[URBAN NOTE] Mark Jacobson at New York on the Uzbeks of Brooklyn

[rfmcdonald]

At New York, Mark Jacobson uses the high-profile case of the arrest of two Uzbek immigrants on charges of supporting ISIS to illustrate the much larger Uzbek immigrant community in New York City.

This ISIS business is a problem for us, but we want everyone to know it does not define all Uzbeks in this country,” Farhod Sulton told me recently, not for the first time. Since the news broke, Sulton, a 35-year-old Tashkent-born insurance agent, had become the local go-to guy on the case. He is the head of Vatandosh, one of the very few Uzbek organizations in the city. Blessed with the dark good looks befitting the far-flung genetic legacy of his homeland, Sulton also speaks English, which the majority of Uzbeks living in Brooklyn don’t.

“We are new here, but we want to show we belong,” Sulton said. This was the purpose of today’s Vatandosh-sponsored activity, a trip down the I-95 corridor to Washington, D.C. “Uzbek immigrants need to realize that America is bigger than just Brooklyn,” he said while the bus crossed the Delaware River, just as George Washington did in 1776.

For the 40 or so Brooklyn Uzbeks on the bus, it had been a long journey. Today, if it rang any bell at all, Uzbekistan was known to most New Yorkers as a dusty (doubly) landlocked ’Stan among other Central Asian ’Stans. Yet Uzbekistan was once a great crossroads of civilization. This was Transoxiana, key pathway of the famous Silk Road, the prime conduit between the ancient marvels of East and West. It was in the fabled cities of present-day Uzbekistan — Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent — that Marco Polo stopped to water his camels. Before that, Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan had overrun and ruled the place. Tamerlane rose up from its midst to conquer much of Asia, from Persia to Delhi. More recently came the conquering Turks and the Russians, who in 1924 invented the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, which would last until 1991, when Uzbekistan finally became an independent state.

There are three kinds of Uzbeks in the New York area. There are the Bukharans of Rego Park and Kew Gardens, who are mainly Jews and have done well in real estate and the Diamond District. You can spot the younger Bukharans, who are assimilated into the New York scene, tooling down Queens Boulevard in their hot cars. There are also the “Old Uzbeks,” Muslims who came to the U.S. as refugees from the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. Staunch anti-communists, they have also prospered, with many living in New Jersey’s upwardly mobile Morris County.

“Then there’s us,” Sulton said with a half-smile, pointing to the passengers on the bus.