Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade

Fighting Our Own Battles: Iraqi Chaldeans and the War on Terror

126 Chaldean immigrants to the United States began to form a visible cluster in Detroit in the 1920s (Sengstock 1982). Today, members of this Catholic Iraqi minority who settle in the United States encounter multiple options for reconfiguring, consolidating, and negotiating their ethnicity. The United States is a host country where, in most cases, they have family and kin who are already well established. As recently arrived Chaldean migrants struggle to create new identities and secure their economic status, the established diasporic Chaldeans work to gain recognition in the United States and internationally , all the while maintaining links to an original homeland that must be continually reinvented, and reimagined, from afar. In this manner, Chaldean immigrants have exhibited assimilative tendencies, refurbished traditions they or their families brought from Iraq, and forged new identities that combine innovation and renovation in ways that, across several decades and generations , have come to define the hyphenated identity “Chaldean-American.” Whether they reside in Iraq, the United States, or other countries, the social lives of Chaldeans are complex; they cannot be adequately understood by looking only at what happens within the boundaries of a single nationstate . This is especially so when attempting to make sense of the political and cultural initiatives Chaldeans have undertaken during the War on Terror. Understanding how multiple locations and affiliations have intersected to shape Chaldean identities calls for a new methodology that transcends the standard focus on integration (or exclusion) in the country of settlement. This new method needs to account for the ethnic, religious, and political mobilization of Chaldeans across national boundaries. In this essay, I will interpret the U.S.-based Chaldean diaspora as a “transnational social field” in which Fighting Our Own Battles Iraqi Chaldeans and the War on Terror yasmeen hanoosh Fighting Our Own Battles 127 community spaces are constantly reconfigured by the transnational activities that transpire within them. Several factors make it necessary to analyze Chaldeans as a transnational diasporic community. For one, contemporary Chaldean immigrants in the United States cannot be called “transmigrants” because most of them do not lead a daily life that “depends on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders,” nor do they frequently travel back and forth between a “sending” nation-state and a “receiving” one (Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc 1995). However, like the identities of transmigrants who maintain strong ties to their countries of origin, the public identities of Chaldean immigrants in Detroit are made in relation to two nation-states, Iraq and the United States, and to the many stations along their way out of Iraq, where asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants move toward preferred destinations. Moreover, in recent decades Chaldeans have been forging multifaceted cultural and economic relations between their society of origin and new settlements in the United States and elsewhere, a process that migration scholars identify as characteristic of “transnational migration.” I will examine several Chaldean transnational projects in this essay. Before introducing them, however , I should first consider what makes these projects, and the people who envision and pursue them, Chaldean. Ingredients of the Official Narrative When U.S.-based Chaldeans explain to other Americans “who modern Chaldeans are,” they offer descriptions containing some or all of the following identity tropes: 1. Modern Chaldeans are the offspring of the founders of the first civilizations , the Chaldeans and Assyrians, whose existence predates Christianity by a few thousand years. 2. They originate in the village of Telkeif, in modern-day Iraq. 3. They speak Aramaic, “the language of Jesus.” 4. They are devout Catholics. 5. They are hardworking, successful entrepreneurs. 6. They are community and family oriented. These components are stable, uniform identity benchmarks. They appear in tabloid versions on official Web sites and Internet forum discussions, in community publications, in documentary videos, and in the verbal accounts culture-makers use to instruct anyone—a non-Chaldean “outsider” or an 128 Yasmeen Hanoosh uninformed Chaldean “insider”—who wants to learn more about Chaldeans . When it comes to Mesopotamian antiquity, the earliest identifiable Chaldeans were Aramaeans (though nowadays some question this assumption) who settled in southern Iraq, forming the basis of the neo-Babylonian revival of the last dynasty of Babylon. The Chaldean (Babylonian) Empire fell in 539 BC, leaving no evidence of tangible racial connections that are exclusive to the ancient and modern Chaldeans. Moreover, with respect to language, the modern Chaldeans of the Nineveh Plains speak dialects of neo-Aramaic, and most...