Arab-American Faces and Voices The Origins of an Immigrant Community by Elizabeth Boosahda (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. 288 pages.)

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 ...