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The Dynamic of Belonging: The Social History of a Yemeni American Settlement
Abstract
In the last forty years, emergent global conditions have influenced the experience of Arab-Americans living in the United States. This paper explores some aspects of the production of this transnational subjectivity, new visibility and cultural citizenship among Yemeni-Americans living in Southern California. While Yemeni immigration to the United States starts in 19th century, with the opening of Suez Canal in Egypt, migration had remained uncommon and sporadic until the 1960s when it sharply increased due to the fall of Imamate and changes in American immigration policy (Friedlander 1988). Until the early 1980s, Yemeni migrants to the US were mostly sojourners rather than settlers: they viewed their migration as temporary (Swanson 1988). Yemeni migrants have maintained an ’ideology of return’ and have primarily moved to the United States to improve their status in Yemen by sending remittances to relatives and buying properties in their places of origin (Staub 1989). This paper is about the social history of a small diasporic community of three generations of Yemeni-Americans that I call Little Yemen. In the 1980s, after years of farm work and other minor occupations, some of the earlier founding members of Little Yemen settled in a small farming town in the San Joaquin Valley in California. The early Yemeni settlers pooled their resources to establish successful businesses, brought wives and other relatives back from Yemen, and to build their own mosque. Based on ethnographic and oral history interviews with multiple generations, I explore the local, regional, and global circumstances as well as challenges that compelled these migrants to settle in Little Yemen. I focus on the implications of American education as well as economic opportunities and success on the dynamic of settling and the poetic of home and belonging. I argue that the inhabitants of Little Yemen, through participating in a variety of community rituals, ‘produce locality’ (Appadurai 1986) and establish a new sense of belonging that may offset the earlier ‘ideology of return.’
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Yemen
Sub Area
Ethnography