Somali Minneapolis: A City Within a City

When the Somali central government collapsed in nineteen ninety-one, the civil war that followed produced one of the largest refugee populations of the late twentieth century. Families fled to camps in Kenya and Ethiopia and Djibouti. From those camps, resettlement agencies began placing families in cities in the United States. Minneapolis received more than its share.

The Somali community in Minneapolis is the largest in the United States, estimated by various counts at between forty thousand and eighty thousand people. It built itself from scratch in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood near the University of Minnesota and spread north and east from there. Mosques appeared. Cultural centers. Schools. Restaurants. A commercial corridor on Lake Street running to Broadway filled with East African businesses: halal butchers, money-transfer offices, tailors, restaurants serving Somali rice dishes and Somali tea.

In twenty eighteen, Ilhan Omar was elected to the United States House of Representatives from Minnesota's Fifth Congressional District. She was the first Somali American member of Congress, the first woman of color to represent Minnesota in Congress, and the first member of Congress to wear a hijab on the floor. She was elected from a district that includes Cedar-Riverside, the neighborhood where her community had built itself over two decades.

The community has navigated federal counterterrorism investigations that critics characterized as profiling, sustained anti-immigrant political rhetoric, the same pattern of police violence that shaped the George Floyd summer, and the economic pressures of a city with a limited supply of affordable housing. It has also, in thirty years, built a community where no community existed before.