On a Sunday afternoon in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, a rubber ball arcs over a net strung high between two poles, and a dozen men in jerseys shout in Spanish as a crowd presses in close, cash changing hands on the sidelines. This is ecuavóley, Ecuador’s street version of volleyball, and on summer weekends the courts near the old World’s Fair grounds fill with players and bettors who grew up in the highland towns of Azuay and Cañar. A few blocks west, under the steel canopy of the 7 train, the smell of hornado drifts from a cart on Roosevelt Avenue, roast pork with skin the color of varnish. Corona does not announce itself as Ecuadorian. You have to read it in the food, the flags, and the Sunday games.
The Ecuadorians in Corona built one of the largest concentrations of their countrymen anywhere outside Ecuador, and they did it the way immigrants almost always do: one cousin, one neighbor, one hometown at a time.
Corona: The Place
Corona sits in north-central Queens, bordered by Jackson Heights and Elmhurst to the west, Flushing and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park to the east, and East Elmhurst to the north. The IRT Flushing Line, the elevated 7 train, runs above Roosevelt Avenue with stops at 103rd Street-Corona Plaza, 111th Street, and Junction Boulevard. Roosevelt Avenue splits the neighborhood into North and South Corona. The housing is dense and modest: two- and three-family brick rowhouses, walk-up apartments, and basement units, much of it among the most crowded residential stock in the city.
How Corona Became Little Ecuador
Before the Ecuadorians
For the first half of the twentieth century, Corona was Italian, Irish, and German, a working-class corner of Queens with backyard fig trees and Catholic parishes. In 1943 the jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong and his wife Lucille bought a house here, on 107th Street, and lived in it until he died in 1971. It is a museum today, with a new Louis Armstrong Center across the street that opened in 2023.
The Italian layer left its sweetest marks on the streetscape. In 1944 Nicola Benfaremo started selling Italian ice from a garage, and the Lemon Ice King of Corona, later run by his son Peter, became a neighborhood institution at the corner near 108th Street and Corona Avenue. Leo’s Latticini, a family deli known to regulars as Mama’s, has made its own mozzarella for generations on 104th Street. These places still operate, surrounded now by a different neighborhood.
Dominicans began arriving in the 1950s, and through the 1960s and 1970s the area drew Latin American newcomers from across the hemisphere. Mexicans, Ecuadorians, and the Colombians who anchored neighboring Jackson Heights followed in growing numbers as the older European families moved out to the suburbs.
The Ecuadorians Arrive
The story starts, improbably, with hats. From the nineteenth century, weavers in the southern Ecuadorian provinces of Azuay and Cañar produced the fine straw hats the world wrongly calls Panama hats, and a New York export trade grew up around them. When that trade collapsed in the 1950s and 1960s, the commercial ties remained, and young men used those connections to come north. Historians call them the pioneer migrants: mostly male, mostly young, and mostly without papers.
What followed was chain migration in its purest form, the same engine that drew Dominicans to Washington Heights in Manhattan. A man who found work in a Queens kitchen or on a construction crew sent for a brother, who sent for a cousin, who sent for a neighbor from the same village. Whole hamlets in the Cuenca highlands emptied toward the same few blocks of Corona and Jackson Heights. The numbers surged in the 1980s after an oil-price collapse and El Niño flooding wrecked the Ecuadorian economy, and the 1986 federal immigration amnesty legalized roughly seventeen thousand Ecuadorians, many of whom could finally sponsor relatives.
Corona at Its Peak
By the late 1990s the flow became a flood. Ecuador’s banking system collapsed in 1998 and 1999, the currency was scrapped for the US dollar, and a generation left. New York absorbed the largest share. More than half of all Ecuadorians counted in the United States settled in the metro area, and Queens held the biggest single community, tens of thousands of people clustered in Corona, Jackson Heights, and an Elmhurst they shared with Indonesian newcomers.
Roosevelt Avenue under the 7 train became their main street. Travel agencies advertised flights to Guayaquil and money transfers to Cuenca. Restaurants served encebollado and guatita to men coming off construction shifts. The 2000s building boom across the city ran in large part on undocumented Ecuadorian labor, framing, roofing, hanging drywall, and the remittances those workers wired home became one of Ecuador’s largest sources of foreign income.
The Change
The community matured. A second generation grew up bilingual, went to Queens schools, and opened businesses of their own. The Ecuadorian presence stretched east along Roosevelt Avenue from around 82nd Street toward Junction Boulevard, the densest Ecuadorian commercial strip in the country.
Then came 2020. The zip code covering Corona recorded the highest number of coronavirus cases in New York City, and nearby Elmhurst Hospital was called the epicenter of the epicenter. The neighborhood’s crowded apartments, its high share of essential workers, and the many residents without insurance made it brutally exposed, and Ecuadorian families bore heavy losses both here and in Ecuador, where Guayaquil was overwhelmed at the same time. The grief was immense and quiet, and the community kept working.
The Landmarks of Little Ecuador
Corona Plaza, at the 103rd Street-Corona Plaza station, is the heart of it. A former truck route, it was rebuilt into a public plaza by 2018 and became an open-air market where dozens of vendors, many of them Ecuadorian, sold food and goods. In August 2023 the city swept the plaza and evicted roughly seventy-eight vendors after complaints about crowding and trash; by that November, after a public outcry, a smaller group of permitted vendors was allowed back.
Leticia’s, at 40-32 National Street, is a Corona standby for the dishes Ecuadorians actually eat at home: hearty fish soups, roast pork, and fried plantains. It grew from the same Corona Plaza food scene that made the neighborhood a destination for eaters from across the city.
El Rincón Guayaquileño, with a Warren Street address near the Corona-Elmhurst line, is named for the coastal city of Guayaquil and known for deeply marinated meats and an encebollado de pescado thick with chunks of fish. It works both as a sit-down spot and from a stand on the Roosevelt Avenue corridor.
Hornado Ecuatoriano, at 76-18 Roosevelt Avenue, builds its whole identity around hornado, the highland roast pig with shatter-crisp amber skin that anchors a Sunday plate with hominy, potato cakes, and pickled onions.
The Lemon Ice King of Corona, near 108th Street and Corona Avenue, is the Italian ghost in the machine, opened in 1944 and still scooping lemon ice on a corner now ringed by Ecuadorian and Mexican businesses. A neighborhood does not erase its past; it layers over it.
Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the old World’s Fair grounds on Corona’s eastern edge, is where the community gathers in the open. On weekends its courts fill with ecuavóley games, and in summer the New York Hall of Science hosts the Ecuadorian Festival, the street-fair finale to a parade tradition that has run since the 1980s.
Where the Corona Ecuadorians Came From
Overwhelmingly, they came from the southern highlands: the provinces of Azuay and Cañar, and the city of Cuenca, Ecuador’s third largest. This was the old hat-weaving country, where women wove straw for the New York export trade and men migrated seasonally for work, a region with a deep culture of leaving and sending money back. When local livelihoods failed, the same routes that had carried hats carried people.
Later waves widened the map. The 1980s and the 1998-99 banking crisis pulled migrants from the coast as well, including Guayaquil and Guayas province, which is why a coastal dish like encebollado sits on Corona menus right beside highland hornado. But the founding thread, and the reason so many Corona families trace home to the same valleys, runs straight back to Cuenca and the towns around it.
Corona Today
Corona is still profoundly Ecuadorian, and it is still arriving. Vendors sell green plantains and herbs near the train, delivery riders idle on e-bikes outside the restaurants, and the Roosevelt Avenue storefronts advertise remittance transfers and immigration paperwork in Spanish. Hometown associations tied to specific Azuayan and Cañari villages still organize dances, fundraisers, and disaster relief from Queens.
It is not a museum piece. The vendor fights at Corona Plaza, the post-pandemic recovery, and a new generation of arrivals all play out on the same blocks, and the neighborhood remains crowded, working, and improvised in the way immigrant neighborhoods always are. The children of the pioneer migrants are lawyers and nurses and restaurateurs now, some still upstairs from the family business, some out in the suburbs.
What holds is the Sunday rhythm: the ball over the net in the park, the roast pork on the plate, the flag in the window. The hats that started it are long gone from the trade, but the people who followed them built something that stayed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Ecuadorians settle in Corona, Queens?
The Ecuadorians in Corona arrived through chain migration that began with the old Panama-hat export trade between the southern Ecuadorian highlands and New York. When that trade declined in the mid-twentieth century, pioneer migrants used the same connections to find work, then sent for relatives, concentrating the community in Corona and adjacent Jackson Heights and Elmhurst.
Is Corona still an Ecuadorian neighborhood today?
Yes. Corona remains one of the most heavily Ecuadorian neighborhoods in the United States, with Ecuadorian restaurants, vendors, and businesses lining Roosevelt Avenue and Corona Plaza. It is also home to Mexican, Colombian, and Dominican residents, and new Ecuadorian immigrants continue to arrive.
What are the most famous landmarks in Little Ecuador?
Corona Plaza at the 103rd Street station is the commercial heart, with food vendors and an open-air market. Flushing Meadows-Corona Park hosts weekend ecuavóley games and the annual Ecuadorian Festival, and older Italian landmarks like the Lemon Ice King of Corona and Leo’s Latticini still operate nearby.
Where did the Corona Ecuadorians come from in Ecuador?
Most trace their roots to the southern highland provinces of Azuay and Cañar and the city of Cuenca, the historic hat-weaving region with a long tradition of migration. Later arrivals also came from the coast, including Guayaquil, especially after the 1998-99 banking crisis.
When did Ecuadorians first arrive in Corona?
The first Ecuadorians in Corona came in the 1950s and 1960s as the hat trade collapsed, with larger waves through the 1980s and a peak after Ecuador’s 1998-99 economic crisis. By the 2000s, Corona and the surrounding Queens neighborhoods held the largest Ecuadorian community in the country.
If your family’s story passed through Corona, through a kitchen shift, a hat-weaving valley, or a Sunday game in the park, it is worth tracing where the line began and how it carried north.