Then he pirouettes, aims the remote control and silences the soccer game that has transfixed an Irish immigrant waiting at the counter. Nodding hello to two teenagers deliberating in Bengali by the horror films, Mr. Arana registers them with the practiced eye of an urban anthropologist. He knows they are from Bangladesh, just as he knows the names of British soccer players and Dominican movie stars, because it is smart business to know. Here at the end of the century, one in three city residents is an immigrant and, of those, nearly half are newly minted New Yorkers who arrived only in the last 15 years. Not since 1910, at the peak of this century's great wave of immigration through Ellis Island, has the ratio of newcomers been as high.
Sheer numbers are only the beginning of the story.
And this diversity within diversity is changing the very definition of the ethnic New York neighborhood. Classic old ethnic neighborhoods that had successfully resisted change for half a century, now belong to no one and to everyone. They are a clashing, colorful, polyglot, multiethnic collection of microcommunities whose members sometimes come together on neutral ground like Mr. Arana's video store, and sometimes lead parallel lives. In their volume and their variety, the immigrants have affected each pillar of the neighborhood architecture. Overburdened schools where bilingual education once was just academic theory now struggle to absorb an influx of children who do not speak English.