The attractive racial makeup of East Harlem
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Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Harlem increasingly became a cultural melting pot with the steady arrival of immigrants as a result of Southern migration to the North, as well as Indian seafarers, forming a space of “overlapping diasporas”, as historian Earl Lewis puts it (Bald, 163). New York City, especially East Harlem, had a very diverse racial makeup, such as Puerto Rican, Jewish, African-American, Caribbean, and South Asian populations. As Bald puts it, this racially diverse and heavily multicultural environment would deem to be very attractive to Indian immigrants “not just because of its low-rent tenements, but also because they could disappear into its dense population of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe” (166). In other words, Indians were able to merge into the larger immigrant landscape of New York City, where racial and ethnic differences were more fluid. They even sought to “disappear into the communities around them, to pass, or even to gain new legal identities as Puerto Rican” as a way of fighting the institutionalised racism that they endured under US law, such that they used racialisation to their advantage in making use of the already repressive racial hierarchies that existed within the marginalised community (Bald, 166).
Another attractive aspect of the diverse racial makeup of New York City, and East Harlem specifically, to Indians is the formation of a new community and sense of solidarity within racialised and marginalised groups of people. An example proposed by Bald in his fifth chapter of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America was the interaction between the Jewish communities of New York City and Indian communities as they would often be “drawn to the neighbourhood because of its kosher butchers, who, in the absence of a local Muslim community, provided the closest available approximation of halal meat” (166). This presents itself as a sort of home away from home for these South Asian migrant communities, as they started to establish themselves within new communities and adapted to the society that they were becoming a part of.