[Discussion] Arab-American Faces and Voices

[sule tarakcioglu]

Elizabeth Boosahda. Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an
Immigrant Community. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. xix + 284
pp. Maps, photographs, notes, bibliography, appendices, indexes. $65.00
(cloth), ISBN 0-292-70919-6; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-292-70920-X.
*Reviewed by:* Sherene Seikaly, Departments of History and Middle
Eastern Studies, New York University.
*Published by:* H-Gender-MidEast <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egend-mid/>
(June, 2004)
The Arabs of Oak Hill, Worcester

In Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of An Immigrant
Community, Elizabeth Boosahda provides a vivid illustration of Arab
immigration to the United States and the processes of integration and
assimilation taking place thereafter. The work relays the origins and
history of Arab American communities in North and South America that had
links to New England and specifically to Worcester, Massachusetts, where
large Arab American communities were established. Boosahda's purpose is
to relay the daily lives of immigrants coming from Greater Syria to the
United States in the period from 1880 to 1915 and to challenge "long
held myths and stereotypes about Arabs" (p. xiii). Diligence, hard work,
and thrift are among the oft-repeated descriptions that characterize
this Worcester community. Boosahda illustrates the adventurous,
entrepreneurial character of Arab men and women, who often came to the
United States landless, penniless, and unable to speak English. While
some worked in factories or city governments, others became small
tradesmen or merchants. The staple figure was the peddler, traveling
from door to door, selling lace, dry goods, threads and pins to
housewives across the country. Men and women alike peddled, and their
efforts became launching pads to successful careers. Chapters 1 through
4 describe the everyday lives of the immigrants who arrived in the
United States from 1880 to 1915. Chapter 1 provides historical
background on the Ottoman province of Syria, which included the district
of Mount Lebanon and the province of Palestine. Chapter 2 describes the
reasons behind and the processes of migration. Chapter 3 details how
Arabs, Italians, Irish, and French immigrants lived together in
Worcester. Chapter 4 covers the various types of work Arab Americans
engaged in: peddling, small business, textiles, and medicine. It
includes a short section on Arab-American involvement in labor strikes
in Massachusetts in 1899 and 1912.

Chapters 5 through 7, covering the years from 1880 to 1989, include the
contributions and achievements that Arab Americans made and the legacies
and customs they brought with them. Chapter 5 covers aspects of
tradition, education, and culture: marital practices, women's positions,
family tasks, community life, cooking, attitudes towards literacy, and
music and dance. Chapter 6 covers the process of Americanization through
racial categorization, citizenship, military service, community
organizations, and participations in public events. The final chapter
provides an overview of the legacies of the Arabic language and food,
and lists public Arab American personas and their contributions to New
England society. Although at times reinforcing women's performance of
obedience in the public sphere, Boosahda does successfully undo certain
stereotypes of Arab women who, when single, were often the first in the
family to emigrate. Her chapter on migration provides rare insight into
the experiences and biographies of Arab migrants, undertaking the long
journey to the United States and the confusion, regulations, and
examinations that awaited them on arrival. Boosahda details the various
networks of resources, charitable organizations, and religious
institutions that Arab immigrants relied on upon arrival in the United
States. Throughout the book, Boosahda captures and documents the sights
and sounds of turn of the century Worcester. She offers a lively tour of
Arab American life replete with colorful anecdotes, photographs, and
documents that provide a unique window on daily life.

Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community is
directed at the general reader and thus necessarily has some
limitations. Boosahda provides a historical summary from the Ottoman
Empire to the European Mandatory period. While the summary is a useful
introduction, its brevity and sharp, disjointed jumps (at one point
going from "the millet system" to "missionaries from Massachusetts")
reduce several historical processes into a unified, teleological
narrative. Boosahda's portrayal of life in the province of Syria leaves
much to be desired. She explains, for example, that when Arab immigrants
where asked why they left their home countries "many admitted they had
too much energy and imagination to accept the time-honored way of life
that others, family and neighbors never questioned" (p. 19). Such
generalizations result in a depiction of Syria and Lebanon as static
places where culture and society remain constant through time.

In addition, Boosahda's emphasis on emigration primarily for the
purposes of "adventure and wealth" neglects the complex changes that the
Middle East witnessed from 1860 to 1915. As various historians of the
Middle East have shown, the later half of the nineteenth century was a
dynamic period of social, political, and economic transformation.
Greater Syria witnessed uneven integration into the global economy
through the Ottoman centralizing policies of the tanzimat. Shifts in the
world market affected not only Syria's cities but also its more remote
and barely settled rural areas. The Syrian peasantry was immersed at
various periods in internecine struggle as well as strikes, campaigns,
and communes that called for regional autonomy from the Ottoman
Sultanate.[1]

Boosahda's effort to present an alternate depiction of Arab Americans
falters into an apologetic tone that naturalizes and essentializes
cultural characteristics. Arab immigrants to the United States are
repeatedly said to have "a strict sense of honesty, morality, and a
natural feel for commerce" (p. 8). Such depictions leave little room to
ponder the differences, complexities, and diversities within Arab
communities. Arab Americans are also essentialized to a certain extent,
described in terms of mentalities and psyches, i.e. "literacy was
important to the Arab psyche" (p. 104). The "naturalness" of Arab
American morality and honesty are compounded by the portrayal of their
interaction with the state, which emerges as a benevolent apparatus,
compelled by the entrepreneurial (read capitalist) tendencies of their
Syrian subjects. Arab Americans, or more accurately, Christian Syrian
and Lebanese Americans of Worcester, emerge as an appealing, patriotic
"model minority" that was able to assimilate and integrate smoothly in
the land of opportunity and wealth. Boosahda's discussion of work among
Arab Americans, for example, concludes in their successful climbing of
an economic ladder. Social mobility is depicted as openly available to
all, but more readily accessible to Arab Americans because of
"commitment, discipline, and the support of family and community" (p. 87).

Boosahda follows a "melting pot" narrative of American immigration. She
affirms the United States as a place of multiculturalism and
coexistence. Immigrants, either Arab or European, are depicted as
seeking and consolidating an "American identity" while preserving a
somewhat idealized cultural heritage. Structural inequalities are absent
from this narrative. While Boosahda briefly discusses the ambiguous and
changing characterization of Arabs as whites or non-whites, the wider
lexicon of race and class and its reverberations in U.S. society is
strikingly overlooked. Moreover, there is no discussion of the privilege
that Christian Arabs, U.S. citizens and upper middle-class Arabs held in
their access to whiteness and/or social and material capital. The
history of the United States as a colonial settler state and the
positions Arab Americans may hold in its various constellations is thus
curiously neglected. This absence is at its most ironic when Boosahda
depicts the Syrian American Association's participation in the 1930
parade commemorating the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: "[The
Syrian American Association] entered a float that depicted an American
historical scene and won second prize for the best decorated float....
The float was a replica of Diggory Sergeant's log cabin with his
nameplate attached to the outside of the cabin. He lived on the high
ridge of Sagatabscot Hill ... known as Union Hill. It was on this
elevation that a Native American murdered Diggory Sergeant.... Ten
members of the association were on the float dressed as Diggory
Sergeant, his wife, and their five children or as Native Americans" (pp.
150-151).

The reenactment of the colonial encounter between settlers and the
indigenous population of North America, with Arab Americans identifying
with the white settler, is in and of itself fascinating. Unfortunately,
Boosahda describes the event but does not comment or reflect on what it
may indicate as far as the Arab Americans in Worcester and their
relationship to official American history. In addition, Boosahda spends
considerable time listing and commemorating the Arab Americans who
served in the two world wars and "subsequent wars" (p. 140). These men
she explains "made the supreme sacrifice in the service of our country"
(p. 140). Ultimately Boosahda replicates an anxiety to prove "good
citizenship" without interrogating the notions and the problematics
inherent in citizenship, belonging, identity, patriotism, and otherness.

The idealization of assimilation and "multiculturalism" is at its
clearest in the absence of any discussion of the post September 11
reality that Arab Americans experience in the United States. Boosahda
brings her narrative up to September 1, 2001 when the United States
Postal Service released a first class postage stamp honoring the largest
Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr and "paying tribute to the estimated six
million American Muslims and 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide" (p. 178).
Boosahda does not extend her analysis ten more days to address the World
Trade Center attacks and their multiple consequences for Arab Americans
through changes in immigration policies, detentions, deportations, FBI
investigations, racial profiling, hate crimes, and discrimination.[2]

Boosahda's work is invested with much passion and a desire to relay the
stories and lives of a group of people whose invisibility has been,
until recently, a central theme in North America.[3] Boosahda's work is
significant in that it makes the Arab Americans of Worcester audible and
visible. It also provides a rich example of the possibilities and
potential of oral history. Boosahda conducted over two hundred
interviews with Arab American immigrants and collected from them a
wealth of biographical information as well as photographs and documents.
This book does not, however, draw on recent historiography that
problematizes Middle Eastern history or the discursive and practical
processes of immigration and assimilation/exclusion in the United
States. Basic standards of transliteration are ignored, for example.
Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community
will be most compelling to teachers, professors, and general readers; it
provides an interesting, vivid, well-written, and accessible
introduction to Arab American life.

Notes

[1]. Linda Schilcher, "Violence in Rural Syria in the 1880s and 1890s:
State Centralization, Rural Integration, and the World Market," in
Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East, ed. Farhad Kazemi and
John Waterbury (Miami: University of Florida Press, 1991).

[2]. Mustafa Bayoumi, "Freedom of Religion Is Being Restricted for
Muslim Americans," The Progressive Media Project (January 16, 2002).

[3]. Nadine Naber, "Ambiguous Identities: An Investigation of Arab
American Invisibility," Ethnic and Racial Studies 23 (2000): pp. 37-61.

Library of Congress Call Number: F74.W9 B67 2003

Subjects:

    * Arab Americans--Massachusetts--Worcester--History.
    * Arab Americans--Massachusetts--Worcester--History--Sources.
    * Arab Americans--Massachusetts--Worcester--Interviews.
    * Immigrants--Massachusetts--Worcester--History.
    * Immigrants--Massachusetts--Worcester--History--Sources.
    * Arabs--Migrations--History.
    * Worcester (Mass.)--Ethnic relations.
    * Arab countries--Emigration and immigration--History.
    * United States--Emigration and immigration--History.
    * Latin America--Emigration and immigration--History.