On the stretch of West Devon Avenue where shop signs run in Gujarati, Urdu, Hebrew and Assyrian, a storefront at 2740 keeps a different rhythm. Children spread homework across folding tables. Somebody’s mother waits for a translator so she can read a letter from the county. The Rohingya in West Rogers Park are the newest arrivals on one of the most layered immigrant streets in America, and they came carrying something almost nobody else on the block carries: no citizenship at all, anywhere in the world.
The Place
West Rogers Park is what the neighbours call it. The city calls it West Ridge, one of Chicago’s 77 official community areas, sitting on the far North Side with Howard Street along its top edge and Ridge Boulevard, Western Avenue and Ravenswood Avenue marking its eastern boundary.
It began as North Town, joined at the hip to Rogers Park until a dispute over how the parks should be run pushed it into becoming its own village in 1890. Three years later, on 4 April 1893, Chicago annexed it anyway.
Today roughly 78,000 people live in its 3.53 square miles: about 39 per cent white, 22 per cent Asian, 21 per cent Hispanic, 12 per cent Black. The Midwest’s largest Hasidic community shares the same grid as Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Korean, Russian and Assyrian families.
The spine of it all is Devon Avenue, which between Kedzie and Ridge carries honorary designations for Golda Meir, Mahatma Gandhi, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman: four names that would struggle to share a room and share a pavement here without incident.
How It Became Rohingya
The law that made them stateless, 1982
The Rohingya are a Muslim minority from Rakhine State in western Myanmar, with roots there going back centuries. In 1982 Myanmar passed a citizenship law that excluded them, and at a stroke roughly a million people became foreigners in the only place they had ever lived.
What followed was decades of restriction rather than a single catastrophe. Movement was controlled. Marriage required permission. Schooling was limited or denied outright, which is why so many Rohingya adults who reach Chicago cannot read in any language, their own included.
Those who left in the 1990s and 2000s mostly went south, by boat and on foot, to Thailand and then Malaysia, which does not formally recognise refugees. A second generation was born there into the same condition their parents had fled: present, working, undocumented, unclaimed.
The first families, 2012 to 2015
The route to Chicago ran through those Malaysian years. One of the first Rohingya families arrived in July 2012, resettled through the US refugee admissions programme. Larger numbers followed in 2013 and 2014, among them Nasir Bin Zakaria, who had left Myanmar in the 1990s and reached Chicago in 2013, and who would become the community’s most public figure.
They were placed in West Rogers Park for reasons partly bureaucratic and mostly obvious. The rents were among the lowest on the North Side, and Devon Avenue already sold halal meat. The mosques, the grocers and the language of the street were closer to what they knew than anything else Chicago could offer.
The Pakistani shopkeepers of Devon Avenue and the Indian traders who built the corridor had spent forty years turning a Jewish shopping street into a South Asian one. The Rohingya arrived into a place that had already been rebuilt twice.
The storefront, April 2016
By 2016 there were around 400 Rohingya families in the city and no institution of their own. Zakaria opened the Rohingya Culture Center that April in a rented storefront near California and Devon.
It started with the smallest possible problems. Children came home with homework their parents had no way to help with. Somebody had to go to the hospital and explain what the doctor meant. Laura Toffenetti, one of the early volunteers, described families losing benefits simply because the mail went unread. The centre’s first service was, in effect, literacy on behalf of other people.
The genocide years, 2017 to 2019
In late August 2017 the Myanmar military launched what it called clearance operations in Rakhine State. By that November more than 620,000 Rohingya had crossed into Bangladesh. The United States and the United Nations both used the words ethnic cleansing.
West Rogers Park watched it by telephone. Zakaria’s parents were still in Rakhine and not permitted to leave, and rang him in the middle of the night to describe what they were seeing. He told ABC7 Chicago that autumn that in Burma there was no future.
The neighbourhood became a place politicians came to. Senator Dick Durbin and Representative Jan Schakowsky travelled to Myanmar and Bangladesh and met the Chicago Rohingya on their return. A community invisible for thirty years was suddenly asked to speak, in the way the Palestinians of Bridgeview and the Greeks of Halsted Street have been, when the news turns.
Meanwhile the ordinary work went on. By 2019 the centre ran English lessons, Quran classes, computer training, paperwork help and youth football teams, and Rohingya women were working at Tea Leaf Garden, a Devon Avenue restaurant serving halal Rohingya, Malaysian and Burmese food, run by a woman who had escaped to Malaysia in 1977 and reached Chicago in 2012.
Building something permanent, 2020 onwards
The Rohingya Culture Center grew from a homework room into a full social service agency: adult English classes with childcare, citizenship preparation, casework, employment help, religious education, youth sports and translation for local schools and clinics.
In September 2022 RefugeeOne, the city’s largest resettlement agency, moved into a new $8 million headquarters at California and Peterson, a few blocks away, bringing youth programmes, English classes, immigration services, a sewing room, a prayer room and a dental clinic under one roof for the first time in its forty year history.
Education remained the hardest ground. Dropout rates among Rohingya teenagers stayed high, some girls left school early to marry, and as late as 2022 researchers counted a single college graduate in the entire Chicago Rohingya community: Rashid Ahmed, whose family had fled persecution in Myanmar, reported as the first.
The Landmarks
Rohingya Culture Center, 2740 West Devon Avenue. The storefront Nasir Bin Zakaria opened in April 2016, still the centre of gravity for Rohingya life in Chicago. On a weekday it is an English classroom, a homework club, a citizenship course and a place where somebody will read your post to you. Zakaria’s own description has never been bettered: it feels like home.
Asian Homecook, 2739 West Devon Avenue. A 45 seat halal Malaysian restaurant that opened in March 2026 directly across the street from the culture centre. Toyuba Amir Ali had cooked in Malaysian kitchens before her family was resettled in September 2024, and sold meals from her West Ridge home to about fifty people a week until her children pooled their money for the lease. The menu is nasi lemak, roti canai and mee goreng mamak ayam, the food of a country that never granted her citizenship.
RefugeeOne, 6008 North California Avenue. The agency has resettled more than 20,000 refugees in Chicago since 1982 and moved here in September 2022, tripling its space. The free dental clinic is the detail that matters most: many patients had not seen a dentist in twenty five years, if ever.
Warren Park, 6601 North Western Avenue. Nearly 89 acres, the largest park in the Chicago Park District’s North Region, with football and cricket pitches and an outdoor ice rink. The culture centre’s youth teams belong to an older West Rogers Park tradition of children who barely share a language sorting it out on a field.
Indian Boundary Park, 2500 West Lunt Avenue. Thirteen acres opened in 1922, named for the line drawn in the 1816 Treaty of St Louis. Its 1929 fieldhouse, a Chicago Landmark since 2005 and restored in July 2014 after a fire, is the neighbourhood’s front parlour, and Rohingya toddlers now use the playground the Jewish families here made famous.
Philip Rogers Fine Arts, 7345 North Washtenaw Avenue. A neighbourhood elementary school whose enrolment reads like a census of everyone who has arrived in West Rogers Park this past decade. For Rohingya children whose parents never sat in a classroom, this is where a family’s literacy actually begins.
Where They Came From
Almost every Rohingya household in West Rogers Park traces the same journey, and it is worth being precise, because the popular picture is wrong. The world knows the Rohingya through the Bangladesh camps, which hold around 900,000 people. Very few of those camp residents reached Chicago. The families here came the other way, south rather than west, out of Rakhine State to Thailand and then Malaysia.
They spent ten, twenty, sometimes thirty years there, working without papers. Their children were born Malaysian in everything but law, which is why the food in the Rohingya restaurants on Devon is Malaysian rather than Burmese.
The language they brought is closely related to Chittagonian, spoken across the border in Bangladesh, which sounds convenient and is not: close enough to invite mistranslation, distant enough to cause it. The Rohingya script was suppressed so long that most speakers have never seen it, and there are concepts, mental health among them, for which a translator must talk around a missing vocabulary.
That is the inheritance West Rogers Park received: people fluent in survival, literate in nothing, carrying the cuisine of a country that refused them.
West Rogers Park Today
The numbers are contested, which tells you something about how this community is counted. Reporting in 2017 put it at around 400 families. By 2019 it was more than 1,600 people, and a 2022 study estimated close to 2,000 out of roughly 12,000 nationally. The Rohingya Culture Center now puts the city figure above 5,000. Whether Chicago or Milwaukee holds the larger community depends on who is counting, but between them they hold most of the Rohingya in America.
What has changed since 2016 is visible on the street. There is a Rohingya-owned restaurant on Devon with a queue in it, publicised by a Malaysian food creator whose video drew close to 150,000 views, filling with Chinese and white American customers. It took over the lease of an earlier Rohingya restaurant that had not survived, which is its own quiet lesson about how thin the margins are.
The pressures have not eased. Around 350,000 Rohingya have been displaced in Rakhine State and neighbouring areas since fighting resumed in November 2023, so the calls in the middle of the night have not stopped. And the community’s central problem, that a generation of parents cannot read the documents governing their own lives, resolves only as their children grow up.
Still, there is a storefront at 2740 West Devon, a restaurant at 2739 facing it, and a school on Washtenaw filling with children who will be the first literate generation in their family in a century. It is the arc this street has run before, for its Jewish families and its Assyrian ones, and the one that carried Indian families out to Bartlett. It is the shape of a beginning.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Rohingya live in West Rogers Park, Chicago?
Estimates vary widely. Reporting in 2019 described more than 1,600 Rohingya in Chicago, a 2022 study put it near 2,000 out of about 12,000 nationally, and the Rohingya Culture Center now estimates more than 5,000. Most of the Rohingya in West Rogers Park and neighbouring Rogers Park arrived through refugee resettlement after 2012.
Why did the Rohingya settle in West Rogers Park?
Resettlement agencies placed them there because rents were among the lowest on the North Side and Devon Avenue already had halal butchers, mosques and South Asian grocers. For families arriving from Malaysia it was the closest thing in Chicago to a familiar street.
What is the Rohingya Culture Center?
It is a community social service organisation at 2740 West Devon Avenue, opened in April 2016 by Nasir Bin Zakaria, one of the earliest Rohingya arrivals in Chicago. It runs English and citizenship classes, homework help, religious education, casework, employment support, youth sports and translation for local schools and clinics.
Did the Rohingya in Chicago come from the Bangladesh refugee camps?
Mostly not. Although around 900,000 Rohingya live in camps in Bangladesh, the Rohingya in West Rogers Park came overwhelmingly via Malaysia, where they had lived for years or decades without legal status after fleeing Rakhine State in the 1990s and 2000s.
Why are the Rohingya stateless?
Myanmar’s 1982 citizenship law excluded the Rohingya, stripping citizenship from a population with centuries of roots in Rakhine State. They are now the largest stateless population in the world, and Malaysia, where many Chicago families spent decades, does not formally recognise refugees either.
Where can you eat Rohingya food in West Rogers Park?
Asian Homecook at 2739 West Devon Avenue, opened in March 2026, is Rohingya-owned and serves halal Malaysian food, reflecting the decades its owner spent in Malaysia. Dishes include nasi lemak, roti canai and mee goreng mamak ayam.
If your family’s story passed through West Rogers Park, or any of the places Rohingya have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the villages of Rakhine State and the years without papers in Malaysia, to a storefront on West Devon Avenue, to wherever you are now.