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...it must have been in one of those cab-induced daydreams that I began to wonder what these new immigrants driving wildly through the streets of New York thought of our madcap city and how they would compare it to the towns and cities and villages around the world that they come from.

Photo: Martha Cooper

Steve Zeitlin is the director of City Lore in New York City.

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From the window of a yellow cab, New York City is a blur of headlights and traffic lights and double-parked cars and mammoth trucks in the middle of intersections blocked by Con Ed construction projects, with the meter ticking and the digital clock on the dashboard telling the rider he’s late and would probably have been better off taking the subway. The driver in the front seat, behind the bulletproof window, is most likely an immigrant New Yorker. The driver’s seat represents a first job for many immigrants arriving thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Amendments of 1965, which repealed immigration quotas favoring northern and western Europeans and placed all countries on an equal footing. Eighty percent of yellow cab drivers are recent arrivals. For me, taking a cab is a chance to chill, and it must have been in one of those cab-induced daydreams that I began to wonder what these new immigrants driving wildly through the streets of New York thought of our madcap city and how they would compare it to the towns and cities and villages around the world that they come from. My first conversation was with a young Moroccan driver, who told me, “No place in the whole world is anything like New York. Everything here is so much—so big, so fast, so crazy.” An Egyptian driver described his home city of Cairo as another “24/7 city—but still New York is much faster.” He remembered being in Egypt and needing to walk up five flights of stairs with some friends. His friends were dumbfounded when he started running up the steps. I asked Arkady, a Russian immigrant from Kiev, how he compared his home town to the Apple. “Different planet,” he said. “That is communist country, this is capitalist country. There it’s one chicken and one hen. Here you can buy one hundred chickens if you want to. There is 350 square feet for five people, here is 5,000 square feet for two people. I own the medallion. I bought for $150,000, now it’s worth $300,000.” Michael from Kingston, Jamaica, presented his own theory of economics. “There everyone is poor—here there’s a lot of poor too. The difference is that here, the poor have more stuff. They have two TVs in every room, every member of their family has a cell phone, they have a car. They have more stuff—and the thing is, the stuff creates jobs, so poor people work for the cell phone company.” As the cab turned corners, found alternate routes, Balev from Punjab, with a full white beard and turban, who also owns valued taxi medallions, took a different viewpoint. “In cities,” he said, “you forget who you are, and just chase after money. I am selling everything and moving back. I’m going to move to the village where I was born, Sher Pur Kalan. My family moved to the city years ago, but I’m going to buy back the house where I was born. There I will live simply and pray and try to figure out what I am doing here on the planet. How do I know they will sell? I will offer them good money.” A driver from Accra, the capital of Ghana, talked about the complexities of moving back. “I would move back, but I don’t have the money. . . . My family and my classmates— some of them walk ten miles to knock on my door to ask for money. Some knock on my door at five in the morning to ask for money. They clean me out. All because I’m American. I can’t afford to go back!” In Crossing the Boulevard, an extraordinary new book of photographs and oral histories of new immigrants in Queens, Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer introduce Sushil, a Hindu monk born in Bombay turned New York City cab driver, poet, and small press publisher. “A young couple comes into my cab on a rainy day. They say, ‘Oh man, it’s miserable out there.’ I say, ‘That is the water of our life.’ They ask me what I mean. I tell them, ‘You can live without food for days at a time. But water you need almost every four hours. . . . Believe me, you will get tired of the Coke. One day you will thank God for the water. . . . You [will] say, Thank you God, it is raining! It is pouring so damn hard, I am drenched from head to toe, and I adore you for it” (36–7). These conversations leave me thinking about how the new arrivals to New York replenish the city’s cultural life—a cleansing rain, as Sushil might put it. Recently, my ongoing conversations with cab drivers have been threatened by new technologies; by early 2006, many drivers had cell phones and headsets, and they carry on their own chatter in their own languages, oblivious to the riders, perhaps devising grand schemes about how to make it in New York. I may have to go back to daydreaming in cabs. But not before George, an Asante from Ghana, reminded me of one of the most remarkable immigrant traditions—the Asanteman’s Association’s custom of electing a king here in the United States, out of deference to democracy. He had just returned from Chicago, where they elected a king for the U.S. In fact, he said the real king of Ghana came to the U.S. for medical reasons and ended up attending the ceremony. Apparently, the real king thought it was quite funny they elect a king. I then asked him who was the king for New York, and he told me the man’s name. Then I asked about his occupation. “Guess?” he said. “I give up,” I answered. “Taxi driver. He’s a king during the day, a taxi driver at night. That’s why I don’t run for king. I’d have to drive the cab at night.”

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