Arrivals and Afterlives of African Immigrants in Oregon since 1970

This book provides an oral history of African immigrants in Oregon, a state that prides itself on inclusion and progressive values even as the voices of one of its fastest-growing immigrant communities remain almost entirely absent from its historical record. Drawing on forty in-depth, life-history interviews recorded between 2021 and 2026 with immigrants and refugees from at least a dozen African countries who have settled in Portland and other Oregon communities, it follows narrators across four movements: the homelands and childhoods that shaped them before migration; the routes and ruptures of the journey itself; the long work of building a livelihood and a sense of belonging in a new place; and the afterlives, the inheritances of memory, faith, and identity that migration leaves behind in families, and in a second generation now coming of age in the Pacific Northwest. Written by a Nigerian-born historian and oral historian at Portland State University whose own life is woven into the story he tells, this book treats oral testimony not as illustration for an argument made elsewhere but as the primary archive on which a new account of Oregon’s African diaspora must be built.