Living Citizenship with Phoenix's Refugees

On 35th and Dunlap Avenue, I sat in a 800 square foot apartment with an international delegation to the United States. Representatives from the Congo, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Somalia gathered to discuss the goal of the day: using the word “street” in a sentence.

For a month and a half, I volunteered my time every Thursday from 6:00 p.m. to 8 p.m. with the organization, Abounding Service. The organization’s mission is to help refugees based in Phoenix learn English, accustom to life in the United States and prepare for the U.S. naturalization test.

Although it is formal citizenship that these refugees are seeking through the naturalization test, substantive citizenship cannot be achieved by personal initiative alone, but by acquiring a sense of “belonging” via substantive citizenship (Glenn, Constructing Citizenship p.6). Their effort to seek inclusion, however must be reciprocated by acceptance.

The experiences of refugees from these regions vary significantly in regards to how they fare amongst the institutional and societal frameworks of their countries, but nonetheless the struggle of acceptance and the politics of exclusion find narratives in their stories. When I practiced conversations with Pen Pen, a woman from Myanmar, I asked her if she has been to other countries other than the United States, she smiled and told me “Malaysia”. “I heard Malaysia is beautiful”, I said. “It truly was”, she ended. I later found out that Malaysia was the country to which she and her husband fled following Myanmar's policy of forced labor and state regulation of their family farm. They escaped “slavery” according to Gary de Velder, the program coordinator. This is in line with Barbara White’s  analysis of how destitution can be implemented by state-coordinated policies of exclusion and not just by cultural or social norms (White, p.884). As refugees, it goes without saying that all their governments played roles in their exclusion.

The refugees who attend class at the Abounding Service English School engage in different interactions with American citizens in class sessions than they do in their experiences throughout their navigation in Phoenix.  In a sense, the school functions as a civic space in which empowerment grows amongst them. By writing a sentence correctly, pronouncing a word successfully and having a dialogue the refugees gain a sense of accomplishment. For some people like Pen Pen, this was the only education they received. These refugees acted on their own agency by signing up for English classes. Abounding service does not seek them, but rather refugees seek Abounding Service. Although they are not “formal citizens”, their participation contributes to their substantive citizenship through engagement in civil society (Barber, 110).

I too stayed engaged in civil society through this process. My relationship with the refugees was more mutualistic than it was one-sided. Along the process, I gained knowledge from them as they did from me, in addition to strengthening my substantive citizenship. My experience challenged my perceptions on the global migration of people escaping oppression and death, and the way strict U.S. policy in recent years have reduced the amount of refugees we admit annually. The narratives of the “trojan horse”, “wolf in sheep’s clothing” view of refugees are politically constructed from higher levels of political authority and are not substantiated by my experiences. This follows White’s account on the experience of the destitute as they navigate society, where political actors act “complicit” to a culture of exclusion (White, p. 884).

I want to emphasize that my role is not “teacher” and theirs is not that of “student”. The fact that I am formally referred to as an “encourager” attests that they initiated their own path to belonging into American society. I simply became their friend and accepted their want to belong. By allowing each other to actively engage in civil society, we all became participants in the democracy described by Barber. I, an American, and refugees from four different countries “lived” democracy.