Burbank the ‘Top Destination’ for Armenians Starting a New Life
Annaida Andranikian, a 19-year-old student who moved to Burbank from Ukraine about two years ago, has big dreams to become a lawyer.
Now a Burbank High School graduate, she’s getting her business associates degree at Glendale Community College with plans to transfer to a four-year university. She works a job on the side, and is learning Armenian too. It’s her fifth language.
“In the US, if you work hard, you can become someone special,” she told the Burbank Leader.
It’s hard to believe that just two years ago, Andranikian was studying at a secondary school in her hometown of Lutsk, Ukraine, when Russian bombers attacked a military airport just miles from her dorm. Blindsided, she woke up to the sound of an air raid siren, followed by an explosion. It was part of Putin’s initial Jan. 24 assault, which launched the now drawn out war.
“I have never been that scared. My whole body was shaking. The only thing that I could think of was, ‘how am I going to get home?’”
Andranikian and her family eventually fled the country to safety, and just five months later, she’d be taking her first steps at Burbank High School as a junior. Andranikian’s father is Armenian, and like many other Armenian Ukrainians impacted by the war, Burbank was their safe harbor in the U.S.
“I think that’s why my high school experience was nice. Because I was in school with a lot of Armenians and people who share my same culture. They were very friendly, even though I didn’t speak Armenian.”
Burbank Unified School District officials have reported a jump in English learners over the past four years, with notable increases in students speaking Russian (3%) and Armenian (17%). Since data on the national origins of Burbank newcomers is scarce, a good litmus test is the English Language Development program at public schools. Students may be placed in ELD levels 1 through 4, depending on their English proficiency tests. They have the opportunity to advance a level or test out of the program once per year if they score “well-developed.”
One 33-year-veteran instructor of the ELD program, and Andranikian’s former teacher at Burbank High, is Laura Messian.
Messian is the ELD coordinator at the high school. She said the dominant primary language in the ELD program differs by school and grade level. At BHS, she estimated that Spanish speakers make up about 10% of the school’s English learners, adding that that number is likely much higher in other district schools.
“Most students entering BHS are Armenian or Armenian Russian, and those are now the dominant languages. It’s been that way now for a couple of years at our high school,” Messian told the Burbank Leader. “They can communicate with most of their peers in their language, but they usually go through kind of a shock at first. These are kids with a really strong work ethic, but many come here still in survival mode.”
In Andranikian’s case, she arrived in the U.S. in a bit of a haze, a sort of honeymoon period, she said.
“When I first got here, I was so excited. I had this euphoria, and I thought, ‘oh my God, everything here is so beautiful,’” she recalled. “But then after some time, things get hard … the glass gets broken and you want to go home.”
It took Andranikian some time to adjust. She struggled at first to make friends or communicate with her peers. Her English was strong, but she was rusty. Even ordering food was difficult, because people spoke so fast. She recalled having trouble in classes, too.
“I was almost failing my history class the first semester, but then the second semester, the teacher started helping me a little bit. He was a really nice teacher, and some of the kids in my class were from ELD, or they spoke Russian, so they helped me too,” Andranikian said, adding that by her senior year, it got easier. She started making real friends. Now, she enjoys living in the U.S.
Asked why most of her students moved to Burbank, “It’s generally because of wars going on. That’s the main thing,” Messian said.
When Messian first started teaching in Burbank in 1991, Armenia had just become independent. The Soviet Union had collapsed and there was economic instability in the former Eastern Bloc. At the same time, wars in El Salvador and Guatemala were winding down.
“We had a lot of people who were the products of the instability that was created by those conflicts,” she said. “After that, you had Armenians leaving Iran because the system they had wasn’t the greatest place for minorities to live.”
Then came the generation confronted with the Iran and Iraq wars, and later, Syrian Christians sought refuge from the civil war. Messian said many Syrians have settled in Burbank because St. Julian and St. Ephraim Syrian Churches are a stone’s throw from Burbank High.
“When you’ve got kids who have survived all these experiences, you have to come at them from a place of respect and compassion. Listen to them and take a humane approach … they aren’t damaged goods,” she said.
Shushan Karapetian is the director of the USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies. A celebrated scholar in her field, she said she’s increasingly been approached by Burbank administrators to conduct cultural training for the city’s public schools in recent years.
“The rate of students of Armenian descent has grown so quickly,” she told the Burbank Leader. “There was Hollywood in the early years, and it has the moniker of Little Armenia. Then Glendale became the center of Armenian life. Now, the newer immigrants have targeted Burbank as the top desired space to start a new life.
Karapetian added that Burbank is close enough to Glendale and to Armenian networks, whether economic, social, or religious, “for them to feel like they have that ethnic network to support a new life here.”
She called Los Angeles a sort of “Mecca” for ethnic Armenians, including those of Armenian descent whose ancestors never lived in the Armenian state.
“Armenians have been a diasporic people for centuries, if not millennia. I think there’s this misperception that Armenian diaspora was born after the Genocide of 1915,” Karapetian said. “Yes, the contemporary diaspora really took shape through the genocide. And really for the last millennium, Armenians have lived all over the globe, and there has always been a diaspora network, even in the absence of an Armenian state.”
Between the years of 1375 and 1918, there was no Armenian statehood, according to Karapetian. Though the Armenian people were subjects of various empires, they held on to a strong sense of identity for centuries.
“I think we should never underestimate the diaspora networks of the Armenian people, because this is what has held them together for at least a millennium,” she said.
