A String of Pearls: The Horizontally‐Networked Immigrant Enclave in NYC
2025-11-26
Scholars in the 1990s theorised that immigrant enclaves were becoming increasingly deconcentrated within the city. However, a number of more recent neighbourhood studies describe a host of new ethnic clusterings. These studies depict intensifying transnational ties in the immigrant neighbourhood at an unprecedented scale, however local relationships across these clusters have been difficult to analyse with ethnographic methods. I propose an update on our theoretical conception of ethnic enclaves to relate the proliferating body of enclave‐esque terms within the literature. Hence, this article begins to take stock of the field and revisit our foundational definition of enclaves to start to reintegrate and synthesise this data at a larger scale of analysis. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Reference USA , I employ Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping to visualise how immigrant enclaves' commercial and residential elements empirically manifest on the city's contemporary physical landscape. New York City's Chinatowns are a meso‐level case study that exemplify my conception of a mutually‐constituting, interdependent, horizontally‐networked immigrant enclave . Findings show that some neighbourhoods like Flushing, Queens, retain characteristics of the classic, vertically‐integrated enclave, where residential and economic spheres spatially overlap; however, in Brooklyn (residential) and Manhattan (commercial), the 'hotspots' do not overlap. Rather than considering each cluster its own enclave, I propose a string of pearls metaphor that connects the flows (links) of co‐ethnics throughout multiple key places (nodes) within the city. Hence, I modify our commonly held spatial understanding of an enclave to reunify co‐ethnic clusters in metropolitan areas into a codependent micro‐economy.