Street Vendors of Roosevelt Avenue

Just over the Queensborough bridge, a mere handful of subway stops away from Midtown Manhattan’s too-big-to-fail banks, towering corporate law firms, and gilded publishing houses lies a complimentary, yet diametrically different world. Western Queens, particularly along the section of Roosevelt Avenue that snakes East under the elevated 7 Train through the neighborhoods of Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Corona, and Flushing, offers a fascinating look into the local economic realities that are both latent by-products and driving locomotives of the global economy. 

This stretch of Roosevelt Avenue is also the epicenter of South American migrant life in NYC and highlights—perhaps most visibly through national food sold out of informal carts, stands, and trucks—important facets of cultural identity for expat communities in the diaspora. Indeed, the importance of food as a signifier of cultural identity is perhaps even more critical in areas of the city largely considered peripheral in the eyes of the dominant class.   

This assumed periphery is usually lumped in together as “ethnic,” and largely unimportant, if noted at all. As the late cultural critic Stuart Hall wrote in Cultural Identity and Diaspora, “Vis-à-vis the developed West, we are very much ‘the same.’ We belong to the marginal, the underdeveloped, the periphery, the ‘Other.’ We are at the outer edge, the ‘rim,’ of the metropolitan world—always ‘South’ to someone else’s El Norte.”

Long hailed as perhaps the most diverse area in the United States, the neighborhoods Roosevelt Avenue intersects with are home to, among others, vibrant working-class Colombian, Ecuadorian, Mexican, Peruvian, Argentine, Uruguayan, and Bolivian new immigrant communities. These communities, often integral to the functioning of the opulent offices and production side of globalized New York’s most profitable firms, can be understood, as Saskia Sassen points out in her work The Global City: Strategic Site/New Frontier, as part of the “vast economic chain… embedded in non-electronic spaces” central to the functioning of the major corporations and larger economy of globalized New York City. Many of the residents of whom live around Roosevelt Avenue either work in the Manhattan service economy that drives the aforementioned super-profits, often “under conditions of sharp social, earnings, and often racial/ethnic segmentation,” or they provide needed goods and services to their own communities through the flourishing informal sector. 

In this regard, much of what can be seen among low wage-earners providing cooking, cleaning, security, and day-care services for Manhattan firms, as well as the bustling, 24-hour informal economy on Roosevelt Avenue today can be viewed through the prism of what Sassen characterizes as “a new geography of centrality and marginality” that, in the post-Fordist period, “partly reproduces existing inequalities but also is the outcome of a dynamic specific to current forms of economic growth.” Conditions like this foster the ingredients for thriving informal economies, like what can be found on Roosevelt Avenue, and is perhaps most visible through the 24 hour street food, to exist.