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As weavers, garment workers, and peddlers, Syrian immigrants in the Americas fed the early twentieth-century transnational textile trade. These migrants and the commodities they produced—silk, linen, and cotton; lace and embroidery; undergarments and ready-wear clothing—moved along steamship routes from Beirut through Marseille and Madeira to New York City, New England, and Veracruz. As migrants and merchants crisscrossed the Atlantic in pursuit of work, Syrian textile manufacturing expanded across the hemisphere. Unmentionables offers a history of the global textile industry and the Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians who worked in it.
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.
"This is labor history at its best: attentive to workers' dreams and demands, ingenious in tracing the flows of capital from Madeira to Massachusetts, and inspiring in its archival breadth. Stacy Fahrenthold centers Syrian workers in a fascinating global history of the textile trade. Crisp and eloquently written, Unmentionables is a must-read." —Sarah M.A. Gualtieri, Georgetown University in Qatar
"Farenthold's greatest contribution... lies in substantiating how the stories of unmentionables around the globe were entangled with each other. With meticulous research, she shows how, in a period marked by the disintegration of empires, migrants and women in particular formed diasporic communities through a complex intermingling of capitalist relations and social bonds in the United States and elsewhere." —Yaşar Tolga Cora, American Historical Review
"By offering a bottom-up story of the dynamic and expanding (if politically and socially diverse) Syrian American population in the rapidly industrializing United States, Fahrenthold makes a significant contribution to several genres of scholarship." —Isa Blumi, Diplomatic History
Introduction: Looking for Work
1. Snowballs and Bayonets: The Syrian Strikers of Lawrence
2. Mutual Aid: Syrian Societies in Industrial Massachusetts
3. The Syrian Shop: Garment Manufacturing in New York City
4. Laboring for Empire: Madeira Island's Fase Síria
5. Logistics: Selling Textiles in the US-Mexico Borderlands
Conclusion: Syrian Shops for the Syrians
Notes
Bibliography
Index