Between the 1870s and the 1930s some 120,000 immigrants left the Eastern Mediterranean and traveled to the U.S., with another 220,000 departing for Central and South America and landing in destinations like Argentina and Brazil. These men, women and children, peasants and tradesmen, factory workers, teachers and merchants came from across “Greater Syria,” an Ottoman province that today encompasses Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine/Israel. We do not know for certain their religious distribution but they included Antiochian Orthodox, Druzes, Jews, Maronite Catholics, Sunni and Shi’a Muslims.
Their sense of self was located within villages and towns like Homs, Bayt Meri, Bethlehem, or Rashaya, and distilled through their experiences of family and religion. Ethnicity and nationality were meaningless to the great majority of them. In other words, when they left they were neither Lebanese nor Syrian, Phoenician nor Arab. However, their sojourns into the racially charged American social, legal and political landscape forced them to re-define themselves in terms of ethnic and national identity. Moreover, World War I and the subsequent division of their homelands into nations under the tutelage of French colonial power, engaged them in spirited—and sometimes violent—debates about who they were and where they came from. The result of these various forces differed but overlapped, and changed identities that were more fluid than fixed, and easier to use as labels than to substantially define.
As these immigrants traveled across the Mediterranean and Atlantic to “Amirka” they were required to have an ethnic/national identity if they were to gain entry to the place that they hoped would make them a handsome sum of money and afford them new opportunities. Ship companies’ clerks and Ellis Island inspectors were not interested in the intimate world of small villages like ‘Ayn Ibl (in South Lebanon), or even the geographically distinct and rapidly growing city of Beirut. Rather, until 1899 these company employees and state functionaries jotted down “Turkey in Asia” in their registers next to the migrant’s name, and after 1900 replaced it with “Syria” for most entries while keeping the earlier term in some cases. Thus, upon entrance into the US, immigrants acquired a different and larger identity—“Syrian”—than the ones they had left with. The label “Syria” made sense geographically as a designation for where they came from, but it also represented an emerging political project and idea among the educated urban elites of their homelands.