The glorious diversity of Queens, New York

A BRISK AUTUMN Sunday morning in Richmond Hill, a scruffy, bland neighbourhood deep in south-central Queens. Half a dozen men gather on the southern edge of a pocket park named for Phil “Scooter” Rizzuto, a beloved post-war shortstop with the New York Yankees. There is an air of hushed anticipation among the men: small talk, warm air blown into cupped hands, frequent glances up and down the otherwise quiet street. An occasional plane passes overhead, perhaps to La Guardia, perhaps to JFK.

The gathered men are all from Guyana, and speak in the lilting accents of their South American homeland. A few blocks away Singh’s Roti Shop is heaving with families out for their Sunday morning saltfish bakes and curried chicken with dhalpuri roti. Guyanese people began emigrating to America in the late 1960s; numbers picked up as economic and political conditions at home declined in the 1980s. Today around 250,000 of them live in America, most of them in the New York area and a lot of them in Queens.