When most Americans think of Fresno, it is for its role as the gateway to Yosemite National Park, just a 90-minute drive away. Others may know California’s fifth largest city as the raisin capital of the world. Fresno also has another claim to fame: It is home to the largest concentration of South Yemenis in the United States. Other Yemeni communities live in Stockton, Bakersfield, Modesto, and Oakland. Yemenis represent the third largest group of immigrant children in the Oakland School District.
How did these smaller California cities become such thriving centers of Yemeni culture?
A new book, Mubarez, provides some fascinating answers. The author, Khaled Alyemany, an Aden native educated in Cuba, served in several diplomatic postings before becoming Yemen’s foreign minister from 2018 to 2019. Like former Pakistani ambassador Hussain Haqqani and the late Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eden, Alyemany was a scholar in his own right before his diplomatic career, and it shows in his writing.
Arabs, like other new arrivals, tended to group where they had relatives, friends, or a support network.
The book gives an overview of the broader history of Arab immigration to the United States, from an Algerian shipwreck survivor in 1779 North Carolina to Lebanese immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century to some 95,000 during the 1880-1924 Great Migration, most of whom appear to have been “Syrian” Christians incorporating those who came not only from what is today Syria, but also Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. Some, however, may have been Southern Yemenis who came as British subjects on British ships given the United Kingdom’s colonization of Aden.
Arabs, like other new arrivals, tended to group where they had relatives, friends, or a support network. For Arabs, this meant Washington Street in Manhattan and then, with the opening of bridges and subway tunnels, an expansion into Brooklyn and New Jersey.
Arab immigration increased again in the 1950s, after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 revised the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that had imposed a quota on Arabs (and others). Legal revisions and new laws during the Civil Rights era deconstructed other discriminatory policies that had favored Western Europeans over everyone else in American immigration calculations.
Palestinians flowed in against the backdrop of the Arab-Israel conflict. Other Arabs came as students. American companies began recruiting Latin Americans and Arabs, including Yemenis, to work in factories and fields because they were cheaper laborers than workers from European background and less prone to unionization. In 1967, South Yemen gained independence from the United Kingdom and quickly became a communist state. Several thousand South Yemenis fled to the United States, many of whom were education professionals. Curiously, these may not have been the first Yemenis to arrive in the New World; archaeologists have uncovered ancient Southern Arabian script carved into stone in Colorado, suggesting some sea-faring migrants from the Arabian Peninsula could have joined other migrations that populated the continent to create Native Americans.
Americans generally embraced Yemenis; they stood aloof from intra-communal conflicts and enjoyed a reputation as hard workers.
In 1947, Yemen opened its consulate in Washington, D.C. Americans generally embraced Yemenis; they stood aloof from intra-communal conflicts and enjoyed a reputation as hard workers. The State Department even made them eligible to sponsor not only family members but also friends as immigration accelerated. Separate chapters cover the birth of the New York, Dearborn, Michigan, and California communities. Agricultural work suited Yemenis. It was hard, even backbreaking, but those engaged could build up small nest eggs and, because of its seasonal nature, the work also enabled Yemenis to return home for visits. Alyemany describes the ambitions, pitfalls, and often successes of those who stood up groceries, businesses, and even developed the in-store ATM trade. Farm owners embraced Yemenis after Mexicans and other Latin Americans began to unionize.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Transworld Airlines (TWA) reportedly even offered a credit system in which Yemenis could get a ticket to California for a $100 deposit on the condition that the laborer would repay the remaining $700 of the ticket cost after they began work. The number of Yemenis TWA reported transporting to California during this time was more than two orders of magnitude higher than the several hundred that official U.S. statistics suggest.
Alyemany not only tells the story of Yemeni immigrants, but he also interweaves how internal developments led Yemenis to seek their fortunes or refuge in America. In one case, it was escalation of a property dispute to murder. In others, Yemenis fled the secret police or the predations of the Imam’s government. He also describes key events in American history such as the September 11, 2001, attacks and their aftermath, through the eyes and experiences of the Yemeni American community.
Mubarez is a joy to read and extremely well-written. Alyemany takes advantage of his connections and so his study is as much an oral history as a document-based one. He is careful and not prone to political polemic, nor does he derail his narrative with excessive but irrelevant theories like so many academics do today. What comes through is pure history and insights that shed light not only on Yemen itself, but also on an important if hitherto understudied component of the Arab diaspora in America.
