On the first Saturday after the autumn rains break in Oromia, a crowd gathers at the shore of Lake Nokomis in south Minneapolis. Women in white dresses edged with red and black carry bundles of fresh grass and yellow flowers down to the water. Coffee roasts in a pan over charcoal, butter melting into the beans, and somewhere a drum starts. This is Irreecha, the Oromo thanksgiving, performed eight thousand miles from the highlands where it began. The people doing it are part of the largest Oromo community anywhere outside the Horn of Africa, and they have given the Twin Cities a second name: Little Oromia.
Minneapolis: The Place
The Oromo presence in Minneapolis centers on Cedar-Riverside, a dense pocket squeezed between downtown, the University of Minnesota’s West Bank, and the Mississippi River, and on the Phillips neighborhood and the East African storefronts strung along Lake Street to the south. Cedar-Riverside is defined by Riverside Plaza, the cluster of high-rise towers with colored panels that hold thousands of immigrant residents within walking distance of the light rail. The housing stock runs from those 1970s towers to brick walk-ups and converted shopfronts. The Blue and Green light-rail lines and the I-94 and I-35W interchange make it one of the most connected, and most crowded, square miles in the city.
How Minneapolis Became Little Oromia
Before the Oromo
The Oromo are the single largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, a Cushitic people whose homeland, Oromia, sweeps across the country’s center and south, and whose language, Afaan Oromoo, is one of the most widely spoken in Africa. They have their own calendar, their own thanksgiving in Irreecha, and a religious life split between Islam, Christianity, and the older Waaqeffanna faith. For most of the twentieth century they were also, inside Ethiopia, a people pushed to the margins of national power, their language barred from schools and government.
Minnesota knew almost nothing of them. The first two Oromo arrived in the Twin Cities in 1972. Tasissa Moti came at the end of August that year as a student, alongside his American wife Geri, a nurse who had worked as a missionary in Ethiopia. Teferi Fufa followed in early September. For a few years they were nearly alone.
The Oromo Arrive
What turned a handful of students into a community was politics back home. In 1974 a military coup deposed Emperor Haile Selassie and installed the junta known as the Derg, which ruled through famine, mass conscription, and a campaign against its own people that historians later called the Red Terror. Nationalist movements rose against it, among them the Oromo Liberation Front, and the war that followed pushed Oromo families into exile through Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, and Kenya.
The Derg collapsed in May 1991. Relief was brief. By 1992 the new government in Addis Ababa had forced the Oromo Liberation Front out of the transitional coalition, and OLF members and supporters faced arrest and worse. A second wave of refugees left, most of them routed through Kenyan camps, and many were resettled in Minnesota through refugee programs and family reunification. By the mid-1990s the number of Oromo in the Twin Cities had grown from hundreds into the thousands.
They organized early. In 1981 Oromo leaders founded the Oromo Relief Association of North America in the Twin Cities to send aid back home. Around the same time, a group that became the Oromo Community of Minnesota began meeting in a small building in Cedar-Riverside, the start of the institution that still anchors the community today. From 1982 they marched in the Festival of Nations, claiming a public Oromo identity at a moment when few Americans could place the word on a map.
Minneapolis at Its Peak
By the 2000s the Oromo in Minnesota numbered in the tens of thousands, with community estimates reaching around forty thousand statewide, though official demographers have counted fewer because federal data folds Oromo into broader Ethiopian and African categories. Whatever the exact figure, it made Minnesota the largest Oromo settlement outside the Horn of Africa, behind only Kenya, and gave the Twin Cities the name Oromo worldwide now use for them.
The faith life split the way it had at home, and both halves built institutions. Christian Oromo who had started a home Bible study in the 1980s incorporated Our Redeemer Oromo Evangelical Church in 1993, joining the Minneapolis Area Synod of the ELCA two years later. Muslim Oromo opened Masjid Tawfiq in 2004, the first Oromo mosque in North America, later renamed the Tawfiq Islamic Center. Coffee ceremonies, weddings, and funerals filled the gaps between, and Afaan Oromoo became a language you could hear on Lake Street and the Cedar-Riverside light-rail platform.
The great annual gathering arrived in 1996, when the Oromo Sports Federation in North America held its first soccer tournament. Every summer since, OSFNA’s week-long tournament has drawn more than twenty thousand Oromo and their friends to a host city for matches, concerts, and meetings, a moving festival both Minneapolis and St. Paul have honored by declaring an official Oromo Week. For a scattered people, the tournament became the one week a year the nation could see itself in a single stadium.
The Change
Recognition came slowly, then suddenly. In early 2015 the Minneapolis City Council approved a proposal from Council Member Abdi Warsame to hang commemorative names on Cedar-Riverside streets, and that September a stretch of South 4th Street between Cedar Avenue and 15th Avenue South was inaugurated as Oromo Street. The mailing addresses did not change, but a people once invisible on American maps now had their name on a green city sign.
The other turning point came from Ethiopia. On June 29, 2020, the Oromo singer and activist Hachalu Hundessa, whose music had been a soundtrack of Oromo protest, was shot and killed in Addis Ababa. Grief and anger moved instantly to Minneapolis. Within days, more than a thousand people marched downtown and briefly shut a stretch of interstate, demanding justice. It was the loudest the community had ever been in public, and it announced a generation that no longer intended to struggle for visibility.
The Landmarks of Little Oromia
Oromo Community of Minnesota. The community’s oldest institution grew from a group that began meeting in a small Cedar-Riverside building in the early 1980s, when there were only a couple hundred Oromo in the Twin Cities. It has carried the community through four decades of new arrivals, running programs for youth and elders and serving as the place families turn to for help navigating a new country.
Our Redeemer Oromo Evangelical Church, 4000 28th Avenue South. What started as a living-room Bible study in the 1980s incorporated as a church in 1993 and joined the local ELCA synod in 1995. It became a spiritual home for Christian Oromo and a reminder that Little Oromia prays in more than one direction.
Tawfiq Islamic Center, Minneapolis. Opened in 2004 as Masjid Tawfiq, it was the first Oromo mosque on the continent. For Muslim Oromo, many of them from the eastern Hararghe and Arsi regions where Islam runs deep, it was the first place in America where the call to prayer and Afaan Oromoo met under one roof.
Riverside Plaza, Cedar-Riverside. The colored towers are the physical heart of immigrant Minneapolis, home to thousands of East African residents, Oromo and Somali alike. The two communities share the neighborhood’s stairwells and storefronts even as each keeps its own identity; their Somali neighbors have their own deep history in Cedar-Riverside.
Oromo Cultures Institute of Minnesota, Cedar-Riverside. Founded in 2013, the institute works to keep Oromo art, music, history, and language alive across generations, gathering elders, poets, and musicians so that the children born in Minnesota inherit more than a passport. It is the kind of place that exists because a community has decided to stay.
Adama Restaurant, 3970 Central Avenue NE, Columbia Heights. Named for the warm Oromia city southeast of Addis Ababa, the family-owned dining room serves Oromo and East African food to a clientele that crosses the whole immigrant map of the metro. It sits among the Ethiopian and Somali kitchens that have turned ordinary suburban strips into places where you can taste home.
Lake Nokomis, south Minneapolis. Every September the lakeshore becomes the site of Irreecha, the Oromo thanksgiving, where hundreds gather in traditional dress for the buna qalaa coffee ceremony and the procession to the water. A festival built around rivers and springs in Oromia found, in a Minnesota lake, somewhere close enough to mean the same thing.
Where the Minneapolis Oromo Came From
The community traces back across the whole of Oromia, the vast central and southern Ethiopian region that includes Arsi, Bale, Hararghe, Wollo, Shewa, and Wellega. Many came from the eastern and southeastern highlands, areas hit hard by the Derg’s wars and later by the crackdown on the Oromo Liberation Front, and Islam and the Oromo nationalist movement both ran strong there.
Few traveled straight from village to Minnesota. The typical path ran through a refugee camp in Kenya, sometimes Sudan or Djibouti first, then resettlement in the Twin Cities, where an aunt or a former neighbor was already waiting. That chain, one family sponsoring the next, is what concentrated a nation’s exiles in a single American city rather than scattering them.
Minneapolis Today
The Oromo in Minneapolis are now two and three generations deep. The children of the refugees of the 1990s have grown up bilingual, moving between Afaan Oromoo at the dinner table and English in the classroom, and some have moved into city politics, business, and the arts. The killing of Hachalu Hundessa showed how connected they remain to Oromia, and how willing the younger generation is to be heard.
They are also still, often, mistaken for someone else. In a metro famous for its Somali population, the Oromo are routinely lumped in with their neighbors, and the work of explaining a distinct language, faith mix, and history continues. The institutions built to answer that, the community center, the cultural institute, the churches and the mosque, keep doing the patient work of being known on their own terms.
What endures is the rhythm of a year lived in two places at once: the soccer tournament in summer, Irreecha at the lake in fall, Afaan Oromoo on the light rail every ordinary day in between. A people once told their language did not belong have made a northern American city repeat their name back to them, and the next generation is the one that will decide what Little Oromia becomes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Oromo settle in Minneapolis?
The first Oromo came to the Twin Cities as students in 1972, and a refugee pipeline followed in the 1980s and 1990s as families fled the Derg regime and later persecution of the Oromo Liberation Front. Minnesota’s refugee-resettlement networks and affordable housing in Cedar-Riverside drew new arrivals, and chain migration did the rest. Each family that settled sponsored the next, concentrating the Oromo in Minneapolis rather than spreading them out.
Is Minneapolis still home to an Oromo community today?
Yes. The Oromo in Minneapolis remain the largest Oromo community outside the Horn of Africa, with community estimates around forty thousand statewide, now spanning two and three generations. The community center, churches, the Tawfiq Islamic Center, and the Oromo Cultures Institute all remain active, and the annual Irreecha gathering at Lake Nokomis still draws hundreds each fall.
What are the most famous Oromo landmarks in Minneapolis?
The best-known sites include the Tawfiq Islamic Center, the first Oromo mosque in North America, and Our Redeemer Oromo Evangelical Church on 28th Avenue South. The towers of Riverside Plaza in Cedar-Riverside anchor the neighborhood, and a stretch of South 4th Street was named Oromo Street in 2015. Lake Nokomis hosts the yearly Irreecha thanksgiving festival.
Where did the Minneapolis Oromo come from?
They come from across Oromia, the large central and southern region of Ethiopia that includes Arsi, Bale, Hararghe, Wollo, Shewa, and Wellega. Many fled the eastern and southeastern highlands during the wars of the Derg era and the later crackdown on Oromo political movements. Most reached Minnesota by way of refugee camps in Kenya, Sudan, or Djibouti.
When did the Oromo first arrive in Minnesota?
The first two Oromo arrived in the Twin Cities in 1972, when Tasissa Moti came as a student in late August and Teferi Fufa followed that September. The community stayed tiny until the 1980s, then grew rapidly with refugee arrivals through the 1990s. By the middle of that decade the Oromo in Minneapolis already numbered in the tens of thousands.
If your family’s story passed through Cedar-Riverside, a Kenyan refugee camp, or the highlands of Oromia, the names and dates behind it are worth keeping. Communities like this one are built from thousands of individual journeys, and yours deserves to be remembered. You can trace the path that brought your people to places like Little Oromia, and others like the Ethiopians of Washington’s Little Ethiopia and the Eritreans of Oakland, whose Horn of Africa roots run parallel to the Oromo.