On a Saturday afternoon in Temescal, the smell of berbere drifts onto Telegraph Avenue from a row of restaurants that have anchored this stretch of North Oakland for forty years. Inside Asmara, a server unrolls a sheet of injera over a platter of zigni, and somewhere in the back a kettle hisses for a coffee ceremony. The conversation is Tigrinya. On the wall, a red, green and blue flag with a gold olive wreath. Not Ethiopian. Eritrean. In this corner of Oakland, the community has spent half a century making sure the difference is heard.
Oakland and its neighbours, Berkeley and San Leandro, are home to one of the earliest and largest Eritrean-American communities in the United States. The Bay Area count sits at roughly 10,000 Eritrean-Americans, larger again when you include second-generation children. The Eritrean Community Cultural Civic Center on West Grand Avenue is one of the oldest centres of its kind in the country.
This is the story of how a small Red Sea nation, only formally independent since 1993, built one of its most visible American homelands on a few blocks of an East Bay avenue.
Oakland, the Place
Oakland sits on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, across the water from the city it is too often confused with. It is a working port and a post-industrial city of about 430,000 people, knitted to San Francisco by the Bay Bridge and to the rest of the East Bay by BART.
The Eritrean community concentrates in two corridors. The first is Temescal, a stretch of Telegraph Avenue between roughly 40th and 51st Streets in North Oakland, where Victorian cottages and low brick storefronts share the block with restaurants, hair salons and small grocers. The second is the Uptown and West Oakland fringe near West Grand Avenue, where the community centre sits. From either, the long ribbon of Telegraph Avenue carries the same culture north into South Berkeley.
It is not a single enclave in the old sense. There is no fenced Little Asmara. But if you know what you are looking for, the signs are obvious: mesob baskets in a window, the angular Ge’ez script on a menu, a notice for Sunday liturgy on a glass door.
How Oakland Became Eritrean
Before the Eritreans
Temescal got its name from a Mexican word for sweat lodge, a nod to the Ohlone people who lived along the creek long before the city existed. By the late nineteenth century the neighbourhood was a streetcar suburb of working-class Italians, Portuguese and Irish, dotted with bakeries and shoemakers. It later took on a strong African-American identity during the Great Migration, as Black families from Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas moved west for shipyard work in the 1940s.
By the late 1970s, Temescal was a quieter, more affordable stretch of North Oakland than Berkeley or downtown. Rents were low. Storefronts were empty. For a newcomer with a small lease deposit and a recipe for sourdough flatbread, it was a place to start.
The Eritreans Arrive
Eritrea is a country roughly the size of Pennsylvania, wedged between Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti and the Red Sea. It was an Italian colony from 1890, a British protectorate after 1941, and then, in 1962, was annexed outright by Ethiopia under Emperor Haile Selassie. That annexation triggered a thirty-year war of independence that pushed an entire generation out of the country.
The first Eritreans in the Bay Area arrived as students in the 1960s and early 1970s, mostly on scholarships to UC Berkeley, San Francisco State and other local campuses. Many never went home. By 1974, the Ethiopian emperor had been overthrown by a Marxist military junta known as the Derg, led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, and the war against the Eritrean liberation fighters turned catastrophic. As many as one million Eritreans were displaced during the 1970s, a third of the population.
The 1980 Refugee Act opened a door. Through Sudan and refugee processing centres, the first significant wave of Eritrean refugees reached the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A handful made their way to the Bay Area, drawn by the earlier students, by cheap housing in Oakland, by the universities, and by the kind of liberal city politics that did not look sideways at an African newcomer carrying a single suitcase.
Oakland at Its Peak
By the late 1980s the community was visible enough on Telegraph Avenue that institutions began to form around it. Cafe Eritrea D’Afrique opened at 4069 Telegraph in 1986, a small storefront with mesob baskets and a hand-painted sign. Asmara Restaurant followed in 1985 at 5020 Telegraph, founded by the husband-and-wife team of Kesete and Okba Yohannes. The Eritrean Community Cultural Civic Center took shape in the same years, beginning as a group of young immigrants who wanted both a piece of home and a platform for their country’s liberation struggle.
Then independence came. In May 1991, Eritrean liberation forces marched into Asmara and declared the country free after thirty years of war. Two years later, in April 1993, Eritreans voted in a UN-supervised referendum, including from polling stations in the Bay Area itself. The result was 99.83 percent in favour, on a turnout above 93 percent. Eritrea was formally independent on 27 April 1993. In Oakland that May, the streets filled with flags.
For a brief moment, the Bay Area Eritrean community felt closer to home than it had in decades. Some flew back. Some sent money. Some bought land. But the peace did not hold.
The Change
In May 1998, a border skirmish at the dusty town of Badme escalated into the Eritrean-Ethiopian War. Over the next two years, more than 500,000 troops fought along the contested frontier. Estimates of the dead run between 70,000 and 300,000. Around 650,000 Eritrean civilians were displaced. Ethiopia expelled some 77,000 Eritreans and Ethiopians of Eritrean origin who lived inside its borders. A new wave of refugees set out for Sudan, Europe and, in smaller numbers, the United States.
The war ended in 2000, but the Eritrean government, led by President Isaias Afwerki since 1993, used the conflict as a reason to harden into one of the world’s most repressive states. Indefinite national service became the rule. Conscripts could be held for decades on low or no pay, in army camps or state farms. There has been no national election. The constitution drafted in 1997 has never been implemented. Independent press is banned. Religious freedom is sharply restricted.
The result has been a slow, relentless emigration. The UN estimates that more than ten percent of Eritrea’s population has fled abroad. Many do not survive the journey through Libya or the Mediterranean. Those who reach the United States often pass through Latin America, walking the long route from Ecuador through Central America to the southern border. Some end up in Oakland because Oakland is where their cousin already lives, or where the community centre has a casework office, or where, on Telegraph Avenue, there is an Eritrean restaurant that hires.
The Oakland community is not one wave but many: students of the 1960s, Derg-era refugees of the 1980s, independence celebrants of the early 1990s, war refugees of 1998 to 2000, and a still-arriving stream of asylum seekers fleeing Afwerki-era conscription. They sit at the same tables. They do not always agree.
The Landmarks of Eritrean Oakland
Asmara Restaurant, 5020 Telegraph Avenue. Open since 1985 and still run by Kesete and Okba Yohannes, Asmara is the East Bay’s enduring Eritrean dining anchor. The space is unfussy, a single long room with a full bar and a wall of awards. The kitchen turns out zigni, tibsi, dorho and shiro on injera, and on a busy Friday it draws Eritrean families, UC Berkeley professors, and tourists alike. It is the closest thing the Oakland community has to a public living room.
Cafe Eritrea D’Afrique, 4069 Telegraph Avenue. Down the avenue toward downtown, Cafe Eritrea D’Afrique has been serving since 1986. Smaller than Asmara, it has the air of a Massawa neighbourhood spot, with mesob platters, sponge-soft injera made daily, and Tigrinya conversation drifting up from the back tables. Generations of Eritrean students have eaten here before exams.
Eritrean Community Cultural Civic Center, 955 West Grand Avenue. Founded in the late 1980s and known locally as ECC Oakland, this is one of the oldest Eritrean community centres in the country. It runs Tigrinya literacy classes for the second generation, mental health workshops, services for newly arrived asylum seekers, and the annual Independence Day celebration on 24 May. For many Eritrean Oaklanders, this is the first address they were given after the airport.
St. Mary Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, 780 54th Street. Tucked into a quiet North Oakland block, this is the spiritual home of much of the local Tewahedo Orthodox community. Eritrean Orthodox Christianity is its own ancient tradition, distinct from Ethiopian Orthodoxy since 1998, with services largely in Ge’ez and Tigrinya. On Sundays, the church fills with white netela shawls and the smell of frankincense. A sister parish in San Leandro serves the southern East Bay.
The Eritrean Festival in Oakland. Each July, the Eritrean Festival USA gathers thousands of diaspora Eritreans from across the country at a venue in Oakland for several days of music, food, soccer, political speeches and dance. It has run for more than fifty years and remains one of the largest annual Eritrean gatherings in North America. Its politics, closely tied to the Asmara government, have made it controversial within the community itself, but its scale is undeniable.
Telegraph Avenue, between 40th and 51st Streets. Not one address but a stretch. This is the corridor where Eritrean, and Ethiopian, restaurants, salons and small businesses sit cheek by jowl with hipster coffee shops and Vietnamese sandwich counters. It is the closest thing to a main street the community has, walked daily by elders, students and arriving newcomers.
Where the Oakland Eritreans Came From
The bulk of the Oakland community traces back to the highland plateau of Eritrea: Asmara, the capital at 7,600 feet, with its Italian art deco architecture and palm-lined boulevards; Mendefera and Dekemhare in the southern highlands; and Keren in the cooler northwest. These are the Tigrinya-speaking, predominantly Orthodox Christian heartlands. They produced most of the early student migration and the urban professionals who later resettled in California.
Smaller numbers came from the Red Sea port of Massawa, devastated by Ethiopian bombing in 1990, and from the lowland regions home to Eritrea’s other ethnic groups: Tigre, Saho, Afar, Bilen, Hedareb, Kunama, Nara and Rashaida. The Bay Area’s Eritrean Muslim community is largely drawn from these lowlands.
Almost all of them came through somewhere else first. Khartoum was the great waystation in the 1980s. Cairo, Athens and Rome were transit points. More recently, the path runs through Addis Ababa, then Uganda, then a flight to Latin America, then the long overland walk north. By the time an Eritrean arrives in Oakland, the journey may already be six countries long.
Oakland Today
The Eritrean community in Oakland in 2026 is older, more settled, and quietly more political than it was a generation ago. Second-generation Eritrean-Americans are now in their thirties and forties, running businesses, teaching at Bay Area schools, working in tech across the bridge. Tigrinya is still spoken at home, often, but English dominates the cousins’ group chat.
Telegraph Avenue has changed around the community. Temescal has gentrified hard since the 2010s. Rents have climbed. Some of the older African-owned shops have closed, and the corridor now reads, at a glance, more like a third-wave coffee strip than an immigrant high street. But the Eritrean anchors have held. Asmara is still on the corner. Cafe Eritrea D’Afrique is still open. The community centre is still answering the door at West Grand Avenue.
The politics remain raw. The annual Eritrean Festival, with its close ties to the government in Asmara, draws protests from anti-regime activists, including from younger diaspora Eritreans who have never visited the country. The community is not a monolith. Some come to Telegraph Avenue to celebrate; some come to argue. Both, in their way, are evidence that the homeland still matters here.
On 24 May each year, the flag still goes up. Outside the community centre, outside the restaurants, on porches in West Oakland and on parked cars along 51st Street. Thirty-five years on from Asmara’s liberation, the Eritreans of Oakland still throw their own party.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Eritreans settle in Oakland?
Eritreans first came to Oakland in the 1960s as university students, then in larger numbers in the late 1970s and 1980s as refugees fleeing the Eritrean War of Independence and the Derg regime in Ethiopia. Oakland offered affordable housing, proximity to UC Berkeley, a tolerant political climate, and an early anchor community along Telegraph Avenue that pulled later arrivals into Temescal and North Oakland through chain migration.
Is Oakland still Eritrean today?
Yes, Oakland remains one of the largest and most active Eritrean-American communities in the United States, with an estimated 10,000 or more Eritreans across the Bay Area. The Telegraph Avenue corridor in Temescal still hosts long-running Eritrean restaurants, the Eritrean Community Cultural Civic Center on West Grand Avenue, and the annual Eritrean Festival USA each July.
What are the most famous Eritrean landmarks in Oakland?
The best-known Eritrean landmarks in Oakland are Asmara Restaurant at 5020 Telegraph Avenue (open since 1985), Cafe Eritrea D’Afrique at 4069 Telegraph Avenue (since 1986), the Eritrean Community Cultural Civic Center at 955 West Grand Avenue, and St. Mary Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church on 54th Street. Together they anchor the Temescal and Uptown Eritrean community.
Where in Eritrea did the Oakland Eritreans come from?
Most Oakland Eritreans trace their roots to the highland plateau of Eritrea, particularly the capital Asmara, along with Mendefera, Dekemhare and Keren. These are largely Tigrinya-speaking, Orthodox Christian areas. Smaller numbers come from the Red Sea port of Massawa and from the lowland regions home to Eritrea’s Tigre, Saho, Afar, Bilen and other ethnic groups.
When did Eritreans first arrive in Oakland?
The first Eritreans arrived in the Bay Area as university students in the 1960s and early 1970s. Significant refugee migration began after the 1980 Refugee Act, with the largest wave settling in Oakland through the 1980s as the Eritrean War of Independence intensified. New arrivals have continued through the 1998-2000 border war and the ongoing exodus from the Afwerki regime.
If your family’s story passed through Oakland, or through the highlands of Eritrea, or through any of the long ports of call in between, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Asmara to Khartoum to Telegraph Avenue, the route is yours to keep.