Sarah Gualtieri's Arab Routes presents the historian and scholar of the Syrian mahjar (diaspora) with a theoretical challenge: to heed both the obvious and hidden notations of archival records. In a departure from her first book about the history of Syrians in the United States and their relationship to whiteness, Gualtieri's Arab Routes offers not so much a comprehensive history of Syrian Los Angeles as it does an exploration of alternative routes to reading the archives of the Syrian diaspora. The book proactively employs the concept of the palimpsest to push beyond the standard narrative about the diaspora, which often centers around Ellis Island and New York's Little Syria. In this standard narrative, Syrian migrants leaving Bilad al-Sham in the late-19th century departed Beirut, oftentimes transferred at Marseilles, finally arriving on the eastern shores of the United States. The story is one of both assimilation, and inversely, of a tendency towards inwardness: of peddlers becoming businessmen, of aspiring journalists establishing Arabic-language newspapers, of Syrians becoming both successful as well as creating ethnic enclaves and giving meaning to the diasporic “Syrian” ethnicity—a category that encompassed Arabic speakers of various orientations from modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. But here Gualtieri offers a different approach: by peeling away at the layered documentary and oral evidence of Syrians from Los Angeles—a place that as the book notes currently contains the largest population of Middle Easterners in the United States—we can come to appreciate a history of Syrians in the United States that is much more multidimensional and multi-ethnic, and which connects us to overlooked migrant routes and geographies that connected Latin America to the US Southwest and Pacific, forging what Gualtieri advances as Arab Latinidad.
The reader might wonder what a palimpsest approach looks like. The book draws from an “archival base from California, Texas, Syria, Lebanon, and Mexico,” that goes beyond the formal structure of the archive to include US naturalization records, Syrian-Lebanese business directories, popular films and literature, family papers and letters, as well as oral histories and interviews (pp. 11–12). The seemingly disconnected nature of the archives, is however, central to both the argument as well as methodology advanced in the book. A central theme running through the various chapters is the disconnect between history telling and the archives. Yet, in considering the theme of the palimpsest—of layered evidence—Gualtieri unearths these contradictions, using them to highlight Arab solidarities with other marginalized groups in the United States, especially as it pertained to Latinx groups. In Chapter 1, “The Syrian Pacific,” Gualtieri charts the itinerary of Mansur Nahra from Mount Lebanon to Boyle Heights, Los Angeles (circa 1913) by way of the US–Mexico border. His story is revealing of more than “step migration,” but the ways in which his multiple stops inflected his identity with multiple meanings. Mansur was conversant in both Spanish and English, his daughter considered him “Mexican,” and his immigration papers—while classifying him as “Syrian”—sometimes recorded his name as Manuel. This multilayered excavation, Gualtieri contends, “embraces the complexities and fluidity of identity that are, ironically, found on closer scrutiny of the records of the state that are too often analyzed in linear and teleological ways” (p. 21). While the story of Syrian migration has generally tended to be assimilationist, Gualtieri reads Mansur's records in such a way as to reveal a man who had to renounce his “legal rights with Mexico,” and who continued to maintain his connections to Mexicanness throughout his life (p. 21).
By peeling away at the layers of historical narrative and archive and reading them in conjunction with one another, Gualtieri contributes to an impressive new reading of the memorialized interethnic work of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, a Los Angeles-based community organization that supported the 12 Mexican-American defendants suspected of murder in a 1942 trial that set the stage for the Zoot Suit Riots in 1943. In Chapter 2, “Murder at Sleepy Lagoon,” Gualtieri brings to light the neglected and whitewashed role of lawyer George Shibley. As she points out, Shibley's work on the trial is underappreciated in both the scholarly work on the trial as well as its memorialization in the 1978 Luis Valdez play, Zoot Suit, in which references to the lawyer's Arab background disappear in the final draft. In her retelling of Shibley's defense of the four Mexican-American defendants accused of murder, Gualtieri shows how Shibley understood his Arab background as informing his solidarity with the Mexican-American defendants, and later his advocacy on behalf of Palestine and gay rights. By resurrecting his story, which as Gualtieri points out is there in the archives, the chapter shows how a history of Syrian Los Angeles maps out in proximity to Mexican Los Angeles.
Traces of cross-solidarities emerge in the other chapters of Arab Routes. Chapter 3, “Meeting at the Mahrajan,” for example, reassesses an otherwise shallow reading of Arab-American festivals as apolitical events reflective of a pre-1967 generation that Edward Said dismissed as “politically conservative, interested in seeing themselves in some harmless folkloric light” (quoted in Arab Routes, p. 78). Alongside an analysis of Lebanese actor Danny Thomas’ career, Gualtieri instead reads the Hollywood-adjacent mahrajrans, or Arab festivals, as “sites of community formation, image fashioning, and marketing that rendered Syrian and Lebanese culture familiar to multiple viewing publics” (p. 75). Chapter 4, “Fragments of the Past,” draws on the author's interviews with granddaughters of 20th-century Syrian migrants, showing how their grandmothers’ ethnic background and histories later informed their travels to the Middle East, and how this then charted their path to Arabness and to their “rearrival” to California coalition politics. The chapter makes a compelling case for how intergenerational readings can produce richer understandings of Arab-American history.
The final chapter, “Palimpsests in Iconic California,” draws the reader in with a captivating photograph. Set in Muscle Beach, it features acrobats in action against a backdrop of Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper clad storefronts; in the corner, we see a sign for Khoury and Auad Café. Rather than considering the presence of this café as “incidental to the photo, a marginal notation in a much grander story of the constitution of California beach culture,” the chapter “reinserts them as central to the conditions that helped produce that culture” (p. 112). The rest of the chapter weaves together a reading of these photographs, Rabee Jaber's novel Amerika, and oral histories that Arab-American historian Alixa Naff collected in Los Angeles in 1962 to push against the sterilized “peddler to proprietor” narrative of the Syrian migrant (which Naff herself helped shape in the earliest historiographies of the mahjar). By excavating the Syrian Pacific, Gualtieri revises the “truncated” oral histories in the Naff archives, and like Jaber's novel, brings Syrian migrants into conversation with other racialized groups in California.
By shedding light on characters who exuded “Arab Latinidad,” who understood their Arabness alongside their connections to Latin America whether through their own journeys or those of their grandparents, Arab Routes makes a significant and new contribution to our understanding of the diaspora and its transnationalism. This understanding moves beyond the liminality of Syrianess in relationship to whiteness as contended in her first book, to one in which Arab migrants also understood themselves to be in some cases Mexican. By employing a layered reading of subtle notations and clues, Gualtieri offers scholars and students of the diaspora new possibilities to explore. While Gualtieri gives the reader an explanation of her use of the term “Syrian” in the footnotes of her first chapter, the book nevertheless identifies many as “Syrian” even after World War II made the states of Syria and Lebanon a reality that in turn informed Syrian-Lebanese identity politics. One possibility for further inquiry is then to what extent identification with either Syria or Lebanon affected the specifics of Arab-American politics. Additionally, hinted at in the author's use of the term “Syrian Pacific,” is what relationship to Asianness and Asian migrants these same Arab Californians may have had. In conclusion, Arab Routes is not only a must-read for those interested in mahjar history and transnationalism but is a shining example of how the marriage of critical ethnic studies and migration history (by prioritizing movement over settlement) can produce more nuanced studies that take into account multiple registers of identity.
