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C Ch ha ap pt te er r 1 17 7 Liberians and African Americans: Settlement and Ethnic Separation in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Area EARL P. SCOTT INTRODUCTION Nuanced landscapes and staple foods provide significant insight into the socio-cultural history of a people . In this chapter the focus is on how Liberians, as recent African immigrants, change established urban landscapes to reflect their cultural heritage, and how Liberians and other recent African immigrants convert existing residential communities in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN to residences that are culturally comfortable and welcoming for them. In addition, we examine the historical and cultural attributes African Americans and Liberians share that have persisted nearly intact over time and space. The historic relationship between Liberians and African Americans is known, but few Americans are aware of the association between the Liberian deep culture and its relation to African American culture. This chapter begins by examining the settlement histories of African Americans and Liberians, how they retained significant aspects of their common heritage and culture, as expressed in strategies of minority populations, to forge and preserve a cultural identity. Specifically, the focus is on how residential patterns influence Liberians’ transformation to African Americans. The third objective of this chapter is to explore the degree to which the African American and Liberian common heritage and culture has the potential for ethno-cultural solidarity and cultural convergence. This study draws attention to the spatial and socio-developmental consequences of residential patterns and the processes of cultural transformation as seen in nuanced landscapes, and outwardly similar, but substantially different attitudes and cultural practices. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the potential for Liberian-African American ethnic solidarity and cultural convergence, and the conscious or unconscious Liberian transformation to new African Americans. THEORY OF VISUAL EXPLANATION In cultural (human) geographical studies, the visible landscape is examined for insight into the society and the way of life of the people that built or altered it (Tuan 1979, 1991; Hart 1995). This humanistic approach to societal change is rooted in the belief that “geographers explore the earth less for its own sake than for what it can tell of its human residents and their character, which is revealed, above all, in the synergies of land and life” (Tuan 1991, p. 100). In order to explain society, Hart (1995, pp. 1–11) believes that “the inevitable starting point is the visible landscape . . . the form and appearance of human structures can tell us something about the “technical competence,” the “cultural baggage” and the “socioeconomic status and gender” of the groups who built the landscapes. It is from the landscape that scholars extract data to construct scientific hypothesis. They look for what the landscape can tell, “in visible and unmistakable signs” (Tuan 1979, p. 101) of socio-economic, physical and cultural well-being of a people. This means that the total built landscape can be examined “subsidiarily,” [that is], “how to see from the landscape to the values and pathos of a folk” (Tuan 1979, pp. 93).1 272 Earl P. Scott While landscape theorists agree that the landscape is their laboratory, they differ over whether the purpose of the built landscape is functional or aesthetic. Tuan’s view (1979, p. 97) is that people everywhere seek to construct an “ideal and humane” or aesthetic living space, often integrating the functional and aesthetic into an “all-encompassing milieu.” Hart, on the other hand, argues that “most people are motivated by functional, not aesthetic, consideration when they erect a structure, and most ordinary human structures must be understood in terms of their functions” (Hart 1995, p. 13). In urban America, the functional and aesthetic are usually combined in a single landscape. Structures are erected for specific purposes, but immigrants also embellish them to their aesthetic taste and occupy those that fit functionally and aesthetically with their perceived environment. Landscapes , then, are geographical expressions of a group’s functional and aesthetic values as well as its symbolic culture. The thesis advanced here is that the Liberian-nuanced landscape in Minnesota reveals a desire to reconstruct the totality of their traditional African landscape in a new space. In traditional West Africa, the compound is the fundamental social or family unit of the rural cultural landscape. Theoretically, the compound (James 1954, p. 45) is a “compage” or an assemblage of material structures, symbolic features, gender specific activity spaces, and locational qualities or advantages. Communities of recent Liberian immigrants, like compound dynamics , reflect the cultural retentions...

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