Our Tricentennial: Is N.O. still an International City?
10th September 2018 · 0 Comments
By Nicholas Hamburger
Contributing Writer
Palestinians find a home on the West Bank; No, not that West Bank
Editor’s Note: This is Part V of a series of articles chronicling New Orleans’ immigrant communities and their cultural influence, economic impact, and individual stories on the Crescent City.
Demographically and statistically, New Orleans is not an international city, not, at least, when compared to the cosmopolitan centers of the United States and the rest of the world. But as a site of memory, New Orleans evokes a manifold past. Formerly West African and Haitian, Anglo and Irish, Teutonic, Polish, Russian-Jewish, Greek, Sicilian, Chinese and Vietnamese, Mexican, Central American, Cuban, and Brazilian, governed at turns by the French and the Spanish, a once booming immigrant port where a remarkable number of tongues were spoken, a former center for international trade, and, still today, the home to varying architectures, themselves landmarks of foreignness, New Orleans is a shapeshifting idea of elsewhere.
It is at once the northernmost Caribbean city: hot and languid, with an economy reliant on tourism and a culture strongly influenced by the complex fluidity of Creole as a race and as an identity. It has been alternately conceived of as the “Gateway to the Americas,” positioned on the threshold of North America and the remainder of the hemisphere, moulding through foreign trade the economies of southern neighbors in Mexico, Central America and South America, and, in return, receiving its share of migrants from those places.
The city imagines itself as Mediterranean as well. The nearby Gulf of Mexico forms part of what is designated the American Mediterranean Sea, while Algiers, situated on the other side of a body of water from downtown, makes a geographic pun of the Mississippi River as the Mediterranean Sea of old, and the East Bank as southern Europe. One need look no further than New Orleans’ Muse-inspired street names or the Greek mythology from which so many Carnival krewes derive their themes to get a sense of the city’s Hellenistic imagination.
But Algiers is as much an indication of the way in which New Orleans looks to the Arab world for inspiration as it is evidence of the city’s Mediterranean bent. There’s Arabi, named after an anti-colonial Egyptian revolutionary, and Palmyra Street, the krewes of Isis and Osiris, Thoth and Cleopatra. These fantasies of the Arab world, however, perhaps obscure an under-recognized fact: New Orleans has long been home to a small but multifaceted community of Arab immigrants.
It’s unclear when migration from the Arab world to New Orleans began. The first wave of Arab immigration to the U.S. occurred in the late nineteenth century, but New Orleans’ port had already started its decline by then, and it’s possible Arab migration to the Crescent City did not begin until much later. Lacking literature on the subject, the history of Arabs in New Orleans is largely oral, and almost all Arabs here trace their roots back to the mid twentieth century at the earliest.
The Arab world, it should be noted, denotes a vast region of complex sectarian distinctions, with the Arabic language, itself subject to myriad permutations depending on where it’s spoken, serving as the main connective tissue between otherwise unrelated peoples. Among Arabic-speaking groups in the U.S., Iraqis, Lebanese and Egyptians are the most numerous, though population estimates can of course be unreliable, a factor in part attributable to an inclination within these communities to maintain a low-profile after experiencing discrimination following the events of September 11th.
According to the Arab American Institute, there are roughly 3.7 million people with ancestral ties to an Arab country in the U.S., a number that almost doubles the Census Bureau’s estimate of 1.9 million and which would make up around eight percent of the total U.S. immigrant population. Of that 3.7 million, a staggering 94 percent live in metropolitan areas, and two-thirds reside in just 10 states, with California, Michigan, New York, Texas and Florida constituting the states with the largest Arab-American populations. Louisiana, unsurprisingly, does not make the top ten.
Nonetheless, a kaleidoscope of Arabic-speaking communities exists in New Orleans. Iraqis own and operate the gas station and convenience store Discount Zone; the Jordanian-run American taxicab company employs many Egyptian drivers; Qataris study at Xavier University’s pharmacy school in an exchange program created after the tiny Gulf nation donated millions of dollars to the university; Saudis once designed ships and offshore structures as part of the Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering Department at the University of New Orleans; and a handful of Syrian and Yemeni refugee families have resettled in New Orleans in recent years.
But in 2018, a single Arabic-speaking community in New Orleans is perhaps more numerous than any of its counterparts: the Palestinian community, which has steadily grown over the last five decades and is largely concentrated on the West Bank.
Most Palestinians in New Orleans hail from the mountainous villages scattered around the city of Ramallah on the West Bank of what was once Palestine, such as Silwad, Beit Anan, al-Mazra’a, and the city adjacent to Ramallah, al-Bireh. “ten percent of Beit Anan is in New Orleans,” said Karim Taha, who founded Mona’s Café after emigrating from Beit Anan in 1988. Indeed, large portions of these villages, numbering in the thousands, are today transplanted in greater New Orleans, to the extent that the governor of Ramallah recently paid a visit from one West Bank to another.
What’s more, these communities brought with them the tight-knit intimacy of village life back home.
“We know the family roots of our neighbors here,” said Ashraf Awadalla, who is originally from Silwad and today owns Vieux Carré Pizza. “You could mention somebody, and if I’m from the same village, and lots of people here are, I’ll tell you not only the names of his parents but his grandparents and great-grandparents, too. I’ll tell you the stories of his family.”
Substantial Palestinian migration to New Orleans commenced after the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel defeated its neighboring Arab enemies in an efficient and overwhelming victory, consequently expanding its occupation of territories on the West Bank. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled, and a few of them ended up in New Orleans.
Since then, marriage has engendered migration. “Marriage brings us here,” Taha said. “Why did I immigrate here, for example? Because of marriage.” In traditional Palestinian culture, prospective marriage is broached through the introduction of two families, one of whom has a son of marriageable age, and the other a daughter. A period of courtship ensues, and if the couple declares their mutual interest, the process culminates in a wedding.
“Traditional marriage also really traveled to the next generation,” Awadalla explained. “They embraced it.” For younger Palestinians in New Orleans, introductions to potential spouses abroad in Israeli-occupied Palestine have sustained a connection to the homeland that is rare among emigrant communities, and they have also slowly expanded the number of Palestinians here, which now totals between 6,000 and 7,000. When a marriage occurs between a Palestinian-American and a Palestinian, the current of migration, more often than not, flows toward New Orleans, not away from it. “Once you move to the states,” continued Awadalla, “that’s it. You don’t move back.”
The inheritance of traditional marriage among the younger generation of Palestinian-Americans is one aspect of a larger priority for the community: the preservation of the customs – and language – of their former home. Arabic endures as a living language across generations within the community, partly due to the efforts of institutions like the Muslim Academy, a K-12 private school in Gretna.
Founded in 2000, the Muslim Academy incorporates an Arabic language course, as well as Islamic studies, into an otherwise standard Louisiana curriculum. The presence of the school testifies to a psychological shift that occurred some years ago in the community, one that began to emphasize education over mere survival.
“The community’s more established now,” said Nabil Abukhader, the principal of the Muslim Academy and a professor of electrical engineering originally from Tubas. “Most Palestinians in New Orleans initially did not have professional jobs; most had stores or were merchants. Now their offspring, almost all of them went to college. It’s kind of mandatory now for us to go to college.”
Positioned at the end of a quiet suburban street, along which the Palestinian-owned Sahara Cafe, Crescent Market and Silwad Community Center first appear, the Muslim Academy represents the apotheosis of an enclave of cultural memory. The school, moreover, has had a magnetic effect on the community, attracting Palestinians to the West Bank and further consolidating the population.
But the center of gravity around which the Palestinian community orbits is Masjid Omar, which opened in Harvey in 2014. The handsome mosque accommodates thousands of mostly Palestinian Muslims every week, a more uniform membership than the comparably-sized Masjid Abu-Bakr of Metairie, which includes Muslims from upwards of thirty countries.
Until a community member purchased the swath of land where Masjid Omar now stands, several Palestinians rented a corner of a shopping center on Manhattan Boulevard in order to have a space to pray. Today, the elegant masjid, a cavernous room in which Muslims gather daily in prostrated prayer, looks out, beyond the mihrab, in the direction of Mecca, where fields of wild grass extend for acres.
Soon, this land will be developed into a housing subdivision populated almost entirely by Palestinians. Imad “Eddie” Hamdan, a co-founder of Brother’s Food Mart originally from al-Bireh, ruminated on the importance of Masjid Omar: “If it weren’t for the masjid, I might have moved away from the West Bank.” For a community that is already impressively unified, the imminent housing subdivision exemplifies its cohesion.
But not all Palestinians in New Orleans are embedded within this community. Shathah, who asked to be referred to by this alias in order to protect her identity, arrived in New Orleans three and a half years ago as a single mother with four children. Unable to speak English, bewildered by the challenge of navigating an American city, she sought out fellow Arabic speakers employed at gas stations, all of whom, she said, assisted her without second thought.
As a woman, her solitude runs counter to traditional Arab and Islamic culture, but the U.S., Shathah suggested, offers the opportunity for such independence. “This is the thing that makes me love the U.S.A.; not for the money; not for anything like that. I love it because living here, you have real freedom. I started focusing on Robert Mueller in the news. This never happens any place in the life – just in the U.S.A. That’s awesome. For me, I’m proud of the U.S.A. because they have this guy. Even with Trump, still for me the U.S.A. is the country of freedom. You know what that means? That means for me a lot. I love my country – it’s small, far from here, not a big, rich, or free country. But I believe in America as an idea. Everything in America is new, it’s a young country. Everything is different.”
One difference is the sheer scale of American infrastructure. “I hate the bridge and the highway,” she laughed. “I love Chalmette because there’s no highways like the West Bank and Kenner and Metairie; no huge things, and that reminds me of my village outside Ramallah.”
But for Taha, gliding in his S550 Mercedes across the Crescent City Connection, the river running beneath him and the greenery of the West Bank emerging below, fills him with a sense of coming home. Abukhader experiences a similar sensation upon returning to New Orleans: “If you have a feeling of comfort when you come back from a trip, you know you’re home. And that’s basically when I land. Most of us – we talk about it – this has become our first country. When you land, you feel,” Abukhader let out a sigh of relief, “‘Oh yeah, I got home.’”
Perhaps the most telling sign of a community’s permanence is a resting place for the dead. To this end, the West Bank Muslim Association recently purchased a plot of land on the border of Jefferson and Plaquemines parishes, and it will soon serve as a cemetery for Palestinians in New Orleans. In providing a residence for Palestinians even after death, the West Bank of New Orleans will complete its evolution into a full-fledged home for the Palestinian community.
The establishment of a second home, however, does not erase the complications of migration. Hamdan noted the modicum of guilt he experiences in the decision to lead his life somewhere other than his birthplace, while Abukhader reflected on the challenges of a life at once divided and enriched by its distances: “We cannot forget back home; that’s why we’re connected to it today. But I still cannot figure it out. That has its sweetness and its uniqueness, and this has its own sweetness and uniqueness. Through communication and traveling, you try to preserve the heritage of both. But we have a Palestinian saying: ‘We shall return.’”
According to Abukhader, the concept of returning, to a holy land, to a lost home, is foregrounded in the consciousness of many Palestinians. Hurricane Katrina, he explained, offered an opportunity for Palestinians, displaced from their native home overseas and now forced from their adopted city in Louisiana, to re-situate the desire to return, but this time on a new continent, and in a place where that homecoming was in fact possible: New Orleans. Not only, then, have significant portions of villages outside Ramallah transplanted themselves here, the very psychology of returning was relocated to this city as well, and it was achieved in the wake of Hurricane Katrina through the Palestinian community’s retrieval – and eventual restoration – of their damaged New Orleans homeland. In its initial welcome, its precariousness, and its capacity for renewal, New Orleans provided a place in which the Palestinian yearning for a homecoming could at last be fulfilled.
But an increasingly prevalent cause of migration continues to emerge – climate change. And in a city several feet below sea level, in a state losing a football field of land to the Gulf every hour, it is not implausible to imagine a future in which another New Orleans exodus occurs. Palestinians in New Orleans have forsaken their native land for good, compelled to leave by a combination of straitened economic prospects and violent threats to safety, only to lay roots in a tolerant but fragile place, a place that is capable of producing its own share of exiles.
This article originally published in the September 10, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
