Palestinian diaspora

14 million Palestinians across the world. Not scattered — extended. Identity carried farther than any border could contain.

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The Scale

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One of the largest and most sustained diasporas in the modern world.

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14M+

Palestinians worldwide

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750K+

Expelled in 1948

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8.3M

Registered refugees

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530+

Villages destroyed in 1948

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The Palestinian diaspora did not happen gradually. It happened in ruptures — 1948, 1967, and the ongoing displacement that continues today. Each rupture sent more families across more borders. Each generation inherited the displacement of the one before it.

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Where Palestinians Live

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From Jordan to Chile, the diaspora is global.

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The largest concentrations of Palestinians outside historic Palestine are in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria — neighboring countries that absorbed the original waves of displacement. But the diaspora extends much further: to the Gulf states, to the United States, to Latin America — particularly Chile, which has the largest Palestinian community in the Americas, estimated at over 500,000 people.

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In the United States, Palestinian Americans number over 200,000, concentrated in cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Houston. They built communities, businesses, mosques, cultural organizations — and kept the identity intact across generations born on American soil.

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Chicago is one of those cities. YUMA is one of those stories.

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What the Diaspora Carried

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You cannot uproot what people carry inside them.

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Language. Food. Embroidery patterns. The names of villages that no longer appear on maps. The keys to houses that still exist but are no longer accessible. Stories precise enough to function as addresses. The particular humor of a people who refused to be reduced to their suffering.

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The diaspora carried Palestinian culture not as an archive — frozen, fragile, preserved under glass — but as a living practice. Recipes were cooked. Dialects were spoken. Tatreez was stitched. Dabke was danced at weddings in São Paulo and Chicago and Amman.

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"We have on this earth what makes life worth living."

— Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege

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The Second Generation

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Children who inherited a place they never saw.

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The second and third generations of the Palestinian diaspora grew up holding two realities simultaneously. Rooted in the countries they were born in. Tied to a homeland known through stories, photographs, embroidery, and the particular weight of a family name that carries geography inside it.

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This dual belonging is not confusion. It is the specific form Palestinian identity takes in the diaspora — expansive, not diminished. You can be Palestinian and American. Palestinian and Chilean. Palestinian and German. The identity does not require choosing.

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It requires carrying.

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The Yuma Project

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A diaspora brand that doesn't apologize for the distance.

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YUMA was built in Chicago, in the diaspora, by someone who knows exactly what it means to carry Palestine across an ocean. The distance doesn't dilute the identity — it sharpens it. It makes every design decision more deliberate. Every piece is a choice to show up, to be visible, to insist that the story continues.

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