What is diversity for?
I consider this as I trace the tracks of the 7 train, nicknamed the International Express for the route it takes across Queens, New York, the most diverse place on the planet—with hundreds of languages, dozens of religious denominations, different flags festooning every restaurant and bakery and corner store. Roosevelt Avenue, which the train traverses on above-ground tracks, cuts through Flushing, Corona, Jackson Heights, and Woodside, to name just a few epicenters of new or recent immigration to New York City. This global influx is on display in the slatted sunlight beneath the train tracks, where I stop for sambal and chaat and lengua and a perfectly shitty street-cart coffee and conclude that this is one of diversity’s great benefits: the satisfaction of ever more tastes. “The fundamental impulse,” Joseph Schumpeter noted in 1942, “that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets.” Diversity, since the emergence of global exchange and immigration in the murky soup of capitalism’s prehistory, has been fundamental to the world system.
What about those less easily quantifiable benefits of diversity—things like “understanding,” “equality,” “comity,” even “world peace”? These had been the bedrock of DEI initiatives since the start of the Diversity Era (D.E.), which began with the post-historical ebullience of the Cold War’s conclusion. “We are the world,” we sang back then, and seemed to really mean it.
Today, though, that image of a happily diverse and globalized world is in retreat. Nationalist and nativist parties are on the rise, DEI has been banished to the dustbin of acronymal history, and our quasi-integralist vice president is not seeking a multicultural nation so much as a unified Christian one.
Into this sorry state of diversity affairs comes Micro-City: Faith Encounters Super-Diversity in Queens, NY (Fordham University Press, 2025), by Richard Cimino and Hans Tokke, sociologists at SUNY Old Westbury and CUNY’s New York City College of Technology, respectively. An ethnography of religious life across several communities of Queens—multifaith Elmhurst and Jackson Heights, Greek Orthodox and Muslim Astoria, Hispanic Corona, and so on—the book offers deeply researched and reported vignettes of what is inarguably, and, on the whole, quite successfully the most diverse place on the planet.
Or super-diverse, rather. The term, theorized by the sociologist Steven Vertovec in an influential 2007 paper, aims to capture communities that are “distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade.” To an outsider like me, lifting my head from my curry long enough to look, the neighborhoods read as “diverse”: so many languages, religions, flags, foods. Super-diversity guides the viewer toward a deeper understanding of a community’s highly stratified nature. It makes legible a neighborhood’s internal diversities.
Take, for instance, Hispanic Corona. Cimino and Tokke use their ethnography of houses of worship to tease out the myriad divisions between Pentecostal Christians from Latin America and Catholics from the same region. “In talking to church people coming from the mountains,” Cimino and Tokke write, “we found that the indigenous-influenced culture results in a syncretism of beliefs mixed with Catholic teachings. These are regional beliefs, sometimes rituals particular to one very small village. They may have knowledge of the larger saints, but there are microvariations and rituals concerning Christ.”
To note such internal differences within a community allows us to see those spaces not as flattened arenas of “diversity” but as communities riven and dynamic with lively complexity—with super-diversity. “On the one hand,” Cimino and Tokke conclude of this community, “there is a deep schism between Catholics and charismatics, from worship practices to the people they associate with and how they restrict and protect the cultural and geographic territories where their faith-life is practiced. Often these schisms and separations, even within a given congregation, are determined by country and ethnic nationalism. On the other hand, there is a commonality in everyday civic life, most readily seen in the area’s shared parks, public spaces, and cultural institutions.”
Cimino and Tokke’s goal, in trying to explore the super-diversity of these communities, is to see beyond what “diversity” discourse sometimes occludes. They note that “asking people about diversity in Queens comes across like asking Seattle natives about the rain.” The stakes are, in fact, far deeper and less obvious:
There is a paradox that runs through our account of Queens’s diversity. Observing the borough as a whole, there is an obvious and enormous growth of ethnic and religious variety, but up close, those of different ethnicities and religions living in close proximity to one another do not necessarily interact much; several blocks of a neighborhood often comprise a single ethnic enclave. Heterogeneity can, and does, breed homogeneity; people cluster with others most like themselves.
This paradox—that diversity breeds healthy coexistence but also homogeneity—is at the heart of their study, and is central to contemporary questions about what diversity is for. “[P]eople in a religious community derive their energy from the core values that provide social cohesion for the formation of its folkways, laws, and religious rituals,” Cimino and Tokke argue. Religion is one of the key ways that enclaves, or “old world villages,” are formed and sustained. Houses of worship organize entire areas of the city, and allow immigrants to “segment into specific cultural enclaves, blocks, or neighborhoods in order to retain an ethnic identity and its cultural rituals, while still assimilating into the broader functions of urban life, such as public transit, health services, and crime prevention.”
Much of this self-segregation is done intentionally. Writing of Hispanic communities in Corona, Cimino and Tokke note that many immigrants “didn’t feel any urgency to completely assimilate to American culture. They respected where they were now yet never seemed to forget where they came from or the cultural norms they carried with them.” Especially for religious people, assimilation is eyed warily, as is diversity. In some cases, congregations have fractured or collapsed because of issues relating to how inclusive these communities should be.
To note such internal differences within a community allows us to see those spaces not as flattened arenas of “diversity” but as communities riven and dynamic with lively complexity—with super-diversity.
Less contested than diversity, though, is cooperation, which defines many of the interactions between communities across Queens. Larger congregations host events for smaller ones. Other congregations grow into what Cimino and Tokke refer to as “communal congregations,” or spaces “where there is a definite inclusion of different ethnicities in the church programs,” even while ethnocentric tendencies linger in microgroups within the congregation. Smaller congregations, meanwhile, might collaborate on cultural activities that draw people from across Queens and New York City.
Perhaps the most widely known example of the cooperative spirit of Queens’s religious communities came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Elmhurst was the epicenter of North America’s first and deadliest wave. Elmhurst Hospital, in the spring of 2020, was so overwhelmed with infections and deaths that the city temporarily kept dead bodies in freezer trucks parked outside the hospital.
Although congregations closed during the height of the pandemic, they maintained a physical and social presence in the neighborhood. The Jain Center provided meals to medical workers at Elmhurst Hospital, the hospital most inundated with coronavirus patients. The Chan Meditation Center created a nonprofit organization to raise funds for medical equipment and supplies at Elmhurst Hospital and planned to branch out to other hospitals. St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church ran a pop-up food distribution center for low-income and unemployed residents; New Life Fellowship, through its community development arm, intensified efforts to minister to the homeless and to low-income residents during the crisis as well as reach out to high-risk students struggling with learning during the stay-at-home order. Paradoxically, these congregations extended their public presence during a time of social distancing and quarantine.
These responses to COVID-19 from Elmhurst’s religious communities show their ability to cooperate in a time of crisis. For the most part, though, Queens’s religious communities in super-diverse neighborhoods embrace both diversity and homogeneity at once. St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church, the largest congregation in Elmhurst, is a model for this. Originally an Irish parish, it now offers its more than 4,000 members Mass in English, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, and Indonesian. A super-diverse church that also segregates along national and racial lines, it still retains quite a bit of unity. “In food and celebrations,” the church’s deacon explained, “you see diversity but not in the Mass, the Mass unifies people. Now people from Asia we don’t coincide with because we don’t eat what they eat, we don’t do what they do. But inside the church, especially if it is a Mass in English, there are no differences, we celebrate the same.”
Here English functions as a unifying force, but in general, one thing that helps these super-diverse neighborhoods thrive is the absence of any dominant language or religious tradition. Elmhurst, Cimino and Tokke note, is defined not only by diverse “in-migration, out-migration, immigration, and urbanization,” but also by the fact that it “consists of microcommunities with distinct social, cultural, and religious identities within the metaneighborhood of super-diversity in which no one group dominates.” What allows super-diverse communities to flourish, this suggests, is that they emerge in the absence of any hegemonic or coercive power. This is not to suggest that no power relations exist between or within the disparate neighborhoods of Queens, but that communities can create enclaves of self-sufficiency and independence that nestle alongside other such enclaves, and that no one community can claim authority over another.
Cimino and Tokke’s research raises interesting questions related to ongoing debates about diversity’s impact upon neighborhood cohesion and social trust. Following Robert Putnam’s 2007 article “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” which argued that an increase in neighborhood diversity was associated with people “hunkering down” and becoming more isolated, researchers have sought to better understand whether diversity has positive or negative effects upon neighborhoods. Putnam’s conclusion (decried as a “poisonous theory” by one of Putnam’s critics) was critiqued for confusing correlation with causation and for not adequately considering structural dynamics, such as poverty and race. More recent research, however, has partially confirmed Putnam’s thesis. A 2020 review of more than 80 studies of diversity and social cohesion concluded that diversity is associated with a slight increase in social distrust. Cimino and Tokke’s study, however, might suggest one of the things that sets super-diverse Queens apart: that where religious bonds are strong, diversity does not lead people to “hunker down,” but rather to rely more heavily on their own ethnic and religious communities.
Super-diverse Queens, then, might embody the best of all possible worlds. On the one hand, there is the dynamism born of cultures and faith communities living, working, and praying side by side. And, of course, eating: at a Yemeni cafe just off Roosevelt Avenue, a customer in a hijab sips tea beside two women chatting in Russian over their cappuccinos. The nearby pastry case displays three versions of Mexican tres leches: one made with Dubai chocolate, another with Biscoff cookies, and a third with Italian espresso. Dishes inspired by Queens’s diversity are common across the borough, and invite people to participate in the cosmopolitan ideals and pleasures of easy-going pluralism. At the same time, people often have, within the super-diverse metropolis, communities they call their own. From the cafe, it’s a short walk to dozens of different temples and churches. The healthiest communities in Queens, this timely study suggests, are those at the intersection of novelty and familiarity, dialogue and autonomy, diversity and homogeneity.