to 2008. Earlier settlement patterns taken by Iraqis after the Gulf War were to the well-established Arab American enclaves of El Cajon and Anaheim’s Little Arabia. After 2008, the unusually large number of Iraqis settling in the US pushed the newer arrivals into new frontiers of the majority-Latinx neighborhoods of the Inland Empire.
Historically, the immigrant pathway to belonging has been shaped by finding specialized neighborhood gateways into ethnic business, political, and religious institutions. But what is the pathway to belonging for Arab immigrants within the sprawling urban majority-Latinx communities of the Inland Empire? Understanding refugees in this region of California that is not densely populated by people of Arab descent will tell us something about how Arab immigrants have survived outside their ethnic communities.8
As it happens, Iraqis arrived in the US in the throes of the Great Recession and in a place suffering from foreclosures and bankruptcies. For immigrants in the US, the meaning of belonging and good citizenship has been historically tied to their economic value as laborers and entrepreneurs. The refugee success story in the US offers membership and belonging to those who make a valuable economic or social contribution to society: the high school valedictorian, the successful entrepreneur, those who combine a high level of acculturation with economic success. Successful cultural adaptations and economic success implicitly grant permission to say, “Now we belong.” In chapter 2, we find out how Iraqis navigate through their economic discouragement and financial strain. I explore the relationship between societal belonging and the ability to find meaningful work. Iraqi youths had much to say about the meaning of economic success in the “money country,” fearing that preoccupation with money could tear families apart. By the time Iraqi families arrived in the Inland Empire, they were already fragmented—some children and siblings still in precarious exile in the Middle East, others building new lives in Germany, Denmark, Australia, and Canada.
How Iraqi parents and their children were clearly troubled by the freedoms of the United States and the potential impact of those freedoms on the family are the concern of chapter 3. Youths feared that the authoritarian parenting styles that worked in Iraq would backfire in the American culture of expressive freedom. Youths had lived enough of their lives in Iraq to recognize and appreciate those parts of Iraqi culture that are grounded in communal ties of faith and family, and they had witnessed how mosques and churches provided a vehicle for celebrating and passing on values. This was of particular urgency for ethnic and religious minorities like Chaldeans, whose cultural survival relied increasingly on its diaspora outside the Middle East.
Iraqi refugee women in the Inland Empire named security as something they valued highly in the United States. Yet for women whose religious dress makes them more visible targets for hate crimes, Muslim women find themselves in the epicenter of the ongoing process by which Arabs and Muslims have been made into racial Others. Chapter 4 situates Iraqi women within the context of the gendered experience of the War on Terror, the atmosphere punctuated by anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from the highest levels of the US polity, such that the act of claiming belonging in public spaces, whether bus stops, graduations, or garage sales, can never be far from the specter of violence. The Iraqi women narrative broaches the question of multiple forms of citizenship, one for them (as Others) and one for “white” Christian America.
Refugees find and create belonging in real, physical places, each shaped by a particular regional history. The process of becoming American for Iraqi refugees was happening within the cultural-political borderland of Latinx California, among people who had also survived a century and a half of their own marginalization. What did “becoming American” mean in this particular cultural geography, with its own layers of racial history? Immigrant strategies to achieve national belonging have historically involved differentiating from subordinate racial groups. Chapter 5 shows how, as Iraqis embarked on the path toward belonging and membership within the majority-Latinx communities of the Inland Empire, they both navigated difference and found a nascent solidarity with Latinx neighbors, despite frustration, confusion, and ambivalence.
As long as the War on Terror continues to fuel fear of Arabs, Arab Americans, and Muslims, the work to prove worthiness to fully belong will never be over.9 Arab Americans know that a terrorist attack that involves a Muslim (or anyone who looks Middle Eastern for that matter) has the potential to set the worthiness scale back to zero, as it did in the fall of 2015. The year 2015 saw historic levels of refugee movements out of Syria, Iraq, and North Africa coinciding with major terrorist attacks in Paris, France, and San Bernardino, California, which is one of the most populous cities in the Inland Empire. While the Republican presidential candidates that year singled out refugees from Syria and Iraq as existential threats, a larger “Islamophobia Industry” foregrounded an anti-Muslim discourse in the presidential primary, naming Arab refugees as a potential fifth column.10 So successful was the political opportunism employed to conflate terrorism and Arab refugees that it led to the passage of the American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act by the House of Representatives in 2015, profiling Iraqi and Syrian refugees as threats to national security.
So it was that seven years after being deemed worthy of asylum, Iraqis were singled out (alongside Syrians) as undesirable refugees and threats to our way of life.11 While the SAFE Act did not become law, the discussion itself made me wonder how people—many who had put their lives on the line for the US coalition—would feel about the United States’ radically changing stance toward Arab refugees from the Middle East. As refugee policy became driven by the ideological constructs of “stealth jihad” and “sharia creep,” what strategies would they adopt on their path to belonging in the United States?
I was particularly concerned about what these changes meant for Iraqi youths and how they saw their future in the US polity. In my interviews with Iraqi youths up until 2015, they had imagined the United States as a space to express individual and collective identities without fear of judgment, a place to find belonging without having to compromise their cultural and religious values. After the seismic political shifts of 2015, what would belonging in the United States look like to them? Chapter 6 draws on their fears and hopes, captured in a focus group I conducted with them in 2016, just two months after the San Bernardino terrorist shooting on December 2, 2015, which left fourteen dead and twenty-two wounded. I wondered if they would continue to embrace this American identity even as the mosque in Indio was attacked and anti-Arab/Muslim rancor lifted its ugly head in national politics. Chapter 6 explores the experience of belonging among Iraqi refugee youths as they confronted the disturbing ways in which they—Arabs and Muslims—were being so brazenly profiled in the public arena.
This book is more about the reclaiming of belonging than its loss. I have tried to bear witness to how cultural citizenship was worked out in the everyday experience of belonging. João Biehl and Peter Locke have written about what belonging looks like for people who are potentially unwanted, how “powers and potentials of desire” can “break open alternative pathways.”12 In a similar fashion, Iraqi lives in this book bear witness to a people’s ability to claim belonging even in the face of such appalling circumstances as being named the “enemy” and to the way they have made their way in a country as perpetual players within the theater of the War on Terror.
Violence was the essential commonality for the fifty individuals who participated in this study. Whether they were Chaldean, Assyrian, Armenian, Kurd, Arab Sunni, or Arab Shi’a, they were all Iraqi citizens who felt the heat of violence—on their bodies, their friends and families, their faith communities. All of them experienced the removal of belonging even before they crossed the border to Syria, Jordan, or Turkey. This is not to gloss over profound communal and religious differences, group power differentials, and vastly different histories of vulnerability. This is a testament, first and foremost, to the pervasive and widespread nature of the violence inflicted on Iraqi civilians in the postinvasion period. No demographic was shielded from the terror that burned through Iraqi society after 2003. Their story begins, in chapter 1, with the terror that removed the possibility of belonging.
1
Belonging
