Maybe You CAN Go Home Again, Even If Seattle Is a Different Place Now - But You May Be, Too!

[The Roux Comes First]

Great pilot article in the Seattle Times by Sarah Stuteville of SeattleGlobalist.com and the Common Language Project:

-clip-

Our city has always had an international orientation. Global industries (logging, shipping, planes), an international border (Canada counts!) and a diverse population (even before Columbia City started promoting itself as one of the most diverse ZIP codes in the country) were part of our identity long before The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded its first grant or The Seattle International Film Festival screened its first foreign film. But as a kid growing up in Ballard in the 1980s and 1990s, Seattle still felt like a small city with small city sensibilities.

I didn't know many people that had traveled outside of the United States (or even the West Coast); Mexican food was always served with giant pink daiquiris and the things that happened far away (the crumbling of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War, the end of Apartheid), felt really far away. I remember an elementary-school assembly welcoming new refugee kids from Ethiopia and Cambodia. I remember my teacher slowly explaining to us where these countries were on a map that had North America smack in the middle of it. I remember the new kids getting teased for being so skinny.

I left Seattle at 20 like I was escaping a small town. I wanted to "see the world," so I saved up some money from my job as a barista and headed to India, then Spain, then Mexico, then New York City — where I stayed for five years. When I returned to Seattle — with a journalism degree and experience reporting from 10 different countries — it felt like I returned to a different city. Or more accurately, I was looking at my city in a new way.

Seattle had been named one of a handful of "Hyper Diverse" cities — essentially a city with immigrants from all over the world — by the Migration Policy Institute. Washington state ranked in the top 10 for highest receiver of refugees in the country.

-clip-