Although US Ethnic Studies has long appreciated the constructedness of ethnic and racial categories, there has been less attention to the dynamic constructedness of "minorities," indigeneity and diaspora from and within the MENA region. Rather than naturalize these categories, this paper considers legal, cultural and epistemic attempts to absorb MENA peoples within hegemonic racial formations that include whiteness and latinidad/mestizaje in the Americas, Soviet "national minorities," as well as national frames in the Middle East. Placed within a long genealogy of displacement, forced conversion and assimilation as key techniques of social engineering, this paper models what is gained through a transnational methodology that simultaneously maps MENA diasporic populations across several sites. Putting multiple imperial systems and subjects in conversation better exposes the process of turning subjects into citizens through race as a core facet of twentieth century statecraft, as well as MENA diasporic populations practicing a politics of refusal that resists this coercion, to explode the national frame.