Somali Immigrants in Lewiston, Maine: An Application of Robert Park’s Race Relations Cycle

Abstract

Over the past century, Robert Park’s assimilation theory, dubbed otherwise, a race relations cycle has simultaneously become the starting point for the articulation of ethnic group relations and the most controversial concept in America sociology. With few exceptions, however, the majority of the sociological reaction to Robert Park’s assimilation has remained primarily at abstract level, and Stanford Lyman’s comment more than half a century ago that “…little more than illustration has yet been done on “contact”, “competition”, or “accommodation,” remains true. I use data from the secondary migration of Somalis to Lewiston, Maine, to provide a description of the empirical content that characterize the un-anticipated encounter between Somali immigrants and longtime residents of the city.