Urban Refugees and Interracial Alliance Building in Education: Geographies of Race, Space, and Place in the making

• In Event: Migrants, Asylees, and Refugees: Efforts and Responses to Welcoming Newcomers to New York City Schools

Proposal

Increasing number of refugees are being resettled in U.S. cities that have been historically populated by urban poor, racial minorities, and immigrants. As one of the many migrant and minoritized communities of varying racial, legal and political positions within these spaces, urban refugees constitute an important part of the changing demographics, race relations, and spatializing practices of the daily strategies on the ground. Based on a case study of Syrian refugees being resettled in a small-scale city in New Jersey, this study examines how race and space intersect when the newly arriving Syrian refugees are being resettled in areas of urban poverty inhabited by predominantly poor and minoritized populations. The study uses a mixed method of in-depth interviews, field observations, historical archives, demographic data, and GIS mapping. The study underscores how history of civil rights and political activism of previous
minoritized communities in the city provide important political capital for subsequent migrants and refugees—a relational process that involves daily geographies of racialization on the ground, and building multiracial alliance of diverse racial, ethnic, migrant, and legal backgrounds to resist urban marginalization across time and space. The findings show how Syrian refugee families learn to build alliances and coalitions with other minoritized communities in the city to claim their legal and social rights, and resist limited resources from the local and state government and education institutions on the ground. This study poignantly illustrates how urban refugees are articulating their agency by producing social and political spaces in connection with other spaces of marginality and reveals how urban spaces can also become important sites for creating new politics of resistance.

Author

• Jamie Lew, Rutgers University-Newark