April 2024: Arab American Heritage
Last year, in 2023, California passed Assembly Concurrent Resolution No. 58, officially recognizing April as Arab American Heritage Month. This resolution recognizes California’s role in Arab American history as the state with the largest Arab American population - numbering upwards of 700,000 people. Dr. Mahbuba Hammad from the Arab America Foundation and the California State Team Leader emphasized that this permanent resolution “also seeks to humanize a group that has been historically stereotyped and dehumanized. By acknowledging and respecting the rich cultural heritage of Arab Americans, we take a significant step in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion measures across all sectors of society.”
Arab Americans are a group of people with varied religious, political, and ethnic identities from Arab Nations. There are 22 Arab Nations in the Middle East and North Africa - Algeria, Bahrain, the Comoro Islands, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Yemen.
Arab Americans in California have long significantly contributed to our region's cultural, social, and labor history, though official state and municipal recognition of these contributions is more recent. In 2022, the City of Anaheim officially recognized the district of Little Arabia – making it the first formally recognized Arab cultural district in the nation. Two years later, plans were approved to create freeway signage directing visitors to the district. This March, a town in Tulare County broke ground on a park named to memorialize Nagi Daifallah, a Yemeni labor activist and farmworker who was killed by the Kern County Police Department while resisting the harassment of fellow UFW activists in 1973. The resources below demonstrate the long and rich heritage of Arab Americans, while these recent events show that Arab American history is being made every day in California.
Online Sources to Check Out this Month:
- This primary source from California Revealed includes an Arabic translation of the United Farm Workers publication "El Malcriado.” This source demonstrates the role Arab Americans played in the United Farm Workers (UFW).
- The Faris and Yamna Naff Arab American Collection is available through the Smithsonian Institution’s Online Virtual Archives. It is composed of research by Dr. Alixa Naff (1920-2013) on the early Arab immigrant experience in the U.S. from 1880 to World War II, and it includes oral histories and photographs that would serve as excellent primary sources for classroom instruction.
- Every April, PBS shares a list of films and documentaries that celebrate Arab American history and heritage. You can stream this year’s picks here.
- The American Historical Association hosted a webinar on December 7th, Approaches to Teaching Israel-Palestine: AHA History Behind the Headlines. The recording is now available for free online. Several historians came together to discuss how both K-12 and university educators can teach the history of Israel-Palestine responsibly and best promote student engagement. Of particular interest for teachers might be the primary sources they mention, some of which are listed at the end of the summary.
- The Arab American National Museum, the first and only Arab American history and heritage museum in the United States, offers free activities and resources for educators that help teachers utilize the experiences and voices of Arab Americans for classroom instruction. Their site also features a virtual gallery that would be a great classroom walk-through activity.
- The Center for Arab Narratives provides accessible and accurate research on Arab Americans and the Arab American experience to academics, policymakers, and community members. Check out some of their featured narratives and blog posts!
Featured Teaching Resources:
This seventh-grade inquiry set from the CHSSP discusses the vibrant interactions that took place in the medieval Arab world. Although this lesson focuses on the Middle Ages, it provides important sources and information on the history of Islam that can help students greater understand their Muslim peers.
History Blueprint- Coldwar - Hot Spots Research Project
In this lesson from CHSSP’s History Blueprint: The Cold War unit, students study the relationship between Cold War principles and practices through individual, group, and guided research. Students will produce a newspaper about a hotspot in the Cold War, in other words, a specific site where the conflict between the Americans and Soviets played out on the ground – and through the interests – of a third nation. Through this, students get an in-depth look at Algeria; specifically, the Algerian War for Independence (1954-1962), and how native Algerian nationalists and writers like Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre inspired liberation activists worldwide.
History Blueprint- Coldwar- Decolonization
This lesson, also from the History Blueprint: The Cold War unit, focuses on a second great historical movement in the post-World War II era: decolonization. The Cold War did not cause the end of the colonial empires, but new nations became entangled in the dispute between East and West. Students learn about decolonization movements in the Middle East during the Cold War (the Arab Cold War), using the Suez Canal as a case study.
Recent Scholarship:
Breaking Broken English: Black-Arab Literary Solidarities and the Politics of Language, Michelle Hartman (2020)
From Syracuse University Press:
“Breaking Broken English shows how language is the location where literary and poetic beauty meet the political in creative work. Hartman draws out thematic connections between Arabs/Arab Americans and Black Americans around politics and culture and also highlights the many artistic ways these links are built. She shows how political and cultural ideas of solidarity are written in creative texts and emphasizes their potential to mobilize social justice activists in the United States and abroad in the ongoing struggle for the liberation of Palestine.”
Arab American Women: Representation and Refusal, edited by Michael W. Suleiman, Suad Joseph, Louise Cainkar (2021)
From Syracuse University Press:
“Arab American women have played an essential role in shaping their homes, their communities, and their country for centuries. Their contributions, often marginalized academically and culturally, are receiving long- overdue attention with the emerging interdisciplinary field of Arab American women’s studies. The collected essays in this volume capture the history and significance of Arab American women, addressing issues of migration, transformation, and reformation as these women invented occupations, politics, philosophies, scholarship, literature, arts, and, ultimately, themselves. “
Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies, Edited by Louise Cainkar, Pauline Homsi Vinson, Amira Jarmakani (2022)
From Syracuse University Press:
“Both a summative description of the field and an exploration of new directions, this multidisciplinary reader addresses issues central to the fields of Arab American, US Muslim, and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) American studies. Taking a broad conception of the Americas, this collection simultaneously registers and critically reflects upon major themes in the field, including diaspora, migration, empire, race and racialization, securitization, and global South solidarity. The collection will be essential reading for scholars in Arab/SWANA American studies, Asian American studies, and race, ethnicity, and Indigenous studies, now and well into the future.”
Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling, Charlotte Karem Albrecht (2023)
From the University of California Press:
“In Possible Histories, Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a site for revealing how dominant ideas about sexuality are imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Karem Albrecht marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their interdependent networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. Possible Histories conceptualizes this profession, and its place in narratives of Arab American history, as a "queer ecology" of laboring practices, intimacies, and knowledge production. This book ultimately proposes a new understanding of the long arm of Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of ways of navigating US racial systems.”
Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California, Sarah M. A. Gualtieri (2019)
From Stanford University Press:
“Sarah M. A. Gualtieri reconstructs the early Syrian connections through California, Texas, Mexico, and Lebanon. She reveals the Syrian interests in the defense of the Mexican American teens charged in the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder, in actor Danny Thomas's rise to prominence in LA's Syrian cultural festivals, and in more recent activities of the grandchildren of immigrants to reclaim a sense of Arabness. Gualtieri reinscribes Syrians into Southern California history through her examination of powerful images and texts, augmented with interviews with descendants of immigrants. Telling the story of how Syrians helped forge a global Los Angeles, Arab Routes counters a long-held stereotype of Arabs as outsiders and underscores their longstanding place in American culture and in interethnic coalitions, past and present.”
Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class, Stacy D. Fahrenthold (Forthcoming, December 2024)
From Stanford University Press:
“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.”
Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return Before 1948, Nadim Bawlsa (2022)
From Stanford University Press:
“Tens of thousands of Palestinians migrated to the Americas in the final decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. By 1936, an estimated 40,000 Palestinians lived outside geographic Palestine. Transnational Palestine is the first book to explore the history of Palestinian immigration to Latin America, the struggles Palestinian migrants faced to secure Palestinian citizenship in the interwar period, and the ways in which these challenges contributed to the formation of a Palestinian diaspora and to the emergence of Palestinian national consciousness.”
Picture Books (#KatesBookClub):
Eleven Words for Love: A Journey Through Arabic Expressions of Love by Randa Abdel-Fattah. A family has fled their homeland in search of safety in another country, carrying a single suitcase. As their journey unfolds, the oldest child reflects on the special contents of that suitcase: photo albums that evoke eleven of many names for love in Arabic. A scrapbook of a family embracing an unknown future even as they honor the past, connecting immigration and the refugee experience.
Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine by Hannah Moushabeck. Three young girls eagerly look forward to their father’s bedtime stories of a faraway homeland — Palestine. Through their father's memories, the Old City of Jerusalem comes to life: the sounds of juice vendors beating rhythms with brass cups, the smell of argileh drifting through windows, and the sight of doves flapping their wings toward home. The daughters feel love for a place they have never been, a home they cannot visit. But they know that through his memories, they will always return.
The Kindest Red: A Story of Hijab and Friendship by Ibithaj Muhammad and SK Ali. It's picture day and Faizah can't wait to wear her special red dress with matching hair ribbons, passed down from her mother and sister. Faizah's teacher starts the day by asking her students to envision the kind of world they want, inspiring Faizah and her friends to spend the day helping one another in ways large and small. But when it's time for sibling pictures, Faizah realizes that she and her older sister, Asiya, don't match like her classmates do with their siblings. With help from her classmates, Faizah finds that acts of kindness can come back to you in unexpected ways. Absolutely adored this book that highlights themes of identity and pride. My favorite line? "She writes all our answers on the board." Inclusive and touching.
Lailah’s Lunchbox by Reem Faruqi. Lailah is excited to finally be old enough to participate in Ramadan and the Muslim month of fasting. Explaining why she is not eating lunch is trickier. Classroom-friendly way to introduce Ramadan to students. Could be paired with Fry Bread, Everybody Eats Rice, and Luli and the Language of Tea that all highlight cultural foods and traditions.
Maryam’s Magic: The Story of Mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani by Megan Reid. Maryam loved school, especially her classes in reading and writing. But she did not like math. Numbers were nowhere near as interesting as the bold, adventurous characters she found in books. When Maryam discovered a new genre of storytelling, geometry, numbers became shapes, making every equation a brilliant story waiting to be told. As an adult, Maryam became a professor, inventing new formulas to solve some of math's most complicated puzzles. The first woman—and the first Iranian—to win the Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest award. Maryam's obituary from Stanford, where she was a math professor, can be found here.
Muslim Girls Rise: Inspirational Champions of Our Time by Saira Mir. True stories of nineteen unstoppable Muslim women of the twenty-first century who have risen above challenges, doubts, and sometimes outright hostility to blaze trails in a wide range of fields. Whether it was the culinary arts, fashion, sports, government, science, entertainment, education, or activism, these women never took “no” for an answer or allowed themselves to be silenced. Through short, information-rich biographies and vibrant illustrations, Muslim Girls Rise introduces readers to the diverse and important contributions Muslim women have made.
Salat in Secret by Jamilah Thompkins-Bieglow. A beautiful story of community, family, and acceptance. Seven is the age when Muslim children are encouraged to pray, and Muhammad is determined to do all five daily prayers on time. But one salat (prayer) occurs during the school day--and he's worried about being seen praying at school. Nice story about identity and acceptance. Perfect for elementary school.
These Olive Trees by Aya Ghanameh. Oraib loves the olive trees that grow outside the refugee camp where she lives. Each harvest, she and her mama pick the small fruits and she eagerly stomps on them to release their golden oil. Olives have always tied her family to the land, as Oraib learns from the stories Mama tells of a home before war. Classroom opportunity to share the life of a Palestinian refugee family.