On a warm night in the late 1980s, the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 79th Street glowed orange from a single griddle. A woman named Maria Piedad Cano flipped corn cakes there until five in the morning, working the late hours because that was when the police left her cart alone. She had been a lawyer and a judge in Medellin. In Queens she was the Arepa Lady, and the line outside her cart was one of the first signs that this stretch of Jackson Heights had quietly become a piece of Colombia.
The story of the Colombians in Jackson Heights is not, in the end, about that one griddle. It is about the bakeries and steakhouses, the travel agencies wiring money home, the social club founded by sixteen people, and the second generation now scattered to the suburbs. This is how a marsh in central Queens turned into the largest Colombian neighborhood in the United States.
Jackson Heights: The Place
Jackson Heights sits in the middle of Queens, threaded by the elevated 7 train that rumbles above Roosevelt Avenue toward Flushing. Below the steel of the el, Roosevelt is a wall of storefronts, fruit stands, and accents from four continents. A block north, the side streets soften into the brick garden-apartment blocks the neighborhood was built around, ringed by private interior gardens. The contrast defines the place: a tight, loud commercial spine and the quiet, leafy blocks just behind it.
How Jackson Heights Became Little Colombia
Before the Colombians
None of this existed before 1909. The land was a marsh called Trains Meadow until the Queensboro Corporation, run by developer Edward MacDougall, bought roughly 325 acres and began laying out a new community. The firm coined the term “garden apartment” for buildings wrapped around shared interior parks, and the first of them went up around 1917.
That same year, the elevated Flushing Line, today’s 7 train, reached the neighborhood and put it about twenty minutes from Midtown. Jackson Heights was sold as a restricted, semi-suburban retreat for middle-class New Yorkers. More than two hundred of those original Queensboro buildings still stand, and the early-twentieth-century street grid they created is the stage on which everything later unfolded.
The Colombians Arrive
A handful of Colombians, professionals and students, had been living in Jackson Heights since the early decades of the twentieth century, drawn by the orderly, suburban feel. The real movement began later. When a recession hit Colombia in the 1960s, more families left, and Jackson Heights, already affordable and well connected by the train, became a landing point.
The push behind the larger waves was harder. Colombia had endured La Violencia, the brutal mid-century civil conflict between political factions, and the instability and economic strain that followed sent people looking for work abroad. The 1970s and 1980s brought garment workers, mechanics, shopkeepers, and clerks alongside the earlier professionals, much as the same decades carried other Spanish-speaking New Yorkers into enclaves like the Dominicans in Washington Heights.
Chain migration did the rest. One relative found an apartment and a job, then sponsored or simply hosted the next, and so a single building could fill with people from the same Colombian city. By the mid-1970s Roosevelt Avenue had become the commercial heart of the community, and the name Little Colombia, La Pequena Colombia, began to stick.
The institutions followed the people. In 1978 a group of about sixteen Colombian entrepreneurs founded the Centro Civico Colombiano, first meeting in nearby Woodside before it grew into a social and cultural anchor offering English classes, folklore dance, and music lessons. The travel agencies came too. Delgado Travel opened its first ticketing and shipping shop in 1973 at 75-09 Roosevelt Avenue, part of a corridor of storefronts that sold flights home and wired remittances back to Colombia.
Little Colombia at Its Peak
By the 1980s and into the 1990s, the Colombians in Jackson Heights anchored a corridor that ran along Roosevelt Avenue and 37th Avenue, roughly between 69th and 90th Streets and centered near 82nd Street. The blocks filled with bakeries selling pandebono and buñuelos, steakhouses serving bandeja paisa, and bars where the music ran late. New arrivals fleeing turmoil in Colombia in the 1990s pushed the numbers higher still, spilling east into Corona. It made Jackson Heights to Colombians what East Harlem long was to Puerto Ricans: the first address, the place you started.
This was also the era that the press fixated on. In the 1980s and 1990s, federal investigators tied Queens, and Jackson Heights in particular, to money laundering for the cocaine trade, and some neighborhood check-cashing and transfer businesses were used as channels for cartel money. The most chilling moment came on March 11, 1992, when Manuel de Dios Unanue, the former editor of the Spanish-language daily El Diario La Prensa, was shot twice in the head at a restaurant in neighboring Elmhurst. He had built a second career exposing the cartels by name, and the killing was ordered by Cali Cartel boss Jose Santacruz Londono. The shooter, an eighteen-year-old, was convicted in 1994, and a small triangle of parkland at 83rd Street and Roosevelt Avenue was dedicated to de Dios in 1995.
That violence was real, and it terrified the neighborhood, but it was never the neighborhood’s story. The overwhelming daily reality on these blocks was work, family, and small business. For every headline about laundered money there were thousands of people who sewed garments, drove cabs, ran bakeries, and sent a fixed share of every paycheck home to relatives in Colombia.
The Change
The community began to thin in the 2000s. Some of the families who had fled the 1990s turmoil returned to a more stable Colombia, and many others dispersed across the United States. Rising rents pushed working families out of Queens entirely, often to cheaper towns in Pennsylvania.
At the same time the neighbors changed. Ecuadorians, Mexicans, and Peruvians moved onto the same blocks, alongside South Asian arrivals and the Tibetans who built their own community in Jackson Heights a few streets over, until the neighborhood became one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth. The president of the Centro Civico Colombiano, Amparo Gomez, has put the shift bluntly, saying the area holds only a fraction of the Colombian presence it once did.
The Landmarks of Little Colombia
The Arepa Lady cart, northwest corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 79th Street. This was where Maria Piedad Cano sold her arepas through the late-night hours after fleeing the Escobar-era violence in Medellin, where government workers like her had become targets. After saving roughly seventy thousand dollars over six years, she and her sons opened their first brick-and-mortar location in 2014. She has since retired to Medellin, and her son Alejandro Osorio now runs the family’s restaurants in Queens and Brooklyn.
La Boina Roja, 80-22 37th Avenue. This Colombian charcoal steakhouse opened in 1998, grown from a butcher shop that the same family ran next door. It is still serving, a working dinner table on a block that has seen plenty of its neighbors close, and the seasoning, the family will tell you, is the mother’s recipe.
Los Arrieros, 76-02 Roosevelt Avenue. Tucked on a corner under the train since 1994, Los Arrieros is small, plain, and famous for portions that defeat most appetites. The name nods to the arrieros, the mule drivers of Colombia’s coffee country, and the kitchen cooks the food of that region without apology or fuss.
Chibcha, 79-05 Roosevelt Avenue at 80th Street. For years this was the loud heart of Little Colombia’s nightlife, a cavernous coastal-Colombian restaurant and club with a multicolored truck built into the bar and dancing that ran into the early morning. It has since closed, one of the rooms that defined the neighborhood’s weekends before the crowds thinned.
The Manuel de Dios Unanue Triangle, 83rd Street between Baxter and Roosevelt Avenues. This sliver of parkland was named in 1995 for the journalist murdered for reporting on the cartels. It is a quiet, deliberate piece of the neighborhood’s memory, a reminder set right on the avenue the cartels once tried to control.
The Centro Civico Colombiano. Founded in 1978 by about sixteen people, the civic center has spent decades teaching English, staging folklore dances, and running what it bills as the largest free outdoor Colombian Independence festival in the country. It remains the institutional spine of the community, open now to the many nationalities that share these streets.
Where the Jackson Heights Colombians Came From
The Colombians who built this neighborhood did not come from one place, but the paisas left the deepest mark. These were people from Antioquia and its capital Medellin, along with the coffee-growing departments of Caldas, Risaralda, and Quindio, a region known for its enterprising, family-first culture. The mule drivers, the steakhouse owners, the woman with the griddle: many traced back to that mountainous coffee country, and the food on Roosevelt Avenue still leans paisa.
They were joined by Bogotanos from the capital and by people from Valle del Cauca and its city Cali in the southwest, including costeños from the Caribbean coast whose music and seafood shaped places like Chibcha. What pushed all of them north was some mix of the same forces: the long shadow of La Violencia, recessions, and the drug-war chaos of the 1980s and 1990s. What pulled them to Jackson Heights specifically was an apartment a cousin already had, a few blocks from a train to a garment-district job.
Jackson Heights Today
Little Colombia is smaller now, but it is not gone. The bakeries near 82nd Street still sell warm buñuelos, the steakhouses still fire their grills, and on a July Sunday the Colombian Day Parade, first held in 2000 and now a quarter-century old, still rolls up Northern Boulevard from 69th to 89th Streets with flags, drums, and dancers. The yellow, blue, and red flies from balconies that also fly the flags of Ecuador and Mexico.
What has changed is the texture of the blocks. Many of the founding families have moved to Long Island, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, and their children grew up as Queens kids who visit on weekends rather than residents who never left. One of those children, Catalina Cruz, who arrived from Medellin as an undocumented girl, now represents the district in the New York State Assembly, a marker of how far the community has traveled in two generations.
For the visitor today, the neighborhood reads as a shared Latin American and global crossroads with a Colombian core still beating along Roosevelt and 37th Avenues, a pattern echoed across the borough in places like the Guyanese stretch of Richmond Hill. The cart on 79th Street is gone, but the restaurant it grew into is full, and that may be the truest picture of Little Colombia now: not vanished, but grown up and spread out, with the original blocks still serving as the place everyone comes back to.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Colombians settle in Jackson Heights?
Colombians settled in Jackson Heights because it was affordable, semi-suburban, and well connected to Manhattan jobs by the 7 train, and because chain migration concentrated newcomers where relatives already lived. Early professionals and students arrived in the first half of the twentieth century, and a 1960s recession plus the violence and economic strain of later decades brought far larger waves. By the mid-1970s the Colombians in Jackson Heights had made Roosevelt Avenue their commercial heart.
Is Jackson Heights still Colombian today?
It is still Colombian, but less so than at its peak. Rising rents and a calmer Colombia drew many families to the suburbs and to states like Pennsylvania in the 2000s, while Ecuadorian, Mexican, and Peruvian neighbors moved in. A Colombian core still anchors the blocks near 82nd Street, and the annual Colombian Day Parade up Northern Boulevard remains a major event.
What are the famous Colombian landmarks and restaurants in Jackson Heights?
The best known is the Arepa Lady, which began as Maria Piedad Cano’s late-night cart at Roosevelt Avenue and 79th Street and is now a sit-down restaurant. Other anchors include the charcoal steakhouse La Boina Roja on 37th Avenue, Los Arrieros on Roosevelt Avenue, the Centro Civico Colombiano, and the Manuel de Dios Unanue Triangle honoring the murdered journalist.
Where in Colombia did the Jackson Heights community come from?
Many came from the paisa region: Antioquia and Medellin and the coffee-growing departments of Caldas, Risaralda, and Quindio. They were joined by Bogotanos from the capital and by people from Valle del Cauca and Cali, including costeños from the Caribbean coast. The food and music along Roosevelt Avenue still reflect that paisa and coastal mix.
When did Colombians first arrive in Jackson Heights?
A small number of Colombian professionals and students lived in Jackson Heights as early as the first decades of the twentieth century. The community grew after a recession in Colombia during the 1960s, then surged through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. That long arc is how the Colombians in Jackson Heights turned the area into the largest Colombian neighborhood in the United States.
Every family in Little Colombia carries a route: a town in Antioquia or a street in Cali, an apartment a cousin found, a flight that changed everything. If your own people made that kind of crossing, their story is waiting to be mapped.