Matthew Tonos
Tupelo and Oxford
Matthew Tonos was born in 1993 and grew up in Gulfport, moving to Tupelo with his family in 2004. His father, Michael Joseph Tonos, also included in this study, was raised in Greenville, where members of the Tonos family still exist. Matthew’s non-Lebanese mother is originally from Akron, Ohio, but she has helped carry on Lebanese traditions in the Tonos home by having learned to cook Lebanese food from her mother-in-law.
In his interview for this project, Matthew recalls traveling to Greenville from Gulfport as a child, especially during Christmastime, to visit family. “It was like Little Lebanon to me,” he said. “It seemed like just about everyone we met there were Lebanese. It was a big Lebanese community.” The Sherman family, which includes Dave Sherman, also included in this project, was one family he remembers in particular. “We always saw them, and they were basically considered family at the time.”
Matthew remembers being only one of two Lebanese children in Tupelo, but he went on to reinforce his sense of ethnic identity when he enrolled in Arabic language and Middle Eastern history classes as a student at the University of Mississippi. While working in those programs he spent two months in Jordan, the closest the Study Abroad program went to Lebanon. Studying the Arabic language and the Middle East was “one of the ways I tried to connect with my family’s past, my ancestors,” he said. “I’d say it’s important to me to be aware of it. I think we’ve got something unique in being Lebanese.”
This interview with Matthew Tonos took place on October 5, 2017, on the University of Mississippi campus. He lives in Oxford with his wife and child.
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