ABSTRACT

Diverse West African immigrants have created businesses and a mosque in the Rainier Valley of Seattle that provide culturally specific amenities and gathering places while facilitating transcultural interaction. Drawn to key elements of an already diverse neighborhood, they have adapted existing commercial buildings to make them their own, but also balance an expression of difference with a fluid exchange among multiple cultural identities. Using sixteen in-depth interviews, numerous informal conversations, and field observation, this chapter traces the story of their appropriation of space. It asks what places they have made, how they use the spaces as manifestations of their multiple cultural identities, what qualities draw people there and facilitate cultural exchange, and how customers and business owners may be negotiating multiple cultures through these spaces.