Home Now: How 6000 Refugees Transformed an American TownA moving chronicle of who belongs in America. Like so many American factory towns, Lewiston, Maine, thrived until its mill jobs disappeared and the young began leaving. But then the story unexpectedly veered: over the course of fifteen years, the city became home to thousands of African immigrants and, along the way, turned into one of the most Muslim towns in the US. Now about 6,000 of Lewiston's 36,000 inhabitants are refugees and asylum seekers, many of them Somali. Cynthia Anderson tells the story of this fractious yet resilient city near where she grew up, offering the unfolding drama of a community's reinvention--and humanizing some of the defining political issues in America today. In Lewiston, progress is real but precarious. Anderson takes the reader deep into the lives of both immigrants and lifelong Mainers: a single Muslim mom, an anti-Islamist activist, a Congolese asylum seeker, a Somali community leader. Their lives unfold in these pages as anti-immigrant sentiment rises across the US and national realities collide with those in Lewiston. Home Now gives a poignant account of America's evolving relationship with religion and race, and makes a sensitive yet powerful case for embracing change. |
Contents
MayJune 2016 | |
Beginnings | |
Summer 2016 | |
Opposition | |
Late SummerFall 2016 | |
Beginnings II | |
Late Fall 2016Winter 2017 | |
Early Spring 2017 | |
Spring 2017 | |
Late SpringEarly Summer 2017 | |
Summer 2017 | |
December 2017March 2018 | |
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