While there is considerable scholarship on Arab immigration to the United States, little of it addresses the diasporic communities of Arab immigrants who settled along the U.S.-Mexico border. In El Paso, Texas, there is a long-standing Syrian community that, for generations, has evolved uniquely and in isolation of the larger Arab diasporic social and cultural networks. This community 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 stagnant, restrictive conditions of the Ottoman Empire, and left their homeland in search of greater economic and educational opportunities. Many Syrians who settled in El Paso arrived there due to encouragement from steamship agents who urged Syrians to travel first to Mexico in order to avoid waiting for passage to New York and risk susceptibility to travel restrictions imposed by the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, the Mexican border provided an alternative route for those who failed the mandatory border health inspection in New York or those who were turned down by physicians working for shipping lines abroad. Multiple forms of corruption, including physician extortion rings, made border crossing from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico into El Paso, Texas a viable, but costly option for Syrians seeking to enter the U.S. The migrant experience, precarious border atmosphere, and prevalent racist attitudes in the U.S. Southwest produced psychic and cultural trauma that continue to impact individual and communal identity of this Syrian diasporic community. As this paper will demonstrate, music often played an instrumental role in the ways that members of this community sought to strengthen or reject communal ties, traces of their family migration story, and their Syrian heritage. Today, feelings of marginalization and exclusion within their precarious borderland experiences dominate the narratives of self-perception that are behind the musical expressions of Syrian-Americans in El Paso. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this paper explores the relationship between trauma and identity through an examination of musical taste and expression among the Syrian community on the U.S.-Mexico border. Engaging the works of Jeffrey Olick, Neil Smelser, and Michael Ungar, this paper interrogates theories of cultural and psychological trauma and borderland epistemologies as a means of exploring how border tensions influence the often-fraught views of identity on the border and the distinctive musical practices of Syrian-Americans therein.