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This chapter analyzes how Yemeni American women’s everyday space-making practices in Hamtramck blur the lines between public and private, complicating mainstream modes of organizing space and scrambling the ideological correlates associated with these two discursive realms. The chapter discusses how Yemeni women across generations choreograph the gendering of space within homes, streets, neighborhoods, mosques, and schools, enriching their lives with social, cultural, spiritual, and economic exchanges. The chapter shows how areas in Yemeni homes, such as women’s living rooms, sometimes function as semi-public spaces open to an extended and loosely bounded set of non-kin visitors during times set apart for sociability and religious instruction. The chapter includes a discussion of how women-only spaces in mosques reproduce or echo some features of home-based gender norms. In secondary schools, Yemeni female youth sustain or modify community-based gender separation practices to establish comfortable spaces for themselves in an ethnically and racially mixed context.

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.

By means of an interview with a young female Yemeni American activist, Summer Nasser, Emily Regan Wills highlights how the diaspora communities influenced the politics of the Arab Spring. Summer Nasser is a leader in the Yemeni American Coalition for Change, a New York–based organization supporting peaceful revolution and the end of the Saleh regime in Yemen. In this interview, Summer explains how she understands the dynamics of gender and age in the revolution in Yemen and the transnational nature of this movement.

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.