Former refugee women’s entrepreneurial journeys are embedded in social, cultural, and legal environments in their home, transition, and host countries. Their multiple context embeddedness creates contradictions and identity issues. Thus, women adopt behaviours that make them visible or invisible simultaneously when navigating these contradictions. Using intersectionality and translocational positionality lenses, this study explored this phenomenon. We collected narrative data using semi-structured interviews from refugee women resettled in New Zealand. The findings illustrate that multi-country social processes, that is, ‘translocational’ experiences, create (in)visibility paradoxes for women entrepreneurs. Women dynamically create visibility for themselves through reliance on or defiance of ethnic, cultural or refugee identities in their ventures and by creating a business identity aligning with the host country’s values. In contrast, cultural conformity and playing a role behind the ‘shopfront’ make women invisible. This study synthesises these paradoxical entrepreneurial strategies, develops a conceptual framework and contributes to women’s entrepreneurial identity studies.

Indigenous entrepreneurs represent a growing segment of the business community in many countries, but face sometimes stark challenges in starting and running enterprises. The success of indigenous entrepreneurs matters because they draw upon their indigeneity as sources of inspiration and innovation, contribute to the collective wellbeing of indigenous peoples, and some represent world class exemplars of sustainable ways of doing business. While enterprise assistance for entrepreneurs is widely accepted as a worthwhile use of public funds few guidelines exist to help policy makers and providers understand the needs of indigenous entrepreneurs and how best to respond. In this paper, we use the theoretical lens of entrepreneurial identity to provide insight into this challenging context. Taking an identity perspective may enable us to tease out how identifying as a Māori entrepreneur can enable and also hinder change in this community context. In doing so we lay foundations for future empirical work.