Syrian Textile Workers in the Arab Atlantic, 1890-1934

FAIN: FEL-272668-21

Stacy D. Fahrenthold
Regents of the University of California, Davis (Davis, CA 95618-6153)

Research and writing leading to a book on the development of working-class identity among Syrian textile workers, focused on cities including Lowell, Lawrence, and Boston, Massachusetts and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

This project is a global history of the Syrian working class, from the advent of mass migration to the Great Depression. Examining a generation of textile workers from the Arab Middle East, I argue that the shared experiences of transit/passage, proletarianization, systemic precarity in immigrant neighborhoods, and labor activism generated a uniquely Syrian working-class milieu. The work is situated in three locales, joined by the commercial circuits of the textile industry: Ottoman Syria (Homs, Hama, Mount Lebanon); New England (Lowell, Lawrence, Boston); and Brazil (Sao Paulo). The emergence of Syrian communities in these towns was complemented by the liquidity of labor among them, and Syrian workers (men and women) circulated the Americas in pursuit of higher wages. Whether in Brazil or Boston, Syria or Sao Paulo, Arab textile workers communicated across oceans to strike better working conditions for themselves, developing a cosmopolitan outlook that was authentically working-class.

Associated Products

Unmentionables: smuggling and the Syrian lace trade in the borderlands (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Unmentionables: smuggling and the Syrian lace trade in the borderlands
Abstract: This paper examines the interrelationships between Syrian immigration, the textile industry, and smuggling in the US-Mexico borderlands between 1900 and 1934. Syrian immigration to Mexico increased significantly during this period, driven by the expansion of the Syrian diaspora’s textile industry and by tightening immigration restrictions across the hemisphere. Tracking one network of Syrian lace merchants also suspected of migrant smuggling, the paper lays out how “unmentionable” circuits of labor produced the laces peddlers carried as well as the illegal Syrian immigrant.
Author: Stacy Fahrenthold
Date: 04/29/2022
Location: Newberry Library, Chicago, IL
Primary URL: https://www.newberry.org/calendar/ashley-johnson-bavery-eastern-michigan-university-and-stacy-fahrenthold-university-of-california-davis
Primary URL Description: Event website

Syrian merchants on Madeira Island (Blog Post)
Title: Syrian merchants on Madeira Island
Author: Stacy Fahrenthold
Abstract: Funchal, April 1922—arriving via steamship from New York City that month, Elias Mallouk was met at the port by a heckling crowd, an ominous start to a difficult year. As Madeira’s most prominent exporter of hand embroideries, Mallouk represented the industry in Funchal and abroad. He came to the island with a specific mission: to restructure the industry to favor American exporters, overwhelmingly Syrian immigrants from New York. Mallouk met with the U.S. Consul General, Eells Stillman, before proceeding to the Madeira Embroidery Club, a manufacturers’ association that governed the wages for embroidery workers. Assembling that April, the body ordered an unpopular thirty percent wage reduction, drawing threats of a general strike by the Madeiran women who sewed Mallouk goods in their homes across the island.
Date: 10/14/2022
Primary URL: https://thelausanneproject.com/2022/10/14/fahrenthold/
Blog Title: The Lausanne Project
Website: The Lausanne Project

Finding fraternity thousands of miles from home, in Syrian São Paulo (Blog Post)
Title: Finding fraternity thousands of miles from home, in Syrian São Paulo
Author: Stacy Fahrenthold
Abstract: Men could read philosophy or poetry, or even demand Syrian independence from French imperialism, but just as often they came to learn about job opportunities or simply while away time in the leather armchairs, amid the dark wood paneling and thick tobacco smoke.
Date: 02/25/2022
Primary URL: https://syriauntold.com/2022/02/25/finding-fraternity-thousands-of-miles-from-home-in-syrian-sao-paulo/
Primary URL Description: English
Secondary URL: https://syriauntold.com/2022/03/15/%D8%A3%D9%86%D8%AF%D9%8A%D9%91%D8%A9-%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A%D9%91%D8%A9-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%88-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%88%D9%84%D9%88/
Secondary URL Description: Arabic
Blog Title: Syria Untold
Website: Syria Untold (feature on "Little Syrias" around the world)

Paper Syrians : Migrant Smuggling and the Textile Trade in the US-Mexico Borderlands (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Paper Syrians : Migrant Smuggling and the Textile Trade in the US-Mexico Borderlands
Author: Stacy Fahrenthold
Abstract: Laredo, 1918—at the outset, this was a typical crossing at the Texas border station. A man called Abdelnour appeared before officials at the station, representing himself as a peddler merchant doing business with Syrian textile firms in New York and Mexico City. Asked for papers, Abdelnour handed over two passports, Mexican and French. The first declared Abdelnour was known to the government in Mexico City, and that he was a non-naturalized foreign resident. The second proclaimed that as a Syrian, Abdelnour status as a “French-protected” merchant. Border officials examined the contents of Abdelnour’s suitcase: personal effects, odd lengths of ribbon, and a large sum of cash, no contraband. Meanwhile, he offered them letters of introduction written by two Syrian American silk kimono manufacturers in New York City, explaining he had come to Laredo to meet kimono dealers from those firms. The inspection dragged on; getting impatient, Abdelnour dramatically offered inspectors a second French passport—this one from the French Consulate in New York City—hoping to staged himself as a “known” friend to U.S. allies. And when that did not expedite things, he pushed one more document into the their hands: an old Ottoman passport, which the American official declined. Four passports and two letters of marque: inundated in documents of vouchsafe, the inspectors allowed Abdelnour into Laredo, where he proceeded to buy textile goods for delivery to Mexico before making his return trip the next morning. This border performance was a mundane one, repeated hundreds of times daily at crossing stations along the U.S.-Mexico border. Syrian pack peddlers couriered goods here during and after the First World War, conducting a carrying trade that represented the “final mile" of the mahjar’s transatlantic textile industry. In this border spectacle, Arab merchants and U.S. officials played their roles in a game of "papers please" amid the shifting geopolitics of the First World War.
Date: 11/11/2022
Primary URL: http://www.unine.ch/files/live/sites/histoire/files/shared/histoire/colloques%20et%20cie/2022/20221018-ordinary-ottomans-flyer-A5.pdf
Primary URL Description: Conference Program

Unmentionables Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class (Book)
Title: Unmentionables Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class
Author: Stacy D. Fahrenthold
Editor: Kate Wahl
Abstract: As weavers, garment workers, and peddlers, Syrian immigrants in the Americas fed the early twentieth-century transnational textile trade. These migrants and the commodities they produced—silk, linen, and cotton; lace and embroidery; undergarments and ready-wear clothing—moved along steamship routes from Beirut through Marseille and Madeira to New York City, New England, and Veracruz. As migrants and merchants crisscrossed the Atlantic in pursuit of work, Syrian textile manufacturing expanded across the hemisphere. Unmentionables offers a history of the global textile industry and the Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians who worked in it. Stacy Fahrenthold examines how Arab workers navigated processes of racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation. She writes women workers—the majority of Syrian garment workers—back into US labor history. She also situates the rise of Syrian American industrial elites, who exerted supply chain power to combat labor uprisings, resist unionization, and stake claim to the global textile industry. Critiquing the hegemony of the Syrian peddler in histories of this diaspora, Unmentionables introduces alternative narrators: union activists who led street demonstrations, women garment workers who shut down kimono factories, child laborers who threw snowballs at police, and the diasporic merchant capitalists who contended with all of them.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=37216
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781503641303

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