Color-Full before Color Blind: The Emergence of Multiracial Neighborhood Politics in Queens, New York City

The United States is undergoing a "majority minority" transition, with the historic European-ancestry white majority projected to fall beneath 50% of the population in the second half of the current century. Elmhurst-Corona, a neighborhood in Queens, New York City, was 98% white in 1960 but by 1990 had become intensely multiracial, multiethnic, and multilingual, with neither African Americans, Asians, Latin Americans, nor the remaining whites constituting a majority of the local population. Based on ethnographic fieldwork between 1983 and 1996, in this article I trace the growth of cross-racial political interaction in Elmhurst-Corona, highlighting initial resistance by white residents, entry of newcomers into civic politics, innovation by female civic activists, and acceptance of shared local "quality of life" concerns as representation at the central political arena, the neighborhood's appointed community board, became more inclusive, political anthropology, race, immigration, New York City, United States]