The Peddler's Route Map , in Arabic, 1920. Sallum Mukarzil, Tarikh as-Tijara al-Suriyya fi-l- Muhajara al-Amrikiyya. New York: al-Matha'a al-Suriyya al-Amrikiyya, 1921.
James Ansara Papers, IHRC208, Immigration History Research Centre Archives, University of Minnesota
Salloum Mokarzel and the Peddler’s Route Map
The Peddler's Route Map was first published in Salloum Mokarzel’s 1920 The History of Syrian Trade in the American Migration . It provides an entry into the complexity of Arab-American belonging and raises questions about the changing cartographies of the United States and Syria: What did the Peddler's Route Map signify in 1920 and what does it represent 100 years later? We can read the map in relation to Arab presence and also in terms of un-belonging, as the Peddler’s Route Map calls forth the maps of the United States and Syria in the period between 1890 and 1920. Salloum Mokarzel (1881-1952) contributed to the development of the Syrian American press through several Arabic-language newspapers in the early twentieth century. His publications included the 1909 Syrian Business Directory and the Syrian-American Commercial Magazine (1918-26). He ran the Syrian American Press, publishing newspapers, magazines and Arabic-language books, including History of Syrian Trade in the American Migration . He patented an Arabic-language linotype machine in 1910, which produced a notable increase in newspapers and magazines in Arabic printed throughout the Americas, playing a crucial role in connecting Arabic-speaking immigrant communities across borders and sustaining bonds to their homelands, especially in the 1910s-20s. Mokarzel, a modern publicist for Syrian American entrepreneurial and commercial activities, was situated at the intersection of early twentieth-century Syrian-American intellectual culture and commercial ventures, advancing a particular modernist sensibility committed to innovation, productivity, profit and progress. From this perspective one can see the influence on Syrian immigrant formations in the Americas of the nineteenth century Arab nahda , variously translated as Arab awakening or Arab renaissance . The nahda emerged in opposition to a reforming Turkish nationalism imposed on Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Nineteenth-century Arab intellectuals, publishers and journalists, writers and poets were the primary advocates of a
cultural revival associated with the nahda and its modernising impulse, transforming Arabic language and generating a previously non- existent sense of Arab national feeling in the decades prior to WWI. Immigration from the declining Ottoman Empire to an ascendant United States in the late nineteenth century can also be understood as a post- nahda effect. For immigrants like Mokarzel, America was the locus of cultural becoming in opposition to repressive Ottoman rule. For other immigrants, the United States was a place of estrangement. In 1908, Khalil Sakakini, a Palestinian intellectual, wrote in a letter home during his year-long sojourn in the US, ‘that America is worth seeing but is not fit to be a homeland [ la taslah an takun watanan ] for us, for it is a nation of toil, and there is no joy in it.’ In contrast to Sakakani, who returned to Palestine in 1909, Mokarzel embraced the opportunities of modern US business and promoted commercial pursuits as the pathway to belonging. The History of Syrian Trade in the American Migration focuses on Syrian-owned businesses in cities on the east coast of the US and includes dozens of photos of factories, mills, offices and shops in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Images of fashionable men and women in modern well-appointed places of work contrast with the folkish and often racist representations of Syrian peddlers in early twentieth-century American magazines. There are no photos of peddlers in the book, only the Peddler’s Route Map in one of the last sections. Its title reads: ‘Syrian migrants in the United States. Map showing details of the history of Syrian peddlers in the American migration [ mahjar ]’. State names are transliterated into Arabic; major cities are noted; dots represent smaller centres. Three arrows point beyond the United States: north to Canada from New York, south to Mexico from Texas, and to the Caribbean and Latin America from New Orleans. There is no date or attribution to a source on the map itself. Trajectories of travel depicted by the arrows suggest that peddler’s routes most certainly correspond to existing rail or roads traced on maps of the United States.
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on site review 42: atlas :: being in place
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