many, probably most, of New York's nearly two million Hispanics are not, strictly speaking, immigrants at all...

...However, as sociologist Illsoo Kim writes in his fine study of New York's Korean community, The New Urban Immigrants, many of these small business people are highly educated professionals for whom entrepreneurial activity is a new—sometimes distasteful but necessary — sstteepp toward getting a foothold in the new land...

...Finally, there is the possibility of a coalitionbuilding politics that brings together native blacks, immigrants, and native whites around local issues...

...10 In smaller nations the role of remittances is even greater...

...Still, Rose worries that: While more and more Asians have come to represent the best of what those who promulgate "Americanization" would like to create . . . they are not and will not be fully assimilated, at least not in the foreseeable future...

...But in Los Angeles, with the predominance of what Michael Walzer has termed "single-minded" uses of public space, the composition of the population means less for the civic culture...

...Foreign-Born Blacks Perhaps the least visible of all of the new immigrant groups, New York's growing foreignborn black population, has undergone the greatest transformation in diaspora...

...Economically, black immigrants have done relatively well in New York...

...The former grew into a massive political display...

...And our law enforcement officials, long wise in the ways of Italian and Jewish gangsters, must now try to make sense of the doings of that small minority of Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Colombian, Jamaican, Russian, Israeli, and Nigerian entrepreneurs who choose that time-honored route to the "American Dream...

...For all of their entrepreneurial success, they have not yet fallen prey to the "cultural contradictions" of an American capitalism that both requires and erodes non-marketplace engagement...

...On whose terms is this assimilation proceeding...

...It is also true that new immigrants are pulled into the midst of the American dilemma almost immediately on arrival...

...Interestingly, although her constituency is, for the most part, intellectuals, it is in popular music that this fusion has taken place most successfully and actually reaches a mass audience...

...A South Bronx high school principal recently told me that he welcomed the influx of new Vietnamese and Cambodian students into his otherwise black and Puerto Rican school because, "being a minority group themselves, they serve as a good example that you really can make it if you want to...

...built on Caribbean elements to be sure, but brought together in a new and unique way...

...13 In March of 1987 the Center held another conference on the issue of minority empowerment, with significantly better results...

...Yet it is in this rubbing of shoulders that the true vitality of New York lies...

...8 Immigrant New Yorkers also affect the economic life of their home countries...

...When blacks see hard-won gains of political struggle, such as affirmative action, going to benefit recent immigrants, they have every reason to be angry—although how much of this is due to immigrant guile and how much to administrative subversion is not entirely clear...

...But issues such as police brutality and the racial attack in Howard Beach (whose victims were all West Indian immigrants) may serve to pull together people of color across ethnic lines...

...Then, in the early 1980s, two more parades were added...

...their exotic nature is transformed into something familiar and, particularly in contrast with domestic minorities, reassuring to many middle-class whites...

...Corazon Aquino received her college education in Riverdale...

...And it's faces, an endless procession of faces that are mostly black—for these are Mother Africa's children—but with noticeable admixtures here and there of Europe, India and China...

...If that isn't what New York is about, what is...

...3 Peter I. Rose, "Asian Americans: From Pariahs to Paragons" in Nathan Glazer ed., Clamor at the Gates (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1985...

...This was true fifty years ago, and for the most part it continues to be true today...

...Caribbean immigrants, with their insular histories and their huge numbers in New York today, may present an extreme case...

...Their inhabitants are brought together in the schools and the universities, in the parks and the nightclubs, in the subways and the streets, and (although as a socialist it has taken me some time to come to grips with this fact) in the marketplace...

...The Hispanic population also includes Cuban, Colombian, Argentine, and other Latin American immigrants, here for a variety of political and economic reasons...

...Teenage pregnancy among Cambodian refugees excites far less concern than among other groups, and when gunfire between Chinese gang members claimed the life of a teenage guest at a New York University dormitory party a few years ago, the incident was quickly forgotten...

...It is the fact that what villages there are constantly intersect and chafe against each other...

...What does the presence of these newcomers mean to the city as a whole...

...Precisely because they have broken down many barriers of structural exclusion, Asians now find themselves the targets of scapegoating in fields where they were not a significant presence a generation ago...

...Many share the middle-class aspirations of most of the city's whites and blacks, and when these aspirations are merged with ethnic pride, many may indeed turn their backs on the underclass and head for the suburbs, psychologically if not physically...

...Some groups, such as Dominicans and West Indians, are overwhelmingly concentrated here...

...6 Where this predominantly dark-skinned group will align itself vis-à-vis New York's black and Hispanic leadership has yet to be seen...

...Puerto Ricans are U.S...

...But similar fusions are happening elsewhere...

...The conviction that things are "going so well" has probably limited the amount of serious academic study of New York's Asian communities, and most journalistic accounts of the Asian populations of lower Manhattan and Queens seem to end with restaurant reviews...

...Yet just as Jews on the Lower East Side brought together dozens of distinct European strains to create a New York Jewish world, so today's immigrants are reworking bits and pieces of their diverse backgrounds into new cultural identities...

...The immigrant, striving and vital, is free of the "American malaise . " This line of argument has an ugly underside...

...What this new diversity means for the civic culture will be a central question in the coming decade...

...The large majority of these people are recent immigrants, having arrived since the Hart-Celler immigration reform of 1965...

...The inability of the Afro-American leadership to make even minimal concessions to their potential coalition partners, Hispanics and Caribbean blacks as well as progressive whites, destroyed their chances of making a credible challenge to Mayor Koch in 1985...

...2 Illsoo Kim, The New Urban Immigrants (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981...

...Teachers try to communicate with parents who speak at least a dozen more tongues: an English-as-a-second-language specialist recently asked me if I knew anyone who could translate notes to parents into Tigritia, the language of northern Ethiopia...