When Sarah Gualtieri interviewed Vera Tamoush, the daughter of Syrian Christian immigrants to Los Angeles, Tamoush described her father, Mansur Nahra, as Mexican.
How, asked Gualtieri, associate professor of American studies and ethnicity, history and Middle East studies at USC Dornsife, did Nahra, a Syrian migrant, become so identified with being Mexican that his own daughter described him as such? Answering this question involves Gualtieri tracing Nahra’s journey from Lebanon (then a part of greater Syria) to Mexico, and then on to Los Angeles via Texas in 1913.
She asserts that Nahra was a quintessential “step” migrant, making several journeys throughout his lifetime in pursuit of stability and economic prosperity for his family. But how did these multiple migrations shape his identity?
Gualtieri, who interviewed Tamoush for her current research project on the history of Southern California’s Syrian American community, seeks to understand Nahra, and Arab immigrants like him, not merely — as she writes in the introduction to her book — as a Syrian immigrant who ended up in L.A., but also as a man who came to the City of Angels imprinted with experiences in pre-revolutionary Mexico.
“Mansur was a Spanish and Arabic-speaking merchant whose ‘Mexicanness’ may help explain why he ended up in East Los Angeles, the owner of a furniture store that catered principally to a Spanish speaking clientele,” Gualtieri said. “Though he later moved to suburban Downey, he still longed for the rhythms of life in East L.A.
“I became fascinated with this multiplicity of identities.”
Her project, originally focusing on L.A., began to expand outwards to Latin America as she learned how many Syrian migrants arrived in Southern California after first moving to countries there — Argentina and Mexico in particular.
“These Syrian migrants ended up in L.A., but sometimes maintained intricate connections to communities in Latin America where they had once lived,” Gualtieri said.
“I wanted to develop a project that would tell the story of this movement of early Syrian migrants — many of whom came from what became the Republic of Lebanon — to the Los Angeles area but that would also be a window into understanding their connection to multiple spaces they called home,” she said of her research, which was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship.
Breaking stereotypes of the perpetual foreigner
More broadly, Gualtieri is interested in trying to change the perception in which people of Arab origin and descent are portrayed as perpetually foreign and unable to assimilate.
“This perception is so out of sync with the historical record that I want to find a way to tell this story so that we may as educators undo this idea that being both Arab and American is somehow an oxymoron,” she said.