Historians have scrutinised the racial classifications of Arab immigrants in the census, in immigration documents and in early‐twentieth‐century naturalisation cases. However, recent scholarship has shown that other archives – ones that do not focus on interactions with the law – reveal a different process of Arab‐American racialisation. This article contends that looking in other archival spaces, specifically the US social welfare archive, shows how ideas about gender, sexual and class difference constituted early Arab‐American racialisation. Social welfare reformers in institutional settings, including the International Institute of Boston, the National Conference of Social Work and the pages of the social work periodical The Survey, systematically linked Syrian labouring practices with notions of dependency, sexual and gender deviance, and Orientalist difference. Syrian women were racialised through their participation in the peddling economy – a network of peddlers, suppliers and domestic labourers that sustained a widespread profession of the early Syrian American community. Syrian women's labouring practices conflicted with white middle‐class femininity and posed a threat to Syrian claims of whiteness. This analysis demonstrates the centrality of gender, sexuality and class to studies of early Arab America and demonstrates how Arab migrant women's labouring practices affected their communities’ standing in the American context.
Alixa Naff's book Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience is a foundational text for Arab American studies. Becoming American centered the voices of first- and second-generation Arab Americans through Naff's extensive use of oral histories. In large part due to Naff's work, pack peddling has had a central place in Arab American historical narratives as being the key to the early Syrian immigrants' integration into US society. This article shows how the claim that peddling facilitated assimilation is dependent upon certain ideological currents regarding race, class, gender, and sexuality. Then, I situate Naff's work within the context of US immigration history and liberal multiculturalism. I revisit the importance of Naff's work in order to show how the study of race, gender, class, and sexuality is crucial for understanding early Arab American history.
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