On the move
By Jerome Chou
Stare at this image, feel your eyes go slightly out of focus, and all of those shards of blue and terra cotta start to move, circling into a vortex centered somewhere around Governor’s Island. A nice optical trick that re-enacts what the graphic describes: movement. Thousands of Asian New Yorkers moving in and out of neighborhoods, abandoning deacdes-old bastions in Manhattan Chinatown, and transforming eastern Queens and southern Brooklyn.
As reported in the New York Times, the Census Bureau has just released its largest set of data in its history, allowing demographers to create maps like the ones above for the New York metropolitan region, each fragment its own neighborhood story. Perhaps most interesting is what isn’t shown on this map: the seas of darkest blue (representing greatest increase in residents since 2000) in places like Fairview and Guttenberg, Bergenfield and Cliffside Park, Elmont and Hillcrest, Sleepy Hollow, South Floral Park and Spring Valley–New York and New Jersey suburbs where foreign-born residents from the Caribbean, Latin America, and China now comprise up to 60% of the population.
Stay tuned for future posts on this map…
About Open City
Open City: Blogging Urban Change is an interdisciplinary neighborhood blog and community project coordinated by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Five commissioned writers, called Organizing Fellows, are working with community organizations and neighborhood folks in Manhattan’s Chinatown/Lower East Side (LES), Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn to collect oral histories and interviews, offer commentary about gentrification, neighborhood change, and produce new creative work around these themes. Read more.
Featured Profile
CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities was formed in 1986 (formerly known as the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence) as a response to an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes both in New York City and around the country (which included violence by police officers against Asians).
They have two offices – one in Manhattan’s Chinatown (which houses the Chinatown Tenants Union, and the new Asian Youth in Action organizing project) and the Youth Leadership Project office in the Bronx – and have members from all over the city. Over the years, CAAAV’s main campaigns have focused on community-based organizing work rooted in Asian immigrant and refugee communities. Although their advocacy and organizing work is focused mainly in Manhattan’s Chinatown and the northwest Bronx, CAAAV’s work also touches upon larger issues (such as affordable housing, war, and immigration) shaping communities all over the world: “Our work is primarily centered around issues facing New Yorkers, but always with a global analysis.”
CAAAV’s mission is to organize and build the power of working-class Asian immigrants, refugees, and youth to change concrete conditions and participate in a broader social justice movement. In the past, CAAAV’s work included organizing South Asian taxi drivers, Korean women workers, and Filipina domestic workers. Several of these organizing projects have gone on to become their own organizations, such as the New York Taxi Workers Alliance and Domestic Workers United. CAAAV’s current work focus on three different program areas: Read more.
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