By Esther Ho
When the Queensboro Corporation developed garden style apartments in Jackson Heights, New York City nearly 100 years ago, it was designed as a suburban neighborhood restricted only to upper class whites. Its owners strictly banned non-whites from living there.
Fast forward to 2019 and Jackson Heights is now one of the most diverse areas in the United States with over 150 languages spoken, said Dartmouth anthropologist Sienna Craig at a recent UC Santa Barbara lecture.
Craig’s talk was sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group that aims to expand discussion on topics such as transnational identities.
Craig spoke in particular about one of the newer immigrant groups to make a home in Jackson Heights: the Nepalis, a population who traveled 7,500 miles away from their home and families in Mustang, Nepal, to New York, spurred by both the hope of encountering economic opportunity in the United States and to seek political asylum.
“There are about 8-10,000 people from Mustang, 3000 of whom are in New York. And this has all happened really within the last 10 years.
Although the Mustang community in New York doesn’t quite yet have the numbers of some other New York immigrant groups, its visibility is steadily increasing as the new arrivals follow a similar political and emotional path to immigrant groups before them: rebuilding their lives in a brand new home, and slowly adjusting to a different culture.
“What we see here is a highly visible depopulation of the Himalayan highlands. So how has Tibetan and Himalayan culture become visible in New York? And how have they held onto their sense of identity and belonging in moving between these different worlds?” Craig said.
Craig cited the Himalayan/Tibetan concept of khora, to explore the uncertainty that transnationalism brings to immigrants. Khora is the act of circumambulation, or a type of pilgrimage and meditative practice, that is performed at the beginning and the end of each day. The Khora practitioner circles around a sacred site or object, to reflect a Buddhist philosophical principle about the cyclical nature of existence.
“Migration is not linear. It’s cyclical. It’s the multivalent idea of walking around sacred sites and also about the cycles we travel as human beings,” Craig said.
She explained that Khora is a way of thinking about the many different lives that individuals live within one lifetime and how one moves from place to place. The concept of Khora extends beyond the life patterns of just the Nepali community in New York, she said, and applies to a larger conceptualization of migration across other parts of the world.
“In a larger sense, Khora stands for the pathways that we travel from one life, one country, or one world to the next and back again,” Craig said. “It’s a way of being in the world as a migrant. People are never just going in one direction.”
Connecting to the difficulties of being a migrant, such as struggling to fit in and build a new home, ties the community back to Himalayan life where people practice khora at the beginning and the end of each day. It is something that the Nepali population in New York desperately miss, Craig said, about the sense of rhythm in life at different times in life, and even about social networks. People do not walk through life alone, but are walking khora together, she added.
Khora is about turning the wheel of existence that provides a sense of stability in the midst of uncertainty. “This is something that comes with transnationalism and how we come to navigate uncertainty,” Craig said.
Esther Ho is a third-year student at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in Communication. She covered this event for her Writing Program course Journalism for Web and Social Media.