When you exit the elevated number 7 subway at the 74th Street station in the Jackson
Heights section of New York City, a walk northward immediately puts you in a Little
India. Bhangra music blares and shop windows display saris, while a halal restaurant
features beef ribs, fried chicken and daal.
Head east from the same station, however, and within a few blocks, signs of South
Asia give way to Mexican taco stands, Colombian, Peruvian and Ecuadoran restaurants, and the rhythms of Latin music.
Jackson Heights, Queens is one of the most diverse places in the nation. Half of the
neighborhood’s residents speak Spanish. Others speak Chinese, Urdu, Hindi, Russian,
Portuguese, Greek or Korean. Altogether, the neighborhood is said to be the home of
167 languages.
And it’s this medley of cultures that is the subject of Frederick Wiseman’s 190-minute
documentary “In Jackson Heights,” which, with subtlety and humanity, explores life
amid these sharp ethnic juxtapositions.
The film also tackles two big facets of urban life in America: economic change and
immigration.
The 21st-century city
Americans have long held conflicted ideas about cities.
Thomas Jefferson feared that city life, in contrast to that of a farmer who worked
his own land, led to economic dependency that was incompatible with democratic
citizenship.
Progressives in the early 20th century railed against the poverty and corruption of
cities, but they also saw them as dynamic places that could, with reform, become crucibles of a vigorous democracy. African Americans who left the rural South with the
hope of building better lives in northern cities discovered the limits of their country’s
democratic promises.
And while Donald Trump fulminates against Mexican immigrants, he fails to acknowledge that Latino immigrants prevented New York and other cities from experiencing catastrophic population losses in the 1970s and 1980s.
Today, cities and their surrounding regions are sites of great ethnic diversity, driven by
immigration and deepening economic inequality.
Yet even as immigrants head for the suburbs in ever increasing numbers, it is in cities
– with their dense populations and vigorous street life – where the trials of becoming
an American, and the pains of globalization, are playing out in real time.
The view from the pavement
“In Jackson Heights” gets at all of these issues through its exquisite attention to the
minute rhythms of life in one neighborhood.