Are Ethnic Restaurants in Ethnic Neighborhoods? (Part 1)
Ethnic neighborhoods* are as old as America itself. Ever since English pilgrims set up the first ethnic neighborhoods in what would later become Jamestown, Virginia and Plymouth, Massachusetts, there have been newcomers arriving through the sea, in the air, and on the ground to make a new life in the United States. The existing culture of where these newcomers arrive is vastly different depending on the time and space, but the benefits of immigrants living near each other are many: lower cost of living, cultural and family connections, cultural familiarity, etc. Thus, ironically, ethnic neighborhoods are as American as America gets.
Over time, these neighborhoods develop a character that is unique precisely because of the cultural landscape that these groups make. Every New Yorker has a beloved bodega, Spanish for “corner store”, a nod to the fact that many Dominican corner store owners have made them what they are today. It’s a challenge to answer the question: “what impact did that group leave on that area”? In other words, how in particular did a certain ethnic group affect the cultural landscape of the area in which they live(d)? This is a question that demographers, linguists, anthropologists, politicians, businesses, and many others would love to know the answer to. In this post, I’ll describe my approach to answering this question through the most common denominator that humans have — food.
Food is the great universal in human life. Everyone needs it, everyone loves it, and everyone has something to say about how it should be done. With this in mind, each group has a cuisine unique to them. It usually follows, especially in America, that people will want to have variety in their diets. This isn’t just because American cuisine is sometimes hard to define, but because nothing makes people more excited to eat than having a little variety in their diet and tastes. As Trevor Noah said in response to nativism in America:
“I think there should be a rule in America that says you can hate immigrants all you want, but if you do, you don’t get to eat their food. That’s a fair exchange for me. If you hate immigrants, no immigrant food. No Mexican food, no Caribbean food, no Dominican food, no Asian food, nothing. Only potatoes.”
The beauty in this joke is how terrifying only eating American food would be for most Americans (me included!). So, with all of this in mind, I want to know: do ethnic neighborhoods display their cultures’ culinary identities to the public? And if so, how much?
To answer this question, I’ll take a look at a few different ethnic groups and try to see if there are, or how many, restaurants, cafés, bakeries, etc. proudly display their neighborhood’s heritage. This analysis will need two pieces of information: an ethnic group’s culinary footprint in a certain area, and the number of people in that ethnic group living in that area. I will examine three different ethnic groups in New York City to determine if their culinary footprint matches where they live. All three groups are all relatively recent immigrants to the United States, but have been here long enough to have children born in the United States. The groups are: the Uyghurs, the Garifuna, and Ghanaian people. Here is a short description of each:
· The Uyghurs are a Turkic people whose homeland is in northwestern China. They are significantly discriminated against in China and have a large diaspora in Central Asia, Russia, the Middle East, Europe, North America and Australia. There are more than 1,000 Uyghurs living in the United States, mostly in the Washington, D.C. area, but also in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston and New York City. Thus, we can say there are probably hundreds of Uyghurs living in New York City.
· The Garifuna (plural Garinagu) are a mixed African and indigenous group whose homeland is spread across multiple countries on the Caribbean coast of Central America. They have lived in New York for decades and number between 100,000 and 200,000 people, mainly living in the Bronx.
· Ghana is a country in West Africa that now makes up the largest African community in New York. There has been an influx of people in the last few decades and now number more than 27,000 in New York alone! They are a very diverse nation with over 75 languages spoken among them. They mainly live in the Bronx, but there are pockets of Ghanaians also in Brooklyn and Queens.
The groups are from very different regions of the world, have varying poulations in New York and are not equally concentrated in their communities. They are perfect test cases for examining the cultural artifacts ethnic groups leave on the culinary landscape and further help us understand the factors that determine a group’s visibility in a given neighborhood.
Part 2 of this blog will use Yelp data to determine the location and number of restaurants for each group in New York City. This data will be combined with the number of people of each group in the same census block. I will then combine these two values to determine the number of people of that group in the same area as the eatery, which will tell us the relative visibility of that group in their ethnic neighborhood.
You can play around with the data yourself on this app.
Note that I mean this term to apply to any recent arrivals to a neighborhood, not limited to people distinguished by ethnicity (whatever that means). Thus, as long as the group lives in a relatively defined area and is distinct, they are considered “ethnic” for the sake of this post. Therefore Okies moving to California during the Dust Bowl and Nigerians moving to NYC in the late 1900’s are equally “ethnic” for the purposes of this blog post. (If you have any terms that better fit my intent please let me know!)
