203 CHAPTER FOURTEEN Women’s Chay Gatherings in Kazakhstan Sustaining Identity in Migrant Communities RACHEL HARRIS AND ZULFIYAM KARIMOVA Uyghurs in Kazakhstan U yghurs have a long history of settlement in the region known as Yettisu in southeast Kazakhstan. During the 20th cen- tury, they moved back and forth across the shifting Soviet– Chinese border, fleeing bouts of violence, famine and unrest on both sides. 1 Earlier settlers are commonly known as yerlik ‘local’ Uyghur. Uyghurs left Xinjiang in large numbers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and many settled in and around the border town of Zharkent. Today, approximately 300,000 Uyghurs live in Kazakhstan, primar- ily in Almaty province, where they are concentrated in Zharkent, in small towns along the road from Almaty to Zharkent, and in Almaty’s suburbs. Support for Uyghur language, education and culture was a key plank of Soviet nationalities policies, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Uyghurs in Central Asia shifted from a position of relative equality within a multi-ethnic polity to that of minority within the new nation-states, and Uyghur communities living in dif- ferent Central Asian Republics now found themselves separated by new state borders. Kazakhstan has maintained the more prominent aspects of state support for Uyghur community organisation, educa- tion and culture, but support at the local level markedly decreased in the 1990s, alongside the loss of state enterprise and economic support in rural areas that impelled significant rural-urban migration. For 1. Ablet Kamalov, ‘Ethno-national and Local Dimensions of the Historiography of Kazakhstan’s Uyghurs,’ Central Asian Survey 31, no. 3 (2012): 343–54. Ildiko-festschrift.indd 203 Ildiko-festschrift.indd 203 28/03/2022 21.58 28/03/2022 21.58