Ottoman History Podcast - Race in Transit

Episode Date: October 17, 2026

with Randa Tawil hosted by Sam Dolbee | At the turn of the twentieth century, large numbers of people from Ottoman Syria began to settle abroad, giving birth to the modern Arab-American diaspora. Yet for generations, what was lost in the history of their becoming American is the changes that happened along the way, as people undertook arduous and sometimes circuitous journeys across a world of both unprecedented mobility and scrutiny of migrants. In this interview with Randa Tawil about her new book, Race in Transit, we explore that liminal zone and the many itineraries of the early Syrian diaspora as reflected across archives in Beirut, Marseille, Liverpool, Manila, Washington, D.C., Michigan, and Texas. At every stage of their journeys, race played a role in the fate of these migrants, but as Dr. Tawil explains, it was far from a stable category. In crossing the globe, Syrian migrants also crossed a "global color line" and passed through shifting legal and conceptual boundaries that defined the politics of migration.          « Click for More »

It's the Ottoman history podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. You know, sometimes on our show we have technical difficulties. Frustrating, yes. But it also just makes it so much more exciting when things seem to work out. All right. Yes, and this is recording. All right. Let's fucking go. That's actually going to be the opening. That's fine. That person excited about our recording, working out, after some technical

difficulties is Ronda Tawil. Randa has a new book out. It's called Race in Transit, tracing the politics of migration from Ottoman Syria through U.S. Empire, published by Stanford University Press. Hi, my name is Randa Tawil. I'm a lecturer at University of Washington, and I'm a scholar and a writer, and this is my first book. It's an account of the itineraries and racial politics of people journeying from greater

Syria to the Americas and beyond in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were mostly, though, not only Christians, and their lives were profoundly shaped by their precarious relationship to whiteness, particularly before the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which greatly limited immigration to the United States. In this discussion, we follow some of these journeys to Marseille, to Cuba, to the Philippines, and to Patterson, New Jersey. And in closing, we discuss connections to the United States. the present and the challenges of finding a structure for stories that sometimes seem to defy structure.

Stay with us. So an important concept in the book is the global color line and the place of Syrians in that. Could you sketch out the meaning of those terms for listeners, both the global color line and what you mean by Syrians in this content? So the global color line is a term I take and any scholars have taken from W.E.B. Du Bois. he talks about, you know, the problem of the 20th century as being the global color line, or who is allowed the rights and benefits of civilization and who is denied it. That's kind of his big thesis for the 20th century.

And many scholars still think of this as like a prophetic idea and concept for the theory of history in this. time, right? Like how it does race define people's lives and how does it shape the world? And so, again, this color line isn't like a literal line. It's just this idea of social difference and the way it is imposed on different peoples. And so for me, you know, as somebody who studied American studies, it was really interesting to me to think about where kind of Syrians fall on this line. Because oftentimes when you read, when you read about the color line, people invoke it, again, like, especially in its original conception, which is around the time I write, the turn of the 20th century, Syrians aren't really included. People from the Ottoman Empire just aren't really

included. And so I really wanted to interrogate that. And, you know, part of this complexity is this idea of Syrian in general. It anyway challenges, I would say, regular notions of, like, race, right? Because what is Syria? Syria is actually a number of different things and a number of different spaces throughout the 20th century. It was under the Ottoman Empire, but it was known as Bilad Hashem, which means kind of the lands of Syria, and it points to the plurality of it. And people from this region didn't necessarily kind of call themselves Syrian in every different context. Different contexts had different ways of identifying, right? If you were from Jerusalem, Maybe you call yourself a Jerusalemite.

But if you're talking to a border inspector, you call yourself a Syrian. This label itself is kind of fluid. It's changeable. It certainly changes over time as the Ottoman Empire ends. The French and British mandates are implemented. And then independence and the creation of Israel and the non-independence of Palestinian people. And so to me, it was a really interesting way, not really to like insert Syrians into this history, but rather to use them or to learn from them how we can kind of challenge concepts of race in general. The book is called Race in Transit. And one of the lines that really struck me was you described one migrant's journey as structured by his Syrianness.

what did it mean to have one's journey structured by Syrianness in, say, a place like Marseilles, a way station for many people on their way to the Americas? I think you're talking about Saffan Shadid, who was a young migrant who ended up in Marseille and taken to Liverpool and then went to the U.S. and had to come back. He was deported. His story is very much a misadventure. When I say it's structured by his Syrianness, I mean that everything that happened to him happened because he was Syrian. He got his tickets to the ship because there were Syrian ticket agents who were employed by friendships like Messagerie Maritin who could sell him the ticket and who could show him what Syrian hotel to stay at.

So in Marseille, many of the hotels, or actually all of the hotels for migrants, were kind of owned by people from those countries. So you would see a hotel called Hotel Jerusalem or Hotel Syria. You could also see Hotel Italy, and that would be owned by Italians. But Syrian hotels were owned by Syrians and were specifically for Syrian migrants. So the fact that he went to a particular hotel was because he was Syrian. And this hotel owner was very corrupt and had a partner in Liverpool and basically told this young kid, I think he was like 15, told him he had to go to Liverpool. And then in Liverpool, he was sent to the U.S., but with the wrong ticket.

And so he was deported back to Liverpool. And all of these things happened because. the people in charge of sort of the minutia of his transit, the people that kind of allowed a peasant from Syria to get on a ship, to get on a train, to get, et cetera, were Syrian and had their own agendas. And so we get a glimpse in these cases, like the ones you just mentioned, of all of the myriad ways that Syrians are involved in the economy of migration, certainly as passengers as hopeful migrants going to say work in a factory in Massachusetts, but also an innkeeper in Liverpool or even translators for U.S. immigration officials. Could you tell us about the business of

immigration? So there was a lot of money to be made in migration. And there were many people from Syria who were involved in making money through migration. A lot of them are actually part of more like elite families. So they might have a store in Valencia run by a cousin and an uncle owns, you know, a hotel in Liverpool and they own a hotel in Marseille. And these families work together to make money off of migration. And in general, cities, you know, they resented them, but they also knew that these businessmen, these intermediaries, like, were, required part of migration, so kind of ignored them more or less. And so while some were very like good meaning and wanted migrants to have a good time traveling, many saw this as an easy way to

make money. And I think this kind of also pushes against this idea of this reductive idea of migrants and people from a certain area that they're all sort of together in solidarity or something. It's like, no, these are businessmen who are taking advantage of peasants. Like, it would have happened back in Ottoman Syria. It's just happening in Liverpool. A fascinating part of the book is how you trace the place of Syrian Americans in the U.S. invasion and occupations of Cuba and the Philippines, later Haiti. Can you talk about some of these figures and what it tells us about the changing color line?

Actually, when I was just finishing. my dissertation, my uncle was like, oh, Renda, you'll find this interesting. And he showed me a bunch of letters that my great, great uncle sent my great-grandmother. And this great-great-uncle, Khalil Aswad, was actually, so he was in the Ottoman army. And then when people in Mount Lebanon started not like in the Ottomans so much, he went to the U.S. And also he needed to repay deaths of his father. Anyway, because he was in the army, he ended up joining the U.S. Army, and he fought in Puerto Rico in 1898. And when I found that out, I was like, oh, my God, that's, I didn't want to be part of that. Like, how, you know, because my family, my dad's Palestinian, my mom Lebanese, they're

born there. And so for me, I'm like the new generation or whatever. And then to find out I have a great grand uncle who fought in Puerto Rico. I was like, what? But anyway, so I think I sort of started thinking that, thinking about that from him and being like, are there more people? Was this a one-off? And so I found around like 300 Syrians in the U.S. went and fought in this war. 1898 War was highly popular across the U.S. So it's not surprising that it's popular among Syrians in their newspapers, but it was very popular. And a number of people went, and some of them, you know, had skills that could help them. So, for example, there's a guy named Gibral-Wordids who spoke Spanish and might have

spoken Spanish because he live in a Spanish-speaking country as like a traveling merchant, and he ended up also fighting in Cuba. And so it's a really interesting history of people you do. don't expect to be there. But I also think it's important because, like, we don't expect them to go because we think in very national history terms. But actually in the Caribbean, there were a lot of Syrian merchants. And so there was already a connection with the Caribbean and already kind of a reason for wanting the U.S. to take over the Caribbean for business interests of these Syrians. But that kind of gets lost if we don't think about the scattered nature of the Syrian diaspora and like the scattered places of power.

So also in the Philippines, we have Syrian Americans serving in various capacities. So the Philippines, to me, is really fascinating. Because, again, in order to understand it, you really have to understand the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. You have to understand the merchant diaspora and kind of what was happening in the Philippines at the time. So there are a lot of, again, different places that seem totally disparate, but actually are really related.

So basically, Syrian started to go to. the Philippines in the late 19th century. And part of that was the colonial administration of the Philippines was in Acapulco, Mexico. And so people in Mexico, Caribbean, but like heard about the Philippines as a space that you could do business. And so they went to the Philippines at sort of the tail end of the Spanish occupation. Because the war of 1898 that we talked about when the U.S. won the war, part of the conciliation of Spain was to hand over the Philippines. And so as Spain was kind of handing over the Philippines to Americans, a lot of Spanish people were leaving their houses, leaving their small plantations.

And so Syrians began to actually buy up these Spanish plantations, often because they were married to Filipino women who owned or Spanish women who owned it or were part of the line. And so they began actually a kind of plantation system there. At the same time, the United States was starting its own colonial administration and particularly thought about and cared about the moro population, which is a Muslim population in the South that was never actually formally sort of taken over by Spain. And the Americans inherited this idea that they were like the worst of the Filipinos or whatever. And because Americans didn't really have that kind of Orientalist knowledge that Europe developed to help their imperial desires, the U.S. looked at sort of some of the

Syrians and were like, well, you know, you're close to Islam. These people are Muslim. why don't you become the administrators of the moral population? And so a number of Syrians became part of this government and also were part of this plantation system that was making a lot of money. And so it was this interesting sort of racial place within this capitalist empire, right? Where the Syrians are both being able to be part of the government and part of business in this colonized space where they are clearly different than the Filipinos.

Are they equal to the white people? It's a question. One of the figures is named Najib Salibi, and he was the assistant chief of the Bureau of of Non-Christian Tribes in the Philippines and was said to be able to communicate with the mora. I don't know if that means he was speaking Arabic with them or some indigenous language. He's interesting. So he went to the Syrian Protestant College and then came to the United States.

United States to do his residency or whatever the equivalent in like in 1898 is. And then he joined the war effort in 1898. He wanted battlefield medicine was very interesting to him. And then from that he was asked to go to the Philippines and to do this job. And so he's, when he is in the army, he spends the weekends actually just traveling. And so, before he is that position, he learns languages. Like, he's the only person in the U.S. Army who can speak Tagalog or the various other languages in the Philippines. And so that's kind of why he gets this position, because nobody else bothered to learn the languages. So an important part of the book is exploring how gender,

heterosexuality, and patriarchy shape migration. And you've actually recorded a another podcast on this topic called Zainap's Odyssey, which I encourage everyone to listen to. And so I want to ask you about a related but distinct part of the book, which is the case of Mary Tutungi and Joseph Shashati. I really love this story. Mary Tatunji is from Aleppo, and she has lived through World War I and through now is sort of the time of French occupation, but also fierce fighting and resistance to it. Her father is dead.

Her mother's location is unknown. And she's 16. So basically her aunt in the U.S. really wants to bring her to the U.S. but the U.S. has just passed very strict immigration law. So basically it has restricted migration from French Syria to 100 people. people a year, which is way lower than it was before. And so one of the strategies of the aunt is to try to find a husband for Mary so that she can come in on a marriage visa, right?

And so this guy that lives a few doors down, Joseph Shoshati, and it's a, you know, they all live very close together in Patterson. It's a very tight-knit community. He looks at her photo, decides he wants a traditional Syrian woman. And so he wants a traditional Syrian woman. And so he wants her as his wife. And this, I think, points also to what's happening to Syrians in the United States at this point, which is there is a lot of anxiety around heterosexuality, around marriage for young people, and preserving Syrian values versus not. And so this guy, Joseph, clearly kind of romanticizes what a Syrian woman from Syria should be and wants to be that heteropatriarchal man in his neighborhoods. He's like, yes, okay. So she can't come to the U.S., so they meet in Cuba.

And it does not go well. She does not like him. He really likes her, but she doesn't like him. So they go to Cuba, they have a civil wedding, but she's religious and she doesn't really, I mean, civil weddings aren't, don't mean anything to her. So she's like, okay, but we have to have a Christian wedding in Patterson. But when they go to Patterson, basically, she really hates him. She moves in with her aunt. She refuses to have a wedding. And so Joseph goes to court to try to deport her, which, you know, the judge says you can't deport your wife. That is not a thing that is allowed. And so then he schemes and he decides to try to annul the marriage because she hasn't had sex with him. And so this becomes a huge kind of scandal for the tabloids.

And what we're seeing is, to me at least, this young girl, right, a 16-year-old whose only option is to put her dependence on a man, even if that man actually causes her more trouble and puts her in more vulnerability, et cetera. So it's these two frontiers that women are having to navigate the sort of immigration system that is patriarchal, that is anti-woman, but also the community, the patriarchal nature of the Syrian community that has its own ideas about what a respectable woman should be. And so you see these kind of layers that Mary Tutungi has to fight against. And it was so interesting and surprising to me that, as you said, this became a kind of tabloid story that newspapers all across the country were following it. I think the story has a lot of this appeal. She's really depicted as this seductress who's like conniving and trying to sort of cheat her way into the United States.

and he's seen as sort of a lovable oath who, you know, is maybe naive. And again, this is right on the cusp of, like, the biggest immigration restriction in the country. And she is, you know, in a way kind of symbolizes this person trying to weasel her way into the nation. And, you know, she's beautiful and, like, young, et cetera. I kind of get why it's a tabloid story, but, and also it's like who tries to deport their wife. Like, that's, I don't know when that's happened before. Yeah, I mean, the leap from, okay, if I can't deport her, I will get this marriage a note. Right.

That's kind of a common. So following these paths of migration from an archival standpoint is notoriously difficult. How did you handle the silences and absences of archives as part of this project? I decided that I wanted to kind of follow the migrants through the archives or use their itineraries to help me figure out where to go. And that's why I decided to do research in Beirut and Marseille and in Liverpool in the U.S. I was just trying to follow them. And I did this because I think state archives will often present stories, right, as the story of the state. And we'll kind of try to present that story as complete and the only, you know, authority.

And of course, that's not true. But how do we get out of it when oftentimes those are the archives we have to go to? And so for me, going to, for example, the Marseille Municipal Archive or the Liverpool Police Archive and the U.S. National Archives, busted open and helped challenge each one because they tell different stories of the same events. And so then it calls this authority into question. And then in terms of the silences, I mean, I thought of this a lot, right? Because most of the documents that I looked at are police archives. And so these archives have been used, have been created in order to punish someone, in order to not tell their story, right? So how do you actually read that in a different way?

And for me, this is where a kind of feminist methodology of speculation can really help, where we already take it for granted that we will never know. We'll never know the inner life, but we'll also never know if the archival document is correct. And so what do we do with this? You know, because we have two choices. Either we say, well, it's silent and we'll never know, and we don't need to. write about these vulnerable migrants. Or we take the silence as an invitation to ask some questions about what would be the strategies of this person or why. Why did this person choose to say this or that?

And just opening it up to ask questions, I think, does something historically. And it again, kind of subverts that state power that always wants to tell us, they're the authority, their story is complete, don't worry about it. Yeah, I mean, if anything, as I was reading, I didn't get any sense that you were taking for granted that the stories as offered were complete. It seemed to me more a sense of frustration, perhaps, of unknown endings of some of these stories of so many of these stories. Like in the introduction, I think you start with the story of two brothers and then maybe the final page of the introduction. You say, I don't know what happened to them. I don't know if it's frustration or just saying that these stories are incomplete for a reason

because we don't organize our archives in a way for it to be complete because the state did violence against them and left them to find out what's next. And so any kind of like deportate, like, again, the archives are are circled by the state or the police or whatever. And once the people are not in their purview, then they don't care. And so I think that for me, it's more like stating and being very clear why we actually can't tell these full stories, but saying that it's worth, like the things that we can tell are very much worth telling. And are there ways to try to get around the archives, oral histories, family histories? For sure. I mean, I did a number of oral histories for this project. And I also think genealogy as a

method is very helpful in terms of if you don't know exactly what happened to one of the people, perhaps you actually can find something about their brother or their father and then piece something together. You know, I'm also from Lebanon. And so some of the people who I've written about, my family had some connection. And I think that also speaks to the power of a certain type of knowledge production in Lebanon, in the Middle East in general, where people really can place each other and know the descendants of many people. Or, you know, they know someone from the village that somebody I'm writing about their village, right? And so that was incredibly useful. And I don't want to take that for granted. That is a form of cultural knowledge that takes a lot of work and a lot of

reinforcement. And obviously it has its limits and it's, you know, it's not something I totally depended on, but it was another aspect of this. So you researched and wrote this book in the midst of the Syrian Civil War and then the Gaza genocide? How did those events shape your work? So the Syrian Civil War was very formative for me. I had just started graduate school and I saw people, you know, walking through Europe, asserting their self-determination to live in dignity. And their migration, I don't know what you call it, patterns or their routes, were very different than what I had kind of learned about and conceptualized, really. So contingent, right?

Like, countries would erect a wall one week and then another country would close or this country would make a new rule, et cetera. And so that really made me think about the contingency of travel. And then with the genocide in Gaza, I think that it raised the stakes for me about what I really cared about. I really cared in this book to tell stories of Syrians, mobile Syrians, and tell them in a beautiful way and make them the heroes of this story. They're complicated people. Not all of them are heroes,

but heroes in the sense of the drivers of history. And to write about them beautifully because not a lot of people write about Arabs in a really beautiful way. And so, and I think it really formed, I mean, it really formed my epilogue, which is about Palestinian, mobility and criminalization. And I think for me, to think that I'd be able to like maybe add

something to that or, you know, I was able to quote people I really admire. That meant a lot to me. And the epilogue, you quote Mahmoud Khalil. How do you see continuities between the history of empire and infrastructure and race that you've told and what we see today in the United States? I mean, I see a lot. So I think that. The migrant and the migrant's body is one of the easiest places for the state to, like, assert control and to police, right? Like, the state has so much power over migrants. And for somebody like Mahmul Khalil, he, as somebody who represents a colonized subject, basically, Not only is the state able to intervene because of the way that he's in this country, like legally, right?

But also, I would say that in the book, I really try to think about what is the threat of colonized people traveling? Like, what is that threat to the world? And what I've seen is in the book is that in this period, in the early 20th century, when kind of there were fears of anarchism and there were a lot of assassinations and stuff like leading to a World War I. Countries were extremely concerned about these migrants who would travel around, cause chaos, but also get rights from the country they went to, right? So like if you're Mahmoud Khalil, you're from Palestine, you come to the U.S. if you become citizen and gain rights, you have a lot of power. And so this idea of the kind of moving, phantasmic migrant who's there to cause chaos and who, if they're not found, can gain rights, I think it's something the state is very against. And I think that to me is where we see a continuity with Mahmul Khalil, where we see continuities with ICE.

is this kind of a colonized person or a person with less rights living in a country that doesn't want to give them rights becomes a real threat. It takes a long time to write a dissertation, to write a book. What surprised you the most about how the project changed over time? Wow. The project changed so much. so many times in a project with this long term, or at least in my opinion, like, it always feels like you're chasing an idea that's like two steps ahead of you. And so you're kind of fumbling in the dark and you know it's there,

but you're not quite there yet. And you keep kind of going and going. And I think that to me always like leads to surprise. I don't know. Do you mean like a cert? I don't know how to answer. Like, do you mean a certain archive or like a certain argument? Maybe argument, but maybe also like just taking the terms that you're using here. Is there a moment where you felt like you weren't fumbling in the dark where you're like, oh yeah, this is the thing? Honestly, after my book workshop, if I'm being honest, I was really, they did an amazing, amazing book workshop with Lisa Lowe. Shodin Psykali. And they really made me think differently. This book for me was really hard to structure because it's a lot of different places, a lot of different types of people, and not

quite chronological. I mean, it is chronological, but beforehand, it wasn't as chronological. And I kept trying to, you know, I mean, my chapters, I was moving things around. I was changing things so much. And then in the workshop, we kind of talked through this structure and really thinking of being place-based. And I think that helped immensely. I knew, you know, it's like you have all these ideas, all of this research, but trying to kind of create a linear narrative out of something that actually. actually, I didn't want to be a linear narrative. I wanted it to be kind of chaotic, if that makes sense. Yeah, that makes total sense. And I think it is productively chaotic and also

beautiful. Oh, thank you. Ronda, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thank you so much. A huge fan. Thanks. That's Rhonda to Wheel. Her book, Race and Transit, is out now with Stanford University Press. Of course, on our website, you can find more information about the book, as well as links to our hundreds of other episodes, including Randa's other appearances. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. Until next time, take care.