“Can’t Take the Country Out of Me!”: Chaldean Place-Identity Projects in Motor City

Abstract

After decades of decline, Detroit has begun advocating for immigrant inclusion as a regional revitalization strategy. Yet, some migrants do not share the city’s enthusiasm. Chaldean Iraqis, for instance, tend to underscore their distinctiveness from the city and its residents. Nevertheless, their insistence on difference seems spatially specific. Drawing on ethnographic observations in and around Chaldean community organizations in metro Detroit, as well as a sociological discourse analysis of urban policy documents, this paper traces newcomers and the city’s mutually constitutive nature of identity formation. Moreover, I show how community members strategically link their collective memories from Iraq to those of Southeast Michigan, resulting in highly complex place-identity projects. The carefully curated public narrative, in turn, has real consequences for Detroit’s social fabric, reproducing, and challenging Detroit’s own regional identity. Theoretically, the findings point to the limitations of a one-dimensional, spatially bounded, and temporally delimited notion of identity formation. Empirically, Chaldeans’ identity formation highlights the heterogeneity in newcomers’ identity construction, one that differs from that of other co-nationals.