Page 6-Sunday, November 19, 1978-The Michigan Daily
The Michigan Daily-Sunday, Novemb
Arabic immigrants plant rool
in Dearborn's
midwestern Me
By Sue Warner
AST NIGHT a poet came to speak at the
community center and now the borrowed
wooden folding chairs are piled in a corner
near the magazine rack until they can be
returned. In recent months, the center's director
Aliya Hassan has become an expert on' folding
chairs. The metalic Samsonite variety sells for
$6.75 at Federal's, a reasonable price, but out of
the question right now. Aliya's co-worker Hiam
knows of a place where _she can get some used
chairs for $3.50 but they'd have to be bought
immediately which is also out of the question. The
folding chairs will have to wait.
"What's your problem today?" asks Ali peering
up at the bewildered Arabic man clutching an
AAA insurance form written in a foreign
language. Ali begins to translate.
In the meantime, Aliya is hunting for the petty
cash box, and, unsuccessful in her search, she
storms across the room after discovering wasted
instant coffee. However, the center is equipped
with a dozen second-hand school desks, and the
children will be able to take a trip to Lansing on
Saturday.
"There is very much work and few people,"
explains a young volunteer who becomes intwined
in the phone cord as he drops a stack of papers.
Officially, the building and the people-inside it
make up the Arab Community Center for social
and Economic Services, with its inevitable
acronym ACCESS. And ACCESS sits in the middle
of a situation warranting social and economic
services. Surrounding the small, brick building is
a one-and-one-half square mile neighborhood
which is home to 5,000 Arabs, many of whom are
recent immigrants to this country. The Arabic
enclave, complete with its own mosque and kosher
butchers, is tucked in the extreme southeast
corner of Dearborn, Michigan, just west of the
border separating Dearborn from Detroit.
The Arabic migration to this community has
created an almost classic panacea of urban
problems-inadequate housing, language
barriers, and unemployment among them. And
accordingly, a cast of characters has converged
on the area to assume the roles and
responsibilities for alleviating the problems.
The principal players are the immigrants
including the Lebanese, Palestinians, and
Yemenis fresh off the plane from the old country
who have come to live with their relatives and
friends who have ventured to America before
them. The "older" immigrants and second-
generation Arabs who have begun to take on the
"new ways" of America also play their part, as do
business and labor concerns. Addto the mix local,
state, and federal government officials. Then, to
complete the picture, insert assorted liberal, do-
gooder types along with the media.
VERY DAY the storyline progresses. As
more families arrive the housing situa-
tion deteriorates while, on a different
front, the battle to establish bi-lingual education
has been won. The characters continually
interact; they fight, they agree, and they
compromise.
"We come for living," says 16-year-old Ali
Hamed of his family's move to Dearborn. Each
day Ali's father leaves his half of a yellow-brick
duplex and walks to his job at the Ford Motor
Company's Rouge Plant, less than a mile away.
The plant looms over the community which is
made up of small single- and double-family
houses, with a smattering of tenement-like
apartment buildings. The proximity of the homes,
most of which were built in the 1920s, to the
gigantic industrial complex is geographically
incongruous. As children chase a kickball across
the playground of the neighborhood school, great
billowing clouds of ste
smokestacks in the immed
faint scent of iron ore hang
from time to time the win
announcing the presence
refinery. But perhaps t
intrusion of the plant on t
continuous hissing of the si
from the Ford steel mill.
the droning hiss punctured
broken by the whistle of
abrupt thuds and clanks oJ
trial machinery.
Beyond the plant's impac
the area, however, is its inl
its neighboring community.
those who have settled in I
work in the auto factory c
machine shops which ring1
lure of jobs in the auto indus
significant reason for th
immigrants which has led n
become the nation's large
center. Of almost 2 mill
persons in the U.S., 125,000 li
Ali Hamed's father Salel
English, does not particula
"It's no good," he says throu
though, quckly adds "but the
The furniture in Saleh's h(
destitute. It is apparent th
carpet were perhaps at one
now they are only a well,
typically American such as
white TV in the corner and
adorned with a pattern of p
See KIBBIE,
Sue Warner is co-editor of
the Sunday Magazine.
Daily photos by Andy Freeberg.
*14 ~ 44 -~