Working in Diaspora: A (Brief) Labor History of Armenian Los Angeles

“Symphony to Serve Work of Chef Who Cooks Up Classics”, announced a 1985 headline in the LA Times about the operator of Ara’s Armenian hamburgers in the San Fernando Valley, whose symphony was going to be performed by the Van Nuys Civic Orchestra. Ara Sevanian, the man of the story, was a celebrated master of qanun, a Middle Eastern string instrument, who had to make a living by operating a burger stand.

When telling the story of the Armenians in Los Angeles and how a community came to congregate around the spatial landscape of the city, the history of labor and its role in the process takes a seat behind the oft repeated narratives of shared heritage, culture and identity as being the primary drivers. However, focusing on Armenians in Los Angeles reveals how labor functioned not merely as economic necessity but as a key mechanism through which diasporic communities were spatially organized and socially stratified. The Ara Sevanian Papers, alongside ephemeral archival materials, Armenian periodicals, and oral history interviews make it possible to reconstruct the labor networks that guided Armenian settlement in Los Angeles and illuminate how Armenians accessed employment through kinship ties, hometown connections and organizations. When read spatially, these sources map relationships among employment sites, transit corridors, and Armenian residential hubs, while illuminating intra-community debates over the moral and social meanings attached to different forms of work.

The foregrounding of labor shows how diasporic identity, urban space, and class formation were co-produced through work in twentieth-century Los Angeles.