Marian Haddad

Marian: Arab American with Tex-Mex Flavor

Marian Haddad is a writer and poet teaching international literature and composition classes at St. Mary’s University. The youngest of nine children born to Syrian immigrants and the first one in her family to be born in the United States, Marian has an interesting and unique cultural identity. I met Marian through one of my academic advisors at the University of North Texas. Marian was very happy to help me with my research and put me in contact with members of the Radius of Arab-American Writers.

Cultural infusion is a term that Marian uses to describe the way that she writes. Marian often talks about how being raised in El Paso has given her the wonderful experience of being a part of many cultures. She is Texan, Syrian, American, Christian, and Mexican. While she has “not one drop of Mexican blood,” her experience of growing up five minutes away from the U.S.-Mexico border and in a city with a population that is 76% Hispanic or Latino (U.S. Census, 2003) gave her a strong connection to the culture that surrounded her.

El Paso is the second largest city on the United States-Mexico border. El Paso shares its borders with Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico,10 separated by the Rio Grande ( Rio Bravo) River. In February of 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was signed by the United States and Mexico to end the Mexican-American War; it created the modern border and included territory acquired by United States that would become the states of Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, most of New Mexico and Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming (Library of Congress, 2005). The settlement of El Paso del Norte (modern El Paso-Juarez) was split in two. Those on the northern bank of the river were now part of the United States; those on the south shore, Mexico ( El Paso County). El Paso’s unique Mexican-American history created the diverse cultural environment in which Marian Haddad was able to develop her cultural identity.

While Marian is not multi-ethnic, she is very much a cultural hybrid. She includes Mexican and American culture with aspects of her Arab culture. Her cultural identity encompasses the cultures that she was exposed to her whole life. Her process of enculturation11 includes both Syrian-American and Mexican-American cultures, therefore creating her Syrian-Mexican-American cultural hybridity.

Her most recent book Somewhere between Mexico and a Place Called Home is a distinct call to all of her cultural influences and a picture of her self-identity. She describes the title as revealing itself to her rather than it being created by her. That is who she is, where she is from: somewhere between Mexico and a place that she calls home, which is El Paso, San Antonio, Texas, the United States, and the Middle East. Even though she has never been to the Middle East she feels equally strong connections to the homeland of her parents as she does to the place of her birth (Haddad, 10/18/2005; Haddad, N.d.).

She displays this cultural connection in the words of her poems.

Posted over on Eagle Feather