Familiar Faces in Unfamiliar Places: Assyrians in the California Heartland 1911 - 2010

By Dr. Arianne Ishaya

This book traces the ups and downs in the regional history of California with particular focus on the Assyrian Immigrants who settled the area of Turlock-Modesto back in 1911. It tells the story of a people who dared to leave the familiar behind and embrace the unknown. Together with other early non-Assyrian pioneers, they developed the area from sand dunes to a town of vineyards and orchards. It is the story of ordinary people with extraordinary experiences.

The detailed family histories take the reader to the world at large from where the members of this dispersed refugee nation have come together to form the Turlock-Modesto colony in the heartland of California. It contains poignant accounts of a people who started out with modest beginnings; but whether they came as penniless hopefuls in search of farmland, or traumatized refugees from the Middle East, they worked hard and were able to establish themselves as a stable and even well-to-do part of the Turlock-Modesto community.

Changes in the history of this immigrant enclave are traced in the context of the economic and political upheavals in the Middle East where the refugees came from as well as the economic boom and bust cycles in the central California valley. This book records the mutual interaction between the region and its inhabitants. The town shaped the structure of the community as a whole as much as the community shaped the character of the town.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453567463

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Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Arianne Ishaya.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2010912789

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4535-6745-6

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4535-6744-9

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4535-6746-3

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Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Chapter I

Turlock, the Little Urmi; Home Away From Home

Chapter II

Turlock in Historical Perspective

Chapter III

From Urmi to Turlock

Chapter IV

Family Snapshots of the First Pioneers

Chapter V

Dreaming of America

Chapter VI

Surviving the Sword

Chapter VII

New Beginnings

Chapter VIII

New Branches

Chapter IX

Turlock in Transition

Chapter X

Newer Grafts on the Old Stock

Chapter XI

Newer Stems on the Vine

Chapter XII

The Fruits of the Vine

Reference List

Appendix A

History of Assyrians in Urmia

Appendix B

Settling Into Diaspora: A History Of Urmia Assyrians In The United States

To Emmanuel Ramsin, MD

My brother, my father, my teacher, and my role model

Foreword

The Assyrian community in Turlock-Modesto encapsulates the ethnohistory of this nation over the past one hundred years. Refugees, old and new, transplants from town and villages, mountaineers and plainspeople, Assyrian nationals of different countries and of different Christian denominations, have all come together in separate waves to become an ethnic mosaic within a larger one in Turlock-Modesto. This is what is unique about this community. Unlike the other settlements, like the Swedish and the Portuguese, the Assyrian settlement in Turlock has been an ongoing event, the new arriving in waves, unsettling the old, jerking them from their comfort zone by the infusion of new culture; the new experiencing a double dose of culture shock of settling among the unfamiliar American faces and estranged Assyrian old-timers.

This book tells the story of a people who dared to leave the familiar behind and embrace the unknown. Together with other early non-Assyrian pioneers, they helped to build a town blooming with orchards where before only sand dunes dominated the landscape.

The detailed family histories take the reader to the world at large from where the members of this dispersed refugee nation have come together to form the Turlock-Modesto colony. It contains poignant accounts of a people who started out with modest beginnings; but whether they came as penniless hopefuls in search of farmland, or traumatized refugees from the Middle East, they worked hard and were able to establish themselves as a stable and even well-to-do part of the Turlock-Modesto community.

This book is based on a total of 108 in-depth family histories which I collected during my stay in Turlock, California in 1981-1982, and follow-up visits in 1983-1985, as part of research for my PhD dissertation for the department of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

In addition to Assyrians, I also interviewed members of the community at large, such as history professors at the local college, businessmen, local government officials, and a few people from the Swedish, Portuguese, Mexican-American and Anglo-American backgrounds: a total of thirteen people.

I have updated the data where relevant, and have compiled new family histories from Assyrian refugees who settled in Turlock from the years 2004-2009. Furthermore, I have sifted the text of technical terms as well as theoretical concepts and turned it into a people’s history to reach a wider readership.

Acknowledgments

This book is truly a people’s history because it owes its existence to the contributions of so many people.

Foremost on the list is Francis Sarguis, who read the manuscript and on whose keen eye and input I relied on chapter by chapter. Having spent his teenage years in Turlock, he relived his personal experiences while reading the manuscript and shared some valuable information about people and events in Turlock. More than an editor, he was a caring coach and a support base for which I am most grateful.

I wish to express my gratitude to the Assyrians of Turlock, who opened their homes and their hearts to me, and although sometimes painful, they shared their family histories with me. I am most thankful to the non-Assyrian community members of Turlock who were forthcoming in sharing their knowledge of the town and of their own ethnic group with me.

I thank God for my daughter, Nineva, and her artistic talents evident in the cover design of this book.

I feel gratitude beyond measure to my son, Ellis, for the time-consuming effort he put in scanning and formatting all the pictures in the book.

Above all, praise belongs to Jesus Christ, whose abundant grace and love makes it all possible.

Chapter I

Turlock, the Little Urmi;[1]

Home Away From Home

Map of Turlock, CA

Image4600.jpg

A Sightseeing Tour of Turlock

You can tell quite a bit about a town just by driving through it. It’s like sizing up a stranger by the type of clothing and hair style they wear. What is the view of Turlock in 2010 looking out of a car seat?

Driving northbound in California toward the town of Turlock along Highway 99 California’s Lifeline, as it is called. We pass through miles and miles of vineyards and almond orchards sometimes called field factories, because they are not family farms but corporate-administered enterprises. As we reach the outskirts of Turlock, odd-looking giant, narrow, and tall structures appear along the highway. These are feed mills silently signaling the presence of a town where the backbone of the economy is the farming and ranching business. At the city limit a sign reads: Welcome to Turlock—the Key to the Valley, conveying the central location of the town in the valley—a fact which established the town in its early history as a shipping center for grain and a service center for the outlying farming communities. Today it has maintained this role vis-à-vis the satellite farming communities of Denair, Livingston, Hughson, Ceres, and Keyes to the north and east; and Hilmar, Delhi, and Patterson to the south and west. In addition, it has attracted a number of light manufacturing and food processing industries geared to the agricultural base. Whereas most cities and towns in California carry saints’ names in Spanish, such as Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, the valley towns are named after the big landlords, who dominated the valley in its formative years.

Founded in 1871 as a Central Pacific Railroad Station, Turlock was to be named after John Mitchell, who was a prominent cattle rancher in the area. But he chose instead to christen the town after his native village Turlough in Ireland. So Turlock reflects the nostalgia and longing of many settlers for their distant homes, which were closer to the heart than the new within the grasp.

To the east and the north of the town of Turlock are acres upon acres of mainly grapevines under corporate ownership. The orchards eventually hit the foothills of the Sierra. On the foothills the orchards give way to grain farming and pasturage, relics from the area’s past economy, which has been pushed farther and farther into the periphery as the production and processing of alternative commodities has become more lucrative.

Most of the light manufacturing firms, such as feed mills, the poultry farms, the egg hatcheries, the town’s cannery, and turkey processing plants, are located in the south and west end of Turlock. There is no suburban development in the south end of town. As soon as we exit from the highway, we are in the older section of Turlock—the downtown where small retail stores and major government buildings are located. Here the Southern Pacific Railroad has left its mark as the streets, in obedience to the railroad track which runs on a southeast, northwest axis, are similarly slanted so as to run parallel and at right angles to the track. But these streets eventually straighten out in a north-south and east-west direction as they extend farther out toward the newer suburbs of the town, symbolically conveying the loosening of the grip of the railroad on the town’s destiny.

The physical appearance of the town has other stories to tell as well. The residential area around the downtown is compact. Here are closely built older bungalows. On the west side of town, across from the cemetery, the houses are shabby looking. Some streets are unpaved; on the others the pavement is cracked and in an unrepaired condition. Undoubtedly the west and south end of the town are poor. But this is not a unique feature of Turlock. Apparently in every town in the valley, the east side is rich and the west side is poor. Why? The answer seems to be in the direction of the prevailing winds which blow the pollution from the factories and the canneries down south and west.

Turlock has a colorful ethnic palette. The early Anglo-American, Swedish, Portuguese, and Assyrian settlers were joined later by the Mexican-American farmhands and the white folks nicknamed the Okies: migrants from the Dust Bowl who were tractored out from their homes during the Depression of the 1930s. All have now become a permanent feature of the population of the town. In addition, South Asians (mostly Sikh), and a few Native Americans and people of African American descent have all turned this Swede Town as it was formerly known, into a rich ethnic mosaic.

The town is located in a flat basin. The relative soil fertility, the level terrain, the long growing season, and the availability of irrigation water have all been important in the development of the district into a rich farming and ranching area. In the early 1980s Stanislaus County, in which Turlock is located, was one of the nation’s largest producers of farm products. Its ten leading commodities were milk, chickens, almonds, eggs, cattle, peaches, grapes, walnuts, beans, and silage (fodder converted into feed for livestock). The small family owned almond orchards and vineyards lacing the town with verdure, succumbed to the urban sprawl of the 1980-1990s. In 1983 the population of Turlock had reached 30,399, eclipsing the growth rate of other towns in the state (Turlock Daily Journal May 6, 1983, A12). The most recent census (2005) placed the population at 55,810. The reason for this rapid rate of population growth is none other than the relatively affordable housing and lower cost of living, which have turned the town into a bedroom community for the larger cities in the north. In the commercial sector and service sector, shopping malls and branch plants of major corporations and supermarket subsidiaries, such as Lucky, Wal-Mart, Costco, Best Buy, etc., have replaced the vineyards and orchards surrounding the town, sweeping away the town’s originality and provinciality.

The Assyrians call Turlock the Little Urmi because its vineyards and fruit orchards remind them of the villages and homes they had to abandon at various times due to the persecution of Christian minorities in the Middle East.

A striking feature of Turlock, as in Urmi, is fruit trees such as walnut, apricot, apple, peach, and lemon trees found in backyards and along the streets. It is easy to spot the houses occupied by the Assyrians if one peeks into the backyards. As in Urmi, you will generally find fewer ornamental plants and more fruit trees, even a couple of rows of vines in any given backyard. The grapes are eaten fresh or dried as raisins. The leaves are used to make varieties of dolma, recipes made with stuffed vine leaves. There is also invariably a vegetable garden in which are planted Mediterranean herbs, such as cilantro, tarragon, sweet basil, dill, and the like. These herbs are important ingredients in the Assyrian daily diet.

Assyrian landmarks abound in Turlock. There are five churches with Assyrian names within two miles of one another representing the ancient rite churches (Church of the East and the Assyrian-Chaldean Church) as well as a variety of Protestant churches (Evangelical, Presbyterian, and Pentecostal) reminiscent of the American and Catholic missionary conversions among the Assyrians. (This is not including three other ancient rite churches in the nearby towns of Ceres and Hughson.)

Driving toward the north end of town, a large, modern-looking, one-story building with walls that have wedge-shaped topped edges reminiscent of the ancient architecture of Nineveh, attracts attention. On the long pole in front of the building stands the sculpture of an Assyrian-winged bull. Underneath is a sign which reads: The Assyrian-American Civic Club of Turlock. This building houses an Assyrian language radio and television station as well as various other charitable, social, educational, and entertainment organizations. An attached restaurant serves Assyrian dishes, tea, and pastries throughout the day.

Continuing north on Highway 99 for about nine miles is the small town of Ceres. On Ceres North Central Street there is a residential development, called the Nineveh Estate, where the streets have all Assyrian names, like Urmi Avenue, Babylon Avenue, Ashour St., and so on. Further along North Central Street, we come across another large building crowned with an Assyrian star. Underneath is a sign which reads Assyrian Cultural Center: Bet Nahrain Inc. This is the site of a second Assyrian civic club as well as the site of an Assyrian language radio and television program. Orhai Assyrian National Foundation (named after an old Christian city, Edessa), is also located in Ceres.

Why is it that the Assyrians in Turlock and Ceres eagerly display their ethnic existence? We can answer this question by posing still another one. What is different about the Assyrians as compared to other ethnic groups in the area?

Unlike the Swedes, the Portuguese, the Mexican-Americans, and others, the Assyrians are a stateless people. There is no country called Assyria. They are invisible as a nation; so they have attempted to establish their identity in the public sphere by the display of national names and symbols. In other words, since they do not belong to the community of nation states, their existence as a people is either most often not known or is misunderstood. It is easy to place someone who is identified as a Swede, a Mexican, or an Irish with a homeland. The identity of these people is displayed on current geographical maps, and reference is made to them in the media. Their existence is recognized in the international diplomatic and cultural centers. Not so with stateless people. They cannot be easily placed since they exist inside the boundaries of foreign nation states. On the contrary, they can be easily misplaced. Take the case of the Assyrians who, in their countries of origin, do not have full rights of citizenship because they are not Arab, or Turk, or Muslim, and as immigrants in the USA, they are misidentified as Arab, Turk, or Muslim. It is interesting that after eighty years of residency in Turlock, in the 1980s the local Assyrians were still trying to clarify who they were. An article on the Assyrians which appeared in several consecutive issues in one of the local dailies started with the title We’re not Iranians and we’re not Arabs… We’re Assyrians. (Modesto Bee, August 1-4, 1982) Since the regular channels for self-identification which are open to other ethnic peoples who belong to distinct nation states are closed to them, the Assyrians find other channels. Signaling their identity is perhaps one of the ways they choose to resist misidentification. The name Assyrian written in English and sometimes Aramaic on church buildings, accompanied by national symbols such as the winged bull or the Assyrian star on civic buildings, cries out the existence of a distinct Middle Eastern, linguistic, and Christian community in the town.

Retired Assyrians from other states in the USA as well as young Assyrian refugee families from the Middle East (with its ongoing political convulsions) are attracted to Turlock due to the lower cost of living and the presence of a large Assyrian community. 4.9 percent of the town population’s reported ancestry was in the category Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac in the 2000 census. This was the fourth highest percentage in the United States for this category; a percentage that does not include the large settlement in Ceres, Modesto, and other nearby small towns.

Outside of the United States, Assyrians have had a larger-than-life image of this somewhat sleepy little town. There is an anecdote about an Assyrian who landed in New York and went on a sightseeing tour there. When he saw all the skyscrapers in this huge metropolis, he exclaimed, If New York is like this, what a wonder Turlock must be!

Chapter II

Turlock in Historical Perspective

Formative Years

Mitchell Avenue, Geer Road, Chapman Street, Whitmore Avenue, Service Road are only street names now. But they echo the names of the people who gave birth to the town of Turlock.

If we went back to the mid-1860s, we would find the area which is now Turlock, an open range for stockbreeding. This was communal land with no commercial value at the time. All this changed when the news of the arrival of the railroad signaled the rise in land values, and the state government decided to cash in on public lands. Its first settlers (after the Native Americans) were of English and Irish origins. Two of the well-known California land speculators who bought vast tracts of land around Turlock were John Mitchell and Colonel Whitmore. Mitchell’s one-hundred-thousand-acre estate stretched from Keyes, north of Turlock, southward to Atwater in Merced County. Whitmore owned nine thousand acres in the Ceres area. These men paid for their land with military warrants or agricultural scrip at rates as low as seventy-five cents an acre. Meanwhile stockbreeding succumbed to dry grain farming, as California wheat became a sought-after commodity in the British and Australian markets. John Mitchell and Colonel Whitmore, in the fashion of feudal lords, parceled out land to tenants in one-thousand-acre tracts. They paid for the expenses of seed and feed for half of the share of crop. A one thousand-acre size farm was not large enough as a means of livelihood under dry farming methods. Only large farms could sustain the tenant family as years of drought drastically reduced yields and ate up the savings made during the years of prosperity.

If you were a tenant farmer in those days, who would your neighbors be?

First there were the rich landlords of English, German, and Irish descent. The most prominent families were those who had attached themselves to John Mitchell as relatives or in-laws. Among these was the Osborn family, Mitchell’s stepbrother, and the Cranes and Geers, his brothers-in-law. Another prominent family was that of Colonel Whitmore, the founder of Ceres, and his friend Service. These men were not only large farmers or ranchers but were later to own businesses in the town that was soon to become Turlock. Mitchell opened up a hotel in Turlock; Whitmore built a creamery in Ceres. Service was a storekeeper.

The tenant farmers were either Anglo-Americans or Portuguese. The farmhands and ranch hands would be recruited from the resident tenant farmer families. The seasonal harvesting crews would be from the wondering workers of the Valley: Mexican Americans, Portuguese, and Japanese. These hobos, as the migrant workers were referred to, worked eighteen hours a day for wages of $2 a day. They lived in J. Mitchell’s barns and were given a daily meal there for the duration of the working season.

Earlier, there existed a Chinese colony of mainly railroad laborers in the town of Turlock. But in 1868 the whites, taking their cue from statewide aggression toward the Chinese,[2] had formed the anti-Chinese League, committing acts as violent as setting the local Chinatown on fire. The real reason for the removal of the Chinese from the town, we are informed, was that the land they were settled on had become of commercial value. (Hohenthal 1972, 57)

Turlock became a town in 1871 when the railroad reached the site. Then it grew as a shipping point and a service center to the area farmers. Until then how you got your morning coffee, we are not told. Probably you had to travel to the nearest town in your wagon to purchase clothing and other necessities. But six months after the railroad passed through the area, Turlock already had two blacksmith shops, one hotel, one general merchandise store, a saloon, a warehouse, and a livery stable. Ten years later (1881) the town had fifteen dwellings, and the number of businesses had doubled. There were no banks in town so as a tenant farmer you would depend on the town merchants for needed cash loans. The Assyrians were not part of this scene, as they settled the region in 1911.

Just as the railroad gave birth to Turlock, it almost killed the town when two new lines were built east of the town. This drew the bulk of the business provided by the area farmers to the newly created shipping points.

A Major Transformation:

From Dry Farming to Wet Farming

From cattle ranching to dry farming (farming with no irrigation) on large estates, to irrigation farming on small family farms: what caused the transformation of a society dominated by large dry farmers? It was the triumph of the Wets over the Drys.

There were several problems that faced the California farmers as a whole: dependence on Eastern US manufacturers who controlled prices for goods, and the monopoly power of the Southern Pacific railroad which, by imposing exorbitant freight rates, almost wiped out their profit margins. But there was another problem that involved the farmers of the Turlock region alone, and had to be solved on the district level. This was the conflict between the Wets (pro-irrigation) and the Drys (anti-irrigation). On this issue the wets won and thereby changed the condition of existence for all farmers in the area.

What activated this conflict was drought. The 1880s were years of repeated crop failure due to the lack of rain. In addition, the virgin soil which had produced the early bumper crops became exhausted under profit-oriented cultivation and responded by diminishing its returns. The large farmers were more likely to have access to rivers and streams on their estates and they could and did make use of that water to irrigate their farms. But the smaller sized farmers were especially vulnerable. Years of drought and poor yields forced the smaller farmers into debt and endangered their very livelihood. These farmers realized that to survive they needed water for irrigation. But they were weary of inviting private companies to undertake their irrigation projects. From the experience of other districts they knew that private water companies, by establishing a monopoly over the price and distribution of irrigation water, enslaved the smaller farmers. The first step in the project was neither raising money nor digging ditches. Strange as it may seem, it was to pass a law that would make public ownership of irrigation water a right and that required repealing the riparian rights which favored private control over sources of irrigation water. From the start the Drys opposed this project because it would result in higher land taxes. After a bitter fight in the courts, the Wets won out. The Wright Act gave them the authority to establish the Turlock Irrigation District, issue bonds, tax land, and start the work of tapping and channeling river waters into the district. One of the reasons for the failure of dry farmers was that some of the large landlords such as Mitchell voted on the side of the Wets because they saw the benefits of irrigation in raising land values and the opportunities for crop diversification. Water reached Turlock in 1901, and as the wets had predicted, land prices skyrocketed. For the following few years, the main economic commodity in the region was land itself, bought and sold on speculation. And so 1901 marked the end of the era of large landlord domination in the Turlock region.

The Era of Small-scale Family Farming: 1901-1940

Question: How does a community of large scale farmers turn into small-size family farmers?

Answer: When land itself becomes a profitable commodity and landlords turn into real estate men. This is what happened in the Turlock region. The large farmers found it more profitable to subdivide and sell their estates now that land had greatly appreciated in value. They actively engaged in the colonization of the region. The heirs of Mitchell, H. Crane (who became the administrator of Mitchell’s estate after the latter’s death), together with H. Osborn and H. Geer, formed a land and colonization company called the Fin de Siecle Investment Company (end of Century Investment Company). They subdivided Mitchell’s large estate into plots of ten-, twenty-, forty-, sixty-, and eighty-acre lots and sold them at prices ranging from $25 to $50 an acre. Other large landlords did the same. Even the farmers, who had only eight hundred acres and were small by dry farming standards, could become rich by selling part of their land. Land speculators from the large cities swarmed the district. Promoters bought land at $15 to $25 an acre and resold it at $60 to $125 an acre. (Hohenthal 1972, 73) By bringing water to the district, these farmers had revolutionized the conditions of production and by so doing they had transformed themselves from a restricted class of dry grain farmers to a diversified class of small and medium size farmers, orchardists, and dairymen. In the year 1900 the population of the town of Turlock was less than one hundred people. In 1908, the year it incorporated, the population had hit the five hundred mark (Tinkham 1921,178; Fjellstrom 1970, 104).

In offering their lands for sale, the mercantile interests of the original settlers took precedence over their desire for ethnic homogeneity. The local people were willing to sell to whoever met the price. The Swedes, the Portuguese, and the Assyrians arrived in successive waves and became a resident part of the community. The Swedes established family farms between 1902 and 1910; the Portuguese had started out as ranch hands and, by 1910, were purchasing dairies and were becoming a propertied class like the Swedes (Larson & Johnson 1972, 86). The Assyrians and the Japanese arrived between 1907 and 1913 and established farming colonies in the south and southeast end of the town. The permanent settlement of Chinese and Mexican-Americans in the district had to wait the boom years after World War I at which time these ethnic groups were able to find permanent employment and