UC San Diego

A Peoples’ History of Middle Eastern-Americans and Race, 1890-1930 recasts early racial classification of Middle Eastern peoples in the United States from the perspective of refugees and organizers. This dissertation compiles and analyzes the context of the “racial prerequisite cases,” revealing a long history of non-whiteness, transnational systems of exclusion and violence, and high stakes in the fight for U.S. citizenship for these communities. It argues that racial categories for Middle Eastern peoples were not only constructed by the State and from top-down sources, but also from below, where migrants and refugees were active agents in trying to shape their lives and classification and did so in an era characterized by crisis, mass displacement and dispossession, and racial terror. Through community formations, Middle Eastern migrants and refugees organized to change their material conditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including through the struggle for refuge via citizenship, at a time when U.S. naturalization was limited only to people who were either white or Black via the Naturalization Act of 1790 and its subsequent iterations, and the U.S. government was fighting Middle Eastern naturalization on the basis of race. This study examines everyday community perspectives through a critical ethnic studies, critical refugees studies, and feminist/queer approach, arguing that the Middle Eastern presence and experience in the prerequisite cases alongside other non-white communities demonstrates they were not “white upon arrival” like European immigrant groups and reveals the ways in which these communities became lodged in a solar system of colliding and orbiting white supremacist, anti-refugee, anti-immigrant, anti-Asian, anti-Black, settler colonial, and border politics, among other systems. Centering refugeehood in early Middle Eastern-American race, especially through the experiences of Ottoman Assyrian, Armenian, and Arab groups, this dissertation outlines histories of early racial regimes, watchlists, routinized racialized restrictions on movement and experiences at border checkpoints of exit and entry, domestic discrimination, displacement, and migration bans by both Western and eastern Empires looking to control those they deemed a “threat” and racialized other. Early Middle Eastern migrant and refugee lifeworlds reveal additional definitions for and dimensions of U.S. racial categories of “citizenship” “naturalization” and “whiteness,” like the freedom to move, freedom to stay, and refuge, or the freedom from racialized violence, especially for displaced peoples who were attempting to flee mass death during a genocide, before the concept of asylum was created as a legal framework by Western powers when it was later deemed necessary for European bodies in subsequent decades. Additionally, I propose the “Middle Eastern Christian figure,” as a fundamental racial device used to build modern U.S. institutions, including the non-profit industrial complex, and forward challenges to such figures by revealing powerful anti-imperialist refugee resistance during the prerequisite era that critiqued multiple systems of oppression at once. Ultimately, I contend that analyzing the lives of early Middle Eastern migrants and refugees reveals larger truths of systems of race and power. Constructing a cross-community, pan-ethnic and transnational study and archive that unites existing literature across fields and grassroots perspectives beyond borders, this dissertation (re)stories the racial prerequisite era, arguing that early Middle Eastern migrants and refugee communities were “grouped and in groups;” they experienced race in pan-ethnic and relational ways, and they formed collective struggles, campaigns, and organizations to fight the violence they faced. This study uncovers that anti- Middle Eastern-American racism is not a contemporary phenomenon of the post 9/11 present but originates in the earliest displacements and migrations of Middle Eastern peoples to the United States.