Ottoman History Podcast - Zeinab's Odyssey: Gender, Mobility, and the Mahjar

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

Episode 478 with Randa Tawil hosted by Chris Gratien How do social categories like gender and race impact migrant trajectories as they move through different imperial, national, and liminal spaces? In this episode, we explore this question through the incredible journey of Zeinab Ameen, one of many Syrian migrants featured in the work of our guest Randa Tawil. Zeinab Ameen was born in late Ottoman Lebanon. Like hundreds of thousands of other people of her generation in the Ottoman Empire, she and her family decided to emigrate to America during the early 20th century. The result was a tale of tribulation that spans more than three decades. In telling Zeinab’s story, we’ll visit a number of other global ports, including Marseille, Liverpool, New York City, and Veracruz. We’ll also visit both land borders of the United States--the Canadian border and the Mexican border, as well as the Midwest, one of the great centers of the Syrian-American mahjar. « Click for More »

Hey, hey, Dan, have we pressed record? Yeah, we've been recording. Okay, we've been recording. This is the Ottoman History Podcast, and I'm Chris Grayton. In this episode, we'll be hearing from Renda Tawil. She's an assistant professor of women and gender studies at Texas Christian University, and she recently received her doctorate from the Department of American Studies at Yale University. She's currently working on a book project about migrants from greater Syria

during the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. Tawil's work focuses specifically on the experience of spaces in between the homeland and migrants' various destinations in the interconnected Arab diaspora known as the Mahjar. I started grad school right at the same time that there was this mass movement from Syria into Europe, right? And we all saw that in the headlines. We all saw people traveling across the Mediterranean, walking through Europe. And it really made me think differently about migration, about what happens when you do a migrant-centered history. Migrants' decisions about where they finally end up are not the same as when they're actually

taking the journey. We saw this. We saw migrants, you know, enter into Greece, and then depending on what country had particular borders open, they go there, and then maybe they have to actually move and go somewhere else. So suddenly national categories of, or sort of a national analysis of migration doesn't really make sense. And in fact, it's national laws that are actually producing the type of migrants that are entering countries. Witnessing that, it really helped me think through the way that the U.S. kind of narrates its history of migration and actually how unhelpful that is in thinking about migrants and in thinking about them politically. Renda Tawil uses mobility as a framework for examining the construction of race and gender among migrants from the first generations of people to leave greater Syria for the Americas, Europe, and Africa. In this episode, we're not going to talk so much about that broader story.

You can look forward to her book for that. Instead, we're going to focus on what Tawil really wanted to talk about when we spoke at the beginning of this fall. The story of Zeynep. She really, I became obsessed with her. So I would love to tell her story. It's really wild. There are parts that are applicable to many people and then there it is kind of just an insane story in and of itself. I'm pretty used to fellow historians going on and on about a story from the archives. I've done it two more times than I can count. But the significance of these archival gems is usually lost on the uninitiated or uninterested listener who lacks the full context.

Zainab's story isn't one of those stories. story isn't one of those stories. Zainab Amin was born in late Ottoman Lebanon. Like hundreds of thousands of other people of her generation in the Ottoman Empire, she and her family decided to emigrate to America. The result was a tale of tribulation that spans more than three decades. In telling Zainab's story, we won't spend much time in Lebanon or the port of Beirut from which she departed, but we'll visit a number of other global ports, including Marseille, Liverpool, New York City, and Veracruz. We'll also visit both land borders of the United States, that is the Canadian border and the Mexican border, as well as the Midwest, one of the great centers of the Syrian-American diaspora.

I'll hand it over to Renda. So her story starts pretty typically. Zainab was in her 20s, had a seven-year-old son, and she and her husband, Mahmoud, decided to migrate to the U.S. to start a boarding house in Michigan City, Indiana. So like most migrants, they traveled from Beirut through Marseille. To go from Beirut to Marseille, the boats would actually go down at the Suez Canal to the port of Alexandria and then up to Marseille, which is different than, let's say, if you were coming from Italy or Greece, where you would take the northern route of the Mediterranean.

Marseilles in the late 19th and early 20th century had a lot of anxiety about ships coming from Egypt to Marseilles. They were very worried about them carrying disease, cholera in particular. It's really interesting. There are these international sanitary conventions that are happening in Europe at the time where they're trying to trace cholera because, of course, yes, cholera is a horrible disease that had many outbreaks in Europe. And so these conventions, which were mostly from European powers, find that cholera is endemic to India. They believe that it's actually through kind of Indian lasciviousness and their lifestyle that makes cholera travel. So through these

pilgrimages people are doing through India, and then actually through the Hajj. So we see that in these international sanitary conferences, they're developing this theory that it is through the Hajj that Indians, they go to Mecca, and then in Mecca, all of these different people are meeting, and then it travels through there. But at the same time, they're racializing this. They're pathologizing it, that it's because of Muslims kind of they party too much, they drink too much, and then they spread this disease. And of course, you know, this is so applicable right now, right, with this idea that COVID is coming from Asia and it becomes sort of pathologized to Asians. Certainly when COVID started, right, it was the like, oh, they eat bats or whatever,

you know. So we see this happening today. So that's how the Suez Canal kind of became associated with this disease and also became associated with this kind of racialized idea of the Arab or the Muslim who is spreading disease. Marseille's economy was like booming from shipping. And so the shipping companies really controlled the city. And so public health officials, they wanted the ships to take longer in their stops, but the shipping companies wanted to move their product really fast, right? So ships that were going from the south of the Mediterranean that passed through Egypt, instead of kind of spending more time to desanitize the ships, the solution was,

we'll just make sure these people are quarantined for two weeks, these Syrians, so that if they have a disease, they won't bring it into France. So they were quarantined on an island called Ile de Friole, which is off of Marseille, about half a mile off Marseille. So Syrians at that point when they're entering Marseille, they are racialized in a particular way. They are categorized in a particular way where they have a mandatory quarantine, whereas Italians, Greeks, others who are traveling through Marseille didn't. So already they are kind of separated and they're also surveilled more by the police, right? So we have, I found all these police reports of there are 10 Syrians staying in this hotel, they're leaving on this date. There are 15

Syrians staying in this hotel, they're leaving on this date. There are 15 Syrians staying in this hotel, they're leaving on this date. So already they're kind of characterized differently in Marseille. And often these quarantines would last an amount of time that Syrians who were traveling didn't know about. So they might miss their ship connection to the U.S. and have to either make different plans or go back or make some money in Marseille before they went. So it is a very, it's a very kind of contingent, precarious position. Back to Zeynep. So, you know, despite all of this, she arrived in New York with her husband and her child. In New York, her husband and child were able to pass the health inspection, which was mandatory at Ellis Island, and she did not. So the kind of disease that was associated most with Syrians and also with Jews was trachoma, which is an eye disease.

And it's true, there was a lot of trachoma in the Middle East at that time. But the way that the health inspectors checked for trachoma was pretty sketchy. Basically, you would lift the eyelid and see if people's eyes were red. You use the same instrument on every single migrant that's passing, right? Actually, a health inspector kind of did this like secret, you know, he pretended to be a migrant so he could see the process and he got trachoma from the inspection. So there's one health inspector who says, his name is Samuel Grubb, he was the head of health inspection on Ellis Island, and he says, you know, it's a,

you have an intuition about it. It takes like one second to figure it out. So whether or not she had trachoma, she was diagnosed with trachoma. And at the time, with trachoma. And at the time, shipping companies were actually the entity who had to foot the bill for migrants who tested positive for a disease upon entering the U.S. So in 1891, the U.S. passed a law which dictated this because they wanted basically to put some onus on shipping companies. Shipping companies were in great competition with each other, and they wanted to make sure that they weren't just putting any old migrant on the ship, that they had some sort of buffer health inspection before they came to the U.S. So for the shipping company, even though there were plenty of hospitals on Ellis Island that people kind of quarantined at and were treated for disease, they actually shipped Zainab to Liverpool to get her eyes fixed, presumably because it was cheaper for that company to send her there than to stay in New York. So what we have then is Zeynep, who came to the U.S. with her husband and her child separated from them and sent basically as this

single woman to Liverpool, who doesn't speak the language and who is illiterate. Liverpool was a center for migrants. The French government really was concerned with migrants going to Liverpool because the city had very little oversight for any of the migrants that went through it. And they were really in the hands of intermediaries, hotel owners, people who were trying to make money off of them, right? So in Liverpool, Zeynep was there. She got her eyes fixed or whatever. She healed from trachoma. And her husband was able to send her money to go to Marseille again so that she could leave. In Marseille, she met another man who was staying at her hotel, a man named Abdullah, who was a Canadian citizen.

And he told her, look, Zainab, I have a passport from Canada. It will be very easy for you to come with me as my wife, pretend to be my wife, come through Canada, and then we can just take you to the U.S. and you can meet your husband. So for Zainab, who didn't speak the language, who was illiterate, traveling as a wife is a much easier way to travel, right? So we see how her gender becomes the way in which she is moving. It is becoming part of her mobility. So she leaves with Abdullah, they go to Canada, and she is able to cross into Indiana, and she with her husband and she's there for about four months. And somebody alerts the authorities about her. And so she is deported.

She's deported again back to Marseille. In Marseille, she decides to go to Veracruz because that's another way to enter the U.S. You go from Marseille to Veracruz and then Veracruz. She can travel by railroad to the U.S.-Mexico border and enter through there. So she does that. And imagine this is like, I mean, this is 1913, right? So she gets to the border. this is 1913, right? So she gets to the border. And this is, again, where her past, the way that she has traveled, kind of produces her into a new subject. Because at the border, they find her

deportation records from Indiana. And they accuse her of basically being, you know, an adulteress, a mistress, or kind of being part of this like group marriage or something, right? And so at the border, she's denied entry for something that was known as moral turpitude. So now she's stuck in Mexico and she tries to enter, she tries to explain what happened, but she's, you know, accused. And actually, it's kind of amazing to look at the files and see kind of the language they use. You know, did. And actually, it's kind of amazing to look at the files and see kind of the language they use. You know, did you sleep in the same bed? Did you have intercourse with Abdullah? Have you had intercourse with your other husband? You know, or your supposed husband is how

they refer to him. So she is stuck in Mexico. And this is 1913 when that is the time of the Mexican Revolution, actually. So now Zeynep and a bunch of other Syrians are living on the border because, as we know from some really exciting work that's coming out now, Camila Pastor's book, there was a pretty active Syrian community who lived in Mexico. But because the U.S., because of their kind of anti-immigrant mentality, they believe that all of these people who lived in Mexico, all these Syrians, and there were Greeks, and there were Chinese, etc., only wanted to just come into the U.S. surreptitiously. So even though there were these communities who were living there, who were making lives there the U.S. only viewed them through this lens that they were just trying to come in illegally and that is kind of we can understand how the U.S.-Mexico border has this kind of logic to it this history to it so Zainab is stuck in Nuevo Laredo with a number of other Syrians. They help her because she's penniless. Her husband

is in debt and he can't support her anymore. So she's basically, at this point, sort of a single woman living in Mexico. And at that time, Syrians band together in Nuevo Laredo through somebody who's living in Texas. This guy in Texas, the Syrian in Texas, he says, look, if you all put a case against this translator at the border named George Khoury, you can get him fired. I will become the translator. And then you can travel through the border. I'll make sure you can come in because there's a revolution. There's violence against Syrians at this point. Pancho Villa is kind of the hero of the Mexican revolution, but part of it, the darker side, is that through his kind of work in creating this idea of Mexicanidad, of a particular type of Mexican subject who is part indigenous and part European, there is a growing xenophobia against the Chinese

and Syrian immigrants who are living there, who are seen as a threat to that kind of new national unity, let's say. And that's also not to forget the anti-blackness, that's also part of that, because of course there is a history of slave trade there is a history of migration between caribbean and mexico that's erased as well but in this time period there is um massacres of chinese migrants in mexico and there are there is killing of syrians at a smaller at a smaller scale but but there is a growing racism against Syrians at that particular time. Not to mention that also just a lot of the country, a lot of it is cut up, it's spliced, there's violence happening in different areas. So Nuevo Laredo is cut off from much of Mexico. So

whether or not those people who are living there, those Syrians who are living there are sort of in fear of their life, or if they're just cut off from the rest of the country and they can't work, they can't make money, because most of them are in some sort of trade, peddling business, right? So suddenly they can't move around, they don't have mobility. So they're trying to get to the U.S. basically to escape this tense situation. Is this too much detail? So far, Zeynep has been through a lot. She made it through quarantine in Marseille,

only to be turned away at a medical inspection on Ellis Island and sent to Liverpool. After recovering from trachoma, she traveled to Canada as the purported wife of a Syrian man, who seems to have helped her briefly reunite with her family in the U.S. But after someone snitches on her, she's deported again, and so she tries the southern route into the U.S. via Mexico. By this time, her immigration record is checkered enough that it's hard for her to pass through what was a relatively open border. And she's stuck in a country where she doesn't know the language, Syrians are increasingly unwelcome, and there's a revolution going on.

And did we mention she's completely broke? It's only in the context of these travails that we can understand what happens next, as Zeynep's own story of migration intertwines with the efforts of a broader Syrian community near the Mexican border to gain entry into the U.S. Basically, they put this case against a translator at the border, saying that he is asking for bribes from men and that he is sexually harassing women so it's it's i mean again the archive is kind of incredible because you get these syrian women testifying pretty um explicit sexual uh harassment in you know 1914 at this point um you know one woman says he's he he asks her how many times he has intercourse she has intercourse with her husband every night he asks you know somebody else testifies that he asks her if she

has intercourse with her cousins and then Zainab testifies and she's kind of the main person in the case that he tells her that he'll let her in the U.S. if she meets him on a bridge at night. And of course, the kind of implicit thing is that she'll exchange sexual favors for being allowed in the U.S. So this case, the U.S. immigration officers actually look into this case for months. They find out that it's fraudulent and Zeynep isn't able to cross the border at that time. But it shows kind of the strategies that Syrians are using and particularly for women, the strategies around gender, you know, how both they're excluded from the country often because of gendered stereotypes or kind of gendered violence. but then gender is the way in which they're able to

move. So they're in a very strange and bind that I think we can see today as well. At this point, Zeynep and her husband are ready to attempt a different, yet equally dubious strategy to get her into the United States. Zeynep's husband, he divorces Zeynep so that he gets his cousin, Mortada, to come down to Mexico to marry her and to bring her back to Indiana. Mortada, Abraham, he comes down to Mexico. He tries to cross the border with her. She isn't. She is rejected again. But somehow, they do end up, they have a marriage certificate in Texas, so they do end up crossing the border somehow. And she ends up with him in Indiana.

And this is where the story gets, I think, quite sad. Well, it's already quite sad. What am I talking about? I found all of this through newspaper articles and marriage records and kind of like court records. So this is through assembling a lot of different archives for this story. And I actually, I researched this for like two years. This was just, I was obsessed for like three years just trying to find information. What happens is Marta actually refuses to divorce her. So she and Murtada and Mahmoud and their child, they all moved to Michigan and it's very, they live in the same town. It's very kind of, it's unclear what their relation is, but it is known that Murt beats zayna they have four children together and then finally

she divorces him in 1930 in 1929 citing abuse and i mean here's the thing there isn't really a record about it right we don't know what happened and this has to you know this this brings us into ideas of like what's in the archive what's's not in the archive, and how we discover the, you know, intimate life. And we don't, honestly, we don't know. I don't know. And also, Zainab, does she really want a record of herself in the U.S.? She is there, undocumented, if you want to say. And these are the kind of things that actually immigrants really keep to themselves. You find out, you know, their children or their grandchildren actually don't know these stories at all because they're traumatic. And why would a person want to kind of relive it or even tell

their children, right? These kind of things are usually erased. And that has to do with trauma, right? But trauma, as we know, follows, and it kind of produces more. So in 1929, Zeynep was living in Michigan, as far as we can tell, married to her husband's cousin, as far as we can tell, against her will, when she finally decided to get a divorce. It had been more than 15 years since they first left Lebanon. Imagine, she had spent nearly half her lifetime in this state. The child she left Beirut with was already an adult. Zeynep endured more than a decade of troubles that began with a failed medical shot in the head. And Zaynab and another man, a Jewish peddler living in Michigan named Louis Gross, are taken to trial.

It is alleged that Zainab hired Louis Gross to kill her husband, ex-husband, Mortada. So in the trial, Zainab is actually, what's it called? She's dismissed and Louis Gross gets life in prison. Okay, this is where the story gets insane. Can I keep talking? Have you heard of the Perry Mason novels? So they're written by this guy, Earl Stanley Gardner, right? He writes for this magazine called Argosy Magazine. It's the oldest men's magazine in the country.

And if you picture it, it's like guns, drinks, women. Like that's kind of what generally things are about. How to hunt, what kind of guns to buy, sports, that sort of thing. Well, so he has this series called The Court of Last Resort, where people can write in about men who are imprisoned. And let's say it's always white men, right, who are imprisoned, but they believe they're imprisoned unjustly. And Earl Stanley Gardner, who is a lawyer, but also is like a crime novelist, he will do detective work to try and free them. And then every week, readers write in to basically vote who are the people that Earl Stanley Gardner should look into. So in 1948, Lewis Gross is now in prison, right? A rabbi who Lewis Gross had talked with or whatever in prison, Rabbi Sparka, he writes in.

And this case becomes a huge part of this series. And in the series, it's not only about kind of the case, but it's about this community of Syrians in Detroit who are dirty dealers making deals with police. They're kind of part of this underbelly of the urban corruption. And Zaynab is part of that. They make this story that Zaynab had a sweetheart and her husband was bothering her. So she wanted to go with her sweetheart, but she got her sweetheart to kill her husband and framed Louis Gross. And there was all this corruption within the community. And Louis Gross himself actually wrote his own article in another kind of seedy crime magazine called True Crimes, where he says that Zaynab was this, he basically, he says she sold him a carpet and that is where um kind of she got the idea to

kill him whatever i mean to frame him and he says like little did i know when i met zaynab she would give me my flying carpet to doom so we already understand now how her story is being manipulated and understood through this other logic right of, of true crime, of sexy women, exotic, sexy, destructive women. So basically, Earl Stanley Gardner actually got his sentence revoked and Lewis Gross became a free man in 1949. And what's also fascinating to kind of add to the idea of race and whatever is Earl Stanley Gardner talks a lot in this series about Louis Gross and Rabbi Sparka's Judaism. This is right after World War II, right? And so, you know, Earl Stanley Gardner is like,

you know, I knew bad things happened to Jews, but I never really realized how terrible it was. And I'd never spent time with Jewish people. And the rabbi was a migrant himself. He had actually left Europe because of a pogrom. And so Earl Stanley Gardner is also thinking about the atrocities against Jews during World War II and before. And kind of you see in this article, then, the kind of exceptional Jewish migrant to the US who came escaping Europe's fascism and who built himself up to a rabbi versus this kind of Syrian underbelly in Detroit. So what did Zeynep have to say about all this was she still around to tell her side of the story

yeah so she is still alive she's just quoted in a newspaper saying she believes that Louis Gross is innocent I mean that's basically where her trail ends and I haven't found anything else about her since then I actually was able to get in touch with her grandniece. But here's the thing, like, trauma is inherited. And people sometimes don't want to open that up, you know. And so I didn't press it. And I didn't feel like it was something I wanted, that the family really wanted to know about. something I wanted that the family really wanted to know about.

And I think that also speaks to intergenerational violence and how these kind of these kind of traumas last for much longer than we think they do. Part of my method is trying to treat my actors, the actors that I find as kind of the theory makers, because their life is theory, right? So I want to learn from them. And Zeynep's story, I found in the archive and just found it so incredible. the journey of many migrants and particularly women and the way that their gender often dictates both how they end up in a place and also how they are understood once they're there. So the choices that they have to make. Zainab's story, it allows us to think through both how gender is used to police migrants and that through that policing is making migrants, particularly women, make decisions that end up having to further isolate them. So the patriarchy, the patriarchal system of migration is both policing women and through

that policing, putting them in isolated positions where they almost have to become the person that the state will deny entry towards. And so we see that with Zaynab, that she is seen as a adulteress. She is seen as this woman with this moral turpitude. And because of that, she is taken away from her husband. She is isolated in Nuevo Laredo. She is made penniless. And then the decisions that she has, the strategies she has to move forward, are actually solely based on her gender and are about kind of accusing somebody of sexual harassment, sexual favors, or actually divorcing and remarrying somebody who then puts her in an even more isolated position that perhaps leads to her actually committing murder, which we don't know and I wouldn't like...

That is pure conjecture. But at the best scenario, it puts her in a kind of relation between her ex-husband and her new husband that is something that, you know, the US would deem unfit. And in the worst case, she's put in an isolated, abusive situation that results in more violence. And so we see in each step, you know, being separated from her husband and taken to England, having to kind of travel as somebody's wife because it's easiest. This all revolves around gender and how it intersects with her racial category as a Syrian woman. not only does it kind of, for me, like, I want to make sure her life matters, right? Like, her life mattered. And what she went through matters for us as we think about justice, as we envision future justice for migrants. I think you'll agree that Renda wasn't exaggerating when she told me this was going to be a wild story.

And if I hadn't read so many stories from the archives myself, I'd have trouble believing that what we just heard was representative of anything. But the thing is, a lot of American immigrants experience many, if not all, of the same things Zeynep and her family did. And that's the thing about mobility that you can see so clearly in Renda Tawil's work. Maybe some migrants just pick up and hop on a steamship, hop off, and settle in a new home where their family remains for generations. But a lot of migrant stories seem to follow the same law that governs everything in the universe.

That something in motion stays in motion. universe. That something in motion stays in motion. You can also look forward to Renda Tawil's in-progress book project based on her dissertation entitled Roots of Race, Migrations Between Ottoman Syria, Mandate Lebanon, and the United States, 1881-1945. If you want more this instant, we've got a reading list on our website, as well as a bunch of other episodes related to this conversation. That's all for now. Thanks for listening.