Communities Within Communities: The Immigrants of Somerville

The Boston area is home to many “communities within communities”- people who were also marginalized, persecuted, or oppressed in the countries they fleed.

For example, Copts fleeing Egypt live all over the Boston area, Assyrian communities landed in Watertown after their subsequent genocides in Iraq, Mizrahi Jews from the Arab world have started their own synagogues in Brookline, caste-oppressed Indian communities live around Brandeis University which has done revolutionary work in solidarity with them, Bhutanese and Tibetan refugees live in Somerville, Mayan K’iche communities fleeing the genocide in Guatemala stay all over South Coast. Undocumented migrants from Brazil, India, Vietnam, Cape Verde, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador all call the Boston area home.

It is important to not see immigrants or foreign countries as a monolith. These migrants come to us with histories of erasure in their own homelands and then come to a new place where they will experience double the layers of erasure. Perhaps, coming to the Boston area is also an opportunity to assert themselves in a way they couldn’t under the regimes back home. Here, they make up the majority of people fleeing their home countries. They can define what it means to be themselves.

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