uncertain cartographies of belonging A rabic-speaking immigrants in early twentieth-century U nited S tates salah d hassan
Descendants of turn-of-the-century Arabic-speaking emigrants from the former Ottoman Empire inhabit an ambiguous space of cultural belonging in the United States. Contemporary Arab-American presence is troubled by erasures and hostility. At the same time, Arabs lay claim to a 150-year history of immigration and the achievements of the so-called pioneers. Philip K. Hitti noted in his 1924 Syrians of America, that 89,971 Arabic-speaking immigrants entered the United States between 1899 and 1919 and settled in communities across the continent. In the introduction to the first edition of Hitti’s book, Talcott Williams, an American journalist born in 1849 in Ottoman Syria, claimed that ‘I know no American city where I have not spoken Arabic and no port on the Gulf or the Caribbean where the Syrian is absent’. In the early twentieth century, Syrian immigrants left their towns and villages in the provinces of the Ottoman Empire and travelled, often in steerage, across the Atlantic. The majority arrived at Ellis Island for immigration handling and then entered the country through New York Harbour. By 1890, they had established a Manhattan ethnic neighbourhood known as Little Syria on Washington Street between Battery Place and Rector Street. The history of Little Syria is a testament to the presence of Arabic- speaking immigrants at the centre of modern metropolitan American cultural and commercial life. In 2013, the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn prepared a special exhibit titled Little Syria, NY: An Immigrant Community's Life and Legacy that was later installed in 2016 at the Ellis Island Museum. The exhibit emphasises the largely erased Arab past in lower Manhattan, and also looks beyond the metropolitan gateway. Included is a 100-year-old Arabic-language map of the United States; labelled the Peddler’s Route Map , it represents the dispersal of Little Syria peddlers in their journeys to far-flung rural locations. Hitti historicised this view of Syrian settlement across the United States: Between 1885 and the [1893] Chicago exposition, the flow of emigration was augmented to such an extent that it spread itself all over the country east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio River, and found its way into the Pacific coast without intermediate stay. But the movement did not assume large proportions until the early nineties...Once started the wave was never checked. The Lebanon furnished the pioneer migrants and the bulk of later emigration, but all portions of Syria and Palestine contributed to the westward- flowing stream.
University of Texas Libraries
Little Syria, in the Lower end of Manhattan, in Rider's New York City , Henry Holt and Company, 1916.
Indeed, the legacies of other Little Syrias can be found in provincial cities and towns across the country often in unexpected places. For example, a 'Little Syria on the Wabash' historic marker in Terre Haute, Indiana reads: ‘Arabic-speaking Christian Syrians…began their lives in this city as poor pack peddlers and with their savings many bought houses and became grocers’. The marker concludes: ‘Many original families are here today’, reclaiming an Arab presence in the United States that was otherwise forgotten. It also offers a development narrative for a community that transitioned from foreign (Arabic- speaking pack peddler) to familiar (Christian homeowner and grocer). That the first Terre Haute Syrians were Christian, that they saved money, shed their peddler past, bought homes and started businesses are central elements to Arab-American belonging in that midwestern town on the Wabash River.
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on site review 42: atlas :: being in place
:: emigration
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