A Map of Sorts: A Quick Introduction to Arab Detroit

The Detroit area is home to America’s largest, most highly concentrated population of Arab immigrants. There are now roughly two hundred thousand people of Arab descent living in and around the city.^[2] Arabs have been coming to Detroit since the late nineteenth century, and they continue to arrive in the thousands each year. The vast majority are from Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Iraq. Initially they were drawn by Michigan’s booming automobile industry; today they are often refugees of war or victims of political oppression and economic hardship. They come to Detroit to live among the large networks of kin and fellow villagers that now exist there. As of 1995 Arab-Americans composed Michigan’s second-largest (and fastest-growing) minority population.^[3] Indeed, certain parts of Metro Detroit have acquired an unmistakably Arab aspect. Barbara Aswad’s description of East Dearborn captures the vibrant feel of America’s largest Lebanese enclave:

As one walks along the streets in the Lebanese Muslim community in Dearborn, one feels transplanted back to the Middle East. Fifty or more Lebanese shops line both sides of a six-block stretch of Warren Avenue, where eight years ago there were only eight. Five bakeries and eight restaurants emit the culinary smells of the Middle East. There are also twelve fruit and vegetable markets, two supermarkets, two beauty salons, numerous doctors, dentists, and a pharmacist, a furniture shop, real estate, insurance, and printing office, auto shops, a clothing store, Arabic bookstores, a publishing company, an Arab social service agency, the Islamic Institute for Knowledge, and a Shi‘i mosque. Signs are in both Arabic and English. There is much activity on this strip. Men sometimes sit at tables on the sidewalk, women usually cover their heads, and many wear Muslim and village attire. Children are seen rushing to religious and Arabic classes at the Institute. (1992, 167)

The area along Warren Avenue—which now has 117 Arab-owned businesses^[4]—is only one of several distinct Arab populations in Metro Detroit. Highly assimilated middle- and upper-class Christians, whose parents and grandparents came to America from Greater Syria before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, can be found in Detroit’s northern and eastern suburbs; Iraqi Chaldeans, a close-knit community of Aramaic-speaking Catholics who own the majority of Detroit’s small grocery and liquor stores, live mostly in Detroit, Southfield, and Bloomfield Hills; Palestinian professionals, mostly Christians from the West Bank village of Ramallah, have settled in Livonia; Palestinians from the Jerusalem suburb of Beit Hanina and Yemenis, both of peasant backgrounds, live together in Dearborn’s South End, a neighborhood that lies in the shadow of the Ford Rouge Plant and boasts its own mosque and business district.

This broad range of lifestyles and levels of assimilation has made the Detroit Arab community hard to represent, both intellectually and politically. Despite its proximity to the University of Michigan, which houses one of the best Middle East studies centers in the country, very few Middle East scholars have worked in Arab Detroit. It seems too big, too diffuse, too resistant to characterization—too “over here.” The small body of research that accumulated in the 1970s and 1980s took up the difficult task of determining the size, internal composition, and history of Detroit’s major Arab immigrant populations (e.g., Abraham and Abraham 1983; Aswad 1974); it was descriptive in nature, and the patterns it located have since been woven into the popular narratives of identity and experience Arab Detroiters tell the outside world.

A more visible (and generally less accessible) tradition of self-representation is found in the lucrative trade in Arab cultural commodities. Detroit is awash in Arabic-language videos, cassette tapes, television and radio programs, books, newsletters, daily and weekly newspapers, and magazines, as well as “Middle Eastern” grocery stores, bakeries, pastry shops, and restaurants. Non-Arab Detroiters are nowadays quite familiar with Lebanese cuisine, but the trade in Arab cultural commodities has been oriented, until very recently, toward Arabic speakers. It is fragmented along national, village, and sectarian lines in ways most non-Arabs can hardly understand, and attempts to weave this flow of goods and images into a common fabric of Arab-American ethnic identity have been made, by and large, only in the English-speaking sectors of the Arab community.

The differences between Arabic- and English-speaking styles of cultural production add to the daunting complexity of Arab Detroit as an object of study. As I argue throughout this chapter, both styles are tied closely to the idea of national communities. The English-speaking style, however, is more consciously attuned to the themes of ethnicity, multiculturalism, and diversity that circulate in the larger society. Its agenda is the creation of a new identity that is equally “Arab” and “American.” The result is a double-bound (but not quite hybrid) field of public culture that, for all its inherent contradictions, allows a growing number of Arab Detroiters to attach themselves to popular American models of community even as they cultivate what are imagined to be essentially Arab ones.