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. Syrians who entered the U.S. from Mexico encountered intense racism and accusations of anarchist conspiracies by border agents. The border offered a backdrop of fear, surveillance, and violence that, as Gloria Anzaldua testifies, becomes so internalized by those who inhabit the borderlands, that individuals struggle to grasp a sense of self identity and communal belonging. Once in the U.S., many continued 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 today boast of the ways that 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 talk 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 engage with the work of Sarah M.A Gualtieri and Hani Bawardi, and interrogate the Anaesthetic Self Effect (Joerg Fingerhut, et al.) model and the concept of Musical Identities (David J. Hargreaves, et al.) as a means of understanding how the U.S.-Mexico borderland conflict has impacted the diasporic imaginary of Syrian American communities in the region, resulting in often-fraught views of identity.