Within the U.S. Southwest, there are long-standing Syrian communities that, for generations, have evolved in isolation of the larger Arab diasporic social and cultural networks. These communities began to form in the late nineteenth century when peoples of what was then the province of Greater Syria sought to escape conflict and the conditions of the Ottoman Empire and left their homeland in search of greater economic opportunities in the Americas. Many entered the U.S. from the border crossing in El Paso, Texas, following the encouragement from steamship agents who urged them to travel through Mexico to avoid waiting for passage to New York. Furthermore, Mexico-U.S. border crossings provided an alternative route for those who failed the mandatory health inspection at Ellis Island and other checkpoints. Multiple forms of corruption and medical extortion rings made border crossing from Mexico into the U.S. a viable, but costly and traumatic option for Syrian migrants. Once in the U.S., many continued on to settle in the rapidly growing Middle Eastern community in Los Angeles, while others remained in border cities and formed smaller, and less visible, communities throughout the Southwest. Members of these communities boast of the ways that strong assimilation efforts and contributions to local civic development have led to economic, and therefore overall, success. However, the migrant experience, precarious border atmosphere, and prevalent racist attitudes produced psychic and cultural traumas that have impacted generations of Syrian-Americans and their individual and communal identities in numerous ways. This paper explores how music has played an instrumental role in the ways that members of these communities sought to strengthen or reject communal ties, traces of family migration stories, and proximities to Arabness. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, I interrogate the relationship between trauma and identity through an examination of musical taste and expression among Syrian-Americans living in the U.S. Southwest. Engaging the works of Sarah M.A. Gualtieri, Massoud Hayoun, and David J. Hargreaves, this paper employs borderland epistemologies, trauma theory, and the concept of musical identities as a means of understanding how a diasporic imaginary influences the often-fraught views of identity within Syrian-American communities today.