Farewell to the Grande Dame of Arab American Social History: Reflections on My Debt to Alixa Naff

Abstract

Among the many ways to pay tribute to the life and legacy of Dr. Alixa Naff, mine is best expressed as personal reflections on how her friendship and collaboration shaped my career and the emerging field of Arab American studies.My entree into the ethnic arena began in the mid-1970s at the American University of Beirut (AUB). As a graduate student in AUB's new program of Middle East Studies, I was introduced to the history and sociology of the region, which indirectly drew my attention to the major emigration from Greater Syria to the USA that began a century earlier. As a third-generation Arab American, I was curious about the social, economic, and religious integration into the USA of the early Arabic-speaking immigrants, and chose, almost by accident, an English-language literary journal published by Salloum Mokarzel (my maternal grandfather) in the 1920s. The Syrian World was dedicated to the American-born children of Syrian immigrants to foster appreciation of and pride in their cultural heritage, and also to encourage national dialogue about the process of becoming American.A decade earlier, in the summer of 1962, Alixa Naff-armed with a history degree from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a tape recorder, and a grant from the university's Folklore Department-set out to collect oral histories of Arab Americans. Her sojourn into the American heartland to capture memories and collect artifacts of the first generation of Arabic-speaking immigrants (1880-1940) set Alixa on a lifelong path of documenting, contextualizing, and preserving the stories of these pioneers.By the time I was completing my master's thesis on the structural and ideological transition of immigrant families from this first wave, there was a burgeoning interest, mostly among American scholars of Arab descent, in the experience of Arab American communities. American attention to race and ethnicity, both in academe and popular culture, was expanding to include groups too small or too invisible (or both) to have warranted the focus of scholarship. Ethnic journals and monograph senes began including content on Arab Americans, itself a relatively new identity, fueled by increasing numbers of immigrants from the newly independent Arab states whose political, cultural, and religious experiences often differed from those of the pioneers, and laid the bases for new ethnic institutions and social formations that were more engaged in the public square.When Alixa returned in the 1980s to the communities she first visited to formalize her research (and the collection of artifacts that would comprise the archive she donated to the National Museum of American History in 1984), Arab American identity had taken root by way of national organizations, networks in support of Palestinian rights, and professional associations that drew largely from American-educated Arabs, but also from the more politicized segments of the pioneer wave's second and third generations. My own induction in the field of Arab American affairs was shaped more by my exposure to the contemporary Middle East and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, learning Arabic, and by membership in organizations such as the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG) than by the history of my immigrant forbears or the ethnic patrimony they left behind.Reading Alixa's book Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience, meeting her professionally and being exposed to the Naff collection were unexpected sources of joy. The curiosity nurtured by my graduate years of poring over six years of The Syrian World and imagining my parents' generation's struggle with traditionalism, national identity, ignorance, and xenophobia was reignited by Alixa's seminal work. Alixa encouraged me to locate family photos and artifacts for the Arab American archive. My ethnic professional life, steeped in politics, intolerance, and the needs of modern-day immigrants, was tempered and soothed by taking time to focus on personal history, looking back through a prism of intimacy and wonder. …