UC Riverside

By the end of 2020, an astounding 26.4 million refugees were forced to leave their homes (McAuliffe and Triandafyllidou 2021). Setting an all-time record for refugees across the globe, this number is sure to rise as these migrants confront arguably the most violent of circumstances that force them to flee. As they grapple with relocation, refugees must simultaneously navigate language barriers, financial hardship, potential deportation, and other various factors that may stifle their opportunities to integrate. As millions have drawn public eye to this international crisis, past literature has failed to assess these issues across various populations or from bottom-up perspectives. Although thousands of miles apart, Latin America and Southwest Asia North Africa (SWANA) share historically embedded political and social unrest that has altered the positions of current internal strife. Given the regions’ historical and contemporary conditions, this study will comparatively analyze two disparate war refugee populations of Latin America and SWANA: Salvadorans and Afghans. Among these two groups I ask: 1) How does societal racialization impact their ability to integrate into southern California? 2) What commonalities of racialization and its outcomes can be understood through a comparative Critical Refugee framework? Employing flexible coding analyses, 26 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 Salvadorans and 13 Afghan respondents residing in southern California. This study finds that there exists a perceived racialized binary of negative and positive racializations amongst both refugee populations. External attributions imposed on Salvadoran and Afghan refugees are highly attributed to the “negative” violent histories of their homeland while also being “positively” attributed to their resilience. With refugees at the center of knowledge production, this study cross- regionally ties diverse lived experiences as cites of juxtaposed societal racializations and foreign militarization.