“The Name Says It All, It’s Saraybostan”: Low-Income Kurdish Migrant Women’s Experiences with Life in a Poverty-Impacted Urban Neighborhood

ABSTRACT

As part of a larger ethnographic study on low-income Kurdish mothers’ reconstruction of their lives after rural-to-urban migration, this article explored how they experienced life in a poverty-impacted neighborhood of Istanbul, Turkey. Twenty-seven Kurdish mothers were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. Data were collected through demographic surveys, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and participant observations. Women’s narratives focused primarily on three aspects, namely financial challenges, crime, and neighbor relations. Participants discussed both challenges and coping strategies pertaining to each aspect. Study findings underlined similarities and differences in life experiences of families living in poverty-impacted urban communities across the global context.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnographic
• families in poverty
• Kurdish women
• migration
• neighborhood

Acknowledgements

The author would like express her deepest gratitude to all participating mothers who made this project possible. The author would also like to thank Dr. Teresa Ostler and Dr. Robin Jarrett for their guidance and feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Notes

1. Vallahi means “I swear to God,” but in everyday Turkish, it also means “really/truly.”

2. Used in the sense of violent and unpredictable.

3. Dershane is a private educational institution that specifically prepares students for the university entrance exam. In Turkey, students are accepted into universities based on their scores in a multiple-choice test that is administered across the country simultaneously. It is comparable to SAT courses offered in the United States.