First published 2013 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2012045449
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scott, Joseph W.
Little Ethiopia of the Pacific Northwest / Joseph W. Scott and Solomon A. Getahun.
pages cm
1. Ethiopian Americans--Washington (State)--Seattle--Social conditions--20th century. 2. Seattle (Wash.)--Social conditions--20th century. I. Getahun, Solomon Addis. II. Title.
F899.S49E747 2013
306.09797772--dc23
2012045449
ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-4987-6 (hbk)
Little Ethiopia of the Pacific Northwest is the account of witnesses to and participants in the first mass transfer of black Africans to the United States since the end of slavery. These witnesses initially resided in Seattle, as accidental residents, not intentional residents. They offered to the authors their oral histories, observations, and other accounts of how they came to Seattle as sojourners, intending to return to Ethiopia, but became stranded as a result of the Ethiopian revolution of 1974 and stayed.
Little Ethiopia begins with the accounts of approximately two dozen college students and spouses who came to Seattle as sojourners in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. They came to earn university degrees, and they did. But they could not return as they had planned to use their college degrees in their homeland. They could not return to Ethiopia to continue the lives they left behind, so they found themselves having to make America their hometemporarily they thought. That meant they had to search for and find prospective spousesusually Ethiopians from elsewhere in the United Statesto start families. They started courting and marrying, birthing and rearing children, and then the need for a fully functional microcommunity became apparent.
These sojourners then found themselves having to start church congregations, mutual aid associations, services, businesses and other institutions to satisfy their social, spiritual, emotional, physical, and economic needs. Once they started building their ethnic enclave, a microcommunity of not fewer than 10,000 people inside metropolitan Seattle emerged. These initial stranded students and spousestogether with the asylees, refugees, and immigrants who cametransplanted a multitude of practicesreligious, dietary, familial, social, and entrepreneurialalong with various beliefs, sentiments, values, goals, statuses, and norms about age, sex, and gender. What they transplanted currently satisfies the spiritual, physical, social, psychological, and economic needs of thousands of foreign-born and native-born Ethiopians residing in Seattle Metro. In the late 1960s and early 1970s in Seattle, no Ethiopian churches, grocery stores, barbershops, beauty parlors, restaurants, cafes, taxi companies, social clubs, aid associations, or political organizations existed. Today, in 2013, all these Ethiopian businesses and institutions are in full operation, meeting the needs of the thousands of Ethiopians who now reside in Seattle Metro.
Little Ethiopia tells a story about the trials and tribulations of transplanted Ethiopians who came from an ancient, agricultural, low-tech, poor society to a young, industrial, postmodern, high-tech, rich society and are trying to adapt, survive, and thrive in this new challenging environment.
The sample. Our respondents number approximately seventy; they include men and women, girls and boys, almost all between ages twenty and fifty-three. This age range reflects two important facts: the criteria the US immigration authorities used for selecting and approving asylum-seekers, refugees, and immigrants, and the age range of individuals who voluntarily and involuntarily risked their lives to leave Ethiopia, not knowing where they would end up.
The US government did not start resettling Ethiopian refugees and asylees in Seattle until 1980, after passing new enabling legislation allowing 1,500 black African refugees to be resettled temporarily. After that, the number of refugees and asylees increased very dramatically throughout the 1990s. Officially, the 2010 US Census estimated that about 7,000 Ethiopians resided in the Seattle metropolitan area. More recent census data puts the number around 10,000. Residents say thousands more Ethiopians have migrated to Seattle Metro from California, Texas, Minnesota, and Washington, DC, but they are remaining by choice undetected and uncounted by the US census. Local Ethiopians estimate that more than 25,000 Ethiopians reside in the Seattle metropolitan area.
Before beginning this research, both authors spent several years as participant and nonparticipant observersattending community celebrations, eating in restaurants, attending church services, teaching students, and forming personal friendships. During the years of interviewing and writing up the data, they have continued to be participant and nonparticipant observers.
The authors. The senior author came to Seattle in 1985 as a result of being hired by the University of Washington as a professor of sociology and as professor and chairperson of the Department of American Ethnic Studies (AES). The Department of American Ethnic Studies started as a brand-new department that combined the faculties and curricula of the Asian American Studies Program, the African American Studies Program, and the Chicano/Latino Studies Program. The AES department did not incorporate the faculty of the American Indian Studies Program, rather it incorporated into the AES major many of the courses that faculty taught.
Prior to coming to the UW in 1985, the senior author had spent twenty years teaching and researching sociology and ethnology for three other universitiesthe University of Kentucky, the University of Toledo, and the University of Notre Dame. He retired as a professor emeritus of sociology of the University of Washington in 2005. During his career at the University of Washington, his teaching and research foci were comparative ethnic cultures, societies, communities, and families. He currently resides in Seattle, and he continues to lecture, consult, and write articles and books.
The junior author is an Ethiopian immigrant who came to the United States in 1994 with a masters degree in African history from the University of Addis Ababa. He started teaching in a Seattle community college a couple of years later. During that time, he applied for a graduate fellowship and was granted one to complete a doctoral degree at Michigan State University. He completed his doctorate in 2005, and he is currently employed as an associate professor of history by the Department of History of Central Michigan University. Before completing his doctorate, he lived in Seattle as a married family man for a number of years. During his residency in Seattle, he was a member of the St. Gebriel Orthodox Christian Church congregation.
