Two Decembers ago, after years away, I went back to Oak Tree Road. That thoroughfare, straddling my New Jersey hometown of Edison and the neighboring Iselin, had been the site of my childhood in the early aughts. Sitting along that four-mile stretch were video stores with DVDs for Bollywood films you definitely couldn’t find at Blockbuster, sari boutiques with their dazzling display of color and pattern, and sweets shops whose indulgences ferried my Bengali immigrant family back to the country they’d left behind long ago.
But my 2021 visit changed the image of abundance that had been frozen in my mind. It was obvious that economic reality had set in; the storefronts I’d once known so well were empty. Video shops were gone in the age of streaming. Some of my favorite restaurants had been maimed by the pandemic. My immediate hunch was that Oak Tree Road had become a shell of its former self. It would take some time for me to understand how wrong I was.
My outlook at the time of my return certainly challenged prevailing portraits of Oak Tree Road, which is, by most accounts, considered one of America’s great immigrant successes. The New York Times once called the street “America’s liveliest Little India.” The designation has merit, though it belies the diversity of populations from the entire subcontinent who have resided in the surrounding areas ever since the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 eliminated the quotas that previously controlled how many South Asians could move to America, thereby undoing decades of restrictive immigration law.
The South Asians who settled in central New Jersey in the years after, scrounging for economic opportunity in this new land, had to find a way to make a living while also catering to the swelling population of fellow immigrants around them. Thus, a new enclave was born. Supermarkets, record stores, and glittering jewelry shops sprouted.
That growth did not come without challenges. I remember, quite vividly, the plumes of prejudice that enveloped Oak Tree Road two decades ago. Long-time residents would sometimes speak of the area’s transformation in xenophobic terms, bemoaning the invasion of South Asians like myself, and my family, who had sullied the longstanding culture with our gaudy song-and-dance and pungent spices.
Yet our reach was too wide to ignore. Our dance studios, restaurants, and movie theaters started to pollinate other parts of the state—like North Brunswick, a nearby town where my family and I later moved—where smaller, but no less vibrant South Asian epicenters bloomed. Aspects of our culture would bend and adapt to the environments around them, too. Walk into Papa Pancho, an Indian pizzeria on Oak Tree Road, and you’ll find tandoor paneer makhani pies, proof that our microcosms were not siloed from the towns that contained them.
