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Ethnographic Grounding

As noted by Lamphere (1992:7), there are some important differences between earlier phases of immigration to the United States (before 1924) and current immigration. A 1965 amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act abolished country-by-country quotas that made it difficult for anyone but North Europeans to emigrate to the United States. Subsequent changes in immigration law, intensifying global economic restructuring, and political strife in their countries of origin have increased dramatically the numbers of immigrants and refugees from non-European countries, mostly Asian and Latin American, with smaller numbers of Black Caribbeans and Africans (Lamphere 1992:7). Furthermore, the class composition of immigrants has substantially changed. Earlier in the twentieth century, immigrants were mostly of peasant or working-class backgrounds. Since 1965, immigrants have included substantial numbers of middle- and even upper-class people with professional or entrepreneurial backgrounds, as well as those from rural and working classes (Portes and Rumbaut 1990). With these changes, anti-immigrant sentiments have also increased (Lamphere 1992:14).

For example, in 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was passed to control and contain illegal immigration, primarily through employer sanctions against hiring undocumented workers (Bean et al. 1989:25). Another indication of anti-immigration and anti-immigrant attitudes includes the passage of “English-only” legislation in states with large Spanish-speaking populations, including Arizona, Florida, California, and Colorado (see Castro 1989). The post-September 11 restrictions on immigration and civil liberty while ostensibly designed to prevent terrorism, also seem to be having the effect of exacerbating this preexisting xenophobic trend. While these sentiments are certainly not new in American history, current trends provide an important part of the context for the present analysis of African/African American identity formation.

The diversity of America’s contemporary African diaspora even further complicates what it means to be both American and of African heritage, providing the context for intense debate and innovative production of new identities among newcomers and native-born groups in Minnesota. The state is now home to the highest concentration of Somalis in the United States and to sizeable and growing Ethiopian, Liberian, Nigerian, and Sudanese communities, as well as other African immigrant groups.¹ The number of African immigrants living in the Twin Cities is expected to grow. According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees, because limits on the numbers of African immigrants allowed to enter the country have been raised, there will be dramatic increases in the number of African immigrants to the United States when already established newcomers attempt to reunite their families. An estimated 12,000 were projected to arrive in 1999 alone and more than 25,000 were expected in 2003. However, government restrictions on emigration to the United States in the post-September 11 period may curtail the number of African immigrants. In addition to its growing Somali population, Minnesota also has a sizable Ethiopian and growing Sudanese and Kenyan populations (see Holtzmann and Foner 1999 for an ethnography of Minnesota’s Sudanese immigrants). The numbers of West Africans living in Minnesota is smaller, but significant, with about 750 Liberian families as well as almost 1,000 Yorùbá, Igbo, and Hausa families, mostly from Nigeria. Also attracted by economic opportunities and the comparatively high quality of life in the Twin Cities, the number of African American and other native-born people of color, particularly those living in poverty and migrating from other Midwestern cities such as Chicago and Gary, Indiana, has also increased in the past two decades (Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights 1998). During the 1980s, the “minority” population rose to 21 percent children of color public school enrollment; and students spoke some seventy languages. These demographic changes were a sociocultural shock for an urban area that as recently as 1970 was 93 percent white.

The specific translocality which is the focus of this study is the culturally diverse, largely low-income Powderhorn community of Minneapolis. Powderhorn is a microcosm of the broader demographic patterns now found in Minnesota. The largest of Minneapolis’s eleven planning districts, Powderhorn has eight neighborhoods, six of which have significant poverty rates. Despite its high rate of poverty, Powderhorn retains some economic assets such as vibrant business and nonprofit sectors and relatively high numbers of owner-occupied single-family homes. Incorporated in 1887, Powderhorn has traditionally been a “launching pad” for new immigrant and native-born arrivals to the Twin Cities. As noted in a recent study of Powderhorn’s history and culture (Larson and Azzahir 1995:13), this very diverse community is perceived by many Twin Cities residents as having an activist culture and community institutions and a strong “feminist culture … with wide acceptance of non-western health practices, new age spiritualists, acupuncturists, and homeopaths.”

Defining its mission as “unleashing the power of citizens to heal themselves,” the CWC attempted to use what it called “cultural health practices” to deliberately build a shared sense of identity among the native-born and immigrant groups that comprise Powderhorn’s 51,000 residents, including Whites, Blacks, Native Americans, Asians, and Latinos of diverse backgrounds.

The CWC’s mission operated simultaneously at two levels.² It attempted to build community among these groups, while providing programs to cultivate shared identity and networks within the various groups that made up its Powderhorn constituent base. The CWC had three core program divisions which provided support groups, health counseling, and classes to develop the body (often called “bodywork” classes) to accomplish its community-building goals: the Health Institute, the Invisible College, and Core Member Activities.³ The Health Institute provided services to help individual members better manage their relationship with mainstream medical practitioners and sponsored research and evaluation studies to document the CWC’s model. The Invisible College conducted educational and support group activities for a wide segment of the CWC’s constituency, including patients and medical doctors, to help them understand the interface between health and culture and regenerate these connections in their personal and community lives. Core Member Activities included basic member services considered fundamental to cultural wellness, including, for example, health self-assessments, introductory courses in cultural health issues, and nutritional and exercise classes.

Although the CWC’s underlying program philosophy will be discussed in much greater detail later in this study, it maintained that to build healthy pluralistic communities, people must be reconnected to their specific cultural traditions. Thus, reflecting its dual mission, the three CWC program divisions also operated at two levels. There were general classes which would be of interest to any constituent, for example, health self-assessments, relaxation techniques, and a farmer’s market. And there were constituent-specific classes, for example, parenting classes for African Americans, leadership classes for women, Hmong dance, English as a Second Language classes for Chicanos and Latinos, European traditional healing, or cultural health sessions for medical doctors.⁴

Two subtle philosophical distinctions also characterized the CWC mission. Its general mission and programs applied to all participants, regardless of ethnocultural, educational, or occupational background. At the same time, according to the CWC’s African leadership, its cultural wellness mission, although universal, had an essentially African base. Therefore, “African” at the CWC was construed as both an ethnocultural category referring to people of African descent, and a universal cultural wellness philosophy and way of life that could be adopted by anyone regardless of their background.⁵

A thorough study of the CWC’s mission, program tracks, and profound constituent diversity was not feasible in the context of this two-year study. This study focuses on the CWC’s role in the construction of African diasporan diversity in the Twin Cities. Given my training as an Africanist and my ethnographic research experiences in African communities in Nigeria and African diasporan ones in the United States, an African diasporan focus seems appropriate. This focus in no way implies that I consider the CWC’s African constituents more important than other participants. Nor does it imply, as indicated by the many general and culturally specific services available to its non-African participants (see Table A6 in Appendix A), that this nonprofit organization only has African programs. The African diasporan focus is driven by the need to delineate a manageable focus for a two-year ethnographic research project, my own training, and my related interest in African diasporan studies issues. Interrelations between CWC Africans and other participants are studied to the extent that it helps to inform African diversity dynamics.

The CWC was formed in 1997 as a spin-off of a foundation-funded demonstration project called here the Cultural Health Initiative (CHI).⁶ The healthcare foundation supported the CHI for two years (from 1995 to 1996) as an experiment to see if a grassroots approach to health care could reverse the high incidences of infant deaths, hypertension, diabetes, homicide, and other lifestyle-related ailments that plague this community. CHI convened several community-based committees called “Citizen Health Action Teams,” or CHATs, which met during this formative stage to design a community-based health center. CHATs focused on both culturally specific issues—for example, defining an African philosophy for health and wellness—and general concerns such as defining a healthy person and community. CHATs represented the diversity of the CWC’s Powderhorn constituency. The goal of these CHAT meetings was to design a health center in which all Powderhorn people felt some sense of ownership. Although staff and volunteers elaborated and refined programs during this research, these formative CHAT proceedings defined all of the cultural wellness approaches described and analyzed in this study, including the CWC’s mission, its program design, spatial philosophy and layout, and what it called “the people theory,” a grassroots model of health and wellness, as well as related program principles and strategies.

In addition to describing the official program and mission of the CWC, this study also uses ethnographic methods to explicate the underlying folk theories of health, wellness, and identity that inform the CWC’s public discourse. While the CWC was a grassroots organization, its mission and programs, of course, evolved within a broader set of power relations. This study describes how the wider sociopolitical climate and CWC African diversity dynamics mutually inform each other.

As a comparatively new and relatively small-budget nonprofit organization, the CWC had a full-time, all female staff of only six people and ten to fifteen part-time instructors (mostly women with about five men) who taught specialty classes (for example, African dance and other classes featured in this study) on either a pro bono or contractual basis. Staff positions included an executive director, a medical director (who was also a physician), an office manager, two cultural healers (who were also licensed social workers), and an administrative assistant (who was also a cultural healer).⁷ As is typical of tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, the CWC had a volunteer board which set program policy. The CWC also housed self-help groups from various communities, for example, a Laotian women’s support group, which had sources of funding independent of the CWC but, in exchange for helping to pay rent and other expenses, may have utilized office equipment, participated in other CWC programs, and/or received general CWC administrative services such as accounting and fiscal agency for foundation grants.⁸ Augmenting the capacity of its full-time staff, board, and part-time instructors was a large network of special-project volunteers from the community, for example, members of CHATs, medical doctors, and other professionals who were members of advisory committees, such as an evaluation committee and a health and wellness policy committee. These committees also shaped CWC program direction. The staff, board, and volunteers reflected the ethnocultural diversity of the Powderhorn community where the CWC was based. Although the majority of board and special-project volunteers were women, there were significant numbers of men working in these capacities.⁹ Thus, the CWC, through its volunteer network, had an effective reach and capacity that extended far beyond its small staff.¹⁰

Anthropologists have been criticized for focusing their studies on disenfranchised populations and exhorted to “study up,” that is, include those who hold power in their research for a more complete understanding of the formation and operation of sociopolitical and cultural systems (Weatherford 1985; Herzfeld 1987). It became evident early in the research that although the CWC focused on the Powderhorn planning district, which included several of the poorest neighborhoods in the Twin Cities region, it worked across a diverse social network that brought together, in sometimes very direct ways, some of the metropolitan area’s poorest residents with the region’s most powerful people, who included foundation funders, wealthy donors, politicians, and public servants. As I better understood the socioeconomic background of the CWC’s African participants, it became clear that although they were working with low-income constituents, the leadership which organized and implemented CWC programs and related efforts would probably be classified by most people as middle class.

One of the many challenges of this study was that I initially set out to understand the broader dynamics of identity and community formation among people of African descent, inclusive of diverse class backgrounds. However, including a broad sample of class backgrounds, particularly among African immigrants, proved difficult. The most active CWC participants tended to be well-educated people who were fluent in both their native language (often in addition to at least one other African and/or European language) and English. They tended to be more established immigrants who had some post-secondary education, professional careers, and had lived in the United States for at least five years. However, there seemed to be more class variation among African American participants than their African counterparts. For example, several African American participants in the CWC’s network held very prominent leadership positions in either the public, corporate, or nonprofit sectors. I did not meet any African participants who held such positions. This was probably a function of their status as relative newcomers. The average age of African and African American participants was about thirty-six, with a range from the early twenties to late sixties. A conscientious effort was made to include intergenerational diversity in the research.

As will become evident in the presentation of the ethnographic data, the CWC’s leadership often acted as intermediaries or agents—cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic—for people of African descent (immigrant and United States-born) of lesser financial means, education, international exposure, or experience negotiating American institutions. For example, several of the CWC African immigrant leaders who shared their migration stories and opinions about African identity formation acted as volunteer interpreters and providers of various social services to people from their community. They helped people with fewer resources and less knowledge of American society navigate the various bureaucracies they needed to understand for survival: for example, by helping with a job interview, working with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to arrange for emigration of relatives; accompanying them on doctors appointments; or working as a liaison with attorneys, social workers, schools, and so forth. Indeed, in many instances African immigrants saw this kind of support as their personal responsibility. This same role of cultural or bureaucratic intermediary was also prevalent among African American CWC leaders with both African immigrants and lower-income African Americans.

Most CWC leaders of African descent, at the staff, board, and special-project levels, were women. While I cannot offer any conclusive statements about why this was the case, it did seem that part of the CWC’s ideology was that identity and community building—defined by the CWC as working to strengthen connections to heritage—was “women’s work,” the actual term often used by the CWC leadership. Therefore, partly by design, across all constituent groups, the CWC leadership and most active participants tended to be mostly, though not exclusively, female. Several active African and European male participants took special note of the many occasions where they were among only a few men in CWC workshops, classes, or other activities.

The CWC was not part of any national initiative. Although the CWC was one of about six local nonprofits working to explicitly promote some version of pan-African identity, such groups were not part of a broader, organized movement. In the context of the Twin Cities’ vibrant and relatively large nonprofit sector, the GWC, as a new organization, had a relatively low profile. Groups like the CWC represent a highly creative, local response to global cultural dynamics in the Twin Cities.¹¹

Given the unique work and particular sociodemographic background of the CWC’s African and African American network, it was not possible to make conclusive generalizations about an identity or community formation process that applied to the Twin Cities metropolitan region’s entire African diasporan population. Nonetheless, the CWC provided an important lens on the region’s broader identity dynamics. With the limitations and contours of the “sample population” in mind, the CWC’s diverse African and African American network, its strong support from the philanthropic and public sectors, and its location in one of the most ethnically diverse and immigrant-populated neighborhoods in the region made the CWC an ideal institutional and ethnic crossroads for case study. The CWC was a mediating institution—a space that brought together African people across various class, ethnic, and political divides to experiment with a particular approach to building pluralistic ethnocultural identities. So, this research does not so much study up as study across the diverse African ethnicities that comprise part of the CWC’s constituent base. It examines how the CWC, particularly its predominantly middle-class African and African American and female leadership, worked across the Twin Cities’ power and ethnic structure (and national boundaries) to promote a shared sense of African community.

It became evident from the earliest phases of the research that the term “African” was a key issue for debate among the CWC’s African and African American constituency. To emphasize participant self-definitions of identity, the term “African” is often used in quotes in this study to underscore the culturally contentious and contextual meanings of the term. In describing various events and conversations in the course of fieldwork, there is also a deliberate effort to use ethnic classificatory terms that the participants themselves use, with explanation where necessary. So, for example, the reader will find, in some instances, the term “African born in America” used by many CWC participants to refer to what some people might describe as “African American” or “Black American.” Another term, “continental African,” is used by African Americans, who define themselves as “African” or “Africans born in America” to refer to a person of African heritage born in Africa but living outside Africa, in this case, in the United States.

The use of the self-defined ethnic terms gives a truer sense of the internal dynamics of identity formation than forcing CWC participant labels into those that I might personally prefer or that are more common in academic discourse. Indeed, the terms themselves are part of what is being posited and debated as various CWC participants create a shared sense of “African culture” among people of diverse origins and backgrounds. By the end of Part II, the tenor of CWC identity formation terminology is established, and I generally discard the quotation marks around the term “African,” although I continue to use self-identified ethnic labels with explanation where necessary.

Ideally, an anthropological study of any transnational cultural formation, including a diaspora, would involve “multi-site ethnography” (Marcus 1995)—in this study, ethnography in the various places in which the CWC’s work was somehow manifest. Unfortunately, such a geographically wide-ranging ethnography was not feasible in the context of this study. An alternative strategy that I used for this study was to track the perceptions, life histories, and social relations of key agents involved in the creation and maintenance of transnational networks as they live and work in a given translocal site. With increased global mobility and cultural interchange, networks—and not places—may provide an important part of the social glue that holds “community” and other collectivities together (Sullivan 1996). Thus, I saw the CWC as a key point of connection—a linking mechanism—in a larger and more complex transnational flow of meaning, images, and symbols connecting various people to places in the African diaspora. Although based in one place, the CWC represented and shed light on a cross section of the micro- and macro-level sociopolitical factors that impact African diasporan identity formation in the Twin Cities and in networks beyond them.¹² This strategy, while providing for an intense study of the CWC’s African diasporan networks, does have its limitations as a transnational ethnography. The findings do not provide for definitive generalizations about African and African American relations in either the Twin Cities or the United States. Instead the study is a point of departure to contribute to anthropology’s efforts to define the contemporary theoretical and methodological grounds of intercontinental cultural production.

The field research for this study was carried out in an applied setting. Although relatively new and small, the CWC was an innovative, high-profile nonprofit funded by several large foundations as part of an effort to promote new approaches to addressing the increasing concentration of poverty in the Twin Cities urban neighborhoods and the disproportionately high levels of physical health problems, for example, diabetes, high blood pressure, and high infant mortality rates, in these areas.¹³ Because of its deliberate and planned efforts to promote a pan-African sense of identity and social relations among Twin Cities’ Africans and African Americans, the CWC was an ideal forum for studying translocal cultural processes. Since the research was in an applied setting and was not a foundation- or government-sponsored evaluation, the CWC was not required to participate in this study. Furthermore, the CWC’s staff and board of directors were committed to a “participatory research policy.” As explained to me, the CWC would only engage in research projects where the benefits to its work were clear, CWC constituents were in some way included in research design, and the researcher “helped out” in setting up meetings or taking minutes and was able to apply what she or he learned to his or her own personal growth and health. The participatory and applied research setting provided unique access to CWC’s culture-building work. Participants’ reactions and my personal reactions to the sometimes unexpected implications of a participatory research strategy are included in the study as ethnographic data and are fundamental to understanding the CWC’s identity formation process.

Key CWC staff and volunteers were involved in every phase of the research design and implementation. The overall research design as presented here was negotiated to ensure that the goals and methods complemented the CWC’s interests and philosophy of working with the community. CWC staff and participants reviewed and commented on interview guides, suggesting questions they thought might better address the study’s key issues. Periodic research reports were provided to the CWC executive director and medical director and to health and wellness committee representatives. I held regular briefings with key CWC African staff, and reported on my general interpretations (while maintaining a confidentiality policy) about what I was learning in various CWC contexts, sessions, committee meetings, and so forth. These briefings provided regular opportunities for me to enrich the study by including participant reactions to my interpretations as research data.

As has been noted by several anthropologists, participatory research has its own set of unique challenges and opportunities. These were compounded here by the dual expectations in the CWC’s participatory research policy that participants be involved in the research design and that I make efforts to apply my research to my personal life. Many of the ensuing challenges and opportunities could not have been anticipated because they emerged as the fieldwork evolved. Situations occurred in which I had to set boundaries about the nature and extent of my participation in a specific context to maintain the always (at some level) sociopolitical balance between “insider” and “outsider” perspectives. I established some practical participatory research rules. For example, while I would occasionally take meeting minutes or volunteer to make reminder calls to participants about meetings, I reached an understanding with the CWC leadership that I would not act as a CWC staff person, promote a particular point of view, or encourage a participant to take a particular action. Also, we eventually agreed that while this study would include CWC participant perspectives on African diasporan identity, it could not promote or advocate particular participants’ points of view. Staff members understood that my role as an anthropologist was not to reduce these views to one perspective, for example, that of the CWC leadership, but to put together the broader story of CWC African identity formation from the feedback of participants of various ethnic backgrounds, social positions, and opinions. The resulting study is my interpretation of these processes. It is not in any way an evaluation or social impact assessment of the effectiveness of the CWC’s work. In many instances, certain situations and their resolution enriched my understanding of the divergent perspectives among the CWC’s participants and are included in this study.

There was a mutually beneficial convergence of interests between the academic goals of my research and the CWC’s activist agenda. The CWC staff was interested in learning how one could document, describe, and explain the effort to define and build community in tangible terms. Given the CWC’s pluralistic constituent base and mission of creating community out of diversity through health care, the complementarity with theoretical interests in anthropology was not surprising. Groups like the CWC are close to the pulse of contemporary translocal cultural dynamics. Yet it is difficult to describe such “soft” community development approaches to funders and practitioners who are more accustomed to a “hard” nuts-and-bolts emphasis on housing or job development programs. Through this study, the CWC hoped to be able to use anthropology’s emerging models to provide a vocabulary that better explained their work to others.

The study’s participatory research approach was complicated and enriched in unexpected ways by the fact that I was also a “native anthropologist.” Although, in keeping with current anthropological practice, I was aware of the sociopolitically contingent nature of ethnography, I did not begin the study by defining or problematizing my role as a “native ethnographer.” However, once the fieldwork began, the CWC’s interest in building a shared sense of African identity to embrace the diversity of the Twin Cities’ African peoples, combined with the research’s participatory nature, quickly highlighted my position as a native ethnographer. I was not only a member of the culture being studied but I was also a participant in various other professional and academic networks and cultures, several of which overlapped with the CWC’s work. Many of the features of my life—being an educated African American female with complex personal, academic, and professional experiences in the African diaspora; being a native Philadel-phian and a relative newcomer to the Twin Cities struggling to establish this place as “home”; being a mother and wife balancing family and career; being a former foundation executive and community development program evaluator—were in many ways reflected in the struggles, debates, and triumphs of the diverse people and institutions that used and supported the CWC.

Like any ethnographer, I recognized that as cultural creatures, we all have perspectives drawn from our personal lives—academic and professional experiences that color our ability to fully represent the diverse views and dynamism of the participants of the cultures we study. The quality of our work is largely influenced by our ability to keep distinct the perspectives of the “insider” and “outsider” and make systematic, self-conscious, and documented efforts to understand how these points of view mutually influence each other in the research process. Throughout my fieldwork, analysis, and writing, I made explicit attempts to understand and document how my own cultural, political, and other perspectives influenced the research design and findings. My primary strategy for accomplishing this was to include in the research as diverse a representation of African diasporan constituents as possible, and to make explicit in the narrative my personal perceptions, how I attempted to control for them, and how these efforts influenced the research context, wherever relevant. For me, the participatory fieldwork context required that I explicitly recognize my multiple sociopolitical roles—including that of a native ethnographer—and practice, at some level, what is now called reflexive ethnography (see Clifford 1988). My hope was that the inclusion of a diversity of perspectives as well as explicit inclusion of myself in my roles as both participant and observer deepened my analysis of CWC efforts to create African community, while avoiding the kind of self-centered, personal diary type of ethnography that sometimes characterizes reflexive ethnographic approaches.