Description
As weavers, garment workers, and peddlers, Syrian immigrants in the Americas fed the early twentieth-century transnational textile trade. These migrants and the commodities they producedsilk, linen, and cotton; lace and embroidery; undergarments and ready-wear clothingmoved along steamship routes from Beirut through Marseille and Madeira to New York City, New England, and Veracruz. As migrants and merchants crisscrossed the Atlantic in pursuit of work, Syrian textile manufacturing expanded across the hemisphere. Unmentionables offers a history of the global textile industry and the Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians who worked in it.
Stacy Fahrenthold examines how Arab workers navigated processes of racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation. She writes women workersthe majority of Syrian garment workersback into US labor history. She also situates the rise of Syrian American industrial elites, who exerted supply chain power to combat labor uprising
