The Assimilation of Armenian-Americans

By PHIL PEHLIVANIAN
Pehl_iva_nian@hotmail.com

It has been over a hundred years since the first Armenian American communities formed, but a new threat emerged to the Armenians that fled to America escaping the genocide: Assimilation. Assimilation refers to adopting someone else’s culture over his or her own. So when the first group of Armenians started to arrive in America, the process of assimilation reared its ugly head towards the Armenians and their soon to be Armenian community. Comparing the forced assimilation and the extreme oppression, dehumanization, and the genocide by the Turks, America seemed like a safe haven, a “promise land” even though there was still discrimination but nothing like what they endured in Turkey and their homeland at that time.

In the first and second waves of immigration to America most Armenians landed in Ellis Island where they underwent medical examinations and cross examinations. The ships contained the first and last name of the persons and where their final destination was in the US along with 29 other questions. These questions were later again asked by legal inspectors during the cross examination. One of them being “why do you want to emigrate to America?” As an Armenian how would one answer that question at that time. Especially under the circumstances where most had left murder, torture, and rape. Imagine the pressure that Armenians were under during this process. One thing was sure they did not want to be sent back to Turkey so they had to try their hardest to show they would fit in to this new world and to show the inspectors that they would be a good product to America’s society. Some Armenians under this pressure changed their names; again they did not want to be sent back to the nightmare that had forced them out of their homeland. This was one of the first forms of assimilation that began during their arrival to the United States. I know it’s not so welcoming having and wanting to change your native name but they were far away from where some of their relatives had been murdered and they themselves escaping complete extermination but how would someone at that time explain the horrific events to a non-Armenian.

When they were granted access they mostly settled in the East Coast during the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s. The first Armenian-American community was built in Worcester, Massachusetts by a small group of Armenians who were brought over by Protestant missionaries to try to get them to attract more Armenians to America, but not all Armenians went to Worcester. Some settled in Watertown, Massachusetts, New York and New England. As the immigration of Armenians rose during the Hamidian massacre and the genocide many Armenians immigrated to Fresno, California also. Fresno’s society compared to that of the East Coast’s was more discriminatory against minorities including the Armenians. They were not allowed to live beyond a certain geographic boundary, which became the second Armenian-American community in the United States at that time. Finding and keeping a job came with difficulties in California. Employers would look at their name and if it was anything but American they would consider the person with an American name rather than the foreign name no matter if the Armenian was more qualified for the job compared to the American. With this restriction many Armenians changed their first and last names that hadn’t done so at Ellis Island and some chose to move out of the community to neighboring or far off states without an Armenian-American community to look for jobs in which assimilation was inevitable. This made it more likely for Armenians to intermarry. Even in schools teachers would tell their Armenian students to change their name so it would be more American, making it easier for the teacher and expanding assimilation of Armenians at such a young age. Now how hard is it to pronounce Hagop or Sarkis? The fact that teachers encouraged young students to be called by a different name shouldn’t have been allowed but they were in America, beginning to live the American dream. In addition, most youth barely found out what their parents and grandparents went through in their homeland, or what they were told as “the old country.” Back then, speaking of such atrocities the Armenians experienced would have had people looking further down on them and further alienating them from American society, so it was thought to not speak of what had happened to them and their kinfolk, furthering the thrust of assimilation.

In the next 30 years, after the genocide, the Armenian communities implanted their roots deep in American soil. They built churches, organized youth groups and Sunday schools where young people could have a sense of identity and fight assimilation by learning the Armenian language and history, but this was only available in the Armenian communities in America. The ones that had moved away and had now began slowly assimilating because there weres no resources to keep them up to date with the Armenian community. They slowly began to adopt their surrounding society’s culture and as the new generations were born they were losing their true identity, but some having full or partial Armenian ancestry began to look a little deeper and on their own began to find out whom they really were. Some even wrote books about their journey to find out who they are and where they came from, such books as, Passage to Ararat by Michael J. Arlen and Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian which I highly recommend and with some parts I can relate to. Both books are non-fiction accounts of Armenian-American men who discover their true identity which they did not know they had. Though now we do not have the same obstacles that Armenians were faced with when they first arrived it is important to understand and know what they went through so we can further slow the rate of assimilation and keep our true identity