The Gujarati and Iraqi Arab corridor
Take the Red Line to Loyola. Walk west on Devon Avenue. Within a mile, the street transforms from a South Asian bazaar into a Middle Eastern market and back again.
On the south side: Gujarati sweet shops, Indian jewelry stores, Patel Brothers — the largest Indian grocery chain in America, founded right here. On the north side: Iraqi Arab restaurants, halal butchers, Kurdish tea houses. Devon Avenue is the densest South Asian corridor in the Midwest, and nobody planned it. The communities just came.
Businesses mapped by ethnicity in Chicago metro
621,000 Gujaratis live in the United States. They are overwhelmingly Hindu, with an evangelical Christian presence of 0.6%. That means for every 1,000 Gujaratis, six have heard and responded to the gospel. The other 994 have not.
Patel Brothers has 52 locations across America. Gujarati churches: zero.
Illinois ranks #5 in the nation for international students — 62,299. India is the top sender at 35.2%. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alone hosts over 10,000 international students, one of the highest concentrations in the country.
“Two out of three international students in the US come from countries on the Open Doors World Watch List for Christian persecution. Four in ten come from countries where the vast majority belongs to unreached people groups.”
— Missions Library Analysis, 2024
“The gospel is only good news if it gets there in time.”
— Carl F.H. Henry
“How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard?”
Romans 10:14
Walk Devon Avenue from Western to California. Count the languages you hear. You’ll lose count before you reach Patel Brothers.
Connect with a campus ministry at University of Illinois or University of Chicago.
Learn the difference between Gujarati and Hindi. They’re different languages, different cultures, different communities.
The nations didn’t wait. They opened a grocery store on Devon Avenue.