Kurdish “Americancis”

When and why did Kurds start coming to the United States? In this conversation, Yuksel Serindag and Stan Thangaraj discuss the nature of early Kurdish immigration.

Most people don’t realize that Kurds started arriving to the United States as early as 1900. Between 1900 and 1920s, some 65,000 reached American shores from Ottoman Turkey. They had started out in the region around Xarput (Elazig), having learned about the United States from the American school there (founded by American missionaries in the early 19th century). They had walked from Xarput north to Trabzon or another Black Sea port, and from there journeyed by ship to Constantinople, then to Marseilles, then to New York or, more often, Providence, Rhode Island.

It was a time of massive expansion of American industry, which needed immigrant labor. Many Kurdish immigrants found work in Salem, Peabody, and Worcester, Massachusetts. Others settled in Dearborn, Michigan, where they helped initiate the Muslim infrastructure that became crucial for later Muslim immigrants. 

Some Kurdish and Turkish immigrants eventually went back home, although Syrians and Lebanese stayed and created mutual aid and support systems for their immigrant communities, like the Lebanese community in Butte, Montana, employed by the copper mining industry.

Stanley I. Thangaraj is a professor of anthropology and sociology at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. His recent article is  “We Share the Same Ancestry: US Kurdish Diasporas and the Aspirational Ascriptive Practices of Race,” American Anthropologist 124, no. 1 (March 2022): 104-17.  His forthcoming book is about the Kurdish diaspora in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Yuksel Serindag is a metadata librarian at Yale Law School Library

Their conversation was recorded on March 21, 2023, for the New York Kurdish Cultural Center’s Kurdish Heritage Month.