Depending on the context, I identify either as a Yonkersonian (a resident of Yonkers) or a New Yorker. In the literal sense, home is Yonkers; I’ve lived there my entire life. I would not identify as a New Yorker when in Yonkers or anywhere in New York State or the New York City metropolitan area; that would essentially be disownment of my hometown. Nor would I, when first introducing myself to someone, introduce myself as a New Yorker except by saying Yonkers borders the Bronx to the northwest. For me, Yonkers, with all its idiosyncrasies, is home, and I would never let anyone believe I was ashamed of it--at least not to the point where I would not identify with it.
The shadow of New York City looms large, however, and Yonkers, being adjacent to New York, is entirely within its shade. This can be seen merely by looking at its demographics: Yonkers is a city of about 200,000 that is still a suburb. About five miles north-northeast of Yonkers, White Plains is a more modern, urbanized city with a population of only about 60,000. Culturally speaking, Yonkers residents are, especially in the southern half, very much New Yorkers; this is most evident in the slang used in Yonkers, which is taken virtually entirely from New York. If Yonkers residents want to hang out with their friends for the day, they often go into the city--when people in Yonkers (and other municipalities close to New York, I presume) refer to “the city”, they invariably mean New York City. When residents of New York City proper speak to their experiences, Yonkers residents often identity with them, unless the topic is specific to New York City and New York City alone (such as the school system).
Despite all of this, I’m not all that familiar with New York--at least not to the extent that many of my friends from home are. Even though I live less than a mile and a half from the the Yonkers-Bronx border and less than three and a half from the terminus of the 1 train line, I haven’t gone into the city very often. I could give you the approximate locations of Times Square, Penn Station, the Port Authority, Grand Central Station, and a few of the colleges in New York--most notably Columbia and NYU--but I couldn’t tell you much else. As much as I identify with New York, I don’t really know much about it.
So when the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College announced its tour would be in New York this year, I jumped at the opportunity. Of course, the main reason I signed up was to have the opportunity to bond with fellow Kuumbabes (the semi-official term for a member of Kuumba). That’s a story of its own, so I won’t tell it here. But most of the time I had outside of choir performances, rehearsals, and other functions--including games of Mafia and Spades--I spent exploring the city with friends, by doing things such as finding diners in Long Island City in Queens; walking through Brooklyn through and over the Brooklyn Bridge; exploring Washington Square Park, Chinatown, and Little Italy; and visiting the Sandy Ground Historical Society in Staten Island. That last activity alone probably made the trip worthwhile, as I probably would have never gone to Staten Island otherwise.
Did I get to attend Broadway plays, go up the Empire State Building, visit the Statue of liberty, or attend a sporting event? No. Those things cost more money than I have, and New Yorkers don’t visit the Statue of Liberty anyway. (It’s kind of just there, if we’re being honest.) Even without those quintessential New York experiences, I still got to see much more of New York than I had before. To be frank, it was because I didn’t have those conventional experiences that I saw the parts of the city that aren’t really tourist attractions--the parts of New York that are more for New Yorkers than for the rest of the world. I wonder how many New Yorkers have been to Staten Island...
