Traditionally, historical scholarship concerning the first wave of 'Syrian' migrants in the United States (migrants coming from the Ottoman provinces of Greater Syria from the late 1880s until 1924) has detailed a process of swift assimilation, describing the period in which Syrian Americans struggled to be legally considered 'white' in naturalization cases as a blip on an otherwise smooth road to social integration and economic success in their new country. Recent Arab American studies scholarship has challenged this traditional characterization of early Arab migration in the United States as being a linear path of assimilation into whiteness and reframes Arab American racial formation during this period as one of liminality and "inbetween-ness". Building upon this understanding of early Arab American racial formation as a shifting and unstable process, this paper aims to understand how the imperatives of gendered roles and sexual behavior (and equally the challenges to those imperatives) were mutually constitutive with processes of racial formation. The common profession of Syrian migrants in this period--pack peddling--has had a central place in these Arab American historical narratives as being the key to the "success" of their integration into U.S. society. However, pack peddling also provided space for migrants away from their families and communities in the United States, and has been cited as venue in which non-traditional living arrangements between women were observed. Drawing on Nayan Shah's theory of itinerant migrant areas of the early twentieth century as "spatial borderlands" characterized by "disorder, conflict, and murky social and sexual ties," my research traces the documentation and policing of travel routes, transit hubs, lodging houses, and entertainment and leisure venues of pack peddling life for potential non-normative gendered and sexual practices, as well as the links between that non-normativity and racialization. Sources include published histories and narrative accounts of pack peddling, as well as police and court records of the locales through which peddlers traveled. Finally, this paper asks how this new reading of pack peddling can challenge dominant narratives of the early Arab immigrant assimilation story, suggesting that these border spaces of early Arab American history were complex sites of social encounter that reveal how gender and sexual normativity are inextricable from whiteness and the process of assimilation.