Refugees in U.S. Take Up Farming, as they always have:
At the Saturday farmer’s market in City Heights, a major portal for refugees, Khadija Musame, a (Bantu) Somali, arranges her freshly picked pumpkin leaves and lablab beans amid a United Nations of produce, including water spinach grown by a Cambodian refugee and amaranth, a grain harvested by Sarah Salie, who fled rebels in Liberia. Eaten with a touch of lemon by Africans, and coveted by Southeast Asians for soups, this crop is always a sell-out
Among the regular customers at the New Roots farm stand are Congolese women in flowing dresses, Somali Muslims in headscarves, Latino men wearing broad-brimmed hats and Burundian mothers in brightly patterned textiles who walk home balancing boxes of produce on their heads.
New Roots, with 85 growers from 12 countries, is one of more than 50 community farms dedicated to refugee agriculture, an entrepreneurial movement spreading across the country. American agriculture has historically been forged by newcomers, like the Scandinavians who helped settle the Great Plains; today’s growers are more likely to be rural subsistence farmers from Africa and Asia, resettled in and around cities from New York, Burlington, Vt., and Lowell, Mass., to Minneapolis, Phoenix and San Diego.
In my work these days with migrants and refugees in the United States, it’s stories like this that are a treasure trove of what is really happening on the ground for refugee communities to forge ties of beloning in a culture that is chilly at best and occasionally hostile at worst. Just look at some of the comments attached to this article to get a sense of the uphill battle it is in the US for refugees to get respect, even for a war refugee who is developing opportunities and contributing to the local economy.
