PUBLIC-MAKING IN HYPER-DIVERSITY: Politics, Elections and the Democratic Party in Queens, New York

Introduction

Queens is the most diverse county in the United States, with no racial or ethnic group even totaling 30% of its population (and a great deal of diversity within those problematic census categories). Much of its diversity comes from relatively recent immigration, as almost half the population is foreign-born. It is an outlier in American cities, even if it may be, as Roger Sanjek argued 25 years ago, The Future of Us All (Sanjek, 1998). It is also exactly the kind of place that some social scientists and theorists have long argued—albeit in disparate and often conflicting ways—cannot have ‘a public’ through which questions of politics, plans and policies can be discussed, debated and negotiated.1 In this article we explore the potential for a public in such spaces of hyper-diversity and do so through the lens of electoral politics and the state. In short, we ask: Can there be ‘a public’ in such spaces of hyper-diversity? Can there be, in the language of political theorists, ‘a political community’ when large portions of the population are foreign-born and especially when that foreign-born population is itself so incredibly diverse (from so many different countries and regions of origin)? We ask this through the lens of the Democratic Party in Queens. We do so because the borough is almost completely a one-party county.2 Thus, the Queens County Democratic Party (referred to colloquially as ‘County’ within the borough, and we shall do so here)3 can stand in for electoral politics and the public realm in the borough.4

It is out of frustration with those theorists (discussed later in this article) who have argued for closed borders based on essentialized identities—and anger and concern about the explicit embrace of anti-immigrant politics in so many countries in the past decade—that this article was born. We therefore are addressing literatures often pitched at the national or societal level, even if our case is a local one. We do so for two reasons. First, while the literatures are framed nationally, theorists of democracy have long argued that it is locally, and only through practice, where people learn to be part of a democratic polis (see, from different perspectives, Pateman, 1970; Barber, 1984; de Tocqueville, 2002). Larger democratic political communities are built, in part, through local practices. Obviously, larger political contexts actively shape what happens in Queens, and there are certainly pockets of anti-immigrant nativism that remain from Queens’ days as the home of Archie Bunker and Fred and Donald Trump, and have been activated by the current political environment in the United States. And, as we discuss later in the article, the national uprising that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis had an impact on race relations in the borough. We do not wish to deny the importance of these and other factors but focus here on the local dynamics in Queens because of how exceptional it is in its demography. Secondly, the theorists we are addressing here are part of a long tradition in European and American thought that have built conceptions of democratic self-governance on the backs of the exclusion, dispossession and oppression of indigenous peoples, Blacks and immigrants. It is this tradition, which the theorists we are discussing have contributed to, that often underpins the ethno-nationalist turn of many countries in the past decade.

Empirically, we find that politics in Queens are not defined by zero-sum competition between ethnic groups. Instead, its politics are characterized by a set of fluid (but with ‘moments’ of fixity) competitions along neighborhood, ideological, power-bloc-building and, yes, ethnic and racial lines. Race and ethnicity clearly matter; nobody acting in the public realm does so independently of a racial or ethnic identity. But how, and in which ways, race and ethnicity matter is malleable and unfixed in the political competition for power in the public realm in Queens. This jockeying for positions and power in the borough is an ongoing process in which ‘the public’ is constructing and reconstructing itself through politics in ways that make static or essentialist renderings of ‘the public’, or the different ethnicities of the people who constitute it in Queens, untenable.

Less abstractly than this overarching point, there is a set of findings that emerges from this research. First, the outlier-level of hyper-diversity in Queens does not change the reality that much of what is happening politically is the very typical and mundane ‘drama’ of power politics in a city. Secondly, in that mundane competition for power, racial and ethnic differentiation5 are not preexisting forces of nature that shape politics and determine political behavior, but are co-constituted with political, economic and social processes that often play out in ideology6 and geography (neighborhood). Our third finding, which follows from the second, is that race and ethnicity clearly matter in the realm of electoral politics, but their meanings only emerge from the material and geographic contexts in which racial and ethnic groups are situated. Finally, all of this leads us away from views of ‘a public’ that implicitly accept or assume either a fixity of its identity or an essential set of characteristics in its constitution. Instead, we argue for a position more in line with Dewey's public—one that is never fully formed but ever emergent and ever in the process of being created by the contexts in which people are situated and by the ongoing actions of those who constitute it.

This article is structured as follows: first, we discuss the framings of immigration and diversity in social theory and the social sciences. We do so to argue that too many of these framings and too much of this theory posits the existence of seemingly fixed and distinct identities (understood as distinct peoples), which make coming together into a public a near impossibility. On the basis of this theoretical framing, we then set the stage by going through the background of Queens as a borough within New York City, and as the borough that has—over the past 40 years—become the largest destination for immigrants in New York City. We then briefly discuss the methods we used in this research as well as the different themes that empirically emerged from it. Finally, we pull these narratives together to build the larger argument we are making in this article.

On exclusions and the making of a public

While there is clearly not enough time or space here to address all the ways in which diverse peoples sharing a public (or publics) have been conceptualized and discussed, we do need to spend some time with these literatures, because this article, and the larger project it is part of, has emerged from frustration with some of these literatures. In particular, we are arguing against notions of ‘the public’ that assume or advocate for its closure. This assumption of, or advocacy for, closure is particularly pronounced in the traditions of moral and political philosophy that theorize social justice, and it is in opposition to those literatures that this article emerges. In these literatures this closure is necessary for there to be a ‘a political community’—a people—in which questions of justice can be decided upon. As Nancy Fraser (2009) helpfully framed it, debating ‘the what’ of social justice has, for many theorists, required an erasure of the question of ‘the who’. This is true for both liberal and communitarian/civic republican traditions, although such erasure and closure are dealt with in different ways.

For communitarian/civic republicans, the task is clear: they need closure to have, as David Miller (2016: 29) put it, ‘a distinct community of people with historical roots that exists as one such community among others’. In this, he follows Walzer (as many have) in his seminal Spheres of Justice (Walzer, 1983), who argues against large-scale migration and for exclusion, because with it, ‘there could not be communities of character, historically stable, ongoing associations of men and women with some special commitment to one another and some special sense of their common life’ (ibid.: 61–62). For this line of thought, exclusion is ontologically prior to everything else. As Miller states, ‘all of the questions we normally ask … rest on the assumption that we already know who is to be included in the political community’ (ibid.: 13). Again, knowing who is in the political community requires exclusion and thereby the minimization of differences—if not, those differences would undermine the ability of people to act collectively as a public or political community.

Liberal theory has struggled more than republicanism at times with exclusion as a requirement for the making of a political community; this despite the reality that the liberal tradition was built by European and American thinkers who were deeply racist, exclusionary and often supporters of colonialism (see Mills, 1997, for a thorough critique of the racism in the liberal social contract tradition). John Rawls, the quintessential liberal moral philosopher of the last half century, showed no qualms in his embrace of exclusion.7 In Political Liberalism Rawls (1993: 41) argues: ‘we have assumed that a democratic society, like any political society, is to be viewed as a complete and closed social system. It is complete in that it is self-sufficient … It is also closed, in that entry into it is only by birth and exit from it is only by death’. In The Law of Peoples (Rawls, 1999), he reiterates and justifies this assumption by stating that if there were genuinely justice for all peoples, immigration would simply go away as an issue. He states: ‘The problem of immigration is not, then, simply left aside, but it is eliminated as a serious problem in a realistic utopia’ (ibid.: 9). He therefore not only assumes immigration away by virtue of his ‘realistic utopia’ but describes it as a problem twice in the sentence when he justifies this assumption. Remarkably, he moves on to approvingly cite Walzer's Spheres of Justice to justify his closed borders, thereby embracing a communitarian framework that is otherwise antithetical to his entire intellectual project. Other theorists have been more explicit about the ways in which liberalism struggles with questions of immigration and ultimately embrace a form of restricted migration—even as they acknowledge that it contradicts some of their values and immigration represents a ‘dilemma’. Abraham (2010), Macedo (2007; 2009) and Weiner (1996) all embrace closed borders, despite their misgivings about it contradicting (an idealized, if not actually existing) liberal tradition. There are others, too, but space constraints prevent us from going farther here. Suffice to say that Ypi (2008) surveyed the frameworks of moral philosophy engaging in questions of migration and asked if they led to a ‘closed borders utopia’.

The essentialized readings of peoples or publics in much of moral philosophy has come with essentialized readings of ethnicity and race. Such essentialized understandings of ethnicity and race are often inherently part of the frameworks of moral philosophy, even if they are not often directly engaging in questions of ‘what is race?’ or ‘what is ethnicity?’8 While most white moral philosophers have not explicitly theorized race, there is a long tradition in the social sciences that has treated race and ethnicity as essential and fixed group-defining categories that play central roles in society. Essentialism, as recently defined by Roth et al. (2023) is ‘the view that members of a group share defining qualities, or essences, that are innate and unchanging and inform the nature, behavior, or abilities of group members’ and that ‘the groups or categories are discrete and uniform; membership in them is exclusive, such that belonging to one group disallows membership in another; and the group is perceived as a coherent entity’ (ibid.: 41). This is what Brubaker calls ‘groupism’, which he defines as ‘the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogenous and externally bounded groups as the basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis’ (Brubaker, 2002: 164). We could cite much of the work in social sciences on housing segregation, voting behaviors, religious habits, and so on, in making this claim, but space constraints prevent us from citing a long list of these here (see Roth et al., 2023, for a lengthy discussion of this work in the field of sociology). It is important to note, again, that what authors such as Rawls, Walzer, Miller and the others discussed above are doing in their work is assuming or advocating for the necessity of closure so as to have a ‘discrete and uniform’ group with ‘innate and unchanging qualities’ in order for a public to be a public.

Constructivist ways of thinking about race and ethnicity have pushed back against the stability of identity found in much of the literature. A large literature on the construction of ethnicity has been developed in the past 30 years, and there is not enough space here to fully engage with it,9 but what Wimmer (2013: 2) calls ‘the constructivist consensus’ certainly informs our thinking. In constructivist work, ethnicity is not a given that exists primordially. Instead, it is constructed through the actions of individuals, organizations and institutions. Politics, political leaders and the actions of those explicitly working in the public realm play an active role in the construction of ethnic identities. Chandra's (2012) work is useful to our project here: it centers politics and elections in construction of ethnic groups and identities, and she argues that ‘elections, and competitive politics more generally, change ethnic identities’ (ibid.: 28). We similarly agree with those who have argued that what is called ‘race’ is constructed, and done so for explicitly political ends (for a quintessential statement of this, see Omi and Winant, 2015). While much constructivist work accordingly studies the processes and actors involved in the creation and dissolution of such group identities (see Lacomba, 2020, for a good example of this), that is not our focus here. We are not studying the construction of race or ethnicity in politics in Queens. We are studying the creation and operations of a public in a context of dramatic racial and ethnic diversity. And while constructivist approaches inform our thinking and line up with our empirical findings, the construction of racial or ethnic identity is a different question.

While there has been substantial pushback among some social scientists to the idea of racial and ethnic identity being fixed, there is also a body of work that has focused on questions of ‘people-making’. ‘The people’ and ‘the public’ are not strictly synonymous (there are people within ‘a people’ that are not part of the public, for example, children) but they can be usefully thought of together, and the points Smith makes about people-making are useful for our discussion of public-making here. Talking about people-making is a recognition that peoples are constructed, that doing so is a political project and that it does not at all require a closed, culturally homogenous community. Rogers Smith's Stories of Peoplehood (2003) is perhaps the most comprehensive statement about the making of political peoples. He stresses that ‘a people’ or ‘peoples’ do not exist and are certainly not static. People-making results from both the actions of those in positions of political leadership and the ‘stories’ such leaders and other people tell themselves (and others). He places particular importance on what he calls ‘ethically constitutive stories’ that provide a way for people to feel value in their membership in a political community. As he puts it: ‘Precisely because no forms of human social life are simply natural, because none are constant and unchanging, because none are long free from contestation, criticism, and doubt, the reassuring work that ethically constitutive stories can do is often crucial’ (ibid.: 101).

Finally, while Smith does not engage with Dewey, his depiction of the processual character of peoples shares much with how Dewey discussed publics and the public in The Public and its Problems (Dewey, [1927] 1954). Dewey was explicitly anti-essentialist in his discussions of publics. Dewey's publics are forever emergent and resist any fixed or a priori definition. Nayaran usefully summarizes Dewey's concept of the public when he states, ‘Dewey's concept of a public does not denote a static or homogenous body of people but rather plural and ever-changing publics brought into existence in reaction to changes in a society's cultural matrix and the consequences of associated behavior’ (Narayan, 2016: 25–26). A substantial difference between Dewey's public-making and Smith's people-making is that for Dewey it is emergent from the actions of individuals in their relations with each other, while for Smith political leadership plays a much more central role. Smith approvingly quotes Gramsci's line that ‘the “first element” of politics was “that there really do exist rulers and ruled, leaders and led”’ (Smith, 2003: 38); this is not a framing we believe Dewey would have embraced.

When all of these approaches are pulled together, our understanding of political communities—publics—is that they need to be conceptualized in ways that resist static or essentialist understandings, and instead embrace more constructivist and processual explanations. As Benhabib (2004: 80) succinctly puts it (in response to Rawls): ‘peoples are not found: they develop’. They are made through the stories that are told and by the democratic processes and associations of people acting in public. They are not closed, and always open to contestation and change. To explore these issues in a place that has undergone a fair amount of contestation and change in the past 50 years, we turn to Queens, New York.

Queens and its diversity

We should start by saying it is more than a little self-contradictory to begin our case by discussing the diversity in ethnic/racial categories when much of the discussion that follows will fundamentally challenge these categories and their presumed centrality in politics. But we begin with them because it is precisely on the basis of those categories that ‘differences’ are presumed to be problems for the public that must be dealt with (through exclusion or other means). We begin with them, therefore, to demonstrate that, based on the metrics typically used, Queens is an extremely diverse place.

Queens is the most diverse urban county in the United States. In 2020 it was 28% Latino, 26% non-Hispanic Asian, 25% non-Hispanic White, and 17% non-Hispanic Black (see Table 1), and these categories themselves contain within them enough diversity to make the categories almost meaningless. The Filipinos, Koreans and Pakistanis in the borough share almost no attributes as ‘Asians’ aside from being from, or having ancestry from, the continent of Asia. Even at the neighborhood scale, in the ‘Latino’ neighborhood of Corona, the Andeans (primarily from Ecuador) who teach Quechua classes there have little in common ‘ethnically’ with the Dominicans with whom they share the neighborhood. However, there are patterns of racial and ethnic concentration in the borough. The diversity evident in the borough is not at all evenly distributed; instead, it is marked by a variety of types of clusters of groups (see Figure 1).

Queens's residents are 47% immigrants who come from virtually all over the world. The largest country of origin for immigrants is China, which, however, only accounts for 13.5% of all immigrants in the borough. The next largest countries of origin are Guyana, Ecuador, Bangladesh and the Dominican Republic. But these five together account for less than 38% of all immigrants in the borough (see Table 2). Immigration is not concentrated in one or even a couple of areas in the borough. Instead, the immigrant population is distributed throughout the borough, albeit unevenly and with areas of greater or lesser concentration (see Figure 2).

Finally, this diversity is now being expressed in the elected officials representing Queens in the City Council, State Assembly and State Senate. Of the current 15 members of the City Council that have all or most of their districts in Queens, there are five white members, which is still an overrepresentation of whites, but almost certainly much closer to reflecting the population than is the norm in American electoral politics. This was not always so in the borough, and we do not want to downplay a history of a public that was not particularly open to newcomers.10 But this is what the Queens delegation looks like in 2024.

Methods

In this article we rely on qualitative research to answer our question and explore and analyze the potential for a public in spaces of hyper-diversity. Our research is based on 30 interviews with elected officials (City Council members, State Assembly members, State Senators and members of Congress), Democratic Party district leaders, Community Board members, local journalists, organized labor leaders and community organization staff. Interviewees were all granted confidentiality to enable them to speak freely, and we therefore do not mention their names. We supplemented these interviews with local media and other sources, and our investigation was further enhanced by the innate information one of the authors (James DeFilippis) has by virtue of being a Queens native and very active in community organizing efforts in the borough.

Narratives that emerged from our fieldwork

There are many different narratives that emerged during our research. We outline these here, but there is not enough space to fully explore any of them here. Instead, we use them as building blocks to work towards our larger points about the nature of ethnic constructions in politics, and, by extension, the construction of the public in Queens.

Conclusions

All of the themes we discussed in this article have led us to a few conclusions. The first overarching theme is how much all of this sounds like the banal dynamics of city politics. Rival blocks are competing for power in elections. The New Reformers are trying to transform County from within, while Queens DSA is trying to build itself into an alternative to County. This is also evident at the neighborhood level in places such as Jackson Heights, where different clubs’ candidates compete in elections, and those competitions are based on anything but ethnic solidarity (ideology, idiosyncratic interpersonal relations, the ambitions of elected officials, and so on). The political goals—what we are loosely calling ‘ideology’ here—of the rivals do matter for some of these power-block competitions, but sometimes they don't. As we indicated several times in this article, the most ethnically diverse place in the country appears to be very ordinary in its electoral dynamics.

The second overarching theme to emerge from our findings is that within these mundane and banal conflicts over power, the meanings of ethnic and racial identity and differentiation are not pregiven. Instead, they are actively constructed, even if only sometimes purposefully. To return to Chandra's framing, the attributes of ethnicity and race remain, but the meanings attached to them change depending on the geographic context, the people involved and the political/ideological goals of the political factions involved. It means something different to engage in electoral politics as a South Asian in Jackson Heights than it does in Astoria, than it does in Richmond Hill, or than it does in eastern Queens. These are very different communities, and South Asianness is not a politically static category, as it takes on different meanings in those disparate neighborhoods. The locations of district line boundaries are themselves actors in the shaping and making of ethnicity in the public realm. All of these elements together strongly support constructivist understandings of ethnicity and push against framings of politics that treat ethnic identity in essentialized ways. Our point here is not that ‘ideology matters more than ethnicity’ or ‘neighborhood geography matters more than ethnicity’. Our points are twofold: first, ethnicity is one of many different components of how people act in the public realm, and secondly, the meaning of ethnicity itself is far from fixed or pregiven.

Thirdly, repeated comments from local elected officials who talked about the shared goods (libraries, schools, parks, the environment, and so on), and how everyone wants those goods to be adequate and competently provided, are excellent examples of the kinds of ‘ethically constitutive stories’ leaders tell when making a people. Before these comments are dismissed as too clichéd to be meaningful, there are a few things to note here. First, it is important to recognize that these are the things that local governments do. What would we expect a local elected official to be concentrating on, if not the schools, libraries, parks, environment, and so on, in the neighborhoods where their constituents live? This is the ‘collective consumption’ (Castells, 1977) that is so important to the constitution of urban life. And it is also these spaces that the elected officials justifiably say everyone (regardless of race and ethnicity) wants to be good—which play a central role in daily life and in constituting a public. They are what Ash Amin (2002: 3) calls ‘the local micro-publics of prosaic interaction’ or what Wessendorf (2014) talks about as ‘commonplace diversity’. We certainly agree with Beebeejuan (2024) that some of those embracing these stories, especially elected officials, can do so as a way to mask continuing unequal power relations and racial or ethnic oppression, and we explicitly discussed the white racism that exists in Queens's public realm in 2023. We do not want to romanticize Queens and the public that is being created there. But we also recognize that we live in a world where there are many elected leaders who deny the components of daily life that are universal—leaders for whom immigrants (and other targeted populations) are, and will always be, different. The elected officials in Queens are certainly well aware of the larger national discussions and politics of immigration. The framing of Queens as a place where hyper-diversity is ‘baked in’ and where commonalities across diverse groups are recognized and emphasized is very much in opposition to larger narratives around immigration.

Finally, all of this leads us to the point that the public itself is not a fixed entity. Recognizing the processual character of publics frees us from the need for a public rooted in a static, bounded and insular ‘political community’; that is, it frees us from the conceptual limitations of both the liberal social contract-rooted theorists and the communitarian theorists—conceptual limitations that are rooted in their exclusions. The public realm of electoral politics in Queens has been fundamentally transformed by the migrants who have arrived there in the past half century. And yet, that fundamental and always ongoing transformation of the public has not resulted in anything like a breakdown in the public realm, but instead enabled a new public to be made—a public that is remarkable for how ordinary it is.