On a Friday after sunset in March, the back lot of a community centre on Fremont Boulevard fills with the smell of woodsmoke and grilling lamb. A line of children waits to leap over a bonfire for the Afghan new year. An elder in a turban tunes a rubab while a teenager films it on her phone.
Half a mile up the boulevard, Maiwand Market is still pulling fresh naan from a stone oven, eight hundred loaves a day, the bakers wrapped in flour. This is Centerville, in the southeastern corner of the San Francisco Bay Area. For forty years it has been the largest Afghan neighbourhood in the United States.
The city of Fremont counts somewhere between ten and twenty thousand Afghan residents, depending on whether you trust the census or the community. The wider Bay Area is home to fifty thousand or more. Fremont has been the anchor since the first refugees arrived from a war nobody in Centerville had heard of yet.
Most maps call it Centerville. The Afghans who live and shop and pray here call it something simpler. Little Kabul.
Fremont, The Place
Fremont sits at the southeastern edge of the San Francisco Bay, in Alameda County, twenty miles north of San Jose and forty south of Oakland. The city was stitched together in 1956 from five older towns, including the agricultural village of Centerville, and grew fast as suburban housing replaced the orchards. The Hayward Fault runs under it. The hills above it are golden in summer and green in February.
The Afghan commercial corridor runs along Fremont Boulevard, in the historic Centerville district, between Thornton Avenue and Mowry Avenue. A few minutes walk from the Fremont-Centerville train station, the strip is a string of low storefronts: kabob houses, halal butchers, bakeries, jewellery shops, money-transfer offices. Around it, the housing is the standard southern Alameda mix of post-war ranch homes and 1970s apartment blocks, dense enough to walk, cheap enough at the time to absorb a wave that almost nobody saw coming.
How Fremont Became Afghan
Before the Afghans
Centerville was farmland for most of its life. A small Anglo-American town grew up here in the 1850s, then a stop on the Western Pacific railway, then a quiet agricultural settlement growing apricots and asparagus into the 1940s. The Centerville Pioneer Cemetery on Peralta Boulevard, Fremont’s oldest, still holds the names of the original Yankee and Portuguese families.
When the city of Fremont was incorporated in January 1956, Centerville was folded in with Niles, Mission San Jose, Irvington and Warm Springs. Tracts of stucco houses replaced the orchards. By the late 1970s, Centerville was a sleepy, mixed, lower-middle-class suburb. Then Kabul fell.
The Afghans Arrive
In December 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and over the next decade roughly five million Afghans were driven across the borders into Pakistan and Iran. A small fraction reached the United States as refugees. The first to land in California found their way to the Bay Area through a quiet logic of climate and chain. The hills above Fremont, brown and creased, looked vaguely like the country around Kabul. The housing was within reach. The first arrivals wrote home.
By the mid 1980s a recognisable Afghan community had taken root in Fremont and the adjacent town of Hayward. Many of the first wave were the educated class of pre-war Kabul: doctors, civil servants, professors, military officers. They drove taxis, stocked supermarket shelves, opened corner stores. They sponsored cousins, then cousins of cousins.
Aziz Omar, who had immigrated in the 1980s and worked in New York restaurants, followed his sibling out to California in the early 1990s. In 1993 he opened a small takeaway on Fremont Boulevard called De Afghanan Kabob House. A year before that, in 1992, Abdul Karimi had opened Maiwand Market a few doors down. The strip was beginning to look like a country.
The second wave came in the 1990s, when the post-Soviet civil war between the mujahideen factions tore Kabul apart, and again after the Taliban took the capital in September 1996. The Afghan Coalition was founded the same year, in 1996, by elders of the first wave specifically to absorb the second. It is still there, on Walnut Avenue, the largest Afghan-American nonprofit in the country.
A third wave followed the United States invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. The Special Immigrant Visa programme, created by Congress to protect Afghans who had worked as interpreters and contractors for the American military, brought thousands of families to the country through the 2010s. Some had spent years on the visa waitlist while the Taliban hunted their relatives in Kandahar and Helmand. The fourth wave was the biggest and most sudden.
Fremont at Its Peak
By the early 2000s, Little Kabul had become a self-sustaining village inside a Silicon Valley suburb. Children spoke English at Centerville Junior High and Washington High and Dari at home. Friday prayers filled the Ibrahim Khalilullah Islamic Center, founded in 1996 by Afghan elders to anchor the community. Nowruz, the Persian and Afghan new year on the spring equinox, drew thousands to community centres and parks across the East Bay.
The strip on Fremont Boulevard developed its rhythm. De Afghanan became the wedding destination. Maiwand sold sacks of basmati and rosewater syrup and the long flat loaves that arrive warm in paper bags. The jewellery shops sold the heavy gold sets that travel with a bride.
The community was never one thing. Afghanistan is a country of Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Aimaqs, Turkmen, Baloch and a small old Sikh and Hindu minority, and Fremont reproduced the mosaic in miniature. The factional politics of the homeland did not entirely stay there, but the kabob houses did not check ID at the door.
The Change
The fourth wave arrived in the late summer of 2021. After the United States withdrew from Kabul that August, Operation Allies Welcome paroled more than seventy-three thousand Afghans into the country in seven months. California received the second-largest share of any state.
By the early months of 2022, more than eight thousand evacuees had been resettled across California. Hundreds landed in the East Bay through Jewish Family and Community Services, the International Rescue Committee and Refugee Transitions. JFCS resettled seventy-seven Afghans in the East Bay in the weeks after the fall of Kabul, the equivalent of half a year of normal work.
The new arrivals did not always land in Fremont. The cost of housing in Alameda County had risen for two decades, and many evacuees were placed in Hayward, San Leandro, Concord, even Sacramento. Others stayed, opened businesses, brought down siblings still waiting in Islamabad or Tehran on visas that took years to process.
What changed in Fremont itself was harder to see. The strip kept its restaurants, but the second generation scattered into the Silicon Valley economy. Children of taxi drivers became software engineers in Santa Clara and physicians at Stanford. Some moved north to Pleasanton, others south to Tracy and Manteca, where the houses were larger. The grandparents stayed.
The Landmarks of Afghan Fremont
De Afghanan Cuisine, 37405 Fremont Boulevard. The community’s wedding restaurant and de facto living room. Aziz Omar opened the original kabob house next door in 1993 as a takeaway hole in the wall, then expanded into the sit-down dining room. The family has since opened locations in Livermore, Tracy, San Francisco and Walnut Creek.
Maiwand Market, 37235 Fremont Boulevard. Opened in 1992 by Abdul Karimi, a native of Kabul, and still run by the Karimi family. The bakery turns out close to a thousand loaves of Afghan naan a day, and the back shelves carry the spices, rosewater and dried fruit that no chain grocer stocks. It is the closest thing Little Kabul has to a parish church.
Salang Pass Restaurant, 37462 Fremont Boulevard. Named for the high-mountain road through the Hindu Kush north of Kabul. The dining room keeps low traditional tables with floor cushions, and serves the standard Kabuli repertoire of qabili palaw, mantu, ashak and kabobs. A first stop for many 2021 evacuees brought here by their resettlement caseworkers.
Sherzad Halal Meat and Pamir Halal Meat. Two of the Afghan-owned butcher shops on the corridor, hand-slaughtering lamb, goat and chicken in the cuts a Kabul or Kandahar household actually uses.
Ibrahim Khalilullah Islamic Center, on Fremont Boulevard. Established in 1996 by elders of the first Afghan wave to give the community a Friday prayer space of its own. The congregation has since broadened to include Pakistani, Bangladeshi and African-American families, but the imams still preach in Dari and Pashto.
The Afghan Coalition, Walnut Avenue. Founded in 1996, the largest Afghan-American nonprofit in the United States. It runs case management, mental health services, youth tutoring, women’s support groups and the slow patient work of moving a family from the airport to a school registration to a first job. Its caseload doubled in the month after August 2021.
The Fremont Boulevard corridor, Thornton to Mowry. The strip itself is the landmark. On a Saturday afternoon it is the loudest Dari-speaking pavement in the United States.
Where the Fremont Afghans Came From
The Fremont Afghans came from every corner of the country, but the heaviest threads run to a handful of places. Kabul, the capital, supplied the first educated wave and most of the Tajik and mixed urban families who arrived through the 1980s. Herat, in the west near the Iranian border, sent a Tajik and Persianate professional class. Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north, sent Uzbek and Tajik families who had reached Pakistan through the Turkmen border.
From the south came the Pashtun majority, the largest single ethnic group in Fremont as in Afghanistan, with deep roots in Kandahar and Jalalabad and the eastern provinces along the Pakistani border. From the central highlands of Bamiyan, Daikundi and Ghazni came the Hazaras, most of them Shia Muslims who had survived a century of persecution culminating in the Taliban massacres of the late 1990s. A small Afghan Sikh and Hindu minority, traditionally based in Kabul and Jalalabad, has reached the Bay Area in smaller numbers, mostly via India.
The languages travel with the regions. Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian, is the lingua franca of Fremont Boulevard. Pashto is the first language of the Kandahari and Jalalabadi families. Hazaragi, Uzbeki and Turkmen each have their own small communities of speakers, and the elders often still keep them at home.
Fremont Today
Fremont in 2026 is a city of two hundred and thirty thousand people, with one of the largest Asian-American majorities in the United States and a tech-economy median income well into six figures. The Afghan community is a fraction of the whole, concentrated heavily in Centerville and along the southern boulevards. The 2020 census found only thirty-four hundred Afghans in the city. Almost everyone working in the community thinks the real number is three to five times higher.
The second generation has scattered across the wider Bay Area and into the professional economy. Aisha Wahab, born in Queens to Soviet-war refugees and raised by an adoptive Afghan family in Fremont, became in 2022 the first Afghan-American woman elected to a state legislature in the United States.
Khaled Hosseini, whose 2003 novel The Kite Runner was set partly in this neighbourhood, lives over the hills in the South Bay and still draws crowds to readings in Fremont libraries. The author Tamim Ansary, the educator Mohammed Qayoumi who served as president of California State University East Bay, and a generation of Afghan-American physicians and engineers have built their public lives here.
Little Kabul itself is changing the slow way these neighbourhoods change. The wedding parties still book the back room at De Afghanan. The bakers at Maiwand still pull a thousand loaves a day. But a quarter of the children walking down Fremont Boulevard now were born to parents who flew out of Hamid Karzai International Airport in August 2021, and they speak the English of California schools. The story keeps moving forward, the way these stories do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Afghans settle in Fremont?
The first Afghan refugees who reached California after the 1979 Soviet invasion found Fremont mild in climate, surrounded by golden hills that vaguely resembled the country around Kabul, and far cheaper than San Francisco or Oakland. Early arrivals wrote home, sponsored cousins, and built the chain. By the mid 1980s Fremont and neighbouring Hayward were the anchor of Afghan America, and every subsequent wave of refugees, from the civil war of the 1990s to the 2021 Taliban return, landed where family already was.
Is Fremont still Afghan today?
Yes. Fremont is still the largest Afghan community in the United States, with somewhere between ten and twenty thousand Afghan residents and the wider Bay Area home to fifty thousand or more. The commercial corridor on Fremont Boulevard, known as Little Kabul, remains the social and cultural centre of Afghan America, even as the second generation has scattered into the broader Silicon Valley economy.
What are the most famous Afghan landmarks in Fremont?
The anchors of Little Kabul are De Afghanan Cuisine and De Afghanan Kabob House at 37395 and 37405 Fremont Boulevard, opened in 1993 by Aziz Omar; Maiwand Market at 37235 Fremont Boulevard, opened in 1992 by Abdul Karimi; and Salang Pass Restaurant at 37462 Fremont Boulevard. The Ibrahim Khalilullah Islamic Center, founded in 1996, anchors Friday prayer, and the Afghan Coalition on Walnut Avenue, also founded in 1996, is the largest Afghan-American nonprofit in the country.
Where did the Fremont Afghans come from?
They came from every region of Afghanistan, but the heaviest threads run to Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kandahar and Jalalabad. Most are Pashtun, Tajik or Hazara by ethnicity, with smaller numbers of Uzbeks, Turkmen, Aimaqs and Baloch, and a tiny Afghan Sikh and Hindu minority that traditionally lived in Kabul. Dari and Pashto are the dominant languages on Fremont Boulevard.
When did Afghans first arrive in Fremont?
Afghan refugees began arriving in Fremont in the mid 1980s, after the December 1979 Soviet invasion drove roughly five million Afghans out of the country. A second wave came in the 1990s during the civil war and the rise of the Taliban, a third followed the 2001 American invasion through the Special Immigrant Visa programme, and a fourth and largest wave landed after the Taliban returned to Kabul in August 2021.
If your family’s story passed through Fremont, or through Kabul or Herat or Kandahar before it, Atlas of Home can help you trace that journey. From the orchards of the central highlands to the kabob houses of Fremont Boulevard, every road has a beginning.