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This chapter situates the rising prominence of Bangladeshi and Yemeni Americans in Hamtramck within an account of the city’s development since its founding as a township in 1798. Beginning with a history of African Americans, who have the most enduring presence in Hamtramck of the groups included in the chapter, the chapter then analyzes the experiences of Polish Americans in Hamtramck, who were the dominant majority for many years. The chapter considers how institutional racism, aimed most directly against African Americans—but also affecting all immigrant groups who were not “white on arrival”—has influenced power structures at municipal, state, and national levels and impacted the development of social relations in Hamtramck. It considers how changes in Hamtramck connect to national socioeconomic fluctuations, internal migration, and immigration reform, as well as regional patterns of Muslim American incorporation found throughout the metro Detroit area.

This chapter analyzes how Bangladeshi American women and teenage girls in Hamtramck renegotiate conceptualizations of the public-private divide through ongoing interpretive and explorative spatial practices while referencing religious and cultural frameworks. It discusses how Bangladeshi women across generations organize the gendering of spaces within paid labor, public and private celebrations, streets, mosques, home-based religious gatherings, and schools. The analysis centers on how Bangladeshi women in Hamtramck are self-consciously and actively engaged in a process of negotiating their relationship to urban space, searching to interface with the city and its institutions in ways that maximize their sense of mobility, mastery, and centrality within public, semi-public, and domestic spaces of the city. In doing so, they advance new agendas of cultural citizenship, thus encouraging municipal environments and institutions to become more democratic spaces that represent and uphold the values of those who participate in them.

This chapter analyzes how Yemeni and Bangladeshi American women and teenage girls in Hamtramck establish a particular type of gender organization—what I call “civic purdah”—across a variety of different contexts. Although there is no exact word for it in Arabic, Bangladeshis and other South Asians use the word “purdah” to signify gender separation, most often in expressed through patterns of dress (hijāb) and proximity, enacted in an effort to protect the sanctity of women’s bodies and spaces from the gaze and interference of unrelated men. Civic purdah signifies the way that women interpret and apply the purdah ethos in the municipal context as a means of participating in different aspects of city life. When enacted in public spaces and institutions, civic purdah can be considered a means for advancing cultural citizenship, defined as engaging in the dominant society while maintaining differences from the norm.