Transnational Beings: Corner Store Entrepreneurship of MENA Immigrants of the Third Wave

This poster will examine immigrant entrepreneurship as a historically contingent strategy of survival, adaptation, and transnational belonging by visually mapping two moments of Middle Eastern and North African migration to the United States. Using a tri-fold poster format, the presentation juxtaposes first-wave Syrian American pack-peddling networks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century third-wave MENA immigration centered on networks facilitated through gas stations, bodegas, and corner stores. In doing so, it argues that MENA immigrant-owned entrepreneurial spaces functioned as zones of transition—sites where migrants negotiated adaptation, racialization, and transnational belonging through everyday economic practice.

The left panel will trace Syrian American migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through pack-peddling networks established by figures such as Salem Bishara, contextualized through the scholarship of Alixa Naff and Hani Bawardi. Using visually rendered migration routes, kinship ties, and commercial pathways, this section demonstrates how peddling operated both as an entry point into the U.S. economy and as a mechanism of communal support. Short contextual captions situate these networks within broader patterns of exclusion, mobility, and early MENA settlement, drawing on Sarah Gualtieri’s work on the relationship between Christianity, racial classification, and claims to whiteness among early Syrian immigrants.

The right panel will focus on third-wave MENA immigration after 1965 through the entrepreneurial network built by Muneer Albadawi, whose story is elaborated in my dissertation, “Transnational Beings: Corner Store Entrepreneurship of MENA Immigrants of the Third Wave” (to be defended Spring 2026). Drawing on oral history interviews conducted between 2019 and 2024, this section visually maps contemporary migration routes, labor placement, and business ownership within gas stations and corner stores. These materials highlight how third-wave migrants relied on community-controlled economic niches to mitigate vulnerability in the U.S. labor market while maintaining transnational ties in ways that parallel earlier pack-peddling networks.

The center panel will synthesize these models of network development into a broader historical argument. Through concise text blocks, timelines, and comparative diagrams, it contends that immigrant entrepreneurship—particularly among MENA communities—should be understood not as a linear path toward assimilation, but as a recurring adaptive response shaped by racialization, exclusion, and shifting opportunity structures. Methodologically, the poster emphasizes the value of oral history and network visualization in recovering immigrant experiences that remain underrepresented in traditional archival sources.

Designed to encourage dialogue, the poster will invite viewers to consider continuity and change in immigrant economic strategies and to reflect on how everyday spaces of work have shaped the making of immigrant America across generations.