Migration, memory and multiple belongings: the identity trajectories of Turkestanian muhajirs

Turkestanians migrated from West Turkestan, then part of Soviet Central Asia, to Afghanistan primarily in the late 1920s and early 1930s, later dispersing to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United States and other countries from the 1950s onward. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2020, comprising 71 in-depth interviews with Turkestanians in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Canada and the United States, mostly held in Istanbul, Turkey, with a smaller number in Turkestan and Almaty, Kazakhstan, alongside short questionnaires and ethnographic engagement in migrants’ homes and community spaces, this article examines how Turkestanian migrants and their descendants define and articulate their identities nearly a century after forced migration. It analyses the role of collective memory in sustaining cultural continuity across generations and investigates how self-identification evolves in response to place, social environment and generational change. The findings demonstrate that identity is not static: migrants actively construct, sustain and transmit multigenerational memories of displacement while simultaneously developing new layers of identification shaped by integration into host societies. These new affiliations coexist with, rather than replace, diasporic attachments and transnational engagements. Across stories, everyday practices and long-distance ties to ancestral homelands, Turkestanian migrants navigate complex forms of belonging that reflect both enduring cultural continuity and ongoing adaptation within a transnational social field.