Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class

Published with Stanford University Press series: Worlding the Middle East

Awarded the 2025 Nikki Keddie Award by the Middle East Studies Association of North America.

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 produced—silk, linen, and cotton; lace and embroidery; undergarments and ready-wear clothing—moved 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 global textile industry and Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians who worked in it.

This book examines how Arab workers navigated processes of racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation. She writes women workers, the majority of the Syrian garment workers, back into US labor history. She also situates the rise of Syrian American industrial elites, who exerted supply chain power to combat labor uprisings, resist unionization, and stake claim on the global textile industry. Critiquing the hegemony of the Syrian peddler in histories of this diaspora, Unmentionables introduces alternative narrators: union activists who led street demonstrations; women garment workers who shut down kimono factories; child laborers who threw snowballs at police; and the diasporic merchant capitalists who contended with all of them.

Read more here: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=37216

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Press Coverage

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Reviews and Praise for Unmentionables

“Deconstructing the the nostalgic symbolism surrounding the men who moved textile goods, Unmentionables adds the missing layer of the story of ‘labor reproduction, textile logistics, and retail’ that reveals the power of immigration and surveillance of immigrants.” — Eileen Boris, LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History

“Unmentionables has a great deal to offer historians of the Syrian American diaspora, as well as scholars of labor history, capitalism, and migration more generally. Among its many insightful contributions are the productive reminder that unionization rates are not the only to trace labor militance. Fahrenthold also offers a nuanced rethinking of mutual aid.” — Emily Pope-Obeda, Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies

“This fascinating book enriches US women’s labor history, complicates histories of Syrian immigration, and foregrounds the ways Syrian American workers resisted US empire. Connecting diverse geographies and modes of production, Stacy Fahrenthold highlights the significance of gendered labor and Syrian American workers in the globalizing US textile and garment industry.”  — Aimee Loiselle, Central Connecticut State University

“This is labor history at its best: attentive to workers’ dreams and demands, ingenious in tracing the flows of capital from Madeira to Massachusetts, and inspiring in its archival breadth. Stacy Fahrenthold centers Syrian workers in a fascinating global history of the textile trade. Crisp and eloquently written,Unmentionables is a must-read.” — Sarah M.A. Gualtieri, University of Southern California

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Talks, Presentations, Publications

• UC Berkeley, Palestinian & Arab Studies Program, February 10, 2026
• George Washington University, GWU Textile Museum and Cotsen Textile Study Center, November 20, 2025 [info]
• Stanislaus State University, Department of History, April 28, 2025
• UC Santa Barbara, Gregory Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies, April 14, 2025
• Immigration & Ethnic History Society, Virtual Book Panel (with Ian Delahanty), February 12, 2025 [info]
• Duke University, Middle East Studies Center and Department of Asian American Studies, February 11, 2025 [info]