Vital information at your fingertips: The Ethiopian yellow pages as a cultural document

In the last decade of the twentieth century, Yellow Pages, the well-known business directories that effectively advertise services in fairly standardized formats, have been published by entrepreneurs for various ethnic communities, including Ethiopians. This essay reads the Ethiopian Yellow Pages (EYP), published for the Washington, DC, area, as a cultural document, interpreting it as a text in which issues of identity and community are represented by and for members of the Ethiopian community. The essay provides a detailed overview of the EYP in its thirteenth edition, covering the year 2006/2007, surveying its structure; its target area; and the wide array of services, venues, and institutions that advertise in its pages. The discussion concludes that the EYP is much more than an instrument for providing information and access to services: It both captures the mundane aspects of life in America and highlights the specific features of an ethnically distinct immigrant population's journey of cultural creativity, which reverberates in both their new and their old homelands.