Rev. Boutros Kahwagee (Pedro Kahwagi): The Recovered Voice of an Arab-Mexican Maronite Priest
Rev. Boutros Kahwagee (Pedro Kahwagi): The Recovered Voice of an Arab-Mexican Maronite Priest
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| Rev. Pedro Kahwagi, c. 1939. The Day 9 May 1939. Courtesy of Newspapers.com |
Most of the recording artists we’ve featured on Midwest Mahjar have been people who immigrated to the United States in some capacity or were born in the United States. Exceptions, however, have included Nourhane, Sami el-Shawwa, and Prince Mohiuddin. The 78 RPM disc with singing by "Rev. Boutros Kahwagee" threw us for a loop! We pruchased the disc in December 2021. There was no indication of where the Kahwagee/Kahwagi recorded any music. It could have been in Syria, Lebanon, the United States, or some other country. During an initial search, we hit an immediate dead end. There was no "Boutros Kahwagee" we could find who lived in any part of the United States. Newspapers and Ancestry.com searches revealed very little. Consequently, we put this disc to the side and focused on other musicians and records.
Now here we are. Flash forward to October 2024. Not quite three years later and we’ve cracked the mystery. Rev. Boutros Kahwagi had been a Arab-Mexican Maronite priest. Of course we've feature other Maronite priests before. There was Rev. George Aziz and Rev. Paul Hage. We had also showcased musicians with Arab-Latinidad heritages like Joe Moshay and Mayer & Nessim Murad. Rev. Boutros Kahwagi lived most of his life between Lebanon and Mexico. He made brief visits to the United States in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1980s to visit his wife’s family and his own relatives but he never immigrated to the US. Born Boutros Kahwagi on February 6, 1903 or 1906 to Naemen Kahwagi and Rosa Kuri in Saghbine, Greater Syria (now Lebanon), approximately forty-five miles from Beirut, the family trace its descendants back almost six centuries. A hillside town in the western Beqaa, historical information about Saghbine and Boutros Kahwagi’s early life remain elusive but weaving and textiles seems to have driven the economy of the general area near Saghbine. At least one of Boutros Kahwagi’s three sisters, Beatrice, immigrated to the United States in 1907 and married Solomon Nahas in 1913. She and her husband struggled to raise four children in New London, Connecticut. The Nahas Family mixed in among the mahjari literati and worked with other Syrian immigrants including Salloum Morkarzel in Connecticut to form the local Syrian American Society. Maloof Phonograph Records singer Mayer Murad played the group’s first anniversary celebration in September 1928. Boutros remained back in the old country where some of the family lived through the transition from Ottoman control to mandate territory. He became an ordained Maronite priest in 1926 and married Elmaz Gastine Nahara, three years his junior, a year or two before. Maronites made up a majority of Saghbine’s population. By the 1930s, Boutros had two sisters in the United States, one sister in Mexico, and one brother in the United States.
Syrian and Lebanese immigration to Mexico began in the last decade of the nineteenth century and newcomers initially found relative acceptance into the first years of the twentieth century. As Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp documents in So Far From Allah, So Close to Mexico, however, In Mexico’s revolutionary and immediate post-Revolutionary eras, nativism led to an anti-Arab and anti-immigrant backlash that extended into the 1930s.
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| Boutros Kahwagi Kuri enters the US at Laredo, Texas during a 1947 visit. Courtesy of Ancestry.com |
We don’t know the circumstances that first persuaded Boutros to visit the United States in 1938, but it may have been his immigration from Lebanon to Mexico in 1937. According to an interview with his youngest son, the growth of the Syrian and Lebanese immigrant population in Mexico coupled with the minuscule number of Maronite priests in the country generated demand for greater religious leadership. Initially, Boutros travelled alone. His wife, Elmaz, and four children remained in Lebanon. In Mexico, local Spanish speakers referred to him as Father Pedro, the Spanish translation of Boutros. The call to do missionary work in Mexico City offered Pedro the opportunity to visit those of his siblings living in the US. Boutros entered the United States through the Port of Entry at Laredo, Texas, with an intention to tour the country for six months. In the US, Boutros or Pedro was anglicized as Peter. This became his first name used by the US press. As presumed earlier, Rev. Kahwagi likely visited the United States to catch up with his sisters Beatrice and Edna. Edna Kahwagi Sowan, Peter’s sister who lived in Akron, Ohio, accompanied him as he travelled in the United States. They stopped in New London, Connecticut and Detroit, Michigan, before returning to New England. In New London, Rev. Kahwagi attended mass and a reception at Saint Ann’s Syrian Catholic Church (Melkite rite). Ironically, A.J. Macksoud recording artist and Melkite priest Anton J. Aneed established Saint Ann in 1929. The next stop was Bennington, Vermont. Reverend Kahwagi had a nephew living there. Buffalo and New York City followed. In Buffalo, Kahwagi conducted mass at Saint John Maron Church, once ministered by Columbia Record’s first Arab American recording artist Rev. George Aziz. In New York City, Rev. Kahwagi met with New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. After LaGuardia heard Kahwagi sing, he dubbed 33 year-old Kahwagi, “the second, Caruso.” Did Kahwagi schedule studio time to cut a series of 78 RPM records here? We can’t be certain. At some point during one of his five documented trips to the States, he likely recorded at least five songs on three discs. Also in New York City, young Boutros visited the 1939 World’s Fair and took part in the Syrian American Society’s celebration. By November 1939, Kahwagi returned to Beirut and then Mexico City. Sadly, the next time Peter returned to the United States, both Edna, in 1941, and Beatrice, in 1946, had died. In fact, the next time Rev. Kahwagi visited the United States was for Beatrice’s funeral.
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| Courtesy of Richard M. Breaux collection. |
Within months after Beatrice’s passing, Rev. Kahwagi decided it was time to move his family to Mexico City. Well grounded in his missionary and other religious work and feeling the weight of the loss of his two sisters, he summoned his wife and children to sell whatever belongings they could not bring and immigrate to Mexico via an Egyptian cargo ship. It was December 1946.
Reverend Kahwagi’s son described the journey from Lebanon to New York City then Mexico as filled with a mix of tears of sadness and the joy of reunion. The thought of leaving friends and family stirred one set of emotions, the joy of reunification with their father others. Then there was the anticipation of visiting the United States before setting out for Mexico. All this unfolded during the dead of winter. The Kahwagi children sang Arabic songs to others on the ship to the US, ice cutters had to clear a path in New York harbor, and the short pants the children wore, affirmed their Christian faith to agents at Ellis Island while the cold served as a welcome to New York City and a reminder of the winters in the Beqqa. The newly arrived family first stopped in Connecticut where Rev. Kahwagi attended special mass officiated by visiting Bishop Joseph Malouf at Saint Ann’s Church, then the headed to Ohio for the holidays. After Christmas in Akron, Ohio, first Rev. Kahwagi, then his family, took a train to Laredo, Texas, and continued on to Monterey, where Rev. Kahwagi presided over mass in the city’s cathedral. Finally, all arrived in January 1947 in Mexico City where the Kahwagi’s were met by Rev. Kahwagi’s only living sister.
Beginning in July 1947, family members founded the Kahwagi Fraternal Society of America. It’s goal - to preserve the history and heritage of the Kahwagi family, which some members claimed, dated back six centuries. The family met for a three-day reunion celebration for the first time in 1947 and they attempted to gather at least once a year from that point on. The first family meeting occurred in Bennington, New Hampshire. Other meeting places in subsequent years included Boston, Fall River, Brockton, New Bedford, and North Adams, Massachusetts. That we can confirm, Rev. Kahwagi attended in 1947, 1948, 1952, and 1955.
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| Article from the Bennington Evening Banner, 27 July 1948. Courtesy of Newspapers.com |
Although Rev. Kahwagi first moved to Mexico City to minister to Arab immigrants he served Jesuits at one church, Dominicans at another, and Maronites the church he oversaw. Locals not familiar with the Maronite rite expressed consternation at the thought of married priest with four children. Typically, in eastern rite churches, especially in Maronite, Melkite, and Orthodox orders, priests are allowed a wife if the he marries before ordination. This idea did not sit well with Catholics in Mexico. In addition to his religious work, Rev. Kahwagi ran several small business including a photography studio run out of the family garage.
Over the years, Kahwagi continued his ministerial work, his children married, began full-time work, and/or went to college and became business professionals and entrepreneurs. The population of Lebanese immigrants to Mexico swelled again in the 1960s. Churches and community organizations blossomed in response.
We are not sure why the Kahwagis were in the United States at the time, but Elmaz Gastine Nahra de Kahwagi died 14 March 1983 at Saint Luke’s Hospital in Houston, Texas. She was 73 years. Rev. Pedro Kahwagi lived almost exactly three more years. He died 16 March 1986 in the Coyoacan neighborhood of Mexico City. His official certificate of death listed him as eighty years old.
While researching Rev. Kahwagi, I found a photo a funeral photograph of Kahwagi with four mourners standing over his body. Reproduced in a newsletter for an emigration research institute, I neither duplicated , nor asked to republish the photo. It is in cyberspace, however, for those wishing to see it.
Richard M. Breaux
© Midwest Mahjar
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