Transcripts

SPEAKER 1: Is there a way that you can describe for me just kind of what it's like being a Somali in Rochester, Minnesota-- being an 18-year-old Somali in Rochester, Minnesota?

YASCIN MOHAMED: It's hard, because when I use here-- when I was in my country, I heard United States-- people who ever lived in the United States equal. Don't matter if you're white or Black or Asian or any color. But when I came to Rochester, everything was different because-- it's different because they're looking at you because what color you are, who you are.

So it's too hard to live in Rochester. When they see you Somalian, picking on you, calling you names.

SPEAKER 1: Yascin moved to Rochester in May of 1994 after living briefly in Houston. Before that, he lived in Kenya for two years, and before that, Somalia, where he was born in 1978. Yascin is a good looking kid who wears big, loose clothes and a baseball cap like the rest of the kids in Rochester. He holds down a part-time job at a Carmike Movie Theater, and lives in a small apartment in Southeast Rochester with his mom, aunt, two brothers, and two sisters.

I had heard at school that the tensions were pretty high, that there are frequently fights or almost fights. Is that the case?

YASCIN MOHAMED: Yep. Because when you walk, they have an excuse that they're saying that every time when there's two Somalians walking by that talking their own language, they're saying that we're saying bad stuff about them because they don't understand what we're saying. That's the excuse. They see you start speaking Somali, and they say, stop talking your language, this stupid language. And that makes you mad too to people telling you that-- so don't talk your own language.

SPEAKER 1: Yascin was not in Somalia when US troops went in, but he says his relatives still in Somalia say life is better there now. One improvement is in telecommunications. He can phone his folks there now. He says, though, he doesn't tell them about the strife in Rochester, because he's afraid they'd retaliate against whites in Somalia if they heard that some whites here aren't treating him with respect.

What are the things that you think you can do in Rochester every day just when you're hanging out for entertainment or whatever and what don't you do?

YASCIN MOHAMED: Go movies if I'm like-- I go around friends, playing basketball. The thing you can do is you can never go by yourself nowhere. If you're going somewhere, you got to have four or five your friends with you, because if you four or five guys, nobody's going to pick on you. If you're one or two, you can't go nowhere.

SPEAKER 1: I would guess that a number of Asians in Minnesota might agree with what you're saying. They might say, yeah, that's been our experience too. Do you have Asian friends?

YASCIN MOHAMED: Yeah, I do.

SPEAKER 1: What do they say about that?

YASCIN MOHAMED: I talked to one friend that Asian, he told me that when they came to here-- from Asia to here like five, six years ago or so-- when the first Asians moved here that they had the same thing that we do now. So now, they get used to it that always, the new people get picked. So he said that after four or five years, he just wasn't going to stop. Different people come in-- different people, different country or a different-- has a different culture that when they come in, they're going to start picking at us. Start picking on the other people, the new people.

SPEAKER 1: At Mayo High School, he gets current events in school every morning. And that's how he keeps informed on the presidential and Senate election. He hasn't heard anything about the candidates' foreign policy. That disturbs him. And he doesn't expect them to be addressing what's happening in Rochester between the so-called All-American boys and the Somalis.

YASCIN MOHAMED: I would like to hear him saying that we'd like to stop the racism. But you know, what we want is the city council or the governor of Minnesota to talk to the community and tell them to stop the racism. That'd be good.

SPEAKER 1: Are you hearing any of that then?

YASCIN MOHAMED: No. No, I haven't heard it yet. Because they seen us, what they're writing in the newspaper is everything-- that we're getting peace and stuff. I don't think there's peace now.

SPEAKER 1: So you're learning in school that-- and you probably knew this before that United States is made up, for the most part, of immigrants, whether we've been here 200 years, 100 years. So what's the deal? Why-- why if these All-American boys, maybe they came from Ireland originally, or Germany or something 100 years ago, why are they picking on you if it just happens that you came here a little bit later than their families did?

YASCIN MOHAMED: Because they don't like Blacks. They don't like people in the color. They were like, go back to where you come from, calling them names. They even wrote their bathrooms in the school, this go back where you come from. You don't belong here. Somalia is belong other side of oceans-- the ocean.

SPEAKER 1: Yascin learned English when his family moved to the US in 1994 while watching TV and listening to other people talk. He says it was fairly easy for him to learn. And, in fact, he understood most of my questions easily. You have to live in the US for five years before you can start the process of becoming a citizen.

Yascin says he'll make the effort because he plans to stay here at least long enough to go to college, maybe for engineering. And he thinks life will be better if he's a citizen. He says he wants to go back to Somalia after college to teach kids there.

Do you have a hope that in Rochester, things will get better or that you'll be able to find someplace else in the United States where things would be better?

YASCIN MOHAMED: I don't think I'm going to move anywhere else but Rochester. I hope that Rochester, we're going to get better in a couple years-- next couple of years. So I'm going to hang out. I'm not going to give up.