“This ingenious study . . . will transform how we conceptualize immigration, race, gender, and the histories and boundaries of Arab and Latin America” (Nadine Naber, author of Arab America). Los Angeles is home to the largest population of people of Middle Eastern origin and descent in the United States. Since the late nineteenth century, Syrian and Lebanese migration to Southern California has been intimately connected to and through Latin America. Arab Routes uncovers the stories of this Syrian American community, one both Arabized and Latinized, to reveal important cross-border and multiethnic solidarities in Syrian California. Sarah M. A. Gualtieri reconstructs the early Syrian connections through California, Texas, Mexico, and Lebanon. She reveals the Syrian interests in the defense of the Mexican American teens charged in the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder, in actor Danny Thomas's rise to prominence in LA’s Syrian cultural festivals, and in more recent activities of the grandchildren of immigrants to reclaim a sense of Arabness. Gualtieri reinscribes Syrians into Southern California history through her examination of powerful images and texts, augmented with interviews with descendants of immigrants. Telling the story of how Syrians helped forge a global Los Angeles, Arab Routes counters a long-held stereotype of Arabs as outsiders and underscores their longstanding place in American culture and in interethnic coalitions, past and present.

This book is both a history and contemporary analysis. Charting the main turnpoints as the growth of cities, trade routes, the petroleum industry and growth of the authoritarian state the author argues that central bureaucratic control is limiting growth. He describes the state as governed by the interests of the ruling family who continue to block opportunities for social mobility. He is also critical of the lack of a broad, productive base in the economy, the export of capital and its effect on investment in local resources, as well as the technological dependence on the West.

This book focuses on the written heritage of Muslims in the Philippines, the historical constitution of chancelleries within the Islamic sultanates, and the production of official letters to conduct local and international diplomacy. The standard narrative on Muslims in the Philippines is one that centres political and armed struggles within the region. However, two important aspects remain unattended: the cultural and intellectual production of the sultanates, and the Moro involvement in Southeast Asian Islamic civilization. This book connects the development and personality of the Philippine sultanates into the regional context of local communities that adopted an international faith. Political alliances and religious missions altered different ethnolinguistic groups and furnished them with the Word, the Qur’anic message, and the Arabic script. Indeed, customary orality and Adab shaped a way of being and acting modelled after what was called the Bichara. Particularly, the book studies the Moro Letter as cultural craft with political meaning, and Jawi heritage in the Philippines. A general catalogue of Jawi manuscripts from the National Archives of the Philippines is provided as appendix.