I grew up in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, about ninety miles north of Cairo, and I knew that our region, Southern Illinois, was nicknamed “Little Egypt,” and that the mascot of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, was the saluki, the lightning fast hunting dog of the Egyptian pharaohs. It was not Arabs who had named the region after the land of the pyramids, but the white male settlers who sought to turn the junction of two mighty rivers into a commercial hub.
I was told that they picked the name Cairo because they saw a correspondence between this meeting place and that of the Blue and White Nile Rivers, located in Khartoum, Sudan, south of Egypt but geographically close enough in their imagination. Or maybe it was because Cairo, Egypt, was the gateway to the Delta. Whatever the reason, Muslim, Arab, Turkish, and other “Oriental” place names were ubiquitous in the Midwest before the Civil War—from Elkader, Iowa, to Mahomet, Illinois.
As for the real Arabs, most people beyond Cairo had little idea that there were any of us living in Little Egypt, and outside my family, no one knew that I was a descendant of the first generation.
Inside my family it was a different story. After school and during summers, I spent a lot time with my Arab grandmother, who moved to Mt. Vernon when I was in grade school. For her, there was no contradiction in being a down-home Arab in Southern Illinois. If she harbored any internalized oppression resulting from anti-Arab and anti-immigrant bias, it was hard to detect. From her retelling of our family’s history, we belonged in Southern Illinois; we were as Saluki as a person could be.
Today, when I hear fellow Midwesterners say that racial and ethnic diversity is new to the small-town Midwest, I know in my bones that the region has always been more than a white settlement. Of course, there are new immigrants in the rural Midwest, many of whom stem the tide of depopulation and provide essential labor, especially in agriculture. But the idea that non-white immigrants are, generally speaking, new to the Midwest could not be further from the truth.
And since the 1880s, Arabic-speaking people have been part of this place. From the Dakotas to Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, and Nebraska, people like my family settled in small towns and put down roots. Before 1920, perhaps half a million Arabic-speaking people from the Eastern Mediterranean left what they called Syria, which for them included the modern-day countries of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. The majority immigrated to Latin America and the Caribbean, with about 100,000 landing in the United States.