There are numerous and trenchant accounts of the tragic and disastrous Iraq War (2003–2011), which focus on its financial, human, and political cost to the US. Less has been written about the human cost to the Iraqi people in the largest displacement in the Middle East since 1948. Few Americans are cognizant that over three million Iraqis, many facing violence due to their cooperation with the US invasion and occupation, fled Iraq and that 124,159 were resettled in the US from 2008 to 2015 after an intense lobbying effort by former aid personnel and veterans. This ethnographic study explores t ... More

There are numerous and trenchant accounts of the tragic and disastrous Iraq War (2003–2011), which focus on its financial, human, and political cost to the US. Less has been written about the human cost to the Iraqi people in the largest displacement in the Middle East since 1948. Few Americans are cognizant that over three million Iraqis, many facing violence due to their cooperation with the US invasion and occupation, fled Iraq and that 124,159 were resettled in the US from 2008 to 2015 after an intense lobbying effort by former aid personnel and veterans. This ethnographic study explores the cartography of belonging for Iraqi refugees within a specific cultural geography—California’s Latinx-majority communities of southeastern California (known as the Inland Empire). The fieldwork in the IE spans a particular geopolitical era of resettlement mobilization, the Great Recession, and the December 2, 2015, terrorist attack in San Bernardino. The attack was immediately followed by candidate Donald Trump’s naming of Arab and Muslim refugees (including Iraqis) as threats to national security. With the mainstreaming of Islamophobia during the presidential election, the United States ceased to be a free space of religious and communal expression. Drawing on seven years of fieldwork with fifty Iraqi refugees, this book is a witness to how the felt sense of belonging—cultural citizenship—is negotiated within the social spaces of work, family, faith community.