Abbie Yamamoto - May 2022

Executive Director, Maine Association for New Americans (MANA )

Growing up biracial in Japan, Abbie Yamamoto has experienced discrimination and the loneliness of “otherness” all her life — which is why she now works to be a “uniter of all races.” Abbie was a college professor who travelled extensively around the U.S. before moving to Maine with her partner in the summer of 2018. “In a place like this, where I get to define who I am and people accept it at face value, I’ve been able to find my space a lot more easily.” The daughter of two monoracial parents who could not truly understand her struggles, she describes herself as “A minority in so many ways. I grew up with a strong sense of constantly wanting to belong and having that be rejected time and time again by the society that I was living in. That loneliness you can really feel and that sense of isolation you can feel for being discriminated against is something very familiar to me and is something that I try to lessen in other people’s experience. And I think affinity groups are a key part of that.”

To better understand the plight of refugees in Maine, Abbie recommends Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine by Catherine Besteman.