In Nashville, hundreds of families descend on a public park or community center each March, wearing traditional Kurdish clothing and carrying flowers. The music starts in the afternoon — a mix of traditional dengbej-style vocal performances and livelier dance music — and the halay circle forms and reforms for hours. Children who have never been to Kurdistan wear the same colors their grandparents wore.

In Dallas, the Newroz celebration often draws people from across the region. Families drive in from smaller Texas cities where there is no Kurdish community large enough to organize an event. The food tables are a geography lesson in Kurdish regional cuisine — dishes from northern Iraq sit next to dishes from southeastern Turkey, all of it prepared by women who learned the recipes from their mothers.

In San Diego and Washington D.C. and Chicago, smaller but equally earnest celebrations happen in community centers and mosque halls. What they share is the impulse that drives all of them: the desire to mark this particular day as a Kurdish day, to be Kurdish in public and in community, to hand something real down to the next generation.