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 Arabicspeaking 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 westwardflowing stream.

Indee d, 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 (Arabicspeaking 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.

The Peddler's Route Map, in Arabic, 1920. Sallum Mukarzil, Tarikh as-Tijara al-Suriyya fi-lMuhajara al-Amrikiyya. New York: al-Matha'a al-Suriyya al-Amrikiyya, 1921.

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 nonexistent 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 postnahda 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.

Cartographic representations of the continental United States proliferated, especially with increased automobile travel and the continual expansion of roadways based upon the old trails of a westward expansion fuelled by the ideology of Manifest Destiny. In the early twentieth century, American automobile organisations lobbied the government to build a continental highway system. In 1911, the International Good Roads Congress met in Chicago and endorsed a transcontinental route from New York City through Chicago to Kansas City, then along the historic Santa Fe Trail to Phoenix and Los Angeles. The National Highway Association printed a map in 1914 that proposed 50,000 miles of national highways to facilitate coast-to-coast travel as an alternative to the Panama Canal route. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Good Roads Act, making federal funds available for building highways. A L Westgard, a surveyor for the railroads in the nineteenth century, was considered ‘the premier ‘pathfinder’ of the early automobile days’; he was later appointed a Special Agent of the Office of Public Roads. The American Automobile Association published booklets and maps based on the notes that Westgard made during his transcontinental travels along the Old Trail Roads – his ‘Motor Trails from Atlantic to Pacific’ in a June 1919 issue of The Independent shows a close approximation of the four major routes from east to west on the Peddler’s Route Map. A national highway network would facilitate touring the country and visiting historic sites. Although the railroad played a crucial role in the colonial settlement of the western frontier, the building of a federal highway system was the basis for consolidating the nation.

Emerging from WWI as a rising world power, the territory of the United States came together through the national network of road and rail; conversely the homeland of Syrians was dismembered after the war. The geo-cultural and ethno-national significance of the term Syrian and the political geography of Syria were dramatically altered in the decades following the war. The 1906 Lippincott’s New Gazetteer gives the following detailed description (paraphrased) of pre-war Syria: ‘a country … forming part of the Turkish Empire. It extends eastward from the Mediterranean Sea to the river Euphrates and the Syrian Desert, … southward from the Alma-Dagh … to the frontiers of Egypt (Isthmus of Suez). ... It comprises the vilayet of Syria, … Damascus, the vilayet of Beirut, the SW. part of the vilayet of Aleppo, and the mutessarrifliks of Jerusalem and the Lebanon. Palestine is included in Syria ...The designation Syria is sometimes used in a wider sense ... The country embraces nearly the entire E. coast of the great eastern arm of the Mediterranean Sea’. These lands in Arabic were called Bilad ash-Sham; in English, Syria, as in Hitti’s book, The Syrians in America, or in Mokarzel’s The History of Syrian Trade in the American Migration. The postwar remapping of Syria was based on the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between the British and French who set the international borders of the contemporary nation-state of Syria, separating it from the territories that would become Lebanon, Palestine, and Transjordan. Lebanon, a narrow coastal strip along the Eastern Mediterranean (blue on the map) was detached from Syria (reduced to Area A on the map), which were subject to separate French colonial administrations. Ultimately, Palestine (brown on the map) and Transjordan (Area B) were also cut off from Syria and placed under British colonial administration.

Although turn-of-the-century Arabic-speaking immigrants to the United States self-identified as Syrians, Hitti noted that, ‘Before 1899 the Syrians, as such, did not exist for the United States immigration authorities, having been hitherto classified with Armenians, Greeks, Arabs and Turks under Turkey in Asia.’ Subsequently, the term Syrian was reserved specifically for those people living in Area A, the future borders of the Syrian Arab Republic. In early twentieth-century USA,

'Arab' referred specifically to the people residing in the Arabian Peninsula. It is only in the 1940s that the ethnic category of Arab American came into use, and more widely claimed in the post-1960s era through participation in the civil rights movement and post-WWII Pan-Arab anti-colonial politics.

Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916. This map was a proposal that influenced the border settlements of 1921. In the context of ongoing post-WWI disputes, Syrians resisted partition, the Repulic of Turkey asserted itself, and the newly established Soviet Union refused to cooperate with Imperial powers. The border of the British and French Mandate territories have now solidified, the colonial carve-up of historic Syria conditioning politics in the region since the 1920s.

Historical accounts of Arabic-speaking immigrants emphasise peddling as their primary occupation – a common-sense explanation for the dispersal of Syrians across the United States, the peddler thesis.

The peddler was such a pervasive figure of the Arab other that he appears in literary works as a pseudo-exotic persona. Glenn Ward Dresbach’s 1924 poem 'The Syrian Peddler' is thoroughly orientalist in its structuring of the tension between the stealth peddler and the men hard at work in the fields, and its reliance on romance between the peddler and a farm girl. The peddler is an illusionist, who 'Quickly spread his wares upon the floor,/Peddler-wise'. 'Brightcolored silks and laces billowed out/in airy grace and skillful hands', which mesmerise the naïve girl. The cunning Syrian peddler is the seducer, and the lonely farm girl is his potential victim. Here is not just the pernicious othering, but reductive over-emphasis on peddling, neglecting the greater number of Syrians employed in other occupations, notably the many women in the textile mills of the US northeast. In the 1960s, Arab American folklorists proposed the peddler thesis, the pursuit of untapped markets in the interior of the USA to explain the spread of Syrians beyond urban centres and more importantly to recover the peddler. The peddler thesis asserted belonging in the wider country redefining as an origin story a stigmatised aspect of Arab American history. Rather than presenting the Syrian peddler as a beggar, a huckster, or a cheat, Arab Americans have reclaimed the peddler as a tireless worker who courageously ventured into the heartland of America with little more than a pack of wares and dogged determination, laying the foundation for all the Little Syrias of twentieth-century American cities.

For twenty-first century Arab Americans the Peddler’s Route Map is a visual representation of Arab migration contemporaneous with the spread and settlement of Arabic-speaking immigrants across the United States. The map is a confident cultural self-representation of Arabness at time when Syrian immigrants had achieved public presence throughout the territorial expanse of the nation. The map indicates the extent of early twentieth-century Arabic language across the country transforming the United States into a place where Arabness fits within the borders of the nation, a testament to cultural belonging, communicated from the past to the present. This proof of historic presence translates across time into a certificate of contemporary Arab-American belonging.

However, presence does not necessarily produce a sense of belonging—that seamless correspondence between the self and a place, or an unquestioned relationship between cultural identity and social space. Implicit in the notion of belonging is an ethics of possession – a place belongs to people, and these specific people belong in that place. Immigrant narratives are always about unbelonging: dislocation from a place of belonging and dispossession of one's belongings.

Postscript

Sam Hallick was my maternal grandfather; his Arabic given name was Hussein Shousher. The family knew that he had lived in South Dakota, that he had married twice during his twenty-year stay in the US, that his second wife in the US was Ayshi Jabbara from the town of Joub Jannine, and that Sam Hallick and Ayshi Jabbara had an American-born son, named Mahamed S. Hallick (aka Mike). An online image of a gravestone in Sioux Falls, South Dakota discovered by one of my brothers displays an epitaph reading ‘Ashey, Wife of Sam Hallick, June 1886-Jan 21, 1919’ with Quranic inscriptions in Arabic. This photo of the gravestone has great significance for our extended family and calls forth our not-so-distant immigrant past. The Sam Hallick of Sioux Falls narrative is both a sentimental retelling of family folklore and a snapshot of a significant modern Arab Muslim immigrant presence in early twentieth-century South Dakota. Sam Hallick spent the first two decades of the twentieth century in the United States. Mostly lost to history, available information speaks only to his years in South Dakota from roughly 1909 to 1920. He was literate in Arabic and English, successful in business, and had a modern sense of fashion and technology, but he left no written account of his experiences in the United States.

If he kept a journal or sent letters home, they have yet to be found. There is no record of his port of entry and there is some uncertainty in the public record about his year of entry: 1901 or 1902. His naturalization papers have not been located, and the public record is silent on his first eight or nine years in the United States. Before settling in South Dakota in 1909 at the age of 24 or 25, there is no confirmed documentation of his existence in the United States, an unnarrated life that cannot be fully assembled. Fragments include two photos of Sam Hallick in his Sioux Falls stores, several professional portraits of him alone and with family members, a small portrait photo of his first wife, Jessie Wayne, commercial ads and personal announcements in the Sioux Fall’s Argus Leader, a Security National Bank account book showing substantial deposits in 1920, a watch fob and chain, and a handful of official records, attesting to his residency in South Dakota from 1909 to 1920. There is also documentation of his two marriages, the death of his first wife in 1910, the birth of a son in 1917, the death of his second wife in 1919, and his ultimate departure from the US in 1920.

For the 1910 Census, Sam Hallick lived in Clark, South Dakota; the record indicates that he was born in 1886 in Turkey Asia/Syria and arrived in the US in 1901. He was a naturalised US citizen, a widower, the head of household and a grocer living in a boarding house in Clark with 'two brothers' and a brother-in-law. Sam Hallick married Jessie Wayne in Coddington, South Dakota in 1909; both were 25 years old. Only a few months after they married, Jessie died, most likely from tuberculosis. Sometime, probably not long after Jessie’s death, Sam and his brothers moved to Sioux Falls, parting company with the Waynes. The first appearance of Sam Hallick in Sioux Falls is in the 1913 city directory, which lists his business as the Hallick & Ramaden confectionary on Main Street. He was associated with other retail ventures in Sioux Falls and neighbouring Canton: the Snow Ball Fruit Store (1916), the Temple Grocery (1916), and the Basket Grocery (1919), all in the centre of Sioux Falls’ prime business district.

He was doing very well in the summer of 1920, just before his departure from the United States. In June 1920, he made a deposit of $12,197 (equal to $382,229.59 in 2022 values) in the Security National Bank of Sioux Falls. Sam Hallick appears to have remade himself in the mould of the modern American man, transcending the markers of cultural difference that distinguish the Arabic-speaking immigrant from the English-speaking native-born Euro-American. His situation in South Dakota is in many respects representative of the numerous Arabic-speaking immigrants who settled in the United States, whose legacies can still be felt in cities such as Sioux Falls, the name of which remains a reminder of the colonisation of Indigenous Peoples. Ottoman Syrians entered the scene of US colonialism at the turn of the century as an alien third party and despite non-European foreign origins, as part of the merchant class in a booming provincial city, Sam Hallick and other Syrian immigrants became circumstantial participants in modern American settler colonialism.

Upon his return to Lebanon in 1921, as Hussein Shousher carrying a laissez-passer from the French Embassy in New York, he entered his homeland as a colonial subject of a European power. In the post-WWI era, his ancestral village of Qaraoun in the Beqa’a Valley was assigned to the French as part of the newly created Mandate of Lebanon. As a 1901 immigrant to the United States, Sam Hallick achieved full citizenship, but on both sides of his twenty-year residency in the United States – before he left Qaraoun and after he returned, he was subject to Ottoman imperial rule and later to the French mandate authorities: Turkey (Asia) Syrian, US citizen and French colonial subject, he died in 1932, fourteen years before Lebanon achieved national independence from France. My family is in North America – belonging to Little Syria communities in Toledo, Ohio and London, Ontario—not because Sam Hallick immigrated to the United States, but because he returned to his home village in the Beqa’a Valley.

Salah D Hassan's areas of research are modern imperialism, anticolonial movements and Arab American history. He has produced two films: Death of an Imam (2010) and Migrations of Islam. He teaches at Michigan State University.