mention my work with Vietnamese and Hmong refugees because there are striking parallels between the displacement caused by the Vietnam War (or the American War, depending on which side you fought) and the Iraq War (2003–2011).4 Both wars led to the establishment of new and significant refugee communities in the US. In both instances, the US justified its support for resettlement programs out of a sense of responsibility for the plight of military and/or civilian allies who were forced out of their countries. Both groups’ pathway toward belonging in the US was shaped by severe economic recession, racial stratification, and geopolitics: “They [Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians] arrived en masse (fully 450,000 during 1979–82 alone), and at the worst possible time: the peak of their arrival (1980) coincided with the highest domestic inflation rates in memory, followed (during 1981–1983) by the most severe economic recession in nearly half a century, and by an accompanying socio-political climate of intensifying nativism, racism, xenophobia, and ‘compassion fatigue.’”5
The Iraqi refugee narrative bears many similarities to that of the Vietnamese and Hmong in the trauma of violence and flight, struggles to build livelihoods during economic recession, cultural adaptations of children and adults, and stigmatizing otherness. There are parallels as well in how both groups began their American lives in unique cultural geographies: Vietnamese and Hmong found themselves in impoverished urban neighborhoods in cities like Oakland, and Iraqis found themselves in working-class Latinx neighborhoods.
Despite the abrupt defunding of the job-development program for resettled refugees, my experience there left me feeling a natural resonance with that kind of work. This led first to Washington, DC, and then to Khartoum, Sudan. My interest in Arabic and the people of the Middle East and North Africa grew from previous travels to Turkey, Jordan, and Syria. That experience had affected me in a profound way, and I believe it had to do with the fact that I was a vulnerable stranger in a strange land, with very little money, which forced me to avail myself of the traditional hospitality of the Arab and Turkish people.
When I arrived in Sudan in September 1986, the country was recovering from “famine,” a euphemism for war- and climate-induced economic collapse and food insecurity, which left huge numbers of people displaced and vulnerable to malnutrition. The neighboring countries of Ethiopia and Somalia had been the arena of proxy wars for the disputed Ogaden region, and the Eritrean struggle for self-determination had left tens of thousands of refugees living a tenuous existence in the eastern part of Sudan. The capital city of Khartoum was home to large populations of ethnically distinct southern Sudanese who had fled civil war and lived in simple shelters on the outskirts of the city. In Khartoum, I worked for an international agency, helping to manage a program that supported thirty government Mother-Child Health clinics that served people displaced by war and famine.
During this time, I also worked with displaced Hawaweer nomads in Sudan’s Northern Province who had been forced by the “famine” to leave their ancestral lands to work as day laborers on the date farms along the Nile. The plight of the Hawaweer illustrated the intersectionality of climate change, superpower intervention, political oppression, and unjust economic policy, leading to the erosion of livelihood.6
I spent the year immersing myself in the Sudanese dialect of Arabic and was subjected to the relentless Sudanese hospitality in the homes of my coworkers. Like Iraqis, the Sudanese are a welcoming and social people, and the joy I found in their homes helps explain how easy it was later to claim ethnography as my most natural expression as a researcher. Sudan also left me with a desire to continue a connection with the Arab world. It explains why, of all the refugee populations in Southern California, Iraqis were the ones I gravitated toward in 2010.
Sudan was followed by five years of work managing mostly rural community-development projects in Kenya. Inspired by Wangaari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement, much of our effort went in support of women’s microfinance, health education, and training in organic farming. Always there was the specter of migration in the background. Rural villages, based on subsistence farming, were disproportionately made up of the old and very young. Women were the mainstay of what was left of the subsistence farming economy, working the shambas (kitchen gardens), “stretching the week” with sukumuweeki (kale). Men had migrated to the cities, once again a way to diversify the household economy, much like some ranchos in Mexico that are characterized by outmigration of men, and increasingly women, of working age. As in Sudan, the most rewarding part of life among the Kenyans was sitting with people and listening to them talk about what was happening in their lives, their families, and their communities.
Six years in East Africa were followed by doctoral work in the rural midwestern US, where I joined a group researching the Mexican settlement within the larger economic and demographic shifts that were transforming agriculture and rural communities. Supported by the Julian Samora Research Institute at Michigan State University,7 I explored the role of Latinx religious congregations in helping individuals, particularly the US-born children, find a place of belonging within a sometimes hostile host community.8
After returning to California in 2008 to teach at La Sierra University, I began reading press reports about the hardship of the newly arrived Iraqi refugee families. Several things struck me as unusual and unique. Iraqis were being resettled in majority-Latinx communities like Fontana and Moreno Valley instead of Middle Eastern enclaves like El Cajon. This spatial reality raised even more questions; not only has very little research been done on the new Iraqi refugee groups in California, but even less is known about the Arab American experience in majority-Latinx communities.
The decision to pursue a study of the emerging Iraqi refugee community in my corner of California finally coalesced in 2010 in Washington, DC. I went there to interview people involved with refugee advocacy and resettlement in the US, including the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC). It was there that I met Abel, an Iraqi man in his early forties who had been in the District for two months and had just landed a restaurant job. Over curried chicken in his small apartment that he shared with his parents, Abel told me his story. He had majored in engineering at the University of Baghdad and studied English at schools in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. His father had left Iraq because some government officials had taken his writing as critical of Saddam Hussein. He was exiled for a time in Egypt, where he met an Egyptian woman, and they married. Abel’s English skills were what landed him the job of translating for the British in Basra, later for the Americans in Baghdad. As Iraqis who worked for the coalition were systematically hunted down by militias, he went into hiding for four years.
I had been introduced to Abel by John, a young staff member for the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies. What brought these two men together was that Abel’s asylum application had been successful because of the work done by John’s organization. State Department officials claimed that Iraqis were not fleeing in large numbers until 2006, when sectarian violence broke out in response to the bombing of the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites for Shi’a Islam. The List Project, however, documented that well before that, many Iraqis who worked for the US and its coalition partners had been targeted for assassination by insurgents. (The organization’s name derived from the lists it had created of those who had been hunted down or forced to leave the country.) The doors to asylum in the US remained essentially closed from 2003 to 2007 for Iraqis like Abel who were staff and translators associated with the US military or the Coalition Provisional Authority.
I was moved by Abel’s story and outraged by American indifference toward the suffering of the country’s former allies. A jarring reminder of this occurred on the flight back from Washington, DC. My loquacious row-mate asked what had taken me to DC, and when I recounted my meeting with John and Abel, her response was (I paraphrase), “Why should I care about them? I know so many Americans who have plenty of problems. And besides, we kicked Saddam’s butt. They should be grateful.” Was it the gin talking, or were the American people truly in deliberate denial about the ongoing consequences of the Iraq War? Appalled by the apathy toward the very real violence that Iraqis fled from, the economic struggles they faced in the US, and the willful ignorance toward the interplay of empire and forced
