I can't believe this exits in nyc....this is Jackson Heights

Auto-captioned from the film, lightly cleaned. Elena's words, not edited prose.

hi hello how's it going my name is elena and there are two things i especially love and that would be travel in new york city and since i can't exactly travel internationally at the moment i do live in one of the most densely populated cities in the us it is full of people from so many different backgrounds ethnic groups cuisines cultures ways of life and more thanks to visible for sponsoring this video made up of its famed five boroughs the new york city is extraordinarily diverse by nearly every measure it has the largest foreign population of any metropolis it's home to more than 800 languages and has no ethnic majority and like anywhere the city is defined by its residents above all else it's out of my deep-seated love for this town that i'm teaming up with locals from all over new york city to share with you their unique experience from the angle of the neighborhoods they call home while places like midtown and soho and washington square park aren't going anywhere there are countless neighborhoods that you're less likely to find in your tour guide book that are vastly underappreciated i'm excited to welcome those guides to my channel to share with you the new york they'd like you to know so i have a little series here on my channel called beyond your block and this is episode two so if you haven't seen the first episode i recommend you check it out i will leave it down below and in that video i discuss a little bit about my own multicultural upbringing and how it's shaped the things that i care about so i was born abroad and then moved back to the us as a kid and grew up here primarily and a lot of my growing up was around my iranian relatives on my mom's side which was a significant part of my identity as well as growing up with parents who consistently taught me how important it is to learn and celebrate people that are different from myself the way i was raised in a lot of my experiences traveling as a young adult have really shown me just like the richness to be learned and found in different cultures from your own and i think what's incredible about new york city is that there's so much diversity here and there's so many different neighborhoods that encompass this so today we're gonna be heading to jackson heights in queens which is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the world there's over 165 languages spoken there so before we dive in i want to tell you guys a little bit of history in jackson heights there's over 170 000 people living in the neighborhood that features culturally diverse architecture restaurants and stores so in 1916 jackson heights was originally developed as a place for middle to upper middle income workers from manhattan to raise their families but after the great depression the apartments became a lot more affordable so a lot of different people started to move in during the 1920s to around the 1950s various people groups from a lot of different backgrounds started to move into this area so this includes the lgbtq community businessmen from latin america and professionals from the indian subcontinent currently jackson heights is homes to many ethnic groups such as colombian ecuadorian argentinian indians pakistanis tibetans nepalese and so many more even today the jackson heights neighborhood is constantly changing in culture and demographics so meet stacy she is a born and raised new yorker and mexican-american she's in her 20s now like me but she's lived across the different browsers of new york city and has specifically been in jackson heights for many years now so she actually responded to my instagram story and she said she'd love to introduce me to jackson heights which i'm so excited about and to share what she loves about it so i'm going to pass the mic off to her now to learn more about the culture and cuisine found in this incredibly diverse neighborhood and hopefully encourage you to check it out for yourself so i'm very excited to show you guys around jackson heights but before we have a sponsor for the video which i'm very excited about it's the first sponsor for this series and today's sponsor is visible which is the first all digital phone service visibles kind of earn this title as being like the phone service of the future because it's all online so there's no stores so the brand is a really good job at offering everything you need and making sure nothing's out at all that you don't need think no contracts no phone stores no hidden fees no cap speeds visible you can get unlimited data minutes messages and mobile hotspot usage on verizon's 5g network for literally only 40 a month which is insane they even have this feature where you can sign up with a friend or even a stranger and you can help kind of bring down your costs it's called their party pay so it's like having a family plan but like without the drama and you can bring friends on and it helps lower your cost as well as your friends cost or a stranger's cost or whoever you want to sign up with i can't get over the fact how cheap and affordable visible is as i know a lot of my followers often are fresh out of school or student etc phone bills can get so expensive and it can be super intimidating to figure out the right phone plan or have to deal with contracts or hidden fees or things like that and so that's why i think visible is so incredible is that for one it's super transparent you know what you're getting yourself into you can even bring your number two visible try it out see how you like it cancel it anytime with no penalty and see if it's a good fit for you so if you want to check out visible for yourself the first online all digital phone service check it out for yourself i will leave all the links down below i think this is a really great opportunity and i'm super excited that they chose to sponsor this video so thanks again to visible that's and now without further ado let's go ahead to jackson heights and go meet up with stacy hello i just got to jackson heights and met up with stacy we're about to go explore do you want to just introduce yourself yeah my name is stacy i'm 22 years old and i've lived in jackson heights basically all of my life and yeah i'm pretty excited to show elena around and i think we're gonna have some fun times so we're going to takeo it's this mexican family owned restaurant they have the best tacos in japan so that's where we're gonna go i'm excited hello hello we're at our first spot we're here at taqueria today we're going to try some aqua store tacos hell yeah a staple of mexican culture we've got our bomb tacos from our first spot you're gonna tell us a little bit about where we just went yeah so uh we just went to taqueria it's a family-owned restaurant by the zapata family and they actually named the restaurant after like the hometown that they're from um it's connected to like a colombian bar uh so that's a little weird considering that it's a mexican yeah it's a nice fusion um and then they have like a bakery block down so it's pretty awesome yeah really huge probably yeah sure this is the best in new york i do have a little fun fact right now okay about jackson science but so let's hear it i love a good fun fact so jackson heights is the most diverse neighborhood in the world basically um we have about 167 languages that are spoken here pretty cool that's insane so cool i think being exposed to so many cultures you know you're more open-minded to stuff that you wouldn't normally be i guess if you grew up in a different location we decided to start off at a mexican spot one of stacy's favorites and then today instead of just focusing on like mexican spots we're going to be going around to several different restaurants like she said jackson heights is so incredibly diverse and so it wouldn't be doing jackson heights justice if we just like stuck to one thing so we're gonna be trying some food from all over the world learning a little bit about each you know culture and food item as we go and getting really cool i'm excited i'm hungry next up we are headed to a section of jaclyn heights that some like to refer to as little tibet or himalayan heights that's home to many immigrants from the countries of the himalayas like tibet nepal and bhutan many moved to queens in the 50s and 60s especially tibetans due to the chinese occupation of tibet and exiled many debates that occurred during this time we are at our second spot and this time we are at a nepalese spot so right now we're at a place that used to be called nepali bugatti var um they're very well known for their momos so they i guess ended up modernizing their storefront so you can find it now through momo corner and there's this really cool place next door it's called it's um it's a tibetan place but i am obsessed with dumplings so i'm very excited to try these out their version of dumplings we got chicken and veggie steamed and i think it's going to be incredible you're saying too that there's there's not like a hierarchy of cultures there are some that have a bigger presence like little yeah like what else is there so like right here on this specific block there's a lot of like like i said himalayan tibetan if you go down the street there's more like indian bengali stores and then once you start walking more towards like 82nd street you start to see that the community becomes more like hispanic you'll see that as we continue walking and is roosevelt the main street is where all the hispanics are okay that's where you go to get your tacos you find a taco truck on roosevelt you eat there i am not lying when i say that last taco we just had was the best talk i've ever had in new york city by a long shot yeah they're open like until three in the morning so you can go at any time if you're a little tipsy those tacos are going to taste like hell yes there's like a 45 minute train ride for me to get here but i will take it for that taco what did you just talk about the f so we're trying momos and momos are a type of east and south asian steamed filled dumpling and they are one of the most popular dishes found in nepal this one is soy sauce this is quito and this one is spicy they're so popular in jackson heights that there's even an annual momo crawl that crowns a new winner each september and pecan chagar has won that title twice now so we just walked through the little india area of jackson heights which is incredible which i'll be doing a whole separate episode on so stay tuned it's about like three blocks two avenues so it's it's pretty big and there's so many stores that you can go into to get like traditional tire so it's beautiful i definitely recommend walking by and looking into a few stores even if you're not gonna buy anything i think it's beautiful just to experience other people's culture many new yorkers know jackson heights as an indian neighborhood and like i mentioned i'll have an entire episode focusing just on little india coming soon there's a very large concentration of south asians found in jackson heights like indians bangladeshis and more this is actually this place is where they host the lgbtq plus uh festival and then this avenue is where we have the festival we're taking a quick coffee break and we're here at espresso 77.

it's a it's a coffee staple in this neighborhood um they have great lattes they're owned by a couple before covid what they would do here is like uh every weekend they would have like live shows and stuff like that sometimes they'd showcase like art galleries and they have like a lot of accessories that showcase the neighborhood pride so right now we're at letty's bakery and cafe they have really good italian cookies and other baked goods um the owner octavio herrera he worked at a different bakery for like 21 years and then he finally opened his own spot in jackson heights and they have amazing stuff so yeah let's go try uh bakery it's a uruguayan and colombian bakery um right next door they have a bar and a restaurant i actually found this place because in middle school i went to school with this girl whose parents are actually the owners of the place and they brought empanadas and they were amazing if you're going to get empanadas here you got to come early because they go by by the end of the day if you come here you will not get them they're already gone so right now we're at the queensborough they're the restaurant that has been kind enough to host the jackson heights community fridge it's supposed to be mutual aid from the community where the community gives and the community receives they have an instagram page if you want to check them out it's called jackson heights community fridge uh they accept donations for food because sometimes obviously the fridge isn't always stocked a nice little addition that they added was the vipoc authors only bookshelf you can leave anything you want and you can take anything if you want if you're in need our last stop is traverse park during the beginning of the development of jackson heights in the early 1900s there was a vision of making it a garden city and it became one of america's first cooperative garden apartment communities while you can find homes with really unique and beautiful gardens out front jackson heights doesn't have any sizable parks for its residents so traverse park has become really special for the locals for being the only park essentially hello from traverse park we brought all of our incredible pastries from earlier and i have to say this black and white cookie from letty that i already like ate a lot of is the best black and white cookie i've ever had and these from the year green spot are so good just kissed and so now we're just going to talk a little bit more about jackson heights about your story and hopefully share with you guys a bit more so you can know more about this area so do you want to start off and tell me a little bit about you your story your background i was born in manhattan my parents are both um undocumented immigrants um they came to america around their like late teenage years so they both migrated from mexico but they actually met here i'm grateful that they've taken that that they took that step because i wouldn't have the opportunities that i have here i've essentially lived here my entire life i feel like because i don't have a strong family unit here or an extended family unit i feel like a lot of my mexican culture i've not exactly lost but i haven't been able to appreciate it the way i probably could have if i was born there or if i had more family here but i think a lot of that has been replaced by all the amazing and beautiful cultures that there are in as i grew up um i was a little embarrassed about being mexican i think uh i just wanted to fit in more i wanted to be quote unquote american but uh as i grew up i realized that like my story and my experience here is the american experience i'd love to hear a little bit more from you as a local about the many cultures here and how you kind of said it's just this like incredible melting pot and one thing that i really i feel like experienced just in this past day that i loved is how quickly it transitions from one to the next what's it been like growing up here with that like melting pot experience one of my favorite things about jackson heights is that it's like you're visiting the world because like elena said you'll go down one block and it's like all colombian stores and then you'll go down another block and it's little india and it's like completely different the signs are in different languages and it's just all like in a span of like 20 blocks which is pretty intense it's so cool i think my favorite thing about jackson heights is i think the diversity you know i've met so many people from so many different places you have so many different backgrounds you know going to people's houses in jackson heights can be pretty crazy because it's like you you see the community and then you go into someone's home and it's like their own like their own piece of their you know homeland so it's it's pretty awesome i think that's my favorite part meeting the people who live here um well to top everything off i guess if you're going to be in the jackson heights community if you're going to visit definitely support the community especially during these times during covid a lot of stores have been suffering if you do want to get like a really cool experience of jackson heights i'd say come here during june we host the lgbtq plus festival and the parade there so it's very cool during june jackson heights has been a hub for the lgbtq community for a really long time um the first i think pride festival was in jackson heights and so that's why they continued doing it there that's a wrap thanks again to visible for sponsoring this video be sure to check them out in the description below you