Afghans in America

While this post has lit­tle to do with the insur­gency in Afghanistan, it does reflect the project I’ve been work­ing on for the past 10 weeks or so. In my clos­ing days at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity as a Knight Fel­low, I decided to explore the Afghan com­mu­nity in Fre­mont, Calif., which is the largest in the United States. I found it fas­ci­nat­ing and I did a short doc­u­men­tary on the sub­ject as well as a photo essay (below).

Why Femont? Because the cli­mate is nice and the refugee assis­tance in the 1970s and 1980s was very gen­er­ous. A core pop­u­la­tion built up and fam­ily reuni­fi­ca­tion pro­grams led to more Afghans set­tling as civil war engulfed their coun­try. After 30 years, you end up with the largest Afghan com­mu­nity in the coun­try, with some esti­mates putting their num­bers at up to 65,000 people.

As you might expect, Afghans in Amer­ica, in many ways, have fol­lowed the same tra­jec­tory as many immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties. They come here, work hard and get folded into the soci­ety at large. After they achieve a mea­sure of suc­cess, they do what all folks in Cal­i­for­nia do: They move out to the ‘burbs to get a big­ger house.

But the Afghans have a par­tic­u­larly con­flicted his­tory in Amer­ica. Most of them came to Fre­mont as refugees after the 1979 Soviet inva­sion of their home coun­try. Amer­ica was seen as their pro­tec­tor, given its adver­sar­ial rela­tion­ship with the USSR. They were wel­comed as vic­tims of Com­mu­nist aggres­sion. But after 9/11, the United States invaded Afghanistan, lead­ing to deep ten­sions in the Afghan com­mu­nity and with the larger non-Afghan pop­u­la­tion in the Bay Area. The vast major­ity of Afghans are happy in Amer­ica and proud of their cit­i­zen­ship. But a small minor­ity sup­ports the Tal­iban and roots for America’s defeat at the hands of al Qaeda. This ten­sion is often gen­er­a­tional, with the younger, American-raised Afghans sup­port­ing the mil­i­tants while the older gen­er­a­tion — which fled the Sovi­ets — look­ing on in alarm.

Most Afghans are reluc­tant to air their community’s dif­fer­ences to out­siders, with one woman telling me, “it’s just pol­i­tics.” But I am grate­ful to those who would talk about it, and help me under­stand the reli­gious and gen­er­a­tional ten­sions slic­ing through this gen­er­ous community.

Speak­ing of that, I’d like to extend my thanks to all the peo­ple who helped me on this project, from my fam­ily, friends and col­leagues at Stan­ford, to the inter­view sub­jects who were so gen­er­ous with their time (and sam­ples of excel­lent food!). And I’d like to thank my wife for pro­vid­ing invalu­able edit­ing tips and a finely attuned BS detec­tor to keep me honest.

So my days at Stan­ford are end­ing. Fri­day was the last day of the Fel­low­ship and in a week, I’m off to Pak­istan. This blog will change when I get there, and will fea­ture more — much more — orig­i­nal report­ing and con­tent like what you see here. I do hope you’ll keep read­ing, keep com­ment­ing and con­sider, if you would, drop­ping a few bucks in the donate jar over there to the right. Your con­tri­bu­tions help keep this whole enter­prise going.

Thanks, y’all.

Photo Essay