Arab-American Faces and Voices

Abstract

Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community offers a detailed history of the lives of Arab immigrants in Worcester, Massachusetts. Elizabeth Booshada conducted primary source research, interviewed nearly 200 people, and documented the immigrants’ stories of their families’ lives from 1880-1915. The author’s personal and family connections to the community, in combination with the candid interview excerpts, provide a fascinating and much needed account of a people who survived, thrived in, and helped to create an important part of American society. The book’s main focus is to describe, from the perspectives of elderly immigrants of mainly Christian Arab ancestry, their experiences in the United States. Booshada gives a brief history of the Arab world at the time of their migration, and each chapter provides extensive depictions of their neighborhoods, workplaces, traditions, education, culture, the process of Americanization, and the legacies that they left to their progeny. Importantly, Booshada points out the complex and complicated sociocultural and economic ties that these early sojourners, and eventually settlers, had to the Arab world and the Americas. For example, they traveled far and wide to be with family and to make a living. The book is rich in description, especially regarding the voices of individuals as they remembered the hardships and successes of starting a business, getting married, joining the war effort at the turn of the twentieth century, practicing religion, or becoming American during politically difficult times. One of the book’s main strengths is its great detail about the various streets and buildings in Worcester in which the early immigrants invested, occupied, or built. However, more could be said, for example, about how property, as well as the use of space for business, church, and family, contributed to an Arab and American identity-in-themaking ...