Friendship Communities of Belonging: How Do the Iranian Immigrant Communities Emerge and Function in the Atlantic Canadian Cities?


Foroogh Mohammadi, Acadia University

Many Canadian midsized cities are declining due to economic restructuring (Filion, 2010). Additionally, these cities are less diverse and have been unsuccessful in attracting immigrants until recently (Carter, Morrish, and Amoyaw, 2008). In addition to the economic and social needs of the region to attract more immigrants, the low retention rate has impacted the public’s view toward immigrants “because of the underlying expectation that newcomers will eventually leave” (Pottie-Sherman and Graham, 2020, p. 23) for more traditional immigration gateways, including Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. The midsized cities across Canada hold a quarter of Canada’s population (Lewis and Donald, 2010), and it is important to understand how they accommodate immigrants. This research focuses on home-ing and doing belonging beyond the individual level and questions them at the community and group level among Iranian immigrants who live in the Atlantic Canadian cities. I focus on the significance of the friendship communities of belonging and their pivotal role in immigrant integration and transferring knowledge to the newer immigrants. I explore how the Atlantic Canadian cities shape the experiences of immigrants in relation to their community building, decision-making to leave the Atlantic region, and their sense of belonging. Also, I ask how the communities of belonging emerge and function in the Atlantic cities. In this, I pay particular attention to the unique characteristics of Atlantic cities and the imaginations the Iranian immigrants have toward living in bigger cities. I engage with the theories of group culture creation and functioning (Fine, 2012; Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003) to analyze how these communities emerge and function. I conceptualize the participants’ practices in connection to Anderson’s (2006) concept of imagined communities, Melucci’s (1989) concept of collective identity, and the role of meta stories (Cope et al., 2019) and narratives in the shaping and functioning of these communities. Using qualitative methods, including semi-structured, in-depth interviews with sixty-seven first-generation Iranian immigrants residing in the five Atlantic Canadian cities and five cities in Ontario, I argue that collective narratives and meta-stories work as a source of driving motivations for the participants in this study to leave the Atlantic region. Previous Iranian immigrants have deposited the knowledge of seeking a better fate on the mainland. New Iranian immigrants are immediately exposed to this knowledge and start to imagine their future outside the Atlantic provinces. However, the uniqueness of Iranian communities in the Atlantic region and the closeness of friendship groups leave a powerful impact on the minds of people who leave for the major urban centres. It drives the Iranian immigrants who left for the major urban centres like Toronto and Ottawa to seek and find old friends and motivate them to reinforce their bonds with them. Focusing on community and group-level processes, this research suggests that meta-stories and narratives shape the common imaginations of Iranian immigrants about remote and central locations and have an impact on their decisions to leave or stay in the Atlantic region. Moreover, it demonstrates that friendship groups significantly contribute to creating a space for interaction, mutual understanding, and performing an “authentic” or an Iranian-style version of self with the central role of the mother tongue language. The close and tied friendship groups play the most prominent role in enacting belonging and are pivotal in operationalizing temporary belonging in the Iranian diaspora in Canada. This study fills the gap in understanding the lives of immigrants who land in the Canadian Atlantic midsized cities, many of whom do not stay there and leave for Ontario. It sheds light on how Atlantic Canadian cities can become more immigrant-friendly and how immigrants could make a long-term home there.

This paper will be presented at the following session: