Armenians at Home
By Kevin Matthews
UCLA International Institute, CA
Sept 7 2006
"That’s where the village was," locals said, pointing at mounds of
earth. "That’s where the church was."A history teacher and curriculum
coach at Glendale High School, where roughly half of the multiethnic
student population is Armenian, Nancy Witt says she attends training
sessions at UCLA partly to keep up with her students-not just the
subjects she’s been teaching for 14 years. At an Aug. 8 session led by
UCLA Professor Richard G. Hovannisian, the discussion centered on the
changing character of Armenian immigrants who have arrived in Southern
California from various spots in the Ottoman Empire, Arab Middle East,
Iran, the Caucasus region, and Europe over more than a century.
Armenians traveled far and wide: the next UCLA conference to be
organized by Hovannisian and the UCLA Armenian Studies Program will
focus on Armenian trade and communities in and around the Indian
Ocean. Still, Southern California and Greater Los Angeles have the
highest concentration of ethnic Armenians outside of the Republic of
Armenia. At the session, Hovannisian highlighted diversity within
a local minority group that has been broadly but unevenly affected
by migrations and a genocide perpetrated in the last years of the
Ottoman Empire.
Just back from his first-ever trip to eastern Turkey, to ancestral
Armenian land where his parents were born and where reminders of the
1915 genocide persist, Hovannisian also had new stories to recount.
The Aug. 8 session was part of a five-day workshop for educators
organized by the UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies and
supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, by the UCLA
History-Geography Project, and by the California Geographic Alliance
at UCLA. Under this year’s theme of "Migration," the workshop included
curriculum planning and three history lessons by UCLA faculty. CEES and
other member centers of the International Institute regularly sponsor
K-12 training workshops. In turn, teachers in leadership positions
such as Witt’s use the experience to train and assist colleagues.
Remains Hovannisian, who holds the Armenian Educational Foundation
Chair in Modern Armenian History at UCLA, visits Armenia regularly and
has traveled around the Middle East and to Istanbul, but his recent
two-week trip to eastern Turkey was different. He was "going back
to see a civilization that doesn’t exist," he explained to about 15
LA-area teachers.
"That’s where the village was," locals would tell him, pointing
at mounds of earth. "That’s where the church was." Disturb the
surface of the Syrian desert, where much of the killing took place,
Hovannisian said, and you immediately find human bones. On this trip,
he traveled with a Turkish colleague, something that would have been
almost unthinkable twenty or thirty years back, he said.
The Armenian Genocide began in 1915 as the Ottoman Empire sought
scapegoats for the defeats of World War I. By 1923, when the Republic
of Turkey was founded, massacres and deadly forced marches had reduced
a pre-WWI population of some two million Armenians in the empire
to about 200,000. Fewer than 75,000 live in Turkey now, and almost
exclusively in Istanbul. The holocaust’s legacies include repetitions
("Who remembers the Armenians?" Hitler said to his generals before
invading Poland), the travels and traumas of survivors, denials by
the Turkish government, and failures by others to acknowledge the
enormity of the facts.
In the latest U.S. chapter of this tale, members of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee have been unable to get the State Department to say
whether the Bush administration’s recall in May of U.S. Ambassador
to Armenia John Evans was related to Evans’ public and pointed
uses of the G-word in early 2005, in place of officially sanctioned
descriptors such as "tragedy" and "calamity." A delayed hearing on the
nomination of Evans’ replacement is set for today, Sept. 7. According
to Hovannisian, Evans acknowledged the Armenian Genocide both at a
faculty luncheon and a public event on Feb. 17, 2005.
Over some of his more than 40 years at UCLA, Hovannisian and colleagues
gathered taped testimony from some 800 genocide survivors, all but
a very few of them now deceased. More recently, he reports, the
long project has advanced. The entire archive has been digitized,
about half of the interviews have been transcribed, and perhaps 100
have been translated from the relevant languages–Armenian, Turkish,
Arabic, Russian.
Three Waves Hovannisian’s focus for the Aug. 8 session was on Armenians
who eventually came to Southern California-beginning with a few
agricultural workers who arrived in the San Joaquin Valley in the
last decades of the nineteenth century. A pre-WWI U.S. population of
less than 40,000, concentrated in New York and New England, swelled
after the genocide, reaching 100,000 by the time of the restrictive
Immigration Act of 1924.
Two more large "waves" of immigrants would affect the development of
communities such as Glendale. After World War II, Armenians began an
exodus from the Middle East, fleeing turmoil and rising nationalism.
Emigration from Iran, where Armenians had lived for centuries
in relative quiet, spiked after the 1979 revolution. Finally, the
numbers of Armenians leaving the Soviet Union from the 1970s increased
dramatically following the unraveling of the USSR in 1991.
So Glendale, for example, is populated largely by Iranian and,
more recently, former Soviet Armenians with very different cultural
heritages-their cuisines, dialects, and behavioral patterns. In
contrast to the more recent post-Soviet immigrants, many Armenians
of Iranian descent arrived with significant financial assets and a
family tree untouched by the genocide.
"We’ve got the waves," Witt said. According to Witt, the Glendale
district has put resources into educating high school teachers
about the Armenian Genocide. Last year, a group of tenth grade world
history teachers visited Washington, D.C., to hear Hovannisian and
other scholars on the subject.
Photo: UCLA historian Richard Hovannisian instructs local K-12
teachers on more than a century of Armenian migrations to Southern
California and elsewhere. His archive of interviews with 800 survivors
of the Armenian Genocide is now digitized, with transcriptions and
translations in the works.
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