Although scarcely a century separates historians from their subjects, researching about twentieth century migration in the Gulf remains complicated. The obstacles to history-writing reveal that national identities and historical narratives continue to be highly contested. This presentation demonstrates that, despite centuries of migrations from within and outside the Gulf, the nationalist sentiment that citizens must belong to a particular group of people demands revisionist personal and national histories. This paper looks at the case of how Kuwaiti national identity and historical memory deals with migrants from Iran in the early twentieth century. It explores the ways in which historical moments of nearly every decade in the twentieth century (Arab nationalism, Bedouin immigration, the Iranian Revolution, the Gulf Wars and political Islamism) have produced different ways of interpreting the presence of the “Persian” migrants, both contemporaneously and at present. But the “outsiders” have not been powerless against these forces trying to diminish or erase them. This paper argues that through the production of literature, revealing and buying of documents and the construction of home museums, Iranian migrant families use the “history market” to maintain their position within the Kuwaiti national narrative and historical memory. While identity and belonging have been the subjects of many recent studies on Gulf politics and cultural production, this paper looks at a new aspect of these phenomena: the material contribution to historical narratives upon which identity and belonging are built. In addition to the contribution this paper makes to the study of migration in the Gulf, it also raises important questions about the methodology of history writing, including the need for historians to engage with the historical layers and politics that produce certain kinds of sources and understandings of them.