How does a place like Little Italy or Little Havana become part of a major city?

Question

How does a place like Little Italy or Little Havana become part of a major city?

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Answer 1

They didn’t “become a part of a major city”, they are in the big city. Little Italy (and everything around it) existed before the major waves of Italian immigrations to NYC in the early XX century, and was mostly farmland of the Dutch and later English early colonists. As the city was growing, it became more urbanized and when the first waves of Italian immigration started it attracted people of similar backgrounds because they could find work, speak their native language, keep cultural, social, family ties etc. Nowadays Little Italy is mostly part of Chinatown showing similar dynamic