Introduction

The Ethiopian diaspora in North America was largely constituted by people prompted to leave or flee Ethiopia following the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia, or those who were forced to overstay work or study visas to evade the violence or turmoil. Conflict-generated diaspora groups, like this particular wave of migrants, have an inherently complex social, political, and emotional relationship with their countries of origin. Much of this complexity is manifested in the diaspora-state relations of emigres, but it also seeps into the personal and everyday discourses and practices that characterize diasporan lives. While there have been subsequent waves of forced and voluntary migrants from Ethiopia, each of these waves has a unique shared experience in terms of the conditions of their departure and the nature of their reception and settlement in the West.

Berg and Eckstein argue that pre- and post-emigration experiences may be more significant in defining generations of migrants and their children than birth and age cohort. They developed a conceptual framework termed “historically grounded generations” and argue “if migrants from any one country uproot at different times with different lived experiences, they would constitute different historically embedded generations.” Using this framework as a starting point, I approach the large cohort of migrants who fled Ethiopia during the Derg regime in the 1970s and 1980s and settled in cities across North America as a particular historically grounded generation. This involves appreciating how the socio-political environment in Ethiopia before their migration and the nature of their departure from the country has profoundly shaped their post-migration lived experiences, including their settlement patterns, social relations, diasporic identities, and homeland engagement. As I discuss further below, this should not obfuscate the heterogeneity of experiences within this cohort of migrants, nor should it detract from the agency of these individuals in charting their own life courses. Instead, thinking through a specific “historically grounded generation” as an analytical lens is meant to alert us to some of the structural processes that connect the groups of people within this cohort, and the sociopolitical points of reference that these individuals often find themselves navigating as they govern their own lives.