“They Can’t Do That; This Is MY Iowa”: Refugees and Belonging in the Midwest

Abstract

Refugees are a growing population in the state of Iowa. Many arrive through the state’s resettlement agencies, yet far more are secondary migrants—those placed elsewhere who voluntarily resettled in Iowa. Even amidst dominant discourses that either vilify immigrants or exclude them from the state narrative, refugees often hold strong claims to their new homeland. Drawing upon two years of ethnographic fieldwork with African refugees, this paper considers how, and under what terms, these new Iowans claim belonging. How are they building satisfying lives for themselves and their families? Where do they place themselves in Iowa’s present and future? Dominant narratives about the American Midwest in general and Iowa in particular, characterize the region as homogenously white and ideologically provincial and insular. I contend that African refugees are producing counternarratives about the region as (1) a place of opportunity, even for Black folks, (2) a place where anti-Black African racism and islamophobia are comparatively less harsh and (3) a place where they have built communities of support. In their responses to the persistent question, “why Iowa” I argue, that African refugees are authoring new narratives for understanding the American Midwest.

1. Introduction

It was early spring in 2022 and spring in Iowa means a new state legislative session. The state legislature had just passed a spate of new bills banning books, regulating what bathroom K-12 (primary and secondary school) students could use, and three bills were under debate that would make the lives of immigrants in the state far more difficult. As it happened, that spring I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork with African refugees and interviewing them about their attachments (or not) to Iowa. African immigrants, be they refugees, students, diversity visa holders, or undocumented migrants are the fastest growing immigrant group in Iowa (a growth of 88% in the last 23 years)1. The Migration Policy Institute estimates there are over 34,000 African-born immigrants in Iowa (MPI 2023). While this number amounts to a small population percentage, it disrupts the pervasive and historically persistent narratives about the state of Iowa as white and homogenous, narratives that have long erased the presence of Iowans of color whether they are indigenous descendants of the state’s original occupants or more recent immigrants (Bremmer 2023; Hill and Hill 2016; Ortiz 2020). Aware of this more complicated history, I anticipated that African refugees’ perceptions of their new home would be impacted by their racial and minority status in a state dominated by white people and by systems of white supremacy. What I did not expect that chilly spring day was to meet a Somali hijabi who vehemently and loudly defended Iowa and claimed the state as her own.

Though small in stature, Burhan nevertheless commands attention.2 A key part of her job is educating state legislators about issues facing women in the African immigrant community and she is highly skilled at getting her point across. She squared her shoulders and raised her voice, gesturing emphatically to me across the table of her small office, “I don’t know if people who look like me or people who are immigrants or refugees or even the other marginalized communities, LGBTQ, everybody, how we are going to live in Iowa if it continues the way it’s going right now. Because right now, it’s not going on the right path…we’re acting like Texas right now. … But Iowa was not that when I came, where I have lived.” She lowered her voice, adopting the calm but forceful tone she uses in her advocacy work, “We need to work, we have a lot of things to do, because they can’t do that. This is MY Iowa.”

Burhan’s comparison of Iowa to Texas was not a passing statement. It was borne out of her substantial political knowledge and her personal experience. Like most of the African refugees I have met in Iowa, Burhan was formally resettled elsewhere. Though Iowa had a robust refugee resettlement program until 2025, many of the African refugees who now live there are secondary migrants who chose to leave their first and sometimes second resettlement site to come to the state. This is essential because refugees’ status is defined by how they began their migration journey, as forced migrants. This has often been used to characterize refugees as passive victims rather than agentive actors (Taylor 2013). In contrast, I join with other scholars to instead attend to the ways refugees shape their own lives (Erickson 2020; Harrell-Bond 1998; Le Espiritu et al. 2022). Migration after resettlement is a key instance of refugee decision-making. When they arrive in Iowa, African refugees have lived in often six other locations—frequently three or four on the African continent and two or three in the United States. Their presence in the state means that they often intentionally chose to relocate there and actively decided to stay. These were choices informed by careful deliberation and considerable knowledge of what Iowa has to offer vis a vis other locations. A key question that African refugees often face from family, friends, (and the occasional anthropologist) is why Iowa?

This paper explores the unexpected tensions revealed by Burhan’s statements. How is it that African refugees—a minority group geographically, racially and, for many like Burhan, religiously—came to be attached to and protective of a state like Iowa? How did they encounter and make sense of the multiple forms of discrimination such as xenophobia, anti-black racism, and islamophobia that are well documented in Iowa (Cleveland 2021; Hendricks 2023; Iowa PBS 2022; Kinard 2022; Kilen 2016; Masters 2020; Swalwell 2018; Ta 2021), as many other places? And what insights does her claim to “MY Iowa” offer for understanding immigrant belonging in our present day? I answer these questions by discussing three thematic orientations to Iowa: what African refugees, sought, avoided, and what they built. In the process, I seek to understand, to “see” Iowa, as African-born-Iowans do, as a place with many faces.

Embedded in the question “why Iowa” is a set of layered assumptions, though with differing orientations. A primary assumption is that Iowa is at best a curious and at worst an undesirable place for Africans to choose to live. The dominant cultural trope—held by Americans and many across the globe—about the Midwest is as a region that is homogenously white and ideologically provincial and insular (Halvorson and Reno 2022). This serves to position African refugees in their blackness and their foreignness, as ill-fitting outsiders in places like Iowa. Liberal white people, particularly those who are class-advantaged, often critique how Iowa’s parochial sensibilities sustain the workings of white supremacy and believe that African refugees would wish to locate themselves elsewhere (Halvorson and Reno 2022). But this presumes that there are places free from the reach of white supremacy to which people of color could (and should?) move. From a different perspective, African refugees’ families who chose to leave Iowa argue that everything from the weather to the paucity of Africans make the state distasteful for living in. African refugees must also explain their choice of home to family abroad who argue that Iowa is “not America” because it is not part of the lexicon of American-ness circulating on the African content. To these varying audience, African refugees must constantly justify their decision to live in Iowa.

African refugees’ unique position both as refugees and as putative outsiders, according to dominant ideologies, affords them a particular expertise for knowing and understanding Iowa. African refugees view Iowa differently from the 69% of Iowa residents who were born there, and differently from liberal white people, conservative white people, or African family abroad (United States Census Bureau 2023). In their recent book, Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest, Halverson and Reno argued that the Midwest is less a material reality than a “stage” on which different groups have performed varying narratives about national values and ideas of national belonging (Halvorson and Reno 2022, p. 4). However, scholarship frequently focuses on dominant, (read, white) imaginings of the heartland, rendering the indigenous, Black, Latino, and other people of color who have long lived there as constant casualties of narratives that erase them (Howard 2023). Nevertheless, these overlooked groups have always constructed their own meanings of the region, counternarratives that at times contradict, at times align with dominant narratives (Boyd 2017; Campney 2019; Chase 2019; Dant 2024; Howard 2025; Vega 2015; Williamson 2020).

I argue that when they respond to the question “why Iowa”, African refugees are constructing their own counternarrative about Iowa and, more broadly, the Midwest. Through a discussion about what African refugees who came to Iowa, sought, avoided, and built, this paper takes up the call from scholars of the Black Midwest to center people of color’s own understandings of the region and their relationship to regional identity (Howard 2023). Taking seriously Halverson and Reno’s contention that the Midwest operates as a stage on which to perform ideas about America as a nation, these responses—to family, to strangers, to the passing ethnographer—are not mere utterances but critical articulations about Africans’ place in regional and national imaginings.

2. Methods and Theoretical Framing

The research for this paper is a part of a larger research project on African migration to Iowa being undertaken by faculty at the University of Iowa and African immigrant community members since 2023. The research team comprises members who belong to and/or are well known to the African immigrant community in Southeastern Iowa, including one former refugee resettlement caseworker. The study combines an intersectional framework with community-based participatory research (CBPR) in order to center African immigrants’ own understandings of their resettlement goals, their assessments of these goals, and obstacles to attaining them (Israel et al. 2017; Wallerstein et al. 2005; Yan et al. 2024). We use a feminist-grounded intersectional approach to understand multiple overlapping forms of marginalization such as anti-black racism, nativism, sexism classism, and Islamophobia impact African immigrants’ experiences (Binder and Tošić 2005). Both methodologically and analytically, our research utilizes Eve Tuck’s “desire-centered” framework to honor the self-determination of African immigrants and attend to the goals, strategies, and obstacles they articulate for themselves (Tuck 2009). This framework counters the trend in research on immigrant integration (and particularly refugee resettlement) that measure success in terms of economic outcomes (e.g., employment, income, dependence on state support) (Bollinger and Hagstrom 2008; Evans and Fitzgerald 2017; Lichtenstein et al. 2016). Research with this orientation both reduce the complexity of social life to a narrow metric and reproduce a “damage-centered” orientation wherein historically marginalized communities are defined primarily by their deficits and need for outside intervention (Tuck 2009). Instead, we use the orienting concept of homebuilding as an open-ended idea through which migrants have been shown to articulate their own goals around belonging and security (Al-Ali and Koser 2002; Den Boer 2015; Lambo 2012; Nibbs 2014). Definitions of homebuilding are “dynamic processes, involving acts of imagining, creating, unmaking, changing, losing, and moving” through which desires are channeled (Al-Ali and Koser 2002, p. 6). By focusing on homebuilding, our research accounts for both the structural discrimination that impacts the lives of African refugees and their aspirations, ambitions, and resources to persevere under these conditions.

Research began with two listening sessions (attendance averaged 65 participants each) that involved presenting the research project, introducing the research team, and soliciting conversation on issues of import to the African immigrant community. The research questions outlined through these sessions were the following: (1) What goals did African immigrants have in their resettlement in Iowa? (2) How do they assess their progress in meeting these goals? (3) What do they see as the obstacles to meeting these goals? (4) What strengths/supports do they have to help them meet these goals? Subcommittees were then formed to address the key issues raised: English language training, financial literacy, and the creation of an African arts and cultures annual festival. Following the listening session, members of the team were invited to present the research project and recruit participants at various assemblies of the African immigrant community: women’s groups, church groups, cultural festival planning meetings, celebrations such as birthdays and anniversaries, and large dinners hosted in families’ homes. The listening session and feedback from the community presentations informed the questions for the semi-structured interview guide and the focus group guide which focus on migration goals, the obstacles and supports to achieving those goals, and the relationship of African immigrants to Iowa and other Iowans. Interviews and focus groups are conducted in the preferred languages of the participants and either translated during or after transcription. Participants all receive a copy of their interview or focus group transcripts in their preferred language and are given an opportunity to make corrections, redactions, and to determine the name they want associated with the data. Transcripts are being coded in Dedoose (version 10.0.59)—a software which allows for collaborative coding—using content analysis, thematic analysis, and constant comparison. Analysis is conducted in English in which all members of the research team are fluent.

To date, the research team has conducted 56 interviews and 3 focus groups for a total of 87 participants. This paper draws upon the 17 interviews conducted specifically with African refugees. Countries of origin for the African refugees whose experiences inform this paper include Benin, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Togo. These participants range in age from their early 20s to their late 60s and their age at arrival in Iowa ranged from age 7 to 42. Of the 17 participants, 13 (76%) were formally resettled elsewhere in the United States and chose to move to Iowa, reflecting a common trend across Iowa’s African refugee population. Prior to the submission of this paper, all participants who are quoted within received a copy and were invited to suggest edits. The only edit was one name change.

3. “Dreaming Differently”—What African Refugees Sought in Iowa: On Opportunities and Environments for Growth

As is often the case with migrants, the African refugees I know came to Iowa at the recommendation of someone they knew, often a fellow-African, if not a fellow-national. They had been dissatisfied with some element of their current living situation and reached out to their networks looking for alternatives. What they sought—affordable housing, job options, education opportunities—were at once both particular and common to people in many places. However, as refugees, who had already fled their home and moved multiple times, they had the will, imagination, and skills to pursue their goals through migration. Thus, every move and every new arrival became a vetting process for where they wanted to build a life. Moves also functioned as persistent reassessments of shifting priorities.

Aduk, one of the few refugees I know who was resettled directly to Iowa, remembers the initial exhilaration after landing in Des Moines from a refugee camp in South Sudan. “At first, when we come here, we excited,” she said. “We get the job, we get food. I mean, we have a shelter over us. Imagine somebody from the war zone, what they thinks. Imagine you woke up in the morning. No, fighting. You never worry about the food. You have a house. You just thank God, like your life is changed.” In the emotional rush of a newfound form of security, Iowa seemed like a peaceful, if chilly, haven. But as Aduk and her family adjusted to a new life without the imminent threat of war, their goals began to shift. “As you grow older and realize it’s not just for life,” Aduk explained. “I mean, people from here, they’re not just fighting for water or food or shelter. You want more than life than that. For someone from a refugee camp, they don’t have anything. Those are the things that they dream of. We had to learn to dream differently.”

For others in Aduk’s family, “dreaming differently” meant leaving Iowa. “They say, Iowa is nothing here,” Aduk noted. Her mother, who complained about Iowa’s winters, moved to Omaha, Nebraska, a place whose weather is not notably warmer, but with a sizeable South Sudanese population close in age to Aduk’s mother. Also seeking a larger South Sudanese community, one sister and brother-in law moved to Minnesota. Another sister, wanting a bigger city with more opportunities moved to Washington, D.C. By the time of these moves Aduk had met and married a Nuer Sudanese man and had started a family. They stayed in Iowa. When I asked why, she waved her hand brusquely saying, “I’m not interested in moving to Omaha. I just want to be here.”

In their dreaming, Aduk and many others sought an environment that enabled diverse job opportunities, home ownership, and educational advancement as pathways to a successful life. While such elements are desired in many places in the US and across the globe, it is noteworthy that these also align closely with dominant tropes about the Midwest as exemplar of American exceptionalism: a place where hard work generates economic prosperity, where owning property enables forms of self-sufficiency and freedom, and where investment in education paves the way to future opportunities (Hoganson 2019; Halvorson and Reno 2022; Vega 2015). In addition to being tropes, there are elements of truth to the desirable elements of Iowa’s cities and towns. Like many others with whom I spoke, Aduk argued that she preferred Iowa because the cost of living was less expensive than other places. Indeed, Iowa consistently ranks in the top 10 states with the lowest cost of living.3 A key element to that low cost of living is the potential to own one’s house. Even for those African refugees who spent considerable time in cities, the concept of renting long-term is deeply distasteful. They desire control over how their living space is arranged, who can (and cannot) visit or be hosted, and, importantly, what will be planted in any available greenspace. Though housing markets are variable and housing un-affordability is a nation-wide concern, Iowa towns and cities consistently score above the national average in housing affordability and have some of the lowest rates of decline in housing affordability in the nation.4

Of course, broad national statistics do not capture the effects of structural racism, sexism, or islamophobia on people’s ability to access well-paying jobs or desirable houses. Notably, Iowa ranks as the 3rd worst state for Black Americans in a list generated by the business new site 24/7 Wall St (James 2022; Stebbins 2022). Rankings such as these are due in part to the fact that racial inequality in markers such as poverty, homeownership, unemployment, and household income in Iowa are some of the worst in the nation (Gordon 2019). At the same time, 25 African refugees whom I interviewed who had been in the country longer than 10 years, owned their own home. Some, like Mama Veve, obtained their house through programs like Habitat for Humanity that seek to increase homeownership among vulnerable and or low- or moderate-income households. Others pooled incomes among three or four working adults to purchase a house large enough to hold extended family. Two African refugees I know had become realtors so that they could assist other refugees in finding houses. They have created a growing Congolese enclave in one small Iowa city with rapidly expanding housing construction. Collectively, they were helping to shape Iowa into a place where Africans could literally and figuratively build community.

Home ownership was closely linked to another central goal, namely, a place to raise a family. There were those who were relocated as families with small children and quality schools and safe neighborhoods were foremost considerations in moving to Iowa. Still others met and married and began their families after coming to Iowa. Jean said he liked Iowa because he liked “living in a quiet area, a quiet state where it is easy, like, to take care of my children than being in a big city.” In the same breath, those I interviewed would complain of how they missed the dense community they had in their country of origin where there was always someone to chat with in the yard but would also praise the quiet of Iowa neighborhoods. Iowa was both too quiet and wonderfully quiet. Quiet here was both auditory—a lower level of noise—and a comment on security. In Iowa, they did not encounter the constant threat of war or violence they had endured in other places. In almost every interview, African refugees cited the quality of education and the safety they felt as central to making Iowa a “good place to raise a family.”

Educational opportunities were not just important for children, but also for the adults. Amina was drawn to Iowa after lamenting bitterly to her friend about her life in Michigan. She felt that the social worker who assisted her and her husband in their resettlement from Sudan viewed them only as low-skilled workers and not as people with their own ambitions. “We had a very tough social worker,” Amina lamented. “She is feeling like, okay, we are immigrant, we come here just to work. They need to throw us in some of the factories to work there. That’s how we felt at that time. Like, they bring us here as just a worker. Not as a refugee, as a new opportunity. No one asked us, what do you want to do? What experience do you have? Just, here’s a job. Take it. So, when I talk with my friend, I complain, I say, ‘Is this going on in everywhere in America?’ He say, ‘you know what? Come to Iowa. There is a good opportunity here for education.’” Soon after arriving, Amina did what many refugees in Iowa City do and enrolled in the free English classes at Kirkwood Community College. She later leveraged this experience and knowledge to take credit-bearing classes that counted towards the master’s in social work degree she ultimately earned from University of Iowa. By pursuing a new degree, Amina was able to secure a job that aligned with her own needs and interests and did not leave her feeling like “just a worker”.

Jean’s Congolese network gave him very similar advice about Iowa as Amina’s Sudanese contacts. “They told me, ‘Come here. It’s a good place. There is a lot of jobs. And you can study if you need to. You can learn. You can perfect your English’,” Jean explained. Jean praised Iowa City for its availability of government grants to support his education, something he made effective use of. Yet what particularly stood out to him was the diversity of job opportunities. “Over there,” Jean complained, speaking of Galesburg, Illinois, his first residence in the U. S. “almost all people of my country was working in the same company. And there I was, every day, carrying pork meat.” Meatpacking dominates the employment landscape for African immigrants in Iowa, but there are also other options, particularly in Iowa City (Nabhan-Warren 2021). “There is a lot of opportunities here,” Jean noted, “People of Africa, everybody is working in different places. They have a lot of jobs. They have a lot of businesses. There is those who work in University of Iowa, work in factories, work in banks. This, professional diversity is a good thing.” To many people, the difference between these small Midwestern cities, Galesburg, Illinois (population 30,000) and Iowa City, Iowa (population 74,000), would seem negligible. But to Jean and Jean’s wife, Bianca, the difference was profound (United States Census Bureau 2023). Bianca explained, “Galesburg is just a small town, a small city. There is not much to see. But in Iowa,” She spread her arms out wide, taking in the whole space, “Iowa is big and it’s more open, there is more [she paused, searching for the words in English] opportunity here than Galesburg.” This was worth moving for.

The African refugees I know came to Iowa or stayed in Iowa when others left because Iowa had many of the attributes they saw as essential for building a future in the United States. These desired attributes are certainly not only desired by Africa refugees. People in many places are seeking a place to live with a variety of promising job options, opportunities for quality education, neighborhoods unburdened by violence and crime, and a housing market where home ownership is possible. Arguably these elements can be found in many places beyond Iowa. But, notably for this discussion, whether they were resettled in Iowa by chance or, more commonly, encouraged to relocate there by others who had come before, African immigrants found what they were seeking in Iowa. Their arguments for why they chose Iowa align closely with how those who speak favorably of Iowa and the Midwest more broadly. The sign that greets people arriving in Iowa by a major interstate reads “Iowa, Fields of Opportunity,” evoking a rural, agricultural state and an expansive sense of potential that could have come right from the lips of Bianca, a Congolese newcomer. Critically, in the context of intense anti-black racism and xenophobia that persists across the Unites States, people like Bianca do not have the same relationship to Iowa’s “fields of opportunity” as the white, English-speaking families many imagine to be Iowa’s natural inhabitants. At the same time, African refugees were well-versed in how to live amidst discrimination and the particular forms that discrimination took in Iowa became another factor in their decisions about where they wanted to build a life.

4. “Iowa Doesn’t Have Islamophobia”—What African Refugees Left: On the Dynamism of Discrimination

In dominant narratives about the geography of discrimination in the United States, racism is thought to be the purview of the South, where the most visible practices of enslavement of Black Americans took place (Halvorson and Reno 2022; Campney 2019). These narratives, the Midwest is often cast the Midwest as a place without racism both because of the presumed absence of people of color and because of the culture of “Midwest Nice” that is thought to dampen overt expressions of racism (Kinard 2022).5 People of color who have long lived in the region, not least of which the descendants of Native Americans violently and forcible removed from their homelands, know well the inaccuracy of these dominant narratives (Howard 2023). Scholars have also documented the long historic presence of various communities of color, the deep history of racism they encountered, their resistance to it, and the lives they have constructed in the process (Campney 2019; Chase 2019; Howard 2025; Hoganson 2019). In preparing for my interviews with African refugees, I mistakenly assumed that discrimination would be one of the most significant elements of their experience in Iowa. Instead, they reminded me that they live far fuller lives than the discrimination they experience and that how discrimination is experienced is complex, contingent, and dependent on context. I draw upon theories of race-making, racial construction, and immigration to analyze African refugees’ discussions about their decision to relocate and remain in Iowa (Molina 2014, 2018; Mullings 2005). Their statements reveal key insights about the simultaneously dynamic and structural features of discrimination and the identity categories towards which discrimination is directed (Mullings 2005). They call attention to the fact that amidst global white supremacy, discrimination is also deeply localized and shaped by the persons, institutions, and histories of a particular place.

Burhan has no love for Texas. She described it as a place without community, without friendship, and replete with constant discrimination from multiple groups. Burhan is highly educated, fluent in English, and has a degree in social work. In Kenya, she worked in an embassy, earning a middle-class salary. But the well-paying jobs Burhan found in Texas all required that she wear pants, which ran counter to her religious principles. Instead, she took lower-paying, lower-skill jobs whose wages and power hierarchies deeply frustrated her. “It was hard for me to fit in in Texas,” she said, “Like it was very hard. I was this inch [she holds her fingers slightly apart] to go back to Africa. It was hard, very hard.” I asked her what challenges she faced in particular, and her response was immediate, “There was a lot of discrimination, not only the, like the white population, the Caucasian population, but also within the immigrants, a lot of like pulling like ‘I was here before you.’” Burhan went on to clarify that the immigrants she referred to were Latino immigrants who dominated the workplaces where she found herself. Such forms of “competitive racism” between immigrant groups commonly occur in contexts where subjugated groups must vie with one another for limited privilege and resources and such infighting is often encouraged by dominant groups to ensure they retain power and the marginalized remain at the margins (Bowser 1995; Mullings 2005, p. 677; Saranillio 2013).

Burhan’s experience in Iowa was quite different. Both Burhan and her husband disliked Texas and at the advice of some contacts in Des Moines, they made a series of short exploratory visits before and finally moving there in 2012. Both in the handful of jobs Burhan held while she was going to school online and in the jobs she held after, she did not experience comments or requirements about her Islamic dress. “In Iowa, when I came, when I applied, nobody talked about my hijab,” She said, “That’s true. Like, outside, yes, but when I looked for a job, nobody talked about how I dress. I have to tell the truth. And, like, nobody asked me to remove my hijab. Nobody asked me to wear a pant. Nobody.” She contrasts her experience both to her time in Texas and to the experience of her mother, aunts, and cousins who after less than a year in Iowa, left Des Moines for Minneapolis so they could live among more Somali people. Burhan notes that her relatives enjoy the benefits of a larger immigrant community in Minneapolis such as more ethnic groceries and a greater accessibility of food and other comforts of home. But they also experience pervasive harassment on the street or in non-African stores, people shouting at them, or pulling on their hijabs. In response, Burhan says, “Iowa doesn’t have Islamophobia. I don’t see it. I don’t, I will not speak for every Muslim person. But from where I stand, I am a Black Muslim, if anybody’s going to get it, I would, and I don’t. And I travel all over Iowa.”

It was not only Burhan, but many Africans I interviewed described Iowa as a place where discrimination operated differently. Amina is a northern Sudanese woman in her late 30s who does a great deal of service work and education around gender discrimination within Sudanese communities in the U.S. and in Sudan. She describes living as a woman in Sudan as feeling like she was never secure, that she was “always fighting”. Though she was surrounded by family and friends, she did not feel safe. In Iowa, she lives as a single mother, but finds it quite different:

“There [Sudan] if I’m walking in the street and there is a man, let’s say an aggressor approach me. So, if I went to the police, I won’t get, you know, the justice. I won’t feel secure. But here, if this happen, I would call 911, and I will feel safe. Here, I don’t need my father to protect me, or my brother to protect me. Because here there is a law. The society here try to provide a safe environment…So, now I can walk 10 h around Iowa City. No one even look to me. [she laughs] …. I feel safe here, even if I don’t have friends around, very close friends, don’t have relatives, don’t have family, but I felt secure.”

Amina makes clear that her sense of security arises not just from the presence of legal protections, which are not unique to Iowa, but also local social norms that discourage public male sexual aggression and that allow women to self-advocate without male family members. This is in keeping with what other scholars have found about the importance of the available recourse to non-family supports amidst gender conflicts for new Sudanese immigrants to the United States (Holtzman 2000).

Iowa is not just uniquely hospitable to African women. Jean is a Congolese man in his 30s who came to Iowa City after a short stint in New York City, which he found too crowded, and two years in Portland, Maine. In Portland, he had lived among a large Somali and Sudanese community and enjoyed the density of African restaurants and groceries. However, he decided to move after encountering too many white residents who associated black Muslims with terrorism and accused the African communities of making the city more dangerous. When I asked Jean how he had been treated as an African in Iowa, he responded, “I didn’t see any difference. Like I was in Africa and here. Yeah, that’s my experience. Everywhere I was, I didn’t meet like crazy people, talking back to you, telling you this or that, no, no, never, that never happened to me since I am in Iowa. I think Iowa is something special for me.”

What then, is particularly “special” about Iowa? It is important to note that the above statements and many others liked them were offered amidst examples of various forms of discrimination: women who were brushed off when they protested mistreatment, Latino line managers who gave the hardest jobs to the small number of Africans, or street harassment from white men. Those I spoke to were certainly angry and frustrated by such occurrences, but they also consistently minimized them. Many responded like Didier who, when asked how he was treated as an African in Iowa, said “It’s okay. For myself, it’s okay. … I know one day, I was driving the car. I didn’t appreciate how the police officer treat me. But, those kind of situation are, too small.” This was in contrast to the violence he experienced in Kenya. Amina followed up an example of racist mistreatment with praise for the culture of “Iowa Nice”, “In general, people in Iowa, they are very friendly. You know, even if, inside them, they don’t accept you so much, but still they are polite with you. [we both laugh] They don’t want to interact with you. Give you smile and that’s it. … if you compare with other situation, it’s fine. We get there one day.”6 In other words, the passive aggressive or “unmarked” racism was preferred, for the time being, over the brute force of other forms of racial violence (Harrison 2000).

What is special about Iowa, for the African refugees I know, was not an absence of discrimination, but how discrimination in Iowa manifested in comparison to other places they had lived. Though their skin pigmentation, gendered identity, religious adherence, or country of origin did not change, the meaning given to these and many other identity components did. As Sudanese scholar Rogaia Abusharaf has noted, “outside the Sudan, one is now transformed from being a Shaiqi, Nuer Beja, or Rustbatabi to being a black person.” (Abusharaf 2002, p. 164). The gender, race, nationality, religion, and class status of African refugees were constructed, contested, and inhabited differently based on the political, economic, and cultural contexts in which they found themselves (Erickson 2020; Harrison 1998; Hartigan 2005; Ong et al. 1996; Williams 1989). Such constructions, though different in different places, were neither random nor unrelated. As much as being a Black Congolese man in Iowa City is different from being a Black Congolese man in Portland, Maine, racialization in both places is influenced by how blackness is systematically deprivileged across the U.S. Further, processes of racialization (and gendering, and classing) are not isolated from other identity categories nor from other racialized groups.

Historian Natalie Molina offers the concept of “racial scripts” as a tool for illuminating how the process of race-making affects different groups simultaneously and in mutually constitutive ways (Molina 2010, 2018). Racial scripts name the processes by which groups become racialized. They cannot automatically be transferred from one context or group to another, but they are clusters of “cultural representations that shape how we see, experience, and imagine race” that are available to be used and applied in varying contexts (Molina 2018, p. 103). This is evident in the example Burhan gave of her experience in Texas. The racial script of non-white foreigner (and the forms of exclusion and disprivilege it entailed) that were applied to Latinos in Texas were readily transferred to African immigrants. At the same time, the racialization of subordinated groups does not only happen in relation to whiteness, but also in relation to one another (Molina et al. 2019). Burhan’s Latino co-workers put forth their own racial scripts that differentiated Latinos and Africans as not the same kind of non-white person, wherein African immigrants were the greater outsiders, more foreign, and further removed from Latinos who could claim a closer insider status. Similarly, in the case of Jean, he encountered a racial script in Portland that associated all African immigrants with Islamic adherence and conflated them with terrorism and crime. Regardless of the fact that he was not Muslim, Jean’s African-born blackness (meaning his nationality and skin pigmentation) remained subject to the racist and Islamophobic racial script in operation there.

As they moved, the racial scripts to which African refugees were subject shifted. In Iowa City, there are racialized groups where dominate racial scripts label them as criminals such as Latinos and African-Americans, though those scripts operate in different ways. But currently, African immigrants inhabit a different script. They are not presently subject to, in Jean’s words, “crazy people, talking back to you, telling you this or that.” Potentially this is due to the fact that the African immigrant population is still small, 1% of the total population, and that they are either unrecognized by the white majority or not seen as a numerical or cultural threat. For Burhan’s case, the situation in Des Moines is different. Though the Muslims also only make up about 1% of Iowa’s population, they are concentrated in Des Moines, and Muslims have been in Iowa since the 1880s when Syrians and Lithuanian brought the religion with them (Kilen 2016; Burnidge 2016).7 Black Muslims also play a prominent and visible role in politics such as former State Representative Ako Abdul-Samad who was the longest serving Black legislator in Iowa, representing part of Des Moines from 2007 to 2024 (Belin 2024). This is in contrast to Texas, where the first Muslim state representatives (both South-Asian) were elected in 2023 and to Minneapolis which has had five Black Muslim state representatives since 2001, two of whom went on to be members of U.S. Congress.8 The political participation of Black Muslims is just one datapoint among many, but here I am using it as a proxy for the relative level of visibility and prominence of Black Muslims as a racial-religious group in these different contexts. In Des Moines, Burhan was not subject to the level of Islamophobic job discrimination she experienced in Texas nor the street harassment her family members experienced in Minneapolis. Instead, her blackness along with her Islamic dress, Somali accented English, and middle-class status was interpreted differently in Iowa and less targeted for discrimination.

Burhan, Jean, Didier, and Amina’s praise for the low levels of discrimination they encountered in Iowa speak to the relational relativity of racial constructions and the forms of discrimination that are directed at them (Molina 2014, 2018; Mullings 2005). Their experiences further reveal how racial constrictions of immigrants (and others) are not just about skin pigmentation, but are impacted by gender, religion, national origin, socioeconomic status, English fluency, and sexual orientation (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Brodkin 1998, 2000; Ong et al. 1996; Prashad 2000; Silverstein 2015). Much like Erickson found with Sudanese refugees in Fargo or Kilen found for Muslims in Des Moines, African refugees preferred the discrimination in Iowa to what they had experienced elsewhere (Erickson 2020). Even the norms of “Iowa Nice” which others have noted also operate as forms of racial regulation oppression, were favored over more violent or direct encounters (Bramen 2017; Erickson 2020; Kilen 2016). In interviews, they went to great lengths to convince a white America researcher that discrimination was not the most salient issue in Iowa. Instead, what they emphasized were the tangible benefits that Iowa offered that made it “home.”

5. “I Call Myself an Iowan”—What African Refugees Built: On Opportunities and Environments for Growth

Scholarship on refugee experiences has a strong preoccupation with refugees’ understandings of ‘home.’ This is not least because of the extreme conditions of refugee migration—their forced exile from a homeland to which they may or may not ever be able to return. Inspired by other scholars, I take the orientation that humans of varying experiences participate in reflecting on the meaning of home, and that refugees, by virtue of their conditions of forced migration, have a particular insight and expertise to offer these reflections (Al-Ali and Koser 2002; Taylor 2013; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). Central to this is a recognition that “concepts of home are not static but dynamic processes, involving the acts of imagining, creating, unmaking, changing, losing and moving ‘homes’” (Al-Ali and Koser 2002, p. 6). Thus, home is not singular (e.g., here vs. there) and is not one-dimensional but rather encompasses spatial, temporal, emotional, and material elements (Erdal 2014; Taylor 2013). Closely related to the concept of home, is the notion of belonging. I use belonging as Feldman-Savelsberg does to encompass relationships based on “(1) social location (2) emotional attachment through self-identifications and (3) institutional, legal, and regulatory definitions that simultaneously grant recognition to and maintain boundaries between socially defined places and groups” (Feldman-Savelsberg 2016, p. 8). Here, I am particularly focused on the second, affective element, concerned with connection. I understand invocations of “home” as what Amrith and Coe term a “register of belonging,” in something which is both used to indicate and express this affective element of belonging, as well as to assess it (Amrith and Coe 2022). I extend Feldman-Savelsberg’s assertion that belonging can be “felt, performed or imposed” to say, it can also be built (Feldman-Savelsberg 2016, p. 8). For the African refugees I know, their conception of Iowa as home was grounded in their efforts to build a supportive community around them.

Burham frequently travels out of state for her job where she often encounters the question that many immigrants of color face, “Where are you from?.” Her response is, “I am an Iowan.” She explains, “this is Iowa, like, you know, we have our differences, and there’s a lot of things going on. But for me, I, call myself an Iowan. Because we go for national trainings outside Iowa. And when people ask me, ‘where were you from?’ I am from Iowa. Like, yeah, I know I’m from Africa, but I live in Iowa and I’m an assistant of Iowa. This my second home.” Burhan’s statements reveal numerous layers to her claiming the status of “Iowan”. She begins with a comment (“we have our differences”) that signals some of the tensions and ambivalences to her feelings of attachment. In the context of the interview, these referred back to earlier statements she made disagreeing with anti-immigrant and other legislation being passed in Iowa. Burhan actively resisted the exclusion embedded in the legislation and in the implied assumptions that because she was African, she could not really be Iowan. Instead, she located her belonging in her activist work (i.e., “I’m an assistant of Iowa”), her spatial residence (I live in Iowa), and in her claiming of Iowa as her “second home”.

Burhan’s attachment and sense of belonging in Iowa were grounded in the community she built here. At the same time, Burhan insists that notions of home are fluid and multiple. Importantly, Iowa is a second home to Kenya, which “will always be home.” She described visiting with her son in 2019 when she “slept like a baby” in part because she was cared for and her son was with her mother, brother, or other relatives. She described that “In Africa, you walk around and talk to people, your neighbors, because you know who your neighbor is. You eat with your neighbor. Nothing here.” She went on to explain that she did not even know the neighbors in her duplex, even though they were African. “I miss all those things. I miss that community,” she said. But even amidst this longing for mutuality and connection, Burhan chose not to follow her U.S.-based family to Minneapolis. Instead, she stayed in Iowa. “I built a community in Iowa”, she said, “It’s a good community,” she says, “We help each other. We try to support each other.” Burhan expressed great pride in her ability to create a community of support in the various places she has lived. She takes particular satisfaction that these were communities not just borne out of shared identity, but of a collective interest in social activism in Iowa. “But for me, I have friends everywhere,” she said, “not only with like more of the African people, but also outside of Africans people, Asians, Caucasians… Like, you choose your family. It’s not like only the ones that you’re born with. In South Africa, I had friends. I had Hindu friends. I had other South African friends.” Though family is important to Burhan, it was not the only way to make connections. Because they were actively chosen, rather than passively acquired, Burhan emphasizes that the community support she has drawn around her was crucial to making Iowa her (second) home.

Where Burhan created a community of shared activist values, Bianca forged a community with whom she could trust to care for her young children. Though Bianca had her children after arriving in the U.S., she still similarly compared childrearing in Iowa to her experience in her country of origin. “In Africa, you have your family. You can leave your kids,” she says. “But here, without your family, you have to know someone’s beliefs, the way they educate their kids. You cannot leave your kids just anywhere.” In her country of origin, Bianca used family ties to outline the boundaries of trust. But, in Iowa, where she lacked extended family, she worried about how to find others who would share the same values around childrearing practices. When I asked her how she managed as a working mother, she replied, “mostly its friends I made. There is some we are close as a family now. I know if I have to do this or this the kids can go to Giselle or Lorraine. I know over there they will be good. They do the same, sometimes they bring me their kids when I’m home. So we support each other.” These two other households were “close as a family” and essential to Bianca’s ties to Iowa.

Over the twenty years she has lived in Iowa, Mama Veve has created a network of people who have supported her through successes and hardships, including the death of her son. “God comes and just dumped me down again, but I have that community which lifted me up,” She said with pride. “Still at the anniversary of my son, they send me notes, they send me this, they send me that. And that is where I say, you know what, I have this. And that positivity, that love, that embrace, it’s something you cannot measure or put a price tag on it. But it’s something really very important, which I appreciate, and I value a lot.” Mama Veve is close to retirement and is contemplating where she wants to spend her older years. She is not sure if she wants to grow old in Iowa because she thinks Americans do not provide good care for older adults. But, what keeps her here, for now, is the supportive community who provides her the emotional support she values so highly.

6. Conclusions: Iowa Has Many Faces

The dominant myth of the American Midwest as homogenously white, Christian, and rural has a powerful hold in U.S. consciousness and iconography. Decades of residents of color and scholars have pushed back against this persistent erasure of the diversity and complexity of Midwestern life and continue to do so. In their response to the pervasive question of “why Iowa”, I understand African refugees to be doing similar work. Their answers stake a claim of belonging, ownership, and assert their own understanding of this place called Iowa. “You know,” Burhan said patting my hand gently, “this Iowa has a lot of faces. That’s the reality.” It is a reality far too complex to fit into the prevailing myths as they have long been repeated.

As I have argued above, their narratives are of Iowa as a good place for Black Africans to raise families, a place with low crime and accessible home ownership. These opportunities are predicated on their second assertion, that, having lived in sometimes six other locations, they see the anti-Black African racism and islamophobia in Iowa as comparative less harsh. Finally, they contend that Iowa is a place where Africans can build cross-racial and cross-generational communities of support that make Iowa, with its vast differences from the African continent, a second home.

This article has presented an African, refugee-generated narrative of Iowa. Centering African-born Iowans’ narratives of their state and their relationship to regional identity means not only recognizing the agency of refugees but also acknowledging their expertise. This is both individual and categorical. Burhan’s work takes her all over Iowa, to small towns whose names I have never even heard. She has seen more of Iowa than many locals and certainly more than I have, a Midwestern-born Iowa transplant, since 2016. When she says, “I feel comfortable driving in rural Iowa while I’m fully dressed in my black abaya [she gestures to her entire body] … I go to Mason City, Sioux City, Ames, Marshalltown, Nevada, everywhere in Iowa, 99 counties, fully covered” she is drawing upon her more extensive knowledge as a corrective to pervasive misconceptions. Furthermore, African refugees have far greater knowledge of other places on the globe than most Americans and most Iowans. This awareness, though painfully gained, affords them alternative perspectives, a different way of seeing places like Iowa. Burhan first told me that Iowa is the home of the longest-standing mosque in the United States. This does not feature in the dominant narrative about Iowa, but it is central to Burhan’s story and to the story of many Muslim Iowans. She is proud that there is a Muslim cemetery in Des Moines where she might be buried one day. Amina told me about the deep roots of the Sudanese community in Iowa, leading me to discover transnational ties that date back to the 1960s. Amina is proud that Iowa City elected its first Sudanese American public office holder in the United States in 2018 (The Gazette 2020). This is Burhan and Amina’s Iowa, an African-envisioned Iowa that they are narrating from their own, situated, perspective.

Even as they argue for the many current benefits to living in Iowa, the African refugees I know are also deeply concerned about the work that needs to be done to ensure that future Africans can come and that their children can thrive here. In other words, they are not only interested in narrating the present, but they also have a strong stake in shaping the future of Iowa. They are starting NGOs, building mutual-aid societies, planning festivals. Burhan’s work puts her in front of state legislators every day, educating them about things like genital cutting, marital relationships, and parenting styles. Jean and some of his community members worked with a team of doctors at the University of Iowa Hospitals to improve the experience of African immigrant birthing mothers through more culturally sensitive treatment. African refugees are indeed both authoring their own Iowa story and creating a new Iowan reality.