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Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Annual Report : Minnesota

Minnesota: on becoming a global village

by Mary Shafer

A few blocks from the Mixed Blood Theater near the U's West Bank, a group of Somali women in brown, teal, peach, and green-striped hijabs, some with children in tow, wait for their bus. They don't stand out so very much in this neighborhood, with its comfortably blended ethnic soup, where places like the Lucky Dragon and the Viking Bar, the Odaa Restaurant and the Kilimanjaro Café all reside within shouting distance of each other.

Though the West Bank is hardly typical Minnesota—or even typical Twin Cities—its ethnic tapestry may well be a blueprint for what the state may soon look like. Minnesota's latest immigrant boom—which began in about 1980 when the first large wave of Hmong immigrants began arriving from refugee camps in Thailand and from other parts of the United States—is changing the face of Minnesota. As it does, College of Liberal Arts (CLA) faculty are helping to shape how the state understands and responds to its new makeup.

The Changing Face of Minnesota

Compared to what the state experienced a century ago, the percentages of new immigrants are not so startling. In 1910, some 30 percent of the Twin Cities population was immigrant, says Rudy Vecoli, director of the U's Immigration History Research Center (IHRC). “Minnesota then had the second-largest immigrant population, second only to North Dakota," Vecoli says. “Any place you went in Minnesota, you could hear a language other than English."

In 1990, in contrast, foreign-born residents made up only 6 percent of Minneapolis's and 7 percent of St. Paul's population. But the speed of change is dizzying, especially in greater Minnesota, where some communities have seen their immigrant-fueled minority populations jump from 3-5 percent in the 1970s to over 20 percent today, says Joel Wurl, the Immigration History Research Center's assistant director and curator. “That kind of growth is hard to grasp," says Wurl. “The impact is phenomenal."

The impact is intensified by the fact that the first-wave immigrants—90 percent of them of European descent—have bequeathed to the state what is generally perceived as a certain ethnic homogeneity that is now very rapidly being turned on its cultural and racial ear by the current wave of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and Africa, as well as the former Soviet Union.

For example, Minnesota is now home to the largest Somali population in the U.S.—perhaps as many as 28,000 people—and the vast majority have come in the past five years, according to the nonprofit Minneapolis Foundation. In three years, says the foundation, the number of Somali students in Minneapolis schools has tripled; one-fourth of the total student body at Roosevelt High School is Somali.

St. Paul, meanwhile, is tied with Fresno, California, for the nation's largest Hmong population. Two-thirds of Minnesota's 60,000 Hmong immigrants live in St. Paul, and Hmong now ranks behind English as the most spoken language in the Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts, where, in all, students speak nearly 90 different languages.

The stories these new immigrants bring with them are generally not the stories of the German and Scandinavian settlers who arrived here at the turn of the century.

"Historically, Europeans had been economic immigrants who chose to migrate with expectations of a better life," says Vecoli. “What brought them to Minnesota was land. These were peasants who went to farming, although some went to the Twin Cities, where the market centers that developed—saw mills, flour milling, exploitation of natural resources—depended on immigrant labor."

By contrast, many recent immigrants are refugees—from Somalia and eastern Europe, as well as from Southeast Asia—who have fled their homes and brought with them harrowing and heartrending tales of suffering and survival.

Some didn't come first to Minnesota, but arrived here from other states to reunite with family members. Like European immigrants before them, Somali and Hmong people have “a strong sense of clan and family ties," Vecoli says. As many as 8,000 Hmong have come to Minnesota from the Fresno area.

Managing the Makeover

It is fair to say that the state's reaction to its newest immigrants has been mixed. On the one hand, a Wilder Foundation poll conducted last spring found that the vast majority of new Twin Cities immigrants found Minnesotans friendly. On the other hand, incidents such as the beating of a Somali boy in southeastern Minnesota last year clearly challenge the state's positive self-concept.

"In terms of welcoming, the entire state is struggling with how immigrants might become part of its fabric," says Rusty Barcelo, the U's associate vice president for multicultural affairs and chair of Chicano studies. “Some communities are doing better than others. Realistic issues are language, culture, and differences—especially in rural areas. In some ways, the Twin Cities offer opportunities for new groups because there are communities are in place already. This is not to say there are not race or ethnic problems. We all have a tendency to fear difference."

Geography professor Helga Leitner puts it a bit more strongly: “Although the majority of Americans subscribe to the concept of cultural diversity, practicing tolerance and respect for the immigrant 'other' is a behavior that does not seem to come naturally. It needs to be learned and practiced," she says.

Vecoli puts it more strongly still. “There still exists a racial prejudice, a kind of xenophobic nativism," he says. “Expressions of racism and nativism, including episodes of violence, have marred the image of 'Minnesota nice.' Newcomers have been subject to insults, stereotyping, discrimination, and sometimes physical attack."

Still, Vecoli says, assimilation has never been easy—and that tension may be the most significant issue confronting immigrants of any century. Assimilation means functioning according to the norms of a wholly new culture while experiencing intense longing for the familiarity of the country left behind. Most Minnesotans, immigrant descendants though they are, can't imagine it.

"Most of us are several generations removed from the immigrant experience," says Vecoli. “It takes a conscious act of memory and imagination to place ourselves back into that painful status of being strangers in the land, to feel the wrenching homesickness, the deep loneliness of the immigrant.

"The myth is that the old immigrants assimilated readily," Vecoli says. “That's balderdash. There's always been a tenacious effort to maintain native languages and cultures. Ethnicity provides a form of community."

At the century's turn, that led to a German-dominated New Ulm, a West St. Paul that began to look Mexican, and—in Vecoli's words—what is still a northeast Minneapolis “crazy quilt pattern of ethnic settlement with its concentrations of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Finns, Norwegians, Swedes, Lebanese, and Italians." Today, it means new versions of the same thing: the Asian concentration in south Minneapolis or St. Paul's Frogtown, say, or the high Somali concentration in southern Minnesota.

"Immigrants are often forced to live together, but they also want to be together, in order to provide mutual support, to rebuild family and neighborhood networks and to maintain languages and their culture," Leitner says.

The struggle for immigrants—and for Minnesotans, then—is to balance the need to assimilate with the need to honor ethnicity—or, in Vecoli's words, to find the precarious balance between melting pot and mosaic.

The struggle, he says, “leads to generational conflict as the youth become more assimilated into pop culture. It manifests as tension in the family when women who have been in a patriarchal system become breadwinners. It is the constant feature of the immigrant experience."

A Look at What's Being Done

Joel Wurl is among a whole host of CLA faculty and staff who are not only studying the immigration issue but also involved in creating the new Minnesota. Last year, Wurl was an adviser, both to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, which commissioned the Wilder survey—the first actually to solicit immigrants' opinions about their experiences in Minnesota—and to a Minnesota League of Women Voters project called “Changing Faces, Changing Communities." The latter is bringing together a cross-section of individuals and opinion leaders to talk about immigration, race, diversity, and all of the accompanying issues—jobs, schools, language differences, and propose action plans for their communities.

"The hot issues are housing, education, how communities provide necessary social services," says Wurl.

Indeed, many efforts are under way to address these issues, Leitner says, noting that schools, non-profit organizations, and churches in particular are offering support to new immigrants in housing, jobs, and schooling. “Organizations such as the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights educate Minnesotans about the new immigrants, their culture, and contribution to Minnesota," Leitner says. “Those initiatives are important, given the lack of knowledge many Minnesotans have about non-European cultures. The U has also been active on this front through courses as well as through outreach activities."

Look for an example of such U outreach efforts and you'd need to look no further than philosophy professor John Wallace. And indeed you would probably find him on any given Wednesday evening over on St. Paul's West Side, chatting with kids in T-shirts, tank tops, and backward-facing baseball caps who are milling around a brick building called Neighborhood House. Every week, these Hmong and Latino kids and their parents come here, not only for the comfort of community but also to teach and learn from each other.

Neighborhood House is home to the Jane Addams School for Democracy, an initiative that Wallace helped found in 1996 and for which he's received national recognition.

As part of a community service requirement, Wallace brings his students here as English tutors. But, he says modestly, “what we do isn't teacher-driven. If I’m Hmong and you're Spanish, we maybe will have coffee and talk and we'll both improve our English."

Indeed, the emphasis on partnership and reciprocal learning, of working with immigrants rather than delivering services to them, is at the core of the Jane Addams school. And if the approach is empowering to these immigrants, it also has ignited Wallace's students, many of whom have stayed on at the school well beyond their required commitment.

The program—already becoming a model for other universities, some of which have sent visitors to observe—may well be one that other communities can emulate as they grapple with changing ethnic makeups.

In other efforts to address the immigration issue, CLA and other U faculty members participated in November in an international conference called “Race, Ethnicity, and Migration: The United States in a Global Context." A conference organizer, Vecoli says the event—part of the U's President's Sesquicentennial Conference Series—was sponsored in part by the Seminar on Race, Ethnicity, and Migration, an IHRC effort funded by the Graduate School to engage people across the U who are “interested in issues of contemporary migration."

The Face of Things to Come

Amid all of the efforts under way to address immigration, Rusty Barcelo, associate vice president for multicultural affairs, believes that there is plenty of reason for some optimism. Although she's more than aware of the need for the whole state to be “constantly vigilant," she says she's also seen real progress in her four-and-a-half-year tenure at the University.

"When I first came, I felt our office reaching out. Now it's the opposite. Colleges and departments are contacting me. There's more diversity in numbers and we're changing the U for the better and preparing all students for tomorrow. We're not there by any stretch, but there's definitely been a change in culture."

Even in the classes she teaches, she says, she's impressed by “the conversations that are struck, by students who take each other on over these issues. The curriculum has been transformed, and the atmosphere is totally different than it was a few years ago. I’m really quite amazed."

Indeed, as the new immigrants make their way into Minnesota's political and economic mainstreams, the entire state seems destined for an atmospheric change. Things may feel a lot more like the West Bank—or maybe more like Neighborhood House, where José and Pang and Maria Elena and Mitch partake comfortably of each other's cultures and where, says Wallace, the setting is “not seen as a host's environment but as the community gathering place where everybody can be at the table. When you have that, everyone gains power."