Overlapping Diasporas, Multiracial Lives: South Asian Muslims in U.S. Communities of Color, 1880–1950

Abstract

During the first half of the twentieth century, a steady flow of Indian Muslim men were jumping ship from British merchant marine vessels and settling in U.S. port cities like New Orleans and New York. These men intermarried within local African American and Puerto Rican communities. Their lives and those of their families illuminate an important arena of encounter between Muslim immigrants and U.S. communities of color as well as the everyday exchanges that occur in the overlap between multiple disporas.

Keywords:

• African Americans
• diaspora
• Harlem
• intermarriage
• Islam
• merchant sailors
• migration
• New Orleans
• Puerto Ricans
• South Asians

I wish to thank Alaudin Ullah for his generosity in sharing his family's history in discussions over the course of the last five years, and for his insights regarding this work. I also wish to thank Vijay Prashad, Adam Green, Andrew Ross, Suresht Renjen Bald, and Kym Ragusa for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article; Gary Okihiro, Sohail Daulatzai, Gayatri Gopinath, Junaid Rana, Jigna Desai, Sunaina Maira, Rajini Srikanth, and Gita Rajan for feedback on portions of the article that were delivered at the 2006 Association for Asian American Studies Conference in Atlanta, Georgia; and Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, Manu Vimalassery, and Rich Blint for their ongoing critical engagement and support.

Notes

United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (hereafter USDC/BC), U.S. Census, 1900: Population Schedule, New Orleans, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, 9th Precinct, Ward 11, Supervisor's District 1, Enumeration District No. 115, Sheet No. 18. USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1920: Population Schedule, Bronx, New York, Supervisor's District 6, Enumeration District No. 271, Sheet No. 7.

New York City Municipal Archives (hereafter NYCMA), State of New York Certificate and Record of Marriage, August 20, 1923, Certificate No. 26075.

NYCMA, Certificate and Record of Marriage, October 29, 1924, Certificate No. 33040.

USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1930: Population Schedule, New York, New York, Ward AD21, Block L, Enumeration District No. 31–1019, Supervisor's District 24, Sheet No. 6B.

USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1900: Population Schedule, New Orleans, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, 9th Precinct, Ward 11, Supervisor's District 1, Enumeration District No. 115, Sheet No. 18. USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1920: Population Schedule, Bronx, New York, Supervisor's District 6, Enumeration District No. 271, Sheet No. 7.

There is also evidence of South Asian men living and working in and around Galveston, TX; Atlanta, GA; Jacksonville, FL; Baltimore, MD; Philadelphia, PA; and Detroit, MI, and evidence of intermarriage within the black community in Detroit.

This history complements the stories of Punjabi-Mexican intermarriage in California in the 1910s–40s, as described in Karen Leonard's Making Ethnic Choices. See: Karen Isaksen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997, 2003), p. 74.

Earl Lewis, “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans Into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” American Historical Review 100, June (1995): 765–787; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Gayatri Gopinath, “‘Bombay, U.K., Yuba City’: Bhangra Music and the Engendering of Diaspora,” Diaspora 4.3 (1995): 303–321; Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).

USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1900: Population Schedule, New Orleans, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, 3rd Precinct, Ward 4, Supervisor's District 1, Enumeration District No. 36, Sheets No. 6 & 7.

USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1900: Population Schedule, New Orleans, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, 3rd Precinct, Ward 4, Supervisor's District 1, Enumeration District No. 36, Sheet No. 6.

USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1910: Population Schedule, New Orleans, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, 2nd Precinct, Ward 4, Supervisor's District 1, Enumeration District No. 59, Sheet No. 5.

See, for example: USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1910: Population Schedule, New Orleans, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, 2nd Precinct, Ward 4, Supervisor's District 1, Enumeration District No. 59, Sheet No. 7 and Enumeration District No. 60, Sheets No. 8 & 12.

See for example: USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1930: Population Schedule, New Orleans, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, 6th Precinct, Ward 5, Block 182, Supervisor's District 11, Enumeration District No. 36-76, Sheet No. 14B.

See, for example: USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1930: Population Schedule, Chicago, Illinois, Cook County, 6th Precinct, Ward 25, Block 393, Supervisor's District 6, Enumeration District No. 16-2638, Sheet No. 5 A.

USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1930: Population Schedule, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Hamilton County, 7th Precinct, Supervisor's District 13, Enumeration District No. 33-22, Sheet No. 13B. USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1930: Population Schedule, Memphis, Tennessee, Shelby County, District 6, Ward 11, Block 417, Supervisor's District 9, Enumeration District No. 79-36, Sheet No. 3B.

Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press, 2002); G. Balachandran, “South Asian Seafarers and their Worlds: c. 1870–1930s.” Paper presented at Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., February 12–15, 2003. <http://www.historycooperative.org/proceedings/seascapes/balachandran.html> (9 July 2006); Conrad Dixon, “Lascars: The Forgotten Seamen,” in Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting, eds, Working Men Who Got Wet (Newfoundland: Maritime History Group, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1980).

Visram, 54.

Visram, 54–56.; see also: Dixon, 269; Balachandran, par. 10–11.

Balachandran, par. 8.

Visram, 64–69, 196–224; Balachandran, par. 18, 31–37.

Visram, 260.

Ibid. 196–197.

Ibid. 257.

Ibid.

Ibid. 258.

See, for example: USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1930: Population Schedule, Paterson, New Jersey, Passaic County, Ward 1, Supervisor's District 2, Enumeration District No. 16-8, Sheets No. 1B & 14A; Enumeration District No. 16-9, Sheet No. 6A.

USDC/BC, U.S. Census, 1920: Population Schedule, Lackawanna, New York, Erie County, Ward 1, Supervisor's District 21, Enumeration District No. 306, Sheets No. 53A, 62B.

In 1922, a railroad shop workers' strike was sparked, in part, by the Erie Railroad's hiring of “fifty Hindus and thirty-one Chinese” to work in their Jersey City rail yards, “most of whom deserted ships in port here,” and was further inflamed as the railroad continued to use Indian, Chinese, and African American workers as strike-breakers. At the time, the New York Times reported there were “about 5000 Chinese and Hindus stranded in this port” and looking for work, “because of dull shipping.” See: “Strikers Migrate to Take Rail Jobs,” New York Times, July 12, 1922, p. 1.

In the 1920s, the connections between the Indian maritime population and New York–based Indian radicals—particularly Sailendranath Ghose and his Friends of Freedom for India—were in fact quite significant. These connections will be the subject of a separate article. Here I would just note that the Indian case bears out much of what Gilroy and Linebaugh and Rediker argue about the maritime trade, namely that the maritime industry—and ships themselves, as “living, micro-cultural, micro-political system[s] in motion”—have constituted an important terrain for the formation of individual political radicals and new collectivities/solidarities, as well as for the transmission and cross-fertilization of radical literature and ideas. While qualifying these spaces and their radicalism as particularly gendered, I would argue that Gilroy and Linebaugh and Rediker's analyses could be extended to certain spaces such as sailors boardinghouses and restaurants, which occupy a liminal position between the maritime and onshore worlds. See: Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 4, 12–13; and Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), esp. pp. 143–173.

Mosud Choudhury, interview by the author. New York, February 2004.

Noor Choudry, interview by the author. Los Angeles, CA, January 2005.

F.O. 371/42909.

Ibid.

M. Choudhury.

Alaudin Ullah, interview by the author. New York, NY, June, 2003.

N. Choudry.

Miriam Christian, interview by the author. New York, 1996.

Alaudin Ullah, interview by the author. New York, August, 2006.

Habib Ullah, Jr., interview by the author. New York, NY, May 2005.

N. Choudry.

Ibid.

N. Choudry, H. Ullah.

H. Ullah.

Ibid.

N. Choudry.

Ibid.

H. Ullah.

Alaudin Ullah, interview by the author. New York, NY, May 2005.

Leonard, 1992.