Main Street is a wide, two-lane road with a rundown western vibe. A quaint bakery, a dress shop, and a café vie for attention. An old hand-painted typewriter-repair sign remains etched on one building. During the summer months, Main Street hosts weekly antique car shows.


On those days, down- town El Cajon looks like a mid-century time-warp. But per- haps what aids the most in making Main Street authentically American is the mul- ticultural vibe. Most notably, the steady stream of Middle- Eastern owned res- taurants and grocery stores. Many busi- ness signs are written in Arabic — not sur- prising, as El Cajon is home to the largest population of Iraq


PHOTOS BY ANDY BOYD


War refugees in the world. It hosts the second-highest pop- ulation in the United States of Chaldeans — Aramaic-speaking Christians from Iraq. Roughly 50,000


Chaldeans live in El Cajon. With an influx of refugees fleeing their homelands due to religious and politi- cal persecution, those numbers are growing. “I think it is going


to end up being trou- blesome,” worries Ben Kalasho, founder and


president of the Chal- dean American Cham- ber of Commerce. “While non–Middle Easterners think it, they won’t say it because it is not politically correct. A poor town like El Cajon cannot sustain it. Forty percent of the people live below the poverty line and that was before the refugees came in.” (City data indi-


cates the 2015 pov- erty rate in El Cajon is 26.4 percent.) Kalasho sits in his


16 San Diego Reader April 21, 2016


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