The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate 9781477314630

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The Mexican Mahjar

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Transnational Maronites,

The Mexican Mahjar

Jews, and Arabs under the French

camila pastor

University of Texas Press Austin

Mandate

Copyright © 2017 by University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2017 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-­7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-­form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-­i n-­Publication Data Names: Pastor, Camila, author. Title: The Mexican Mahjar : transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French mandate / Camila Pastor. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017009440 ISBN 978-­1-­4773-­1445-­6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-­1-­4773-­1462-­3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-­1-­4773-­1463-­0 (library e-­book) ISBN 978-­1-­4773-­1464-­7 (non-­library e-­book) Subjects: LCSH: Arabs—Mexico—History—20th century. | Jews— Mexico—History—20th century. | Maronites—Mexico—History— 20th century. | Mexico—Emigration and immigration. | Middle East—Emigration and immigration. | Mexico—Ethnic relations. | Mexico—Ethnic identity. | Mexico—Civilization—Arab influences. Classification: LCC F1392.A7 P37 2017 | DDC 305.800972—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009440 doi:10.7560/314456

Para Rania Lawah y Samer El-­Bunni

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Contents

Illustrations and Tables

ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1

23

The Mexican Mahjar



Managing Mobility

Chapter 2

48

Chapter 3 Race and Patronage

79



Chapter 4 Migrants and the Law

103

Chapter 5 Modernism

133



Chapter 6 Making the Mahjar Lebanese

153

Chapter 7 Objects of Memory

176



213

Chapter 8

The Arab and Its Double

Conclusion 234



viii

contents

Notes 241

Bibliography 291

Index 317

Illustrations and Tables

Illustrations 0.1 Map of the Mashriq (Nimeh, Historia del Líbano, 1945)

7

1.1 Map of Mexican Railways 1890. Carta de los Ferrocarriles de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos 1890, Impreso y grabado por Erhard Hnos., Paris MX09017AGN-­0000021558927, procedente del Archivo de Miguel Rul y Azcarate, Archivo General de la Nación

30

1.2 The Shia family of Mohamed Hassan Ahmad Sabag

41

2.1 The young Isidoro Duek of Aleppo, a Jewish migrant to Mexico, peddling with his indigenous Mexican porter in 1924

54

3.1 Wasela Abuali and her husband Assad Salman Abuali, a Druze couple who returned to Lebanon

100

4.1 The Lebanese-­Mexican family of Mohamed Hassan Ahmad Sabag

132

6.1 Meeting of the Committee for Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian Youth

160

6.2 The Druze-­Shia wedding of Farid Said and Alia Yaffar, 1950s

165

Tables 1.1 Mashriqi Migrants in Mexico

35

1.2 Mahjari Arrivals in Mexico 1878–1951

37

1.3 Mashriqis in Mexico

44



x

illustrations and tables

6.1 Migrant Chambers of Commerce

157

6.2 Arabic-­Language Schools in Mexico

163

6.3 Lebanese Leagues and Unions in Mexico

171

6.4 Lebanese Centers in Mexico, 2017

174

Acknowledgments

This book, produced over many years of work and conversation, has incurred enormous debts of guidance, collegiality, and intellectual companionship. I first want to acknowledge the team of scholars who encouraged the beginning of this project as my graduate school mentors, whose work has been foundational to my scholarly and personal development: Mariko Tamanoi, Sondra Hale, Jim Gelvin, and Kyeyoung Park. While at UCLA I was fortunate to also learn closely from Susan Slyomovics, Sandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, Sherry Ortner, Akhil Gupta, Karen Brodkin, and Andreas Wimmer. My parents, Rodolfo Pastor and Teresa de Maria Campos, were my first readers; the book owes much to their reactions and suggestions and to their own scholarship on Latin America. I also want to thank companions and fellow graduate students who, in sharing homes, meals, anxieties, and assigned reading, remain some of my earliest and very personal guides to the Middle East and other geographies: Ganesh Raghuraman, Anja Vogel, Clarice Rios, Shawqi el-­Zatmah, Awad Awad, Zeynep Turkylmaz, Melis Hafez, Ziad Abu-­Risch, and Anin­dita Nag. My explorations as an ethnographer were facilitated by the warm welcome extended by scholars who guided and made possible my fieldwork, providing contacts and letters of introduction across Mahjar and Mashriq: Pati Jacobs, Martha Díaz de Kuri, Guita Hourani, Liz Hamui, Silvia Cherem, and Kathy Saade. I particularly thank my language tutors, who not only developed my fusha into more conversational Arabic but taught me to live in Lebanon: Issam Hourani, May Ahmar, and especially my dear friend Rania Lawah, her husband Samer el-­Bunni, and their beautiful family in Tripoli. As an anthropologist, I am indebted to everyone who invited me into their home and into their memory, sharing family stories and community histories, books, photographs, al jubz wal milh. A list of my interviewees is included in the section on sources, but I would like to especially thank the family members who negotiated permission to reproduce family photographs: Alberto Said, Nacif Sabbagh, and Raquel Fredi Charabati.



xii

Acknowledgments

As I grappled with the process of developing a narrative, participation in the UC Subaltern-­Popular Multicampus Research Group provided precious intellectual examples and interlocutors who were crucial to the development of my analytic imagination and my moral compass as I navigated archives and field sites. I especially thank Swati Chatopaddhay, Parama Roy, Michael Provence, Paul Amar, Nuha Khoury, Sudipta Sen, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Bhaskar Sarkar, David Lloyd, Freya Schiwy, Kamala Visweswaran, José Rabasa, and other members of that collective who offered questions or encouragement and modeled postcolonial engagement. During the years of revisiting archives and developing the book, I was fortunate to be interpellated by scholars who challenged me to articulate arguments and seek out literatures. Sarah Gualtieri, John Karam, Christina Civantos, Raanan Rein, Jeffrey Lesser, and Mariano Plotkin were important interlocutors. The encounters facilitated by Casa Árabe of Madrid under Gema Martín Muñoz’s direction, through the Arabia Americana program implemented by Karim Hauser, launched an important Iberoamerican conversation and collaboration with Isaías Barreñada, María del Mar Logroño, Paulo Pinto, María Cardeira, and the TEIM team: Ángeles Ramírez, Miguel Larramundi, Bernabé López García, and Ana Planet. Conversations on Mashriq and Mahjar at the conferences organized by Akram Khater, John Karam, and Andrew Arsan at the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies have been central to my work, and I especially thank Stacy Fahrentold, Simon Jackson, Jacob Norris, Devi Mays, Reem Bailony, Steve Hyland, and Sally Howell for discussion. The Mandate Studies workshop organized by Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan at Princeton helped me develop new avenues of research; I thank them, and especially Elizabeth Thompson and Orit Bashkin, for their questions and comments. I thank my colleagues at CIDE, Colegio de Mexico, and Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, whose complicity and insights have been crucial since I returned to teach and work in Mexico: Luis Mesa, Jean Meyer, Antonio Saborit, Gilberto Conde, Marta Tawil, Indira Sánchez, Mariam Saada, Laila Hotait, and especially my friend and mentor Clara García. I thank CIDE for institutional support over the past six years and for encouraging and partially funding my frequent research travels. I thank archivists and library staff at CIDE, Colegio de México, the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères at La Courneuve and Nantes, the Archivo General de la Nación, the Archivo Municipal of Torreón and Saltillo, the Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman Library at the

Acknowledgments xiii

Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in Aix en Provence, the Services Patrimoniales of the Marseille Chamber of Commerce, and the Widener and Schlesinger libraries at Harvard for their help and cheer. And I thank my students at UCLA, Colegio de México, Instituto Mora, and CIDE, who challenged me to refine ideas through their questions and encouraged me through their enthusiastic engagement with historical ethnography. I have been fortunate to develop conversations on Middle Eastern mobility with scholars from intellectual traditions beyond my initial Anglophone formative background. I especially thank Aude Signoles and Bernard Botiveau for hosting me on sabbatical at Sciences Po, Aix en Pro‑ vence; and Anton Escher, Paul Tabar, Midori Iijima, and Hidemitsu Ku‑ roki for their invitations to pre­sent my work to enriching audiences in Mainz and Tokyo. I thank the people who made the production of this book possible: my editor Jim Burr of University of Texas Press, who welcomed the project enthusiastically, and the wonderful University of Texas Press team. The careful archival and editorial aid of my research assistants at CIDE, especially Miguel Fuentes and Ruth García, has been invaluable. I thank my family, my transnational context of origin: my aunt Beatriz, my brothers Rodolfo and Jerónimo, my grandmothers Teresa and Gladys, and my dear friends Mariana Avendaño, Esmeralda Urquiza, Aida Orea, Patricia Cabrera, and María José Roa, for cultivating the affective continuities that anchor my intellectual projects. I thank Sergio Rajsbaum, my partner, for his humor, his company, and our travels. Finally, I thank the editors of various journals where earlier drafts of my work have been published for permission to use this material. Earlier versions and fragments of chapter 4 appeared in “El modernismo en un Atlántico moro: historias de viaje,” in Andalusíes: historia cultural de una elite magrebí, ed. José Antonio González Alcantud and Sandra Rojo Flores (Madrid: Editorial Abada, 2015) and “The Mashriq Unbound: Arab Modernism, Criollo Nationalism, and the Discovery of America by the Turks,” Mashriq & Mahjar 2, no. 2 (2014). Earlier drafts of chapter 6 appeared in “La creación de un ámbito público transnacional (segunda parte),” Estudios de Asia y África 48, no. 1 (2013), 99–134; “La creación de un ámbito público transnacional (primera parte),” Estudios de Asia y África 47, no. 3 (2012), 485–520; and “Invisible Hands: Twentieth-­Century Networks and Institutions of the Mashreqi Migration to Mexico,” Palma Journal 11 (2009): 31–37.

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Introduction

Six days after his death in August of 1924, Botros Maalouf of the Lebanese Mountain, grandfather of the celebrated writer Amin Maalouf, was addressed in the following note by a former student. The young man announced his intention to travel from Paris to Mexico: I leave Paris three days from now, for Bologne, where I will take to sea the 30th of this month. I will be taking with me my misery and my concerns, which are so heavy that I fear to see the steamship founder. Ah, yes, I finally leave for this faraway country, Mexico, which may fulfill my dreams or destroy them. I may stay there forever and be buried in its soil, or I may leave it in a month’s time. I know nothing. I have the feeling today that the entire world is narrow. In saying this, I must seem arrogant, which I am not . . . I dreamed of fighting for the law and for God under your flag . . . but the circumstances that no one ignores forced me to leave the country and abandon the ambitions that I had nourished in my homeland. . . . You must write to me, dear professor, for your letters will be the only light in the black night of my life. I hope you will not forget this young man who found in you the confessor to his spirit. Write to me at Sr. Praxedes Rodríguez, San Martín Chachicuatla, Mexico, requesting for mail to be forwarded. A sad young man Your spiritual son Ali Mohammed al-­Hage N.B. In any case, I would like you to greet the land of Lebanon, and to say goodbye to it for me since it seems to me that I will never see it again.1

As French mandate administration over Syria and Lebanon was consolidated, Ali, a young Muslim exile, sought guidance from his Melkite professor, who had embarked on a failed American adventure in 1900.2 The rest of the correspondence carefully preserved by Botros’s widow Nazira



2

Introduction

in the family archive, a suitcase, were letters of condolence for the Maalouf family: more than twenty-­four messages from the mountain’s villages, Zahleh, Beirut, Aleppo, Cairo, New York, São Paulo, and El Paso, Texas.3 The salience of singular subjects in diasporic networks shines through in the cosmopolitan condolences spiraling from the world to the mountain. A complicated story of modernism, nationalism, interconfessional alignments, uncertain horizons, and exile facilitated by steamship webs linking the Eastern Mediterranean, France, and Mexico darkens Ali’s letter. There is no official record of his arrival in Mexico. Did he disembark? Did he travel? What do Ali, Botros, and Nazira tell us about the relevance of mobility, as project and practice, to lives anchored in the Lebanese Mountain and other localities of the Eastern Mediterranean at the beginning of the twentieth century?4 What horizons of possibility did migration inaugurate and how do we access their history? How did the modernist Nahda imagination of Arab nationalisms situate Middle American geographies and populations?5 Who undertook the leap of faith of transatlantic travel and crucially, how did France mediate these transits? This node in migrant sociability highlights some of the core processes structuring the Mexican Mahjar, a transregional formation that straddled political transitions and linked subjects anchored across Mashriq and Mahjar. Mashriq is a geographical term referring to Arabic-­speaking countries of the Eastern Mediterranean; it will be used throughout this book to refer to the region.6 Mashriqi refers to its inhabitants, an alternative to the modern national categories slowly and incompletely produced during the twentieth century. Mahjar—space of migration, diasporic homeland, dwelling in movement—was the term used by Arabic speakers to describe geographies and sociabilities inhabited by muhajirin, migrants, since the late nineteenth century.7 The Mahjar was a transnational field, weaving together social formations across distinct national, imperial, and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. I will use the terms Mahjari and migrant to refer to people who moved and to their descendants, insofar as they continued to engage the Mahjar as a social space, dwelling at a crossroads, in transit, subject to multiple sovereignties. Unprecedented numbers of people were set in motion by economic and political transformations in the last third of the nineteenth century.8 Rural and marginal populations left Europe and the Mashriq, East and South Asia. The industrializing American nations absorbed much of this labor force. As part of this global mobility, hundreds of thousands of

Introduction 3

people boarded newly available steamships in Beirut, Jaffa, and Alexandria; traveled through Marseille and often Havana; and were deposited in the Atlantic ports of the long American continent, anywhere between Canada and Buenos Aires.9 Doctor Bollamir, a Mashriqi resident of Marseille, noted their circulation’s economic and affective logics in 1901: The emigration of the inhabitants of Syria and Lebanon, which has taken on very important proportions, began about twenty years ago. Marseille has remained the usual route for travelers, and on their way out or as they return, they spend more or less time there . . . most migrants . . . hurry to return after a few years away from their homeland, along with their families, who have shared this voluntary exile. This return is not definitive, however . . . having immersed himself in his native soil, the migrant is taken with nostalgia for a new voyage, and we find him again on the road to America. . . . The growing number of emigrants has reached three hundred thousand, of which a third has returned permanently to their homeland, and the rest constitute a population dispersed across the different countries of the New Continent, dedicated to commerce which is the main goal of these displacements. Some have managed to create very prosperous situations and to establish great commercial houses with very important business ties to France.10

Between 1870 and 1901, three hundred thousand estimated migrants circulated between Mashriq and Mahjar. By the time the First World War exploded and the Ottoman political system collapsed in 1918, between a third and a half of the population of the Lebanese Mountain had made the transatlantic journey.11 Their intense mobility was interrupted by the Great War, but resumed in the 1920s and continued through the late 1940s, when the new states of Lebanon and Syria were under French mandate. Many migrants returned definitively to the Mashriq; the rest concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, with important communities in Haiti and Mexico.12 The Mahjar has long been studied through national histories of reception of Arabic-­speaking migrants. This book argues that the Mahjar was a multifaceted transregional formation that migrants inhabited as the floating world of elsewhere once they had shaken their moorings in village and Ottoman belonging. This global Mahjar of the migrant imagination was, however, fragmented by the legalities of national and imperial constructions. Migrants were subject to distinct administrative practices that



4

Introduction

operated simultaneously, constituting overlapping frames to migrant trajectories. When we read different archives in conjunction, particular national and regional Mahjars become apparent—the Mexican Mahjar, the Latin American and North American Mahjars—in which national and regional politics intersected first with Ottoman and later with French imperial practice. Mahjaris have also been the object of interventions by the universalist jurisdictions of religious institutions—initially the Maronite, Greek Orthodox, and Melkite churches, later also Zionist Judaism, and eventually a proselytizing Islam. This book recognizes the importance of national jurisdictions channeling mobility, while attending to imperial circuits and migrant notables framing migrant trajectories, to offer a colonial history of mobility centered on migrants as agents crafting networks and mobilizing discordant authorities. The migration’s pulse reflects the bewildering variability of individual experience as well as social processes framing divergent trajectories: the social location from which a journey was initially undertaken; its timing; and the social and political conditions organizing departures, arrivals, transits, and returns. In Amin Maalouf ’s family memoir young men hope for economic success, political exiles flee regional reconfigurations, journalists and professors address global Mahjari publics, and women work in the administration of memory.13 Their mobility was experienced and narrated as conquest, diaspora, exile, or pilgrimage. Making Mashriqis in movement the unit of analysis, I follow mobilities and migrant constructions of memory, attempting to track their logics and make sense of their constraints, intending to grasp the human experience of broad structural and discursive phenomena, to explore global history on an intimate scale.

Moving Mashriqis In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Mashriqi migrants were headed for the Americas, which they conceived as a vast and undifferentiated land of opportunity, the New World. In the Ottoman imaginary, Amrika was not a single country or cultural or political beacon. It was a place where people could go to make money and return home rich, traveling repeatedly rather than settling overseas. As American Protestant missionary Henry Jessup observed about Douma in 1910: Since those days [1858] the village has been completely transformed. Emigrants to North and South America have returned enriched and have built beautiful homes, with tiled roofs, glass fronts and marble

Introduction 5

floors, vying with city houses. Indeed this holds true of the Lebanon villages for a hundred miles along the mountain range. Everywhere the people say “This was done with American money.”14

According to oral history, in the beginning, destination was sometimes determined by the first port of call of the next available ship of the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, the Société Générale des Transports Maritimes, or the Compagnie Cyprien Fabre proposed by an emigration agency.15 By the 1920s, 90 to 95 percent of migrants reported that they intended to join family, fellow villagers, or friends, constituting a classic case of chain migration.16 While the initial destination was often chosen because kinsfolk were already there, once migrants found their footing, they remained extraordinarily mobile across American geographies. If Amrika was a land of plenty, Latin America, Amrika al Jnubiya, was narrated as a place to discover and conquer. Arriving as liberal Latin American states invested in infrastructure in order to better link up with a global industrial order, Mashriqis contributed to the creation of regional markets through their itinerant credit economies and transnational business networks and profited from the expansion of emerging economies in the Belle Époque global moment. Ottoman subjects brought with them newly articulated Nahda claims regarding the place of Arabic speakers in modernist global hierarchies, which imagined Native American populations as racially and civilizationally subordinate to Arabs. Mahjari racialization as white in Middle American postcolonial formations, though briefly contested by xenophobic nationalisms in the wake of the Great Depression, consolidated their reading as potential local elites. Migrants who arrived in Mexico in the final Ottoman decades came mostly from the Lebanese Mountain, with many arrivals from the northern districts—especially from Zgharta, Akar, and Zahleh—and from the Shouf, initially from Deir al-­Qamar. Over the next decades, migration diversified and the mostly Maronite and Melkite pioneers were joined by a growing Arab Jewish migration and compatriots of all confessions arriving from Tripoli, Aleppo, Homs, Damascus, Bait Laham, and Bait Jala, among numerous cities and villages of the Ottoman Arab provinces. Many arrived in Mexico from other Mahjars; tens of thousands stayed; others moved on in the pursuit of kin, stability, or profit.17 As the twentieth century unfolded, mobility reflected the pulse of political and economic life across Mashriq and Mahjar, dwindling during the early decades of Middle Eastern independences, to peak again with the eruption of the



6

Introduction

Lebanese Civil War. As with other Latin American destinations, Mexico’s attraction declined along with the promise of the Mexican economy, from a late nineteenth-­century moment pregnant with potential, to a more difficult early twenty-­first-­century present. Changing global conditions redirected flows from Latin and North America to Australia and the oil economies of the Arab Gulf. Much scholarship has focused on the national projects migrants had to contend with in the Americas and the Arab nationalisms that they developed through homeland politics.18 While national projects were important, political jurisdictions other than the nation intersected with nascent nationalist imaginaries to frame trajectories. I will argue that the transnational field woven across Mahjar and Mashriq by the ebb and flow of migrant circulation from the late nineteenth century through the present is best understood in light of the circumstances framing the two peaks in mobility in the Mashriq-­Middle American circuit: Ottoman modernity and the French mandate. These two political moments were times of social reconfiguration that built on existing social formations but also produced new subjects, discourses, and cultural practice that continue to inform Mahjari practice in the early twenty-­first century.19 The recognition of Mahjaris as simultaneously imperial subjects (Ottoman, French) and postcolonial national subjects (Lebanese, Syrian, Mexican) alerts us to the fact that they navigated geographies framed by distinct and unequal projects. Trajectories in the Mexican Mahjar were afforded by the intersection of Arab, French, and Mexican colonial modernisms. An exercise in historical anthropology, this book will explore the transition from the Ottoman to the mandate moment in the making of the Mexican Mahjar. The transition was vital, establishing new boundaries within Mahjar networks and communities, organizing institutions, aligning categories of subjects. It was essential to migrant social mobility during the second half of the twentieth century, when geographic mobility diminished and Mexican Mahjar dynamics were fundamentally focused on migrants’ differential access to material and moral accumulation. Mandate-­era understandings continue to structure migrant memory work, Mahjari self-­orientalizations, and Mexican Orientalisms and Islamophobias—conditioning trajectories, as recent arrivals with the right connections and attributes capitalize on definitions of Mashriqi privilege in Mexican public culture. The first chapters rely on crossing the official archives of imperial and national administrative, commercial, diplomatic, and punitive institutions housed in libraries, state archives, and universities in France,

Figure 0.1 Map of the Mashriq (Nimeh 1945).



8

Introduction

Lebanon, and Mexico. My training as an anthropologist informs my reading of these archival formations. The final chapters are ethnographic. They center migrant memory, accessed through personal and family archives, in-­depth life history and oral history interviews, community publications, and ethnography, as well as representations and appropriations of migrant practice by Mexicans of other genealogies, accessed through the press, online publications, interviews, and participant observation between 2003 and 2015.

Thinking the Mexican Mahjar Middle East mobility studies produced by anthropologists and historians trained in regional historiography and languages have only come into their own in the past decade and a half. The recognition of mobile subjects as central to the region’s modern history is gradually shifting the historical narrative and opening up avenues of inquiry.20 This section briefly reviews the theoretical and methodological approaches to mobility that inform my analysis throughout the book. I use analytic tools developed by scholars of transnationalism, subaltern and feminist studies, and historical anthropology to argue that crucial insights emerge when we approach migratory processes through historical ethnography. Most scholars writing about mobility before this shift focused on diaspora—as migrants, their children, grandchildren, or spouses—working to produce community and family memory. In community histories and the oral history elicited through my ethnographic process, migrants generate a mythology of mobility. Some of the core tropes in migrant memory, terrible Turks and Phoenician propensities to travel and commerce, constitute Christian narratives appealing to Western Christendom’s hospitality or constructing Lebanese nationalism. Chapter 7 offers a brief social history of the production, confessional diversification, and circulation of memory literature in the Mexican Mahjar. Community histories of varying degrees of professionalization memorialize the migration, narrating through an affective lens that defends the migrant as a morally sound citizen of the receiving state. This moral imperative impoverishes analyses of mobility, confining narratives to the celebratory and foreclosing complexity. Professional historians situating Mashriqi migration within Mexican national history respected and reproduced migrant narratives as the historical truth of immigrant “origins.” Even when they don’t work within policy-­oriented, government-­funded fields that demand analyses intelli-

Introduction 9

gible to state institutions, scholars, too, are subjects produced by states. The twentieth-­century project of the homogeneous nation-­state has deeply structured how we imagine and narrate history. Framing mobility through national histories reflects a national imagination at work, producing what Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick-­Schiller have called methodological nationalism.21 Methodological nationalism has ensured that, until very recently, histories and ethnographies of migration focused on migrants’ lives in the context of reception, with little serious attention to their sustained mobility, the history of their place of origin, or the ways in which that context continues to inform their trajectories as they dwell in movement. Notable exceptions have explored return migration.22 Moving people rub against the grain of the nation-­state, according to which subjects are members of one and only one state-­nation-­ territory-­language; those who live otherwise are represented and managed as deviant.23 In normative policy and social science diagnosis, the migrant is deviant unless she submits to the nation-­state logic, making a national choice. The national lens encourages scholars to portray the migrant as emigrant and immigrant, figures that fit nation-­state ideologies even though they do not necessarily reflect all migrants’ projects, affective investments, or expectations. In order to describe migrants as morally adequate beings, movement needs to be construed as unidirectional and permanent. Emigrant populations leave one national context, often cast in migration literature as problematic or structurally flawed. Sending countries are portrayed as poor, underdeveloped, overpopulated, politically unstable places anyone would want to leave. Receiving countries are defined as rich and modern places providing security and opportunity, where everyone would like to settle. Such states expect that migrants should want to rid themselves of the habits and markers of their former nation and do their best to assimilate, to become as much like their host’s hegemonic culture, or mainstream, as they can manage. This process is construed as taking time, one or two generations. The achievement of cultural similarity is assumed to cultivate a concomitant shift in political allegiance to the new nation. Focusing on mobility between two world peripheries is a way out of such assumptions, of finding new questions. Migration studies additionally tend to define migrants—assorted individuals who share the fact of movement—through the marked collective category of the ethnic and as communities.24 Migrants from culturally distant sites are produced as ethnic groups in contrast to a national norm, and the study of immigrant populations consists of tracking the progress of their assimilation into the mainstream. The good immigrant story, preva-



10

Introduction

lent in Mexico and other areas of migrant destination in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tells the tale of a hardworking foreigner. He arrives with no resources other than his willingness to work and emulate local society and thus eventually—through hard work, thrifty habits, and sagacious investment—achieves local middle-­class status. Celebrations of migration describe migrants’ contributions to the adopted nation and their role in local nation-­building projects. Accounts attempting empathy with the challenges of mobility quickly slide into a politics of sentimentality that favors nostalgia and migrant struggles with belonging.25 New paradigms that emerged in the past two decades encourage us to retain the state as a fundamental producer of subjects and boundaries while recognizing other processes simultaneously at work, undoing or at least complicating some state effects. Transnational studies emerged in the work of sociologists and anthropologists engaged in ethnographies of migration.26 Anthropologists of globalization, tourism, travel, and migrancy have attempted to reconceptualize movement as central, rather than marginal, to human sociality.27 These conceptual shifts set our analytic imagination free from national expectations, allowing us to explore the diversity within movement. Current nation-­states, their boundaries, and the variety of mechanisms developed to reify them—travel documents, visas, and immigration checkpoints—become visible as recent historical projects.28 Ideologies of mobility and reception shape the administration of mobility, informing migrant choices and behavior, which are historically specific. Historical anthropologists have noted the importance of contextualizing movement, attending to agents’ categories and narratives and exploring the role of sites and practices of remembering in the construction of national and community histories.29 Migrants arriving in particular national contexts face changing demands and opportunities. Their experience can highlight axes obscured in political histories of the nation—such as differential experiences of class, religious tradition, or political participation—affording richer, more textured histories of multifaceted processes.30 Attending to the diversity of migrants and their trajectories and to the transformations of the discursive frameworks through which they narrate and enact their lives affords glimpses beyond hegemonies. While confessional identities have been historically important in the Mashriq and have taken on crucial political dimensions since the mid-­nineteenth century, they tend to displace and/or subsume other locally relevant social fault lines in popular and expert discourse, notably class and gender dif-

Introduction 11

ference. I will explore these intersections through the conjunction of historical ethnography and subaltern studies.

Historical Anthropology Historical anthropology has emerged as a recognizable body of literature that moves beyond the ambivalence of interdisciplinary work and debates about exchanges of method and theory between history and anthropology conceived as distinct disciplines. Though the field is characterized by overlapping conversations with distinct genealogies, shared sensibilities, concerns, and politics have generated common strategies for knowledge production. It was perhaps anthropologist Bernard Cohn, working at the University of Chicago, who first formulated the perspective foundational to current historical anthropology.31 Pieces published by Cohn between 1962 and 1981 were brought together in a volume titled An Anthropologist among the Historians in 1987. Historian Ranajit Guha, founder of the influential Subaltern Studies collective, wrote the introduction to the volume, revealing the extent to which Cohn’s scholarship cultivated conversations with Subaltern Studies in the twenty-­five-­year interval it took him to define the field. The enterprise of historical anthropology, which Guha labeled anthropological history, was constituted in this encounter, with questions about power providing a joint frontier.32 Guha and Cohn define historical anthropology as an intellectual exercise that treats cultural categories as processes constructed in the interaction of differentially situated subjects.33 The colonial encounter is privileged as a site for the study of power through the making of categories in the interaction of dominant and subaltern subjects.34 Concerned with the themes of national and colonial effects, Cohn’s work transformed the analytic horizon by centering the colonial situation. He moved firmly away from earlier anthropological articulations of impact, culture contact, and influence, which implied the possibility of disentangling a primitive pristine from European modernity. Situating the European colonialist and the indigene in one analytic field forced recognition of “savage” and “civilized” as inhabiting a common temporality, of their difference as an effect of power differentials structured in the colonial encounter.35 It created the possibility of analyzing how such differentials are produced and distinctions stabilized through the colonial administration of subjects and categories of rule. From an anthropologist’s perspective, the field has been built by schol-



12

Introduction

ars seeking alternatives to epistemologies acknowledged as problematic in the discipline’s debates of the 1980s. Talal Asad first recognized in 1973 that constructions central to our analytic and narrative work stem from anthropologists’ unacknowledged collaboration with colonial administrations.36 As Eric Wolf, working in a political economy key, produced Europe and the People without History, Johannes Fabian questioned the convention of the ethnographic present in describing the Other, noting that the Other’s historicity was eliminated by this narrative fiction.37 Renato Rosaldo and critics of area studies like Lila Abu-­Lughod and Michael Gilsenan challenged the construction of cultures as bounded, discontinuous entities, and Susan Slyomovics scorned anthropology’s romance with the anonymous subject.38 Ann Laura Stoler dissected the production of the colonial state in intimate interaction. These contributions suggested alternatives: ethnography directly concerned with colonial modernity and the colonial encounter, committed to situating singular subjects in time, bent on telling connected histories. From a historian’s point of view, anthropological history is also characterized by subversive ruptures and rethinkings of core disciplinary practice. With a strong history of historicism through the first half of the twentieth century, the goal for many historians is still to understand an age in its own terms, priority given to politics and great men. This often produces event-­based, particularistic, atheoretical, intuitive, supposedly factual and truthful narrative histories.39 Though strong reactions to the historicist paradigm developed on several fronts—with French historians after World War II defending an analytic, theoretical, comparative history of society that set the stage for the emergence of schools of social and cultural history—historicism is alive and well as disciplinary common sense. Unruly innovations included E. P. Thompson’s social history of the making of the English working class, Robert Darnton’s histories of popular culture in eighteenth-­century France, and Natalie Davis’s attention to extraordinary subjects like Martin Guerre and her three women on the margins. Perhaps productive tension is best exemplified by Michel Foucault’s monumental oeuvre, which he defined as a history of the limits of Western reason. A passion for margins also fueled the Subaltern Studies project, with Guha welcoming Cohn’s explorations as a breath of fresh air, pointing scholars in the direction of “a new sense of wonder and the play of an insatiable doubt.”40 Foucault, however—like Gramsci, who informed subaltern and other postcolonial production—is often read as theory and cast out of history by fellow historians reluctant to engage with what they perceive as bad

Introduction 13

history, obscure theorizing. Anthropologists are often received with suspicion on historians’ terrain with similar arguments. Historians’ preference for periodization as explicative and narrative strategy can stump the anthropologist, exhortations to flag our chronologies falling on the deaf ears of those trained to organize analysis through theory. Cohn offers us a fieldwork metaphor, claiming that historical anthropology is best made by bicultural subjects who are familiar through immersion with the professional histories, life-­worlds, and practices of both traditions and fully conscious of their differences.41 In spite of institutional configurations that continue to enforce disciplinary distinction, tinging efforts to consolidate the field with anxiety, its articulations are ever richer. Robert Darnton’s 1984 invitation to write history in the ethnographic grain is enticing, as he moves away from individuals and events in his reconstruction of social meaning.42 The Comaroffs’ Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992) is a theoretical tour de force, a passionate plea for the sustained relevance of ethnography—as a modality of theoretically informed practice—to an anthropology that needs to become historical. They defend historical anthropology’s potential to “dissolve the great analytic divide between tradition and modernity.”43 Cooper and Stoler’s joint introduction to their edited volume Tensions of Empire (1998) became an important landmark, revisiting the centrality of the colonial encounter as analytic horizon.44 Keith Axel (2002) and Saurabh Dube (2007) have compiled important collections, imagining futures for historical anthropology.45

subaltern Studies and Feminism Historical anthropology’s concerns with the social construction of power have facilitated conversations with subaltern and postcolonial studies, the theoretical centers of gravity of colonial studies during the 1980s and 1990s. The Subaltern Studies project of reading the archive—sometimes along the grain and sometimes against it, for processes of subalternization, for the production of a power differential between social actors, in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak’s seminal definition of the subaltern— is central to my analysis.46 I also rely on a vast postcolonial literature exploring the dynamics of colonial projects and anticolonial resistance, noting the role of transnational populations and movements in enforcing and extending colonial projects into intimate realms as well as in orchestrating public challenges to the state.47 Mariko Tamanoi’s work on the gendering of Japanese nationalism and differential erasures of national



14

Introduction

memory in postcolonial Japan has been particularly useful in thinking through non-­Western colonial projects, as has Prasenjit Duara’s work on decolonization. Beyond Spivak’s seminal question of whether the subaltern can speak, a necessary point of departure, feminist analytics of intersectionality have informed my analysis of formations enforcing subalternity through the articulation and mutual constitution of axes of difference and hierarchy. I am particularly indebted to the theoretical work of Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality and to Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s attention to differential feminisms. Nadje al-­Ali’s work moves beyond the coconstruction of racial, gendered, and class subjections to insist on ethnographic inquiry into which intersections are relevant for the analysis of a particular historical process. I follow Adrienne Rich in centering the body as a strategic beginning, source of questions, and compass of a grounded politics; and Kamala Visweswaran on narrative alternatives in feminist ethnography.48

Ethnography in the Archive Ethnography approaches the document, the archival artifact, as relevant for whatever it may tell us of the conditions of the past and for what we may read in it of the discursive formation within which it operated.49 Ethnographers have questioned archival authority and archival transparency by posing questions about how archives are produced and about what, exactly, constitutes an archive. Asking, with Akhil Gupta, through what alchemy today’s secondary sources—press accounts, for example—are rarefied into the truth of the past. Questioning the processes that produce the archive as truth invites inquiry into the institutional location of archival material and the politics of archiving practices, beautifully theorized by the Subaltern Studies collective and more recently by Ann Stoler. Ethnographers note that initially bureaucrats, and in their turn, scholars, make archives. Following Cohn, the Comaroffs recommend that a historical ethnography begin by constructing its own archive: “It cannot content itself with established canons of documentary evidence, because these are themselves part of the culture of global modernism—as much the subject as the means of enquiry.”50 They observe that history resides in mute meanings transacted through goods and practices, icons and images dispersed in the landscapes of the everyday, as much as in the historian’s written word. Historical anthropologists need to work both in and outside the official record, both with and beyond the guardians of

Introduction 15

memory in the societies they study. This perspective asks what is recognizable as an archival formation beyond the authorized institutional archive; what personal, private, and popular archives might look like; where and how they might be assembled and accessed. The scholar must make choices not only about which archives to construct, but also about how to read the archive and the processes through which the archive is constituted and material entextualized for it.51 In the case of colonial and other institutional archives, tensions between archival superiors and subalterns generating documents with disparate agendas and the archival afterlives of documents pertaining to precolonial or preinstitutional history must be explored. Such concerns have produced brilliant discussions on the role of ethnography and statistics in the construction of colonial truth and archival reality, initiated by Talal Asad and Nicholas Dirks, and effectively pursued by new generations of scholars. I follow the Comaroffs and Stoler in search of strategies to take the ethnographic imagination to the archive. The archive I constructed for this project includes state archives, private archives, and the ethnographic archive built through interviews and participant observation. In Mexico, I consulted the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City and state and municipal archives: Archivo Municipal de Torreón, Archivo Municipal de Saltillo, Archivo Estatal de Coahuila. In France, I relied on the Archives d’Outremer housed in Aix en Provence, the Marseille Chamber of Commerce Patrimonial Service, and the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Relations housed in Paris and Nantes, which include correspondence produced and filed in the Metropole but also the consular and administrative archives repatriated from French consulates in the Americas and from the mandate institutions housed in Beirut. My ethnographic fieldwork was carried out between 2003 and 2015, with the bulk of interviews and participant observation clustering in Beirut (June–­December 2005) and Mexico City (January 2006–­January 2016); additional interviews in Torreón, Saltillo, and Monterrey; and in Honduras, in San Pedro Sula and La Ceiba. Fieldwork provided occasions to access private family “archives”: photographs, letters, personal documents, and community publications stored in suitcases and attics, displayed on sitting room walls and coffee tables.

World History on an Intimate Scale The colonial encounter has been studied in historical anthropology and postcolonial scholarship through boundaries inherited from national his-



16

Introduction

tory.52 Scholars have often concentrated on encounters between colonial administration and colonized subjects within the elastic, expansive boundaries of a single empire. Official archives organized as national repositories and the weight of historians’ assumption of national histories as natural units are powerful deterrents to global imaginations.53 When scholars look at more than one imperial venture, work slides into comparative key.54 When anthropologists tackle the question of mobility across imperial domains, they construct ethnographies anchored in temporal displacement, like Engseng Ho’s magnificent Graves of Tarim (2006). An important part of this book’s contribution is extending explorations of the colonial encounter through geographies, imaginaries, and politics missing from the conversation. Conceptualizing a colonial and postcolonial global, recognizing that colonialism afforded encounters not only within the expanding political boundaries of empire but across domains of differently constituted sovereignties, requires additional theorizing. Revisionist historians of nationalism have extensively pursued the work of undoing the nation as an omnipresent referent by recognizing it as a political project proposed by dissident elites at particular historical conjunctures. We need to not only denaturalize nations and nationalism, but to move toward the theorization of alternative, parallel, nested, intersecting social formations. Creating a history of movement requires shifting the boundaries of analysis to recognize the spheres of action of various agents: migrants, states, and religious authorities among others. These overlap only partially, are frequently at odds, and need to be understood as fundamentally unfinished, discordant processes in the making. The story of Mashriqis in movement destabilizes regional historical narratives as much as it reflects the history of the regions that their migration weaves together. This book is about encounters at a colonial crossroads where Ottoman, French, and Mexican civilizing missions intersected, attempting the administration of mobile populations of the Ottoman Arab provinces, later the French mandate territories of Syria and Lebanon. As I step beyond methodological nationalism to consider the world of the migrants, two aspects of the Mexican Mahjar become salient: migrants’ experience in spinning transnational life-­worlds and a transnational imagination at work in the administrative practices that they were subjected to by the French, during the mandate and by postcolonial governments and religious authorities since then. Stabilizing and inscribing difference at the Mexican Mahjar crossroads was particularly challenging. Changing imperial projects fueled subversion by various subalterns and destabilized

Introduction 17

even exceptionally successful trajectories, as did the ambivalence of postcolonial Middle Eastern and Middle American modernist nationalisms. Attending to Cyrus Schayegh’s reminder that small is beautiful in the production of new social history, I analyze the colonial encounter as global process through the everyday lives of mobile subjects. Following Cohn, Stoler, and Cooper, I place colonizer and subaltern in a single social field, recognizing that Mahjari notables and Middle American criollos were both colonized and colonizers. Mahjari notables were subject first to the Ottoman center and later to French and criollo elites; they in turn constantly attempted to colonize other Mahjaris and Middle American natives. Criollos invoked their European heritage to legitimate a monopoly on power and their right to categorize Mahjaris as desirable or not, yet they were subordinate to French and American imperial projects in global geopolitics. In the twenty-­first century, robust Middle American Orientalisms remain blind to Mahjari diversity even as they celebrate solidarities with the Orient.

Map of the Book In the remainder of this introduction, I will outline the core argument of the book as it develops over eight chapters. As a historical anthropologist writing a history of the present, I flag chronologies but do not reduce analysis to temporal sequence, attempting instead to follow cultural categories as processes, produced in the interaction of differentially situated subjects. Following feminist ethnography, each chapter tells a story of intersections while centering one of three main actors: Mahjaris in their diversity; the global colonial French state under construction; and Mexican elite, state, and popular interventions. Since each of these heterogeneous actors has different genealogies, chronology in each chapter recedes and adjusts, bringing into focus the cultural history necessary to situate an interaction within the broad transition from Ottoman to mandate Mahjar. The two final chapters reach into the contemporary, focusing on migrants’ memory work and on early twenty-­first-­century Mexican Orientalisms afforded by the Ottoman-­to-­mandate history. Geographical anchoring fluctuates across chapters; attention focuses initially on Mashriq and then on Mahjar, circling on to how the Mashriq is remembered or imagined in the Mahjar in the final chapters. The Mexican Mahjar emerges as transnational not only in regard to the Eastern Mediterranean but also across a web of American migrations. Mashriqis in Central America and the Caribbean—Haiti, Guatemala, and Hon-



18

Introduction

duras—were often integral to the Mexican Mahjar through the circulation of migrants and their cultural production. The press and the notables of the North American Mahjar, with its heart in the mother colony of New York City, were constant interlocutors, and the Mexican-­US border a vehicle for the production of value. Chapter 1, The Mexican Mahjar, reviews late Ottoman transformations to better situate initial mobility and contextualize the transition to the mandate. I sketch the numbers, patterns, and pulse of the mobility undergirding the Mexican Mahjar. Migrants who arrived in Mexico in the early decades of the twentieth century were not a mass of penniless peasants, as they have sometimes been portrayed in the literature, but a wide cross section of Mashriqi society. Those who left rural areas were often rich farmers, artisans, merchants, and rural notables; migrants of urban origin were professionals, diplomats, and merchants. Ottoman migrants could afford to extend regional mobility into transatlantic circuits. Elites displaced and middle classes created through Ottoman reforms circulated along with newly rich peasants, creating a stratified Mahjar and transplanting a politics of notables to the American geographies. Chapter 2, Managing Mobility, examines the transition from Ottoman subjecthood to mandate citizenship in Mexico. French interventions in the Mexican Mahjar preceded the conferral of the mandates, since Maronite and Jewish Mahjaris, accustomed to French protection within the Ottoman Empire, actively sought to extend it to the Mahjar. During the Great War and the onset of the French mandate and throughout the 1920s, a migrant associational thicket flourished, indexing fierce debates and diversifying political postures. After 1920, French practices of protection, a favor accorded deserving Ottoman subjects, were refined into the assumption of international responsibility for the citizens of new states under French tutelage. The migrants’ new status was formalized through census and registration procedures involving complicated official and unofficial negotiations between the migrants and French officials with different perspectives and preferences. French attempts to manage migration into and out of the Syrian and Lebanese mandates, reaching into the diaspora to legitimate and institutionalize the mandate in the Mashriq, changed the horizon of possible trajectories for Mashriqis in the Mexican Mahjar. Mahjari notables were active in denouncing and displacing marginizable Mashriqis in collaboration with the French. Chapter 3, Race and Patronage, tracks the production of networks of patronage and racial equivalencies in the Mexican Mahjar during the Mexican Revolution and the postrevolutionary period (1910 through the

Introduction 19

1930s). Both practices contributed to Mahjari prosperity and were mobilized to counter the 1927 Mexican ban on Mashriqi immigration. The migrant elite’s subalternity as citizens of the French mandate was central in structuring access to privilege in Mexico. French patronage afforded a local reading of Mahjari bodies as Spanish if they could claim to be French, an alchemy that equated the racialization of migrants as white with their right to postcolonial privileges in Mexico. After the Mexican Revolution, migrants’ status as French protégés and their Oriental whiteness made them both intelligible as elites and vulnerable to xenophobia. Mahjaris faced growing rejection from Mexican state and popular sectors after the Great Depression, during the economically difficult 1930s. Legislation curtailing movement targeted impoverished migrants but eventually threatened entire national categories and therefore Mahjari notables. Notables developed two strategies to situate Mahjaris as rightful conquerors of Latin American geographies in this context. They denied destitute migrants their status as Mashriqis, displacing them morally and physically from community institutions and the public landscape. Only white—that is, wealthy and Christian—Mahjaris could claim continuity with the Mashriq. The second strategy is explored in chapter 5. French authorities quickly mobilized to protect Mahjaris against the ban, with limited results. Their colonial casting of Mahjaris as problematic Orientals, however, frequently sympathized with Mexican xenophobia. Chapter 4, Migrants and the Law, dissects the intersection of French and Mexican patronage of migrant notables, through situations in which the two jurisdictions were at odds or came into conflict. Making the fragility of even exceptionally successful migrant trajectories in the face of Orientalisms and Islamophobias visible, this chapter is crucial to the revision of celebratory narratives of social ascent that reproduce the displacement and effacement of subaltern migrants by community institutions, practices, and chronicles. Mahjaris established ties to French and Mexican formations of authority largely through informal practices of patronage that sometimes flirted with illegality. The patron-­client relationships established between the emerging Mahjari elite and their less-­ fortunate fellow migrants allowed prominent men and women to accumulate further wealth and prestige while those in need found credit, flexible labor conditions, and mentoring. During the turbulent decades of the Mexican Revolution, Mahjari fortunes diversified. Many were hard hit by cash strangulation, and even prosperous families were subalternized as French and American political surveillance, initiated during the Great War, interacted with the economic downturn. Those who weathered the



20

Introduction

storm reaped profits, but bankruptcy threatened again during the 1921 and 1929 economic depressions. Allegiance to the mandate, cultivating intimate ties to corrupt French and Mexican officials, and affiliation with Francophile community institutions were crucial to securing accumulation in the Mexican Mahjar, as the uneven salvaging of losses incurred during the revolution through reclamation committees illustrates. Chapter 5, Modernism, argues that French Jesuit and Arab modernist recoveries of Ottoman representations of the Americas during the Nahda cast Latin America as a horizon to discover and conquer. Recovered Ottoman Arab travel chronicles dating from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries narrated voyages to the New World from the perspective of Ottoman imperial subjects belonging to an age of exploration, producing Latin Americans as savages. Edited and published through the efforts of Nahda and Jesuit Orientalists and available to migrant intellectuals, these representations fed nationalist debates seeking to situate Arabs as moderns in a global history of civilization. Criollo elites building the Mexican state also assigned truth value to universalist modernism, assuming the same position as mediators between Euro-­ American modernity and locals that Mahjaris claimed for Arab moderns. This common subalternity afforded Mahjari notables a strategy to counter criollo arguments casting Mahjaris as undesirables in the 1930s. Mobilizing a Maronite Phoenician nationalism, they managed to partner with criollo elites in a common civilizing mission to bring Middle American mestizo and Indian populations into the fold of Eurocentric, Christian civilization. Chapter 6, Making the Mahjar Lebanese, focuses on the institutionalization of Mahjari social mobility, investigating associational life in the Mexican Mahjar. The construction of a transnational public sphere claiming citizenship and patronage from different states fractured the migrant population according to sect, class, and political affiliation. This chapter reconstructs the emergence of this transregional public, tracking participation in institutions active in the Mexican Mahjar during the mandate and beyond.55 The consolidation of considerable migrant fortunes and political influence had made early associations into privileged niches for the Syrio-­Lebanese national category as a whole. The migrant middle class capitalized on the national identity shared with outlier success stories, harvesting further opportunities for social mobility as geographic mobility waned. In contrast to notables’ sustained transregional practice and their clients’ de-­A rabized Lebanese national identification anchored in community institutions, the migrant majority lost their moorings to a

Introduction 21

Mashriqi past. Working-­class populations of all religious traditions became invisible as Mahjaris. Unmooring the collective boat from Palestinian and Syrian national imageries tainted by the politics of the American century and linking the Lebanese in public culture to a Phoenician past and a French present were a strategic move toward Mahjari prosperity in Mexico. Greek Orthodox or Jewish, Syrians were shuffled out of sight, and the Lebanese emerged as (Maronite) Christian, (upper) middle-­ class, economically liberal, culturally Western, and distinct on all these counts from neighbors, Mexican and Mashriqi. Chapter 7, Objects of Memory, explores the circulation and construction of memories of Mahjar and Mashriq, through a grounded reading of Mahjari texts encountered during my ethnographic process: national histories, community histories, cookbooks, and family memoirs, a corpus that maps social memory as differential. These genres are marked by the inscription of confessional and class difference in the Mahjar. The distinctions they guard resulted from the loss of spaces of everyday interaction as migrant populations dispersed across urban space according to their economic trajectories and Mahjari institutions defined new boundaries to sociability. Community intellectuals have produced increasingly normative memories, developing and importing national and confessional boundary-­building projects from the Mashriq. By the 1980s—when genres and production multiplied—subjects generating them were already the product of national-­confessional projects and local differentiation. Recent texts bear the additional weight of commemoration, memorializing family or community institutions. Yet the multiplication of genres with different configurations of authority and permanence, patterns of production, circulation and consumption, provides degrees of freedom. As ephemera, a devalued feminine genre, cookbooks offer a microsite of freedom, where memory erased by national and community logics can be smuggled into the future. Stowaway remembering of a hidden diversity and crossed histories among Mahjari “communities” affords a multilayered, divergent structuring of migrant memory. Chapter 8, The Arab and Its Double, tracks the circulation of representations of the Arab Orient in Mexico. Middle American imaginaries of the Arab conceive both cultural difference and identity through the Orient. I argue that local representations are refracted through the Orientalisms of two successive hegemonic presences, Spain and the United States. I explore two imagined histories of connection between Middle America and the Middle East: practices of distinction through which criollos claim continuity with Iberic Arab history to legitimate themselves as heirs to



22

Introduction

Spanish colonial privilege; and middle-­class collaboration, consumption, and refusal of Mahjari projects. I then attend to the Orients imagined by Middle American mestizo youth: mediatic, consumer Orientalisms fashioned into forms of cosmopolitan resistance to American hegemony, patriarchy, and postcolonial class formations. Media portrayals of an occupied Orient have provoked third-­worldist solidarity movements among urban lower-­middle-­class students since the 1980s and invoke gendered, eroticized fantasies affording the liberation of third-­generation feminists. Media Orientalisms also provide tropes for the articulation of discontent with modern migrants. Finally, I discuss conversion to Islam in Mexico as aspirational: attempting class mobility against neo-­imperialism and patriarchy, subverting a class structure still organized by the colonial encounter with Spain. In contrast to community efforts to inscribe difference, Mexican Orientalisms fail to note confessional distinctions among Mashriqis, making Arab and Jew indistinguishable.

T he Mexic an Mahjar

Chapter 1

Mexico hosted one of the five largest concentrations of Mahjaris in the Americas. Mashriqi migrants first appear in official records at the Mexican port of Veracruz in 1878.1 Veracruz received 58 percent of Mashriqis who arrived before 1910 and up to 85 percent of Mashriqi arrivals between 1920 and 1929, while the ports of Tampico in the Gulf of Mexico and Progreso in Yucatán welcomed the rest. The constant trickle of Mahjaris who came down through the US-­Mexico land border at Nuevo Laredo and Ciudad Juárez swelled to 10 percent of registered migrants in the 1930s, and others came up through Mexico’s southern land border with Guatemala. The process quickly escalated, linking the Mexican Mahjar to the Mashriq, but also to the North American, South American, and European Mahjars. This chapter lays out the numbers, patterns, and pulse of the human mobility undergirding the Mexican Mahjar. The beginning of the migratory circuit in 1878 and its first peak, between 1900 and 1910, were framed by the transformations of Ottoman modernity. Social, economic, and political change in the Ottoman world and newly available steamship travel encouraged a wide cross section of Mashriqi society to venture into transatlantic circuits. Rich peasants, artisans, and rural notables could afford to extend regional circulation along with urban professionals, diplomats, and merchants. I argue that the socioeconomic and confessional diversity of early migrants allowed for the politics of notables to be transplanted to the Mexican Mahjar, where Mahjaris soon polarized into a privileged set of mediators, whom I will call migrant notables, and their less-­fortunate clients.2 These developments intersected with Middle American histories and social formations in early migrant experience, establishments, and intentions in the Mahjar.



24

The Mexican Mahjar

Ottoman Modernity The late Ottoman context of the migration is refracted by what I will call the Mexican Mahjar mythology, the hegemonic narratives developed by migrants. In the Maronite-­majority Mexican Mahjar, interviewees and community cultural production tell a two-­pronged immigrant story that highlights integration into Mexican society through social ascent yet defines migrant difference as virtuous, as long as it is Christian and Phoenician.3 In the early twenty-­first century, migration is narrated as flight from sectarian conflict and Muslim oppression. Mobility is explained by supposed Mashriqi propensities for travel and commerce, naturalized through the invocation of a Phoenician past.4 These narratives elide the diversity of mobile Mashriqis and the complexity of their trajectories, inviting careful revision of the triggers and contexts of migration, the uneven directionality of Mashriqi trajectories, and migrants’ relationships to national and imperial projects framing their mobility. Recent scholarship regards the emergence of Mashriqi transatlantic migration in the late nineteenth century as afforded by changes in the regional political economy, particularly of the coast and its immediate hinterland.5 Interrelated processes shaped mobile subjects: Ottoman reform across the empire, the embrace of the Ottoman Arab provinces in an Ottoman civilizing mission, and the region’s integration into both a global economy and emerging institutions of global governance, including the nation-­state form and international bodies like the League of Nations.6

Conflict and Sectarianization Christian Mahjari community memory roots migration in sectarian violence construed as religious persecution. Conflict and fear of Ottoman conscription were braided into the portrayal of a Muslim menace from which terrified Mashriqis fled. This myth has been challenged by scholarship noting that Christians had been Ottoman subjects for four centuries when the late nineteenth-­century migrations began. Akram Khater is particularly severe in his assessment of what he describes as a fabrication propagated by early migrants to elicit sympathy and support from Western Christians, especially powerful or wealthy ones, for their project of a Christian Lebanese nation.7 Mahjari Muslims and Jews, in contrast, usually narrate early migration as an economic choice.8



The Mexican Mahjar

25

The specter of persecution is grounded in two distinct historical events: the legal transformation of non-­Muslim subjects in the late Ottoman administration and the violence of 1860. Both stemmed from the Tanzimat reforms that reconstructed the Ottoman state, centralizing administration to modernize the Sublime Porte.9 The reforms were preemptive, emulating European administrative and political practice in order to forestall political intervention in the empire.10 They were driven by mounting European, especially British, pressure for the suspension of slavery and the disappearance of the Muslim/non-­Muslim legal divide.11 The proclamation of equality of all subjects before the state regardless of creed affected a number of domains, among them male subjects’ eligibility for conscription, which became universal. Ottoman millets—Christian and Jewish communities formerly defined as protected religious minorities, with a clear if subaltern status as dhimmis, tax-­paying legal unbelievers— were no longer exempt from military service. The relationship between the Damascus riots and the civil war in Mount Lebanon in 1860 remains obscure, and a causal link between the violence and international migration missing. Large numbers of people moved about during the twin crises, both as refugees fleeing violence and as its perpetrators. Sectarian identities were territorialized without large-­ scale population expulsion, as massacres displaced people who resettled within a hundred-­mile radius.12 More villages became more homogenous in their sectarian composition, and sectarian categories became associated with specific territories in Mount Lebanon. Maronites mostly returned to Zahleh and Deir al-­Qamar, while Druze from the Shouf—by some accounts as many as seven thousand families—settled into the hilly area east of the Hawran plain, which came to be known as the Druze Mountain, Jabal al-­Duruz.13 It was not until the late 1870s, nearly twenty years after the massacres, that migrants left for the Americas in large numbers. Their mobility peaked almost fifty years later. Rather than a natural clash of rigid sectarian categories supposedly antagonistic since the dawn of time, the 1860 conflicts were symptomatic of a broader reorganization of power through the differential effect of reforms and new silk wealth on various sectors of the population.14 During the war, sect increasingly mediated and legitimated a new logic of political representation.15 Maronite and Druze notables came to be considered rightful leaders not because they belonged to ancient and notable lineages, but because they represented a community whose boundaries were established by religion.16 Once Ottoman authorities intervened, severely



26

The Mexican Mahjar

punishing those responsible for the massacres and establishing a new political order, the region settled into a long period of relative tranquility that Akarli has called the long peace.17 Greater Syria, Bilad al-­Sham, had been inscribed with many new boundaries, however, including those constituted by the memory of violence perpetrated in the name of sectarian categories.

Class and Changing Mediation Economic and political transformations continued to remake the region. The establishment of a governorate of Mount Lebanon in 1861 as a European-­instigated reaction to the 1860 crisis had several crucial consequences.18 The wealth and social standing of traditional elites had been grounded in their role as mediators between state and peasant. Administrative centralization, which involved an imperial attack on feudal privileges blamed for the unrest of 1860, threatened the fortunes of intermediaries when Mount Lebanon became the only place within the empire where tax farming was abolished.19 Yet in providing new administrative independence for local notables, the governorate weakened Ottoman presence.20 Relative independence and social stability multiplied opportunities for European, especially French and British, economic ventures in the area. Christians and Jews continued to be perceived as natural partners by European entrepreneurs, absorbing a disproportionate share of new trading opportunities. Their merchants prospered and purchased land.21 Sericulture had been part of the mountain’s economy for centuries. After 1861, however, the profitable intensification of sericulture for the French market transformed family, gender, and labor practices. Silk production increased fivefold between 1860 and 1890, peaking around 1873 when it represented 82.5 percent of total exports, gradually declining to a more modest 62 percent by 1911.22 Despite the fact that peasants’ access to this growing market was mediated by landlords, elders, and others, from the acquisition of silkworm eggs and all the way through the transport and commercialization of raw silk, the blooming silk trade made new standards of living possible in Mount Lebanon. Administrative and infrastructural changes in the Beirut port and urban area attracted rural migration from the city’s hinterland. Beirut’s silk-­trade prosperity and status as seat of European enterprise and consulates were enhanced by its designation as the site of commercial courts ruling all dealings between Ottoman subjects and European entrepreneurs. With the completion of the Damascus-­Beirut road in 1863, the city’s position as commercial port



The Mexican Mahjar

27

and nexus of foreign missionary and consular activity consolidated its regional hegemony.23 These processes created new class horizons. European missionary schools available to all provided a vocabulary of equality, as did the texts and categories of the modernizing Ottoman state. Amid a culture of hierarchy that distinguished between ahali, the people, and mashaikh or zua’ma, the notables, peasants had new access to property and cash through the silk trade with French merchants. As peasants acquired wealth, the mashaikh complained of their scandalous marriage proposals, lamenting that the ahali could fathom themselves equals to the notables. Marriage and reproduction, not employment or education, had been the prime sites of discipline in a class structure in which subjects born into a stratum remained there for life regardless of wealth acquired.24 A new imaginary of stratification developed as silk wealth called into question the prevailing class model.25 When prosperity fell along with the price and demand for silk, peasants left the region hoping to maintain their higher standards of living; having grown accustomed to affluence, they sought it elsewhere, across the ocean.26

Late Ottoman Mobility According to the circular Mexican Mahjar Phoenician myth, Mashriqis travel because they are a seafaring nation, as is demonstrated by their inclination to travel. Claims of national descent from Phoenicia are best understood as elements in the construction of a Christian Lebanese nationalism.27 The modern invention of the nation by state elites projected the continuity of current populations with the glories of earlier inhabitants of the same territory as proof of the persistence of the nation through history, its distinctiveness, and its historicity—­legitimating its right to political self-­determination.28 Since ancient Phoenicians established settlements throughout the Mediterranean, they are useful for claiming a privileged position for the Lebanese as natural mediators between East and West, since antiquity no less.29 Under Ottoman administration, Mashriqis migrated within and across provinces of the empire for work, seasonally or as part of career trajectories. Abraham Rihbany, interviewed by Alixa Naff, recalled that most of the men in his village of al-­Shwair left it every year between spring and late autumn, to ply their trade as stonemasons.30 Syrians, especially educated Christians, migrated to Egypt, where they were known as shuwam, in order to pursue careers in administration and as merchant intellectuals,



28

The Mexican Mahjar

especially under British colonial administration after 1882.31 The children of rural Arab notables traveled to pursue higher education, sometimes as far afield as Istanbul.32 Imperial conflicts complicated mobility in the second half of the nineteenth century. The 1858 Land Code, passed to eliminate the tax farming increasingly perceived as inefficient, required land to be registered by those who cultivated it. In the Palestine area, cultivators fearing debt and taxation agreed to register land in the name of notable and merchant families, who thus acquired legal rights to large tracts, becoming absentee landholders.33 Some, like the Sursoq family, went on to sell to European Jewish settlers who defied Ottoman prohibitions to migrate to Palestine. The Ottoman wars with Russia generated an influx of Circassian Muslims, who became a public liability in some areas given their large numbers. Armenian refugees fleeing genocide in Anatolia also arrived in Beirut, which housed a thriving Armenian population.34 Mahjari mobility extended late Ottoman population movement. International migration developed from regional patterns and habits of mobility, as new technologies and opportunities for travel took people further afield than had been possible before.35 Displaced elites and new middle classes accessing global networks through trade and missionary education traveled with missionary-­educated, newly rich peasants. The return of successful Mahjaris created expectations of consumption and cosmopolitanism in emerging middle-­class cultures, fueling new departures.

Merchants as Migrants The skill in commerce associated with the Lebanese in Mexican popular culture and with Arabs or “Turks” in Central and South America, as part of the Phoenician myth, is better explained by Mahjari origins in the artisan and trading strata of towns that functioned as important commercial hubs.36 Trading populations whose networks had multiple layers of interconnection left the Mashriq for the Mahjar. Zahleh was a center of trade, situated on the western edge of the grain-­producing areas of the Beqaa and Hawran and just east of the livestock-­breeding pastures of the mountain; it was also an important rail hub. The town supported a variety of industries, from tanning to wheat milling, and its population cultivated olive groves, vineyards, orchards, and mulberry trees. Although some inhabitants were involved in sericulture, there were no filatures in the town, and the Zahlani were not as directly dependent on silk as other areas of the mountain.



The Mexican Mahjar

29

Zahlani tradesmen in the North American Mahjar were men with some experience in trading and traveling.37 Over one quarter of the greater–­ New York community, the largest Syrian community in the United States at the turn of the century, was from Zahleh and the surrounding Beqaa area.38 Many Zahlani families also migrated to Mexico, tapping into new markets and, along with tradespeople from other regional centers, developing a transatlantic circuit that took them from the port of Beirut to Marseille, on to New York, with stops and exchanges of goods in Cuba and Haiti, and back again.39 Aleppo, home to half of the Syrian Jewish migration in Mexico, had been a crucial nexus for land trade, concentrating caravans from Mesopotamia, Persia, and Anatolia for centuries. Most of the Greek Orthodox migration of the Mexican Mahjar arrived from the Syrian town of Homs, a staging post on the major trade route between Aleppo and Damascus on the edge of agriculturally productive regions and more arid land, which has long been a commercial and service hub. Deir al-­Qamar in the Shouf was a silk trading center, boasting large silk khans that concentrated the production of a sizable hinterland. It sent so many migrants to Mexico that it spawned two different hometown associations.40 Traders who shared a religious tradition and moderate but mobile economic capital migrated en masse to Mexico and Argentina from the village of Douma in the Metn. During an ethnographic visit in 2006, a nephew of migrants answered my questions about mobility: “All the shop owners left,” he said. “You saw that street downtown with all the closed shutters? It used to be full of shops, which were all owned by Kwetlis.41 Those were the ones who left, they sold their things and left and most of them didn’t come back.”42

The Mexican Mahjar With Mexico’s history of economic and political centralization, Mahjaris were caught between the concentration of wealth and power in the capital and opportunities available in emerging provincial economies. During President Porfirio Díaz’s administration (1875–1910), commercial opportunities were inaugurated through the completion of a railway system connecting key ports and regional production to Mexico City.43 Early migrants dispersed along railway lines, extending economic corridors through northern and southern Mexico, where they contributed to developing regional markets.44 As Hassan Zain Chamut of Nabatiyeh remembered, many migrants arrived knowing established paisanos that gave them merchandise to sell in small pueblos.45

Figure 1.1 Map of Mexican Railways 1890. Carta de los Ferrocarriles de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos 1890, Impreso y grabado por Erhard Hnos., Paris MX09017AGN-­0000021558927, procedente del Archivo de Miguel Rul y Azcarate, Archivo General de la Nación



The Mexican Mahjar

31

Migrants attracted friends and family, especially the young, who arrived as business apprentices to older relatives, newlywed couples starting out, or as brides and grooms to the children of established migrants. Young Maronite and Druze men often left the Lebanese Mountain before they came of conscription age; some Jewish youngsters left Anatolia soon after their bar mitzvah.46 According to travel accounts, Mashriqi boys and girls became apprentices or worked outside the home for wages beginning at a very young age.47 Occasionally, young people traveling as stowaways were discovered by irate steamship authorities. The Herrera family, on the other hand, traveled from Istanbul to Marseille, spent a week in Paris, and went on to Le Havre, where the head of household supervised the embarkation of the full house ménage on the Lafayette, a steamship bound for Havana en route to Veracruz.48 In his memoir, Isaac Dabbah recalls that the usual Jewish Halebi pattern was for the head of the household to travel first and save enough money to bring his wife and children to the Mahjar.49 Escalating mobility and step migration connected the Mexican Mahjar to the Mashriq, North and South America, and Europe. Miguel Chaya, born in Haddet al-­Guibbeh in 1872, left for Brazil with two friends as a very young teenager and spent time in the United States before moving to Mexico in 1905 to set up his shop La Reforma in the state of Durango. His son Antonio stayed behind in Vermont, where he had been born, with his grandmother, who took the baby back to Lebanon with her. When he turned seventeen, Antonio joined his parents in Durango. Having studied in Lebanon, he supported the family so that his brothers could become a doctor, a lawyer, and an engineer.50 José Assad Farah, of Aitamit, explored possibilities in Central America before joining his brother in Mexico in 1918. The Gebara family, also from Aitamit, spent twenty-­six years in Haiti before two of the family’s sons moved to Mexico in 1935. Four men of the Kamel family first came to Mexico in the 1870s. Their nephew Julián joined them in 1895 but returned to Lebanon before persuading his brother Jorge, who had settled in the Gold Coast, today Ghana, to migrate to Mexico with him in 1920. Wadih Bulhosen of Alqalaa, who would become a notable of the Druze community in Mexico City, spent a year in Lisbon before traveling on to Mexico to join his father’s business, La Primavera, in 1935. He was able to set up his own shop, American Junior, only five years later and had joined forces with two cousins to buy a textile factory by 1943. The Betech family fled Aleppo in 1949 in the wake of anti-­Jewish rioting and traveled to Panama City after



32

The Mexican Mahjar

some time in Beirut. Their daughter Bertha met her Mexican Halebi husband in Panama and settled in Mexico City. Other documented family trajectories include settlement in various countries in Europe, Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras before arriving in Mexico. Mashriqis arriving between 1900 and the 1920s often initially set up shop in popular spaces of consumption. They sold in market stalls, sometimes called cajones, offering an assortment of textile-­related merchandise tempting to a popular consumer: manta, the white cotton cloth that was the basis of Indian and mestizo dress, needles, and thread. Peripatetic popular markets called tianguis assembled in different towns on different days of the week; migrant merchants traveled in such clusters or on their own. When successful in informal or itinerant commerce, migrants accumulated enough capital to launch mercerías, fixed shops selling many of the same items but offering larger selections and including more expensive textiles. This was accomplished in a few short years for most of those who came to help established relatives, but it could take over a decade for migrants like Jorge Caram, who struck out on their own. Jorge, born in Kartaba in northern Lebanon in 1909, traveled to Veracruz in 1926, at the age of seventeen. After ten years of peddling merchandise out of the cities of Tuxpan (in Veracruz state) and Oaxaca into neighboring sierras—sparsely populated, inaccessible mountainous rural areas—he managed to establish a shoe and clothing shop in Tuxtepec, Oaxaca. In 1935 he married Flora Kuri de Caram, also born in Kartaba, in Veracruz. With the help of his wife, business prospered and he continued to peddle. In a tropical twist of fate, a flood destroyed their shop in 1944. Jorge’s intimate knowledge of consumer preferences, acquired through his peddling experience, and his excellent credit history allowed the family to get back on their feet and open a new shop, in Córdoba, Veracruz state. Don Jorge continued to peddle occasionally, cultivating his clientele, built over an impressive eighteen years of itinerant commerce. He also bought farmland to rent out. He became a member of the Lebanese Union of Mexico and of the Lions Club, and his daughter Gloria became an accountant.51 Like Gloria, the children of families that acquired stability through commerce often became professionals in fields accruing prestige, like law or medicine, or providing skills useful to the consolidation of family business, such as accounting and business administration. Professional children helped a family branch out into new areas of business, most often real estate but sometimes services, especially hotels. The Arun Tame



The Mexican Mahjar

33

family was a typical case. Lorenzo Arun and his wife Nasta Tame traveled from Zgharta to the city of Puebla in 1900, where they set up a stall at the Victoria market and then several others in neighboring streets. In the largest shop, they sold domestic and imported cloth. Of their four male children, one became an accountant, another a civil lawyer and owner of a real estate business, and one worked in his brother’s business. The fourth, Don Guillermo Arun, the most successful of them all, studied business and went on to establish multiple textile factories with state-­ of-­the-­art equipment, producing luxury textiles like combed cashmeres, poplins, and gabardines that replaced imports. Don Guillermo’s success was indexed by his presence in the public sphere. He was counselor to the state of Puebla’s Chamber of Textile Businessmen, president of the state’s Board of Directors for Public Beneficence, and administrative inspector of the General Hospital of Puebla, as well as a member of numerous children’s charities and humanitarian aid institutions. His impeccable moral standing was confirmed when Cardinal Tisserant of Rome appointed him Knight of the Venerable Order of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and through his position as secretary of the Lebanese Pro-­Allies and Free France Committee during World War II.52 Once the Mashriq came under French administration after the Great War, consular correspondence illustrates French officials’ role in the mediation of migration: Consulate of France at Vera Cruz, May 1923 The Consul of France at Vera-­cruz to His Excellency Monsieur the President of the Council, Minister of Foreign Affairs I have the honor of requesting of Your Excellency if you would be so kind as to ask the relevant authorities established in Syria to allow M. Boutros Jalil Rahy and his wife to come to Mexico. M. Rahy lives in Meniana, Lebanon (district of Akar) and his mother who is a trader in Vera-­cruz needs him to assist in her business. Madame Rahy’s business also requires the presence of her young nephew Jalil Cesin Derzi who lives in the same locality as his cousin.53

Joining family or friends who could guarantee a place to stay and employment on arrival became crucial to new migrants when it was made into a requisite for travel by French authorities. Family shops continued to draw kin from across the sea and even cousins or siblings with formal education as teachers, for example, joined in on the family business. Fares Abed, a university teacher trained at Beirut’s teachers college, traveled to the city of Puebla in 1929 and spent



34

The Mexican Mahjar

three years working in his cousin Miguel Abed’s textile factory El Patriotismo. He returned to Beirut to teach Arabic and French at the university but decided to move permanently to Mexico in 1936 in the company of his sister, Bernadette. Fares went into the textile business, first selling and then producing cloth for national markets and for export.54

The Problem with Numbers Establishing numbers for Mahjaris is difficult. Numbers are politically significant and therefore much contested by a variety of agents—inflated, minimized, and fabricated to suit particular political agendas.55 Additionally, it is very difficult for the state, even the modern nation-­state, to effectively keep track of movement. Since borders constitute boundaries, migrants fearing that they will not be allowed free passage often make special arrangements to bypass state checkpoints. Ottoman legislation discouraged emigration from the Mashriq, especially for Muslim subjects, and many exits were therefore irregular.56 There is no shortage of migrant stories of negotiating European sponsors for migration and adventures of escape from Ottoman authorities, reflecting a veritable industry in human traffic during the late Ottoman period. Mandate authorities were wary of mobility as well and quickly moved to regulate and discourage movement into and out of mandate territories, as the next chapter tracks. Migrants remained extraordinarily mobile, changing their places of residence and work in the pursuit of profit, community, and politics, communicating with hometowns and kin via the post and through packages and letters carried by migrants returning to the Mashriq to settle, invest, or visit.57 Tracking the movement of families and individuals who remained mobile through official channels is notoriously difficult. A family that initially settled in Haiti but—due to political tension or commercial interests—decided to move to El Salvador where they had relatives and then to Mexico, where a business could be taken over, morphed in citizenship, obscuring its trail. Through subsequent moves these subjects might be registered as Haitians or Salvadorans entering Mexico or as Mexicans entering the United States.58 Name changes and translations, recommended by some established migrants or enforced by migration officials, blur the tracks of step migration as well. Widely discrepant Mahjari numbers are fascinating examples of how migration was visible or invisible to the state. The Mexican state recorded entries and resident foreigners through various mechanisms. Relying on community censuses, Carmen Mercedes Páez Oropeza’s pioneering work



The Mexican Mahjar

35

Table 1.1. Mashriqi Migrants in Mexico

Source

Dates calculated

Total population

Sálazar (1996) Páez Oropeza (1976) Zeraoui (1997) Alfaro-­Velcamp (2007) Páez Oropeza (1976)

1895–1940 1880–1948 1878–1952 1878–1952 1970

36,000  1,223  7,533  8,240  2,149

Instituto Nacional de Migración (2006)

1920–2007

 7,756

Category Foreigners Lebanese migrants Arab migrants Middle Eastern migrants Lebanese-­born population in Mexico Mashriqi migrants

estimated a mere 1,223 migrants.59 The Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City houses immigration cards for registered migrants who entered Mexico between 1878 and 1951.60 For the Ottoman period between 1878 and 1910, Salazar’s census total of 5,756 Mashriqi foreigners living in Mexico contrasts with Alfaro-­Velcamp’s 2,277 immigrants from the registration cards, suggesting that 3,479 people, amounting to 60 percent of the migration, never registered with the National Registry of Migrants. This could reflect the migratory pattern described by early sources, with about a third of arrivals settling in Mexico permanently while two thirds returned to the Mashriq. Registration was only made mandatory in 1932, five decades after the first migrants arrived, however, and its retrospective efficacy might have been weak. Information concerning earlier arrivals was reconstructed through the ideologies and conditions of the moment of registration. Zidane Zeraoui reported 7,533 such immigrant registration cards in the AGN, where Theresa Alfaro-­Velcamp later found 8,240 cards. According to staff at the Historical Archive of the National Institute of Migration, the total number of migrants who have arrived in Mexico from the Mashriq since the onset of migration in 1878 is 7,756.61 French consular authorities reported between 20,000 and 30,000 Mashriqis in Mexico in their 1921 mandate census. Delia Salazar has calculated 36,000 from national census data, coinciding with Lebanese estimates of 35,000 by the mid-­1950s, roughly the same number of Mahjaris as were resident in Haiti.62 The percentage of migrants reporting their occupation as merchants in the National Registry is strikingly high, between 47 percent and 57



36

The Mexican Mahjar

percent.63 In some areas the percentage of merchants was even higher, up to 87 percent in Torreón for 1938, for example.64 Nearly a third of migrants declared their occupation to be housewives; about 10 percent of women labeled themselves merchants, and less than 1 percent considered themselves peddlers. The domestic organization of merchant families and migrant gender ideologies can inform our reading of such taxonomies, however. Migrant narratives describe multiple roles played by women in family businesses: as saleswomen, accountants, supervisors, hostesses, and business partners. Women’s labor was transformed by the migratory experience, yet a strong preference for women not to be labeled as workers persisted. If “housewives” were spouses to the “merchants,” close to 90 percent of the registered Mahjari population participated in merchant households for every decade from 1878–1951.

The Historical Pulse of the Migration A rhythm to Mahjari flows is discernible in all the sources. Mobility first peaked between 1900 and 1910 with 5,756 Middle Eastern foreigners, mostly from the Eastern Mediterranean Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, registered by the national census. Registered Ottoman migration was overwhelmingly Maronite (86 percent). The vast majority of these Mahjaris declared that they were merchants (79 percent according to my household analysis), though the subordinate categories of chain migration—students (4 percent) and employees (4 percent)—would raise participation in merchant households to 87 percent. A mere 2.6 percent of migrants claimed to be farmers. Only about a fifth of migrants settled in Mexico City, while 78.3 percent dispersed across the country, engaging in settled or itinerant commerce. Tensions leading to and following from the 1908 Young Turks Constitutional Revolution and subsequent Turkification policies in the Arab provinces of the empire provided new incentives to travel across confessions. The revolution was debated by the small-­town Arab intelligentsia as a moment of liberation for all Ottomans. A dangerous moment, however, because if free Ottomans failed to quickly make something of themselves, to catch up to the “advanced nations,” they would be in danger of being dehumanized and humiliated by advanced peoples who “will see us no more as human beings! They will be persuaded that we were created but for humiliation and submission, and they will fall upon our goods and our interests to devour them.”65 Maalouf contrasts the trajectories of Gebrayel, the uncle who successfully settled and made a fortune in Cuba,

Table 1.2. Mahjari Arrivals in Mexico 1878–1951: Occupation, Port of Entry, Religious Tradition (compiled from Alfaro 2007 and Sálazar 1996) Migrants 8,240 entries

Occupation 8,196 entries

Port of entry

Religious tradition

1878–1910

Census data: 5,756 AGN registry card data: 2,277 Difference: 3,479 60% not registered

47% commerce 32% housewife 4% students 3.8% employees 2.6% farmers

58% Veracruz 4.4% Progreso 1.6% Tampico Residence: 21.7% Mexico City

86% Catholic 3.3% Jewish 3.1% G. Orthodox 2.2% Muslim 1.7% None 0.9% Free Thinker 0.7% Druze

1910–1919

919

56.7% commerce 33.4% housewife 1.3% employees 1.74% farmers 0.11% students

83% Veracruz 4.2% Tampico 4.2% Progreso 2.8% Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua 2.7% Nuevo Laredo Residence: 37.9% Mexico City

68% Catholic 19% Jewish 5.4% G. Orthodox 3% Muslim 1.63% None 1% Druze 0.76% Free Thinker

1920–1929

3,675

55.4% commerce 32.3% housewife 0.6% students 2.6% employees 1.4% farmers

85% Veracruz 8.4% Tampico 2% Progreso 0.5% Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua

53% Catholic 26.3% Jewish 6.5% G. Orthodox 5.9% Muslim

Dates

Table 1.2. continued 0.5% landlords 0.4% industrialists (male)

0.8% Nuevo Laredo 0.4% Mariscal, Chiapas Residence: 49% Mexico City

5.9% Muslim 2.4% Druze 1.2% None

1930–1939

585

55.4% commerce 34.9% housewife 8.7% students 1.9% farmers 1% employees

65% Veracruz 2.3% Tampico 4.4% Progreso 3% Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua 7% Nuevo Laredo Residence: 49.7% Mexico City

45% Catholic 19.3% Jewish 13.5% G. Orthodox 7% Maronite 5.3% Druze 4% Muslim 0.9% None

1940–1951

598

55.4% commerce 37.6% housewife 4.5% students 2.3% industrialists (male) 1.2% employees 1% farmers

2.7% Veracruz 3% Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua 8% Nuevo Laredo 47% Mexico City Residence: 18.1% Mexico City

46% Catholic 30.4% Jewish 6.7% G. Orthodox 4.9% Maronite 3.9% Muslim 2.3% Druze 0.8% None



The Mexican Mahjar

39

and Botros, the grandfather disappointed by the Mahjar who returned to reform his homeland in the following terms: “Neither of the two had any illusions about the future in store for them in the land of their origins, in the state in which it found itself. But Gebrayel had a conqueror’s soul, he wanted to split the world to make a place for himself in it; while Botros had not yet given up on seeing his countrymen metamorphose through the miracle of knowledge.”66 A rapid succession of constitutionalist movements and other nationalisms created great expectations and dashed hopes for young people living through the transformations of the late Ottoman Empire.67 Young Turk projects of political and social emancipation were welcomed by a number of communities in the empire, which were quickly scapegoated as the immoral vectors of a Western modernity in the sultan’s counterattack. The sultan appealed to all those sectors that found the constitutionalist project unsettling—noting the immoral behavior of women, for instance. Wealthy women who had until recently dressed modestly were suddenly running around in the streets, offering uncovered faces to the public’s eye, vociferously manifesting political demands like men and forcing the caliph to proclaim a special firman to bring them back to order.68 Young men joining kin in the Mahjar, especially those with access to education in the Mashriq, thought of themselves as striking out to join a global intelligentsia, but part of that romance was a bitter perception of themselves as exiles, as new men for whom the Mashriq’s social and political horizon had become constraining. The Mexican Revolution, which lasted from 1910 through the early 1920s, interrupted migrant flows, reducing Mahjaris to under a thousand registered new arrivals between 1910 and 1919. Migration peaked again after the worst of the struggle, which itself presented opportunities as well as dislocation. The small number of incoming migrants were more diverse than those of the first three decades. The revolutionary wars were a multiplicity of overlapping uprisings that overthrew a thirty-­five-­year-­ long modernizing, liberal dictatorship and made profound transformations to the social contract. The new order was slowly institutionalized over the following decade, as different factions and warlords struggled to gather power in their own hands.69 Circulating currency changed with the cascade of factions in power, making paper money obsolete from one day to the next, occasionally luring desperate Mahjaris into forgery.70 As some unfortunate Mashriqis also experienced in the context of the Russian Revolution during the previous decade, families were disappointed to see a lifetime of savings quickly reduced to trunks full of paper.71



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The Mexican Mahjar

The Mexican Revolution overlapped with World War I, which suspended nonmilitary circulation across Mashriq and Mahjar. In the Mashriq, the Great War was fought not only as an Allies-­Entente conflict pitting the Ottomans against the Allies with massive losses at Gallipoli, but also as the British-­backed Hashemite Arab uprising against Ottoman overlords. Allied blockades interrupted trade and resulted in widespread famine; a third of the inhabitants of the Mashriq starved to death.72 The widespread destruction of infrastructure and the demographic collapse created long-­term economic problems, which continued to be felt acutely in rural areas for decades. Different areas had differential experiences of the war, however, and while the Lebanese Mountain and the Syrian interior were strangled by food scarcity despite Mahjari and other humanitarian efforts, provisioning the British army stationed in Palestine became a lucrative business for local entrepreneurs.73 The pulse of people moving out of the Mashriq was not the only organizing flow. According to Enrique Castro Farías, over fourteen thousand Lebanese fought under the American flag during the First World War, and the New York community alone raised $1,207,900 in bonds toward the war effort. Despite recruitment efforts channeling Mahjari men into the American, Canadian, and French armies during the Great War, not everyone was willing or able to fight. Some sought draft exemptions from Spanish consulates; others were prevented from fighting as nationals of an enemy country.74 Many young men chose to temporarily relocate south, crossing the border to Mexico with the help of smugglers when necessary.75 Once in Mexico, they received orientation from migrant aid institutions, like Alianza Monte Sinaí.76 The Great War also provided unprecedented opportunities for trade across Mahjari communities. As the war severed market ties between Western Europe and Latin America, especially reducing the role of German providers, Mashriqis in New York developed an important role in strengthening trade between North and Latin America. As intermediaries, they also reaped considerable profits.77 The financial crises of 1921 and 1929 and subsequent migration restrictions were other catalysts for movement from the gravely affected US economy to fresh horizons in Mexico and Latin America, contributing to the growing Mashriqi presence there.78 One of the most successful of Mexican Mahjari businessmen, Abdelnour Aboumrad, initially migrated from his hometown of Aaran to Worcester, Massachusetts, where his two older sons were born. He left the United States, moving to Mexico City in 1920, where he built up a textile factory and banking business that employed thousands of people.79



The Mexican Mahjar

41

Figure 1.2 The Shia family of Mohamed Hassan Ahmad Sabag, who was born in Nabatiye, Lebanon, in 1880; arrived in Mexico in April 1905; and died in Torreón, Coahuila, Mexico, in April 1951. Top: Camilo, Raúl, and Raymundo Sabag Matar. Center, left to right: Mohamed Hassan Sabag (Salomón Sabag ), María Matar, and Said Mohamed Sabag Anaice (Luis Sabag ). Children, left to right: Fatima, Luis, and Emne Sabag Matar. Photograph taken January 13, 1934, in General Cepeda, Coahuila, Mexico. Courtesy of his great-­g randson Antonio Nassif, Saltillo, Coahuila.

The Aboumrad family became one of the pillars of the Greek Orthodox community in Mexico. The political collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the partition of most of its territory, and the military occupation and establishment of the French and British mandates in the Mashriq as of 1919 marked a moment of social and political reorganization. If we credit the mandate census, there were 30,000 Mashriqis in Mexico by 1921, mostly from Syrian and Lebanese territories under French mandate and from British Palestine. Registered arrivals during the mandate, peaking between 1919 and 1929 with 3,675, were fewer than the Ottoman era migrants but confessionally much more diverse, with the percentage of Jewish (23.6 percent) and Muslim (5.9 percent) Mahjaris climbing sharply in contrast with the earlier decades of Maronite majority. This migration, more urban in origin, concentrated in Mexico City (49 percent), where Mahjaris developed the contentious politics described by French consuls in chapter 5.



42

The Mexican Mahjar

As migrant numbers grew, official policies in the Americas tightened, attempting to regulate migration in the wake of financial crises in 1921 and 1929. People found themselves turned away by port authorities on the grounds of sickness, poverty, illiteracy, and various other filters set in place in Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Colombia, and the United States.80 These measures were particularly draconian among Central American states. The evolution and consequences of these restrictions are discussed in detail in chapters 3 and 6, along with migrant responses to them. After 1926, Mexican migration legislation severely restricted entrance to Mashriqi migrants. A Mexican consulate was established in Beirut in the mid-­t wenties in order to alert migrants to new requirements and legislation. The Second World War, 1939–1945, forced new mobilities. Colonial pacification troops were mobilized when De Gaulle’s Free French disputed colonial territories with Vichy in the Mashriq. As during World War I, Lebanese fought in the American army; this time seventy thousand men were drafted. Some extended families contributed many of their able-­bodied men; of the eight hundred Gemayels living in the United States, forty-­three were soldiers during World War II, and of the four hundred Hatems, seventy-­six fought in the war.81 The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 set Palestinian and Arab Jewish subjects in motion, only a trickle of whom came into the Mexican Mahjar. Mashriqis continued their migratory tradition. Even in the prosperous late 1960s and early 1970s, when Lebanon was admired as the Switzerland of the Middle East, large numbers of professionals sought their living elsewhere. According to Philippe Fargues, 70 percent of Lebanese engineers were employed in the Gulf oil industry by the 1960s.82 As Latin American economies lost their sparkle and went into protracted crises and many states became military dictatorships, migrants fleeing the 1975–1992 Lebanese civil war were drawn to Europe, the United States, and the emerging Gulf economies rather than the Latin American Mahjars. Boutros Labaki estimates that approximately one million people left Lebanon during the civil war, only fifty-­six thousand of whom traveled to Latin America.83 As anti-­A rab/Muslim discourse and practice proliferated in the United States, the Gulf states, Australia, and Germany emerged as privileged migration destinations in the last third of the twentieth century.84 In 1998 Mexico revised citizenship and nationalization criteria and negotiated dual citizenship with a number of states, making it freshly at-



The Mexican Mahjar

43

tractive as a passport-­granting destination and prompting a wave of arrivals in the early 2000s. While the economic reconstruction of Lebanon championed by Rafiq Hariri was much applauded in world forums, it was slow to reach populations living on the margins. Artisan families, Sunni from Tripoli or Shia and Druze from Nabatiyeh and Hasbaya, began trickling into Mexico as providers of services in the food industry and as performers for Mahjari businesses and institutions. The war between Israel and Hizballah in the summer of 2006 also brought a number of new or returning migrants to Mexico. Officials at the Lebanese embassy in Mexico City estimate four hundred thousand Mexicans of Lebanese origin currently living in Mexico. Their confessional distribution—80 percent Maronite, 15 percent Greek Orthodox, 3 percent Melkite, and 2 percent Shia, Sunni, and Druze— offers a striking contrast to the demography of the early twenty-­first century Mashriq. The embassy only registers a small self-­selecting population of recent migrants, elites and nationalists, so these remain informed approximations. Many migrants who have acquired other passports are not interested in keeping their Lebanese (or Syrian) nationalities, which they describe as offering few advantages and posing problems for international travel. Lebanese policy regarding the transmission of nationality to offspring complicates counting, since only the children of Lebanese men are conferred Lebanese citizenship.85 In efforts to capitalize on its diaspora, in 1994 the Lebanese Foreign Ministry developed a state-­sponsored summer homeland tourism program for teenagers.86 The program was particularly successful with Mexican third- and fourth-­generation youngsters. Parallel efforts were developed by the Centro Libanés to encourage adult travel. There is no Syrian diplomatic representation in Mexico, no comparable registration process, and no official updates are available for the Syrian half of the migration.87 According to the National Institute of Migration, approximately 50 percent of all Mashriqi migrants, around five thousand people, were Jewish, mainly from Aleppo and Damascus. Jewish Mahjaris developed a distinct institutional landscape that doesn’t overlap with the rest of the Mahjar. They interact with the Israeli embassy and “return” on visits to Israel as their adopted ancestral homeland. Community schools funnel teenagers to Israel on summer visits and encourage a year-­long visit, their hajsharah, upon high school completion. According to the directives of Tribuna Israelita, the coordinating umbrella institution for all Jewish educational, recreational, and spiritual institutions in



44

The Mexican Mahjar

Table 1.3. Mashriqis in Mexico Dates calculated

Total population

Páez Oropeza 1976

1975

 51,900

Centro Libanés webpage Lebanese embassy in Mexico

2007 2006

380,000 400,000

Source

Category Lebanese population in Mexico of Lebanese descent of Lebanese descent

Mexico, the total population—including Arab, Ashkenazi, and Sephardi Jews—is estimated at around forty-­five thousand families (of four or five individuals), concentrated in Mexico City.88

Early Associations and Institutions Ottoman Mahjar associations reflected chain migration dynamics, the transportation and communication technologies available to migrants, and the spatialization of opportunity in Porfirian Mexico. Albergues or guesthouses for paisanos, fellow countrymen, like the one run by David Saba and Julián Kuri at Correo Mayor #4, Mexico City, in 1900 were among the earliest institutions.89 The newly disembarked, those working as peddlers or settled in small towns along the thriving new railway routes, stayed in such guesthouses or at relatives’ or patrons’ homes when they traveled to urban centers to restock merchandise. Albergues and associated small eateries serving the cooking of el bled provided opportunities to interact with paisanos, exchange information, and recruit and counsel newcomers.90 They became orientation centers where recent arrivals met more established Mahjaris who could provide information on local dynamics, employment, and credit. Abd el Adj was born in Kartaba, Lebanon. He spent two years in a seminary where he learned French and Latin before arriving in Mexico in 1903, aged eighteen, and changed his name to Domingo Kuri. Once he had become a prosperous merchant in the port of Veracruz, he purchased a home with twenty-­eight bedrooms and a dining room seating twenty-­four that served food twice daily.91 Don Domingo made a habit of visiting boats docked at the port in search of Arabic-­speaking passengers. Greeting them warmly in Arabic, he facilitated procedures with local authorities and hosted travelers at his house, Chalet Josefita, until they had



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recovered from their journey and could be sent on to their relatives or fellow villagers via the railway. He recommended translating or hispanicizing names and adopting Kuri or Miguel as family names, as he had, as part of crafting locally acceptable personas.92 Don Domingo’s efforts are remembered fondly by many families who found in him a providential helping hand. Also among the earliest and most long-­lived associations were those bringing people from the same town or village together.93 Islah Beit Mellet, known in Spanish as the Unión Akkarista de México, has been active from 1924 through the present. S. Matuk provided a brief glimpse into its functioning in the 1940s: “My father belonged to the Junta Akkarista, because he was from Akkar . . . there were some monthly fees which were used to help needy people in that place.” They also organized weekly sahriyes, plays and fundraising to help the sick, poor, and those paisanos that had fallen behind on credit payments.94 Larger towns, like Deir al-­Qamar, the silk trading hub in the Shouf region of Lebanon, spawned several hometown associations. In 1929, the Asociación Camarina de México congregated four hundred families; the rival Sociedad Diranesa, or al-­Jama’iya al-­Diria fi al-­Meksik, was presided by gastroenterologist William Nimeh, its secretary Georges Letayf.95 Like the Société Joseph Bey Karam, whose president Gabriel Barquet boasted of assembling “all the sons of Zgharta” in 1927, the Sociedad Diranesa sent telegrams and letters to French authorities in Paris and Beirut. Their correspondence reflected migrants’ anxieties over the partition of Ottoman administrative units during the mandate, which brought wealth and political representation to some regions while marginalizing others. Nimeh advocated reinstituting Deir al-­Qamar’s right to political representation in upcoming elections.96 Barquet protested against rumors of the territorial fusion of Greater Lebanon and Syria.97

Periodicals Arabic-­language and bilingual Arabic-­Spanish periodicals sprang up in Mexico City in the first decade of the twentieth century.98 Al-­Sharq, initially owned by Yusuf Karam and later by Abraham Bechalani and Alejandro Gabriel, started out as a bilingual Arabic-­Spanish monthly publication in 1905. A success, it soon appeared every two weeks and then daily. José Helú’s bilingual Arabic-­Spanish Al-­Khawater began as a biweekly in 1909, becoming a daily. Saut al-­Meksik was published between 1906 and 1940. A number of short-­lived periodicals succumbed to mundane un-



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The Mexican Mahjar

viability, like the ephemeral Vida Nueva—founded by Rashid Khuri, who arrived in Mexico from Brazil—or Jalil Daher’s Diario Era Nueva. Others were associated with competing political projects. Al-­Kadaa, for example, was created in 1909 to promote Nasib Bey Kuri’s candidacy for the post of Ottoman consul in Mexico. Al-­Huruades/Sucesos was a Maronite religious magazine coordinated by Father Chekrala Juri.99 The abundance of early Mahjar press alerts us to the presence of Ottoman Mahjaris literate in Arabic, French, and Spanish, reflecting missionary education in the Mashriq, especially in rural Christian areas but also in Beirut.100 In Puebla, an astounding 88.63 percent of Mahjari men and 57.78 percent of women were literate.101 If literacy itself, not to speak of multilingual literacy, represented a considerable resource in early twentieth-­century Mexico, literacy in French afforded not only a shortcut to the acquisition of competence in Spanish, but familiarity with a language admired and emulated by the Porfirian elites.102 Familiarity with French language and ways was legible as a marker of elite status and opened many doors. A new set of concerns and institutions emerged toward the end of the First World War. Associations calling themselves political parties appeared on the Mahjari horizon for the first time. Their names reflected the surging debate over the fate of the Mashriq after the impending Ottoman collapse and the territorial dismembering of the empire. These associations indexed fierce disagreements between pan-­A rabists—advocating the independence of Greater Syria, an entity incorporating the current nation-­states of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and parts of Iraq and Jordan— and Maronite factions seeking an independent Christian Lebanese nation. New periodicals sprang up as part of the new constellation of power brought about by France’s mandate in the Mashriq. Political rivalries manifest in the press were consequential. José Cheremonte, a pan-­A rabist who had once sought to be the local Ottoman consul, established the United Syria Party and an associated publication, Al-­Itihad al-­Suri (The Syrian Union), in 1917. The periodical appeared in French, Arabic, and Spanish. Cheremonte was exiled to Havana by the Mexican government in 1927, after having all his assets confiscated. His uncle, Elías Youssef Tannous Chmouti of Batroun, filed a complaint with the high commissioner in Beirut, requesting French authorities to intervene on behalf of his nephew, “Doctor Yusef Chmouti, who has been established in Mexico for sixteen years.”103 French investigation of the case resulted in the following response: “M. Youssef Chmouti, alias Joseph A. Shemonti, was expelled from Mexico in May of 1927, at the re-



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47

quest of his own Syrio-­Lebanese countrymen, whom he constantly provoked in his newspaper, whether by attacking the families of his political adversaries or through blackmail and manipulation. Since Chmouti’s hostile attitude toward us, already noted by this legation on October 4, 1920, had continued until his expulsion, it does not seem to me that the reentry of the petitioner to Mexico is a desirable thing.”104 The offending periodical was El Correo de Oriente (Post of the Orient).105 Editors sometimes tried to change the stripe of their discourse but remained tainted by past work. José Helú’s Al-­Khawater, for example, survived at least until 1933, when M. Hubert F. Dussol, chargé d’affaires of France in Mexico, complained about it scathingly to the French minister of foreign affairs, describing the publication as one “formerly infected with Germanophilia and that remains dubiously loyal to us after the War.”106 Excerpts were translated into French and sent on to higher authorities, injuring Helú’s reputation given the periodical’s critical views on the limits of French protection. Greater Lebanon was a successful new periodical run by José Musalem, a Syrian migrant. He went on to establish Al-­Ghurbal, which was published from 1923 to 1996, for some time under the care of Juan Bichara and eventually of Selim Abud. Originally in Arabic but later bilingual, La Criba/Al-­Ghurbal called itself an illustrated Arab weekly intended to bring together Arabic speakers of Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi nationality in brotherhood.

The Mahjar Politics of Notables Diverse resources afforded an early differentiation into three categories of Mahjaris: notables, their clients, and undesirables. With the mandate in place, French authorities seeking to extend mandate administration globally were available to migrant efforts at accumulation. Migrants cultivated French affiliations in Mexico, where the Porfirian regime had buttressed modernist Francophilia, while global geopolitics subordinated Mexico to France.107 In this Maronite-­majority Mahjar, Christianity became important for French patronage and Mexican inclusion. Mexican and French Islamophobia could be harnessed to marginalize the small Druze, Shia, and Sunni Muslim migrations. The large Jewish migrations from Aleppo, Damascus, and Beirut, though largely Francophone and Francophile given the Alliance Israelite Universelle school network operating in the Mashriq since 1860, developed a parallel associational landscape increasingly oriented toward global Jewish networks.

Chapter 2

Managi ng Mobilit y

After World War I the Mashriq came under French tutelage when the League of Nations conceded the Arab provinces of the dismembered Ottoman Empire as mandates to France and Britain.1 The French mandate over the new states of Lebanon and Syria extended formally from 1923 through 1946, but in practice began with French military administration in the Levant at the close of the Great War, in 1919. Mandates, as late imperial formations, embodied the height of European hegemony, while they incubated its demise and the birth of the world order and the political imaginary that we still inhabit. The transition—from an imperial order structured by industrial colonialism’s scramble for territory to a global order characterized by the intensification of colonial practice just as emerging bodies of international governance began recognizing all states on an equal footing—required new strategies of rule. Mobility challenged efforts at stabilizing new borders and new logics of rule. As they institutionalized a mandate administration, French authorities worried about Mashriqi habits of transhumance and about migratory circuits launched by modern projects such as Arab nationalisms, Zionism, and women’s increasing labor mobility.2 They were concerned about rural to urban movement within mandate territories, which they believed depleted the peasant labor force and engorged urban areas. They were wary of refugees from Anatolia, of contagion, of pilgrims, of traveling troupes and artistes. They were also worried about the sustained migration of mandate subjects to the Americas. They hoped that investment in agriculture and industry would stall migration in the long run by creating jobs and alleviating what they perceived as the driving forces behind migratory patterns: poverty and unemployment. Concerns about the political consequences of a massive influx of nationalists meant a watchful eye was also kept on Mahjaris returning to the Mashriq after the Great War. While scholars have long noted that the bulk of Mashriqi migration to Latin America occurred between 1900 and 1930, immediately before and during the first decade of the mandate, the role played by French



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consular authorities stationed in the Americas in shaping migrant trajectories has only begun to be explored by a new generation of scholarship taking French sources seriously in writing Mahjar histories.3 The interaction of French authorities with Ottoman subjects in Mexico was reconfigured with the official conferral of mandates. The mandate introduced new poles of authority engaging Mahjaris, as the Metropole struggled to coordinate mandate authorities in the Mashriq and consular authorities in Mexico in the management of migrants. Reaching into the diaspora to legitimate and institutionalize the mandate in the Mashriq, French interventions radically changed the horizon of possible trajectories in the Mexican Mahjar. Establishing authority in mandate territories entailed ascertaining or renouncing authority over the human tentacles constituted by migrant colonies. While Britain curtailed the right of return of those leaving British Palestine, France attempted to manage migration into and out of its Syrian and Lebanese mandates, reaching into the American diaspora of subjects under French protection with census and registration policies. French authorities began making plans regarding the administration of what they called the Syrian and Lebanese colonies of America and the role they should play in France’s relationship to the Mashriq even before the mandates were officially conferred. Their “numerical importance and the multiplicity of elements that compose them” made these attractive targets for regulation and intervention.4 Consuls and other representatives of European interests had a long tradition of protecting Ottoman subjects in the Mashriq.5 French mediation in the Mexican Mahjar preceded the mandates, since subjects accustomed to protégé status within the Ottoman Empire actively sought to extend it to the Mahjar. The logic of protection was selective, targeting minorities whose loyalty could be cultivated to the detriment of Ottoman sovereignty. Protégés, often Christians and Jews, sometimes acquired consular salaries and, more importantly, consular privileges of exception under the Capitulations regime. Though migrant mandate subjects were initially referred to as protégés in the French colonial archive, the transition to mandate rule, legitimated by its international accountability, complicated informal practices of protection. The boundaries of the French state vis-­á-­v is Mahjaris needed to be redefined and proper loci and procedures for interaction with the new diasporic citizen-­subjects defined. League of Nations requirements and responsibilities replaced the ambiguous and contingent terms of protection, but only slowly. The transition was ambivalent, with officials caught between the Orientalist com-



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The Mexican Mahjar

mon sense of colonial public policy, the constraints of political calculus, and French economic interests in Mexico. If the colonies were to play the role of subjects, they needed to remain politically and affectively Syrian and Lebanese. A census report in 1921 reminded the central authorities that “[we] have an immediate political interest in reinforcing the ties that unite our protégés to their country of origin and prevent them from melting into the masses of the country to which they have emigrated.”6 The French sought to actively cultivate and facilitate migrants’ social and economic ties to the Mashriq, constituting the region as part of a global imperial entity and its subjects as transnational beings. Fearful of mobility, they also launched legislation curtailing migration out of and into mandate territories, even though some officials defended the desirability of outflows that could become vectors of French influence elsewhere.7 French interest in the migrant colonies mirrored their concerns with the mandated territories themselves and centered on the extension of French political influence and economic ventures. A memorandum addressed by Parisian authorities to all their consuls in the Americas provides a window on French priorities and strategy: We have every interest in the development of the countries entrusted to our mandate as well as in the extension of our influence in meeting and consolidating these relations. Would you kindly inform me: a) On the importance of cash remittances sent by our protégés to their countries of origin, on the means currently employed [to do so], on the possibilities for our financial establishments in Syria (Banque de Syrie, founded by the Banque Ottomane, Banque Française de Syrie, controlled by the Société Générale) to open an agency in your city of residence or to at least have a correspondent there; b) On the importance of the movement of travelers with France or Syria as their destination and on the possibility of assuring this clientele for our navigation companies. You will surely be interrogated on the ends pursued by France and on what she has already done to satisfy the wishes of [the mandated] populations. You will be careful to show in all circumstances that we are exclusively inspired by the principles encompassed in the Pact of the League of Nations and to demonstrate how spurious those interpretations which cast us as pursuing a different goal are.8

Such transparent pursuit of a lucrative monopoly on financial transactions, remittance flows, and transatlantic traffic was far from the dis-



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interested civilizing mission that France claimed as the rationale for its mandates, but the situation was more complicated than naked economic interest.9 French authorities needed to “protect Syrians abroad in all circumstances” given the geopolitics of imperial competition and the administrative politics of colonial state building.10 Mahjari loyalty had to be secured in order to shield migrants and the French Empire from the British and other competing propaganda and to extract ideological and economic contributions to the mandate administration from them. French consular and mandate authorities became important interlocutors to migrants in Mexico, displacing other sources of political patronage. Crucial aspects of protection dynamics reproduced in the new institutional context followed a colonial logic. The practice of establishing preferential relationships with collaborating subjects across Mashriq and Mahjar is one example.11 Mandate authorities introduced official census and registration processes and normalized travel documents, instating new mobility and passport regimes. They surveyed and struggled to halt the mobility of undesirables: nationalists attempting to return to the Mashriq, rebel leaders on fundraising tours, indigents. They also monitored and tampered with migrant associations and cultural production. They destabilized networks and institutions that they considered suspect or threatening to French rule and rewarded those who collaborated with the mandate. Such practices conditioned access to resources and opportunities and contributed to the polarization of the migrant population along confessional lines that soon constituted class distinctions. As happened in the Mashriq, competing Mahjari factions organized resistance and allegiance to the mandate. Clashes between them led to the blacklisting and even expulsion of migrants who refused alignment with the French, the reconfiguration of the migrant associational landscape, and the dissolution and creation of important Mahjar institutions. Migrants expended considerable effort to secure French interventions in their favor, orchestrating public gestures such as telegrams of congratulations and private ones like luncheons and hunting expeditions. This chapter explores the transition from Ottoman subjecthood to mandate citizenship in Mexico. During the Great War, but particularly from the onset of the mandate and throughout the 1920s an associational thicket flourished, indexing fierce debates and diversifying political postures. Mahjari notables actively denounced and displaced marginizable Mashriqis in collaboration with French authorities. The practice of according protection as a favor to deserving Ottoman subjects was refined



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The Mexican Mahjar

into French assumption of international responsibility for the citizens of new states under French tutelage. Mahjaris’ new status was formalized through administrative procedures involving complicated negotiations between migrants and French officials with different perspectives and preferences, instating filters that would continue to structure migrant trajectories into the second half of the twentieth century.

Protection in the Ottoman Mahjar In order to understand the changing jurisdictions of the mandate moment, we need to take a closer look at French consular practice in the Mahjar before the Great War. Mahjaris who had been French protégés in the Ottoman Empire sought out the same status in Mexico. According to French Minister Jean Périer, Ottoman neglect of the numerous Lebanese settled in Mexico had led the French to assume protection of the colony.12 That protection, however, was caught between old French habits and prerogatives in Ottoman lands and the juridical landscape of the Americas. The contradictions and ambivalence of official policy kept French consuls consulting with their superiors on cases that cropped up in every corner of Mexico—Morelia, Veracruz, Guadalajara, Tampico—during the first decade of the twentieth century. In early 1902, M. Camille Blondel, a French official in Mexico City, was forwarded a note authored on May 1898 by M. Louis Renault, of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris. Renault recommended that consuls cultivate a strategic benevolence toward deserving Ottoman subjects without allowing “these Orientals a permanent and official right to protection.”13 He considered taking official charge of Ottoman migrants a grave mistake, since he found them, overall, disreputable. Renault was especially concerned about the cost of repatriations and feared the confusion that would ensue in public opinion between true protégés (Tunisians and Annamites, for example), French citizens, and other people claiming French consular services. He recommended avoiding the registration of Ottomans in consulates, making clear to everyone involved that if and when French authorities interceded on their behalf, it constituted a favor. The matter should be left to the “tact and prudence” of consular agents. A group of twenty-­one merchants, natives of Arabia, living in Veracruz, petitioned the consul of “France and Arabia” in 1904. Swearing allegiance and obedience, they requested he intervene with Governor Teodoro A. Dehesa of the state of Veracruz in favor of a Mexican administrator who defended their interests. They were eager to have him



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vanquish political opponents who, they felt, would not guarantee their interests as people from faraway lands. Merchants in Guadalajara and Chihuahua approached the French consul in Mexico City, hoping to certify letters allowing friends and relatives in Lebanon to take care of business for them by proxy. They argued that French certification would be recognized in Ottoman courts in Lebanon whereas Mexican certification would not. A group of migrants from Deir al-­Qamar scattered across Mexico—in Tampico; Laguna del Carmen, Campeche; Colima; and Mexico City—requested protection as Lebanese Maronites. Consuls assured petitioners in Mexico that they could only register French citizens, that intervention was unnecessary in the Mahjar since citizens and foreigners were under the common protection of Mexican law. In February of 1904, S. Nasser, a native of Port Said and owner of the shop Casa Fenix in the small town of Salina Cruz, Oaxaca, petitioned to be registered as a protégé. Consular authorities in Mexico City explained that while customary in the Levant, protection was not portable, and the French had no official capacity to protect Ottoman subjects in Mexico. Nasser insisted, convinced that documents demonstrating French protection would make him “freer and more secure” in Mexico.14 And indeed, in 1913, Alfredo Haddad, living in Pichucalco, Chiapas, requested intervention from the French consul in Tapachula and was allowed out of prison on his reference. Some French consuls grew uneasy with the growing presence of Mashriqis in Mexico. Leon Schoenfeld, consul of France in Veracruz in 1905, reported denying consular protection to Eusebio Jorge of Zongolica, Veracruz, on the department’s directive that Syrians and Ottomans, regardless of their religion, were not to be regularly or officially considered French protégés in the Americas. He confided to Blondel in Mexico City, “I trust that I understood your wishes and that you—like me—consider that the continuous immigration of Syrians constitutes a grave danger for our compatriots and that it is convenient to check it to the extent possible.”15 French merchants had introduced peddling in Mexico and peddled the same articles as the Mashriqi newcomers well into the 1930s. Though the French had been present in Mexico since the early nineteenth century, the community was no longer growing, and the two migrant populations competed economically. Their shops in towns and cities sold the same cloth, sewing supplies, and modern luxury goods.16 As Mashriqi migration gained momentum, it quickly overtook the French. The Mexican census of 1895 registered 3,763 French citizens living in Mexico; estimates set the Mashriqi population at 5,000 by 1905.17

Figure 2.1 Isidoro Duek of Aleppo, a Jewish migrant to Mexico, peddling with his indigenous Mexican porter in 1924.



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Migrants coming to Mexico from other Mahjar sites claimed that French protection was customary in the Mahjar at large. Salomón Chimali, a Lebanese merchant, disconcerted Consul Mathiss in Tampico when he showed up in May of 1913 with a letter of consular registration extended to him during his years in Haiti by the French legation there. Chimali wanted to get the formality of consular registration over with, but Mathiss wondered if Mexican law contemplated French protection and if he should extend registration to all Syrians who requested it, given that the Syrian colony of Tampico was home to over two hundred people. The response from French consuls in Mexico City was that “the question of ‘protection’ is left to the agent’s initiative, but the department’s theory overall when it comes to Orientals, is to be generous and not forget our ancient privileges regarding the protection of the Christians of the Orient.”18 When denied French protection, migrants who had come to expect it panicked. The Syrian colony in Tampico sent a desperate telegram to the French minister in Mexico City on April 25, 1914; “French consul refuses protection our Colony in danger. We respectfully request your aid.”19

Surveillance and the Great War The Great War was fought in the trenches but also through the suppression of trade with enemy countries and their nationals. In officially neutral countries, the Allies regulated trade through the creation of blacklists of merchants sympathizing with or aiding the enemy. The Ottoman Empire had formally ceded the protection of its migrants in Mexico to the United States in October 1914, but as it went to war it entrusted their consular protection to the German consul, von Ekhart, in 1915.20 When German overtures to the Mexican government promising support in taking back Mexican territories annexed by the United States finally sparked President Wilson’s decision to enter the fray and the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, Ottoman subjects in good standing with their own authorities suddenly became suspect and subject to denunciation to French, American, and British consular and border authorities. Blacklists supervised by the Bureau of War Trade Intelligence of the War Trade Board in Washington, DC, were published periodically in official Mexican press organs—for example, the Boletín Financiero. Blacklisted subjects ran into ruinous restrictions, as the desperate attempts of Mahjaris to clear their names attest. They were banned from Ally-­owned international transportation, and Ally businesses stopped filling their orders.



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Competitors were eager to denounce those whose nationality or religious tradition could be invoked against them. American authorities coordinated with French consuls to establish and modify Enemy Trading Lists of Ottomans in Mexico. American and British consuls charged with the defense of American interests were especially active in northern Mexico. French consuls relied on the French Chamber of Commerce, Anglophone consuls, and Mashriqi notables to draw up blacklists of Mahjaris established in Veracruz, Monterrey, Torreón, Chihuahua, and Mexico City.21 Blacklisted Mahjaris were mostly denounced by business competitors: French merchants and other Mashriqis. Accusations infuriated merchants and contributed to anti-­French sentiment among notables.22 It is clear from French blacklists of Ottoman subjects in Mexico during the Great War that being Muslim was enough to render a Mahjari suspect in the eyes of French authorities, a fact instrumentalized by migrants who saw an opportunity to sideline competitors.23 Christian merchants took advantage of French and American Islamophobia while Maronites in particular went to great lengths to document and naturalize Maronite friendship with France. When Mahbub Chartouni demanded a certificate of protection from M. Paul Lefaivre, minister of France in Mexico, in April 1915, he attached a recent special issue of the French newspaper Le Temps and several pages of extracts from a history text titled La France au Liban (France in Lebanon) documenting Maronite collaboration with the French from the Crusades through the present.24 Mediterranean Christians, like one Stamatias Lafkas, capitalized on the conjuncture. Lafkas, Greek and a florist by trade, lived with his wife Mary in San Antonio, Texas. In October 1917, he was excited to spread murky news that he and a Greek friend of his in Tampico, Mexico, considered border authorities at Nuevo Laredo, Texas, should be alerted to: Turkish and Syrian aliens getting passports from the French consul in Tampico by claiming that they were natives of Lebanon. “Such persons would then come to this country, particularly through Laredo, and purchase goods and take them back to Tampico, and either sell the goods themselves or sell them to German merchants there; that the Mohammedan Syrians, Turks, and Germans in the city had formed a sort of union for the purpose of furthering the interests of the Central Powers and cooperating in business matters.”25 Was this an American patriot speaking, a Greek denouncing terrible Turks, or a migrant who did business between Tampico and Texas putting the brakes on his competition? Merchants were often perplexed by their inclusion in blacklists and wrote to notables who were close to the French enlisting their help.



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Alfredo Haddad, whom we met at the beginning of this chapter when he was in prison in Chiapas in 1913, was one of the men affected by Lafkas’s denunciation. By 1917 the owner of the store La Perla de Oriente in Tampico, he wrote to Mahi Rahaim for help. Haddad was baffled and disappointed at being attributed political ideas “which I have never held or ever will hold.”26 The blacklist for Torreón provided by M. M. Chabot in August 1918 identified nine Mashriqi commercial houses as Turco-­Germanophile or suspect; all but one were Muslim. A note claims that business partners of the worst among them—the Nassar brothers, Bujud & Jalife, and Chain & Sapah—had been deported to Mexico from the United States while shopping there, a fact that the “US consul” at Eagle Pass, Texas, could be called on to verify. Fourteen Palestinian and two Lebanese Christian businesses in Torreón were listed as friendly to the Allied cause.27 P. O’Hea, British vice consul, consulted with what he considered to be reliable members of the Syrian community and confirmed the “sincerely Christian and pro-­ Ally” reputation of thirteen other Lebanese traders in the city, otherwise confirming Chabot’s lists in September 1918. The final published blacklist included twenty businesses, seventeen of them owned by Muslims. A vicious anonymous note transmitted by the French Chamber of Commerce to French chargé d’affaires Viscount Dejean ran as follows: The Syrio-­Lebanese Christians of the Laguna region in the states of Coahuila and Durango are alarmed by the fact that French commercial houses from the capital of the Republic sell and even provide credit to the houses of Mohammedan Turks, sworn Germanophiles, who appear on the United States blacklists . . . enemies of our sacred cause.

The authors claimed to know that the French-­owned department store El Palacio de Hierro had sent merchandise to the Nassar brothers and that El Correo Francés, owned by Lambert & Cía., sold to Bujud & Jalife and Chain & Sapah. The note warned that its authors had made the British consul at Gómez Palacios, in charge of American interests, aware of the fact that French businesses continued to trade with commercial houses that appeared on official US blacklists. After a thorough investigation, the chamber dismissed the anonymous complaint as irrelevant because the transactions denounced had been carried out before the inclusion of these merchants in the blacklists, and Chain & Sapah was not even on the official lists. All merchants had effectively suspended trade with the blacklisted houses in August, when the lists had been published. Coincidence between the lists provided by



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The Mexican Mahjar

Torreón collaborators and the acrimonious anonymous note suggests that the same people scripted both and expected their definition of friend and foe to become officialized. Merchants did their best to contest blacklisting, not always successfully. The brothers Pablo and Antonio Ayub, merchants from Douma residing in Chihuahua, managed to get certificates of good conduct and Ally sympathies from French and Italian consular agents in Chihuahua. The Ayubs anchored their defense in their Christianity. They denounced Turkish oppression in Lebanon and underscored the fact that as Christian refugees from Turkish violence, they had nothing in common with the Turks and celebrated the British liberation of the Levant.28 They presented a declaration of allegiance and disambiguation to the American consul in the city of Chihuahua, which they forwarded to the French ambassador in Mexico City. They explained that when the American consul, who had been their protector in Chihuahua, was removed, they had resorted to the German consul for support in times of danger and need—given that no other consular representation was available locally in 1913. The Ayubs were severely affected by revolutionary violence, with combined losses from the sacking of their shop La Violeta in 1916 running to $129,967.31, as chapter 6 discusses in more detail. The weight of Germanophile accusations during the Great War would stall discussion of their case decades later, during debates at the Mixed Franco-­Mexican Claims Committee, with the Ayub claims file dismissed as unacceptable. Emilio Nassar, a young man of twenty-­six from Nabatiyeh, learned of his and his younger brother Manuel’s blacklisting from a compatriot in Puebla in July of 1918, before official lists were published.29 In his appeal to the French chargé d’affaires Viscount Dejean in August, he requested justice and protection, invoking all the right notables as references. The Bashas, Nacif Fadl, Pedro Slim, and Alejandro Gabriel could vouch for his neutrality in the war. In early September, Nassar followed US Bureau of War Trade instructions to file an affidavit with the British vice consul in Torreón, O’Hea, petitioning removal from the Enemy Trading List, which O’Hea had helped compile. Emilio declared that he had been strictly neutral in regard to the war, expressing support, if at all, for the Allied cause as “the cause of Liberty and Democracy.”30 He attributed his blacklisting to enemies—not personal ones, which he thought he didn’t have, but business competitors. He noted that there were no ties, deals, or connections to enemy countries to break, because none existed. Consul O’Hea conceded in his cor-



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respondence with the American and French consulates in Mexico City that he had reported the Nassar brothers to the State Department and the British legation as pro-­German Mohammedan Turks in spite of the fact that they had suspended interaction with the German vice consulate and connections. Like Domingo Kuri, O’Hea was a mediator to whom the people he condemned were referred for help. He had difficulty dissociating “sentiments in regard to religion and nationality” from political practice: In the present case, a decision would have to be taken concerning whether political passivity and inoffensiveness, which appears to be sufficiently proven, may merit the restitution of the privileges of commercial traffic with the United States and Allied countries, or whether as characteristic Mohammedan Turks and Enemy Nationals, therefore, they should anyhow continue to be barred from commercial intercourse and should be retained on the Enemy Trading List.31

The final decision, which involved approval of trade with the Singer Sewing Machine Co., O’Hea judged to be beyond his attributes.

Francophile Associations Most notables were quick to express their support to France. Necib Kuri and Pedro Slim established a pro-­Ally Syrio-­Lebanese Association in Mexico City sometime before 1918, under the tutelage of Fernand Couget of the French legation. Pedro Slim owned La Mariposa de Oriente, the largest and most prosperous textile and sewing supplies shop in the Mexican Mahjar, where young men arriving from the Mashriq and children of migrant families began careers as clerks and salesmen. A crucial space of apprenticeship for a generation of migrant businessmen— among them Juan Bedran, Halim Duayhe, and Jorge Trabulse—a source of credit, employment, and community news, its owner was vastly influential with Mahjari public opinion.32 The French legation in Mexico City relied on a handful of such Mahjari notables as guarantors of their compatriots’ moral standing during the war. Passports were issued only to migrants holding identity and antecedent certificates signed by at least three or four members of two groups of five notables. The first group included Selim Basha, José Gastine, Ibrahim Basha, Alejandro Gabriel, and Neguib Chami; the second Nacif Fadl, Necib Kuri, Albert Rahaim, Pedro Slim, and Philippe G. Safa. Even Basha and Chami, considered particularly informed and trustworthy Franco-



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The Mexican Mahjar

philes, occasionally misjudged Mashriqis in transit, as Consul Brouzet complained. Selim Hallak and Selim Husney, two Jewish businessmen from Aleppo making their way to Buenos Aires, received passports as French protégés on their recommendation as honorable and later caused trouble.33 As the Great War progressed, the initial pro-­Ally vs. pro-­Central Powers divide crumbled into more complicated political projects. Sympathies in the Mahjar began to be gauged in terms of new nationalisms—among them many shades of Arab, Syrian, and Lebanese nationalisms—but also in terms of favoring French or American tutelage of new states-­to-­be in the Mashriq. Participation in associations created at this juncture, like being blacklisted, had important consequences for particular Mahjaris’ attempts to mobilize French patronage toward the end of the war and later during the mandate. Collaboration between French consular authorities and US postal censors allows us to follow the reconfiguration of the Mexican Mahjar’s associational landscape and the power struggles among migrants jockeying to situate themselves vis-­á-­v is each other and various authorities during the war. The pro-­Ally, Lebanese nationalist, and pro-­French tutelage Union Libanaise was established September 20, 1918, in Mexico City under the auspices of French foreign minister in Mexico, Viscount François Dejean. Its founders were the handful of Mahjari notables working with the French legation: Selim Basha (president), José Gastine (secretary), and Neguib Chami (treasurer), along with Ibrahim Basha, Albert Rahaim, Alejandro Gabriel, José Abdo, Said Adib, Georges Trad, and Antoine Aftimos. They listed the two main French periodical publications in Mexico—the Courrier Français du Mexique and the Echo Français—and the Mahjari newspaper Al-­Hoda in New York as their correspondents. In 1919, a Société Syrio-­Libanaise du Mexique with much the same membership was established.34 Friendly associations were invaluable to French administration. Well connected across the American Mahjars, Francophile notables became the eyes and ears, and the police, of French consular authorities in Mexico. A member of the Mexico City Syrio-­Lebanese Union, José Gastine, born in Bzebdine, Mount Lebanon, a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, was the owner of the store La Sorpresa. His Venezuelan citizenship, Mexican residency, children schooling in New York, and friendship with Antonio Letayf raised eyebrows among French consuls. He was a correspondent of Al-­Hoda, however, where he wrote against Letayf ’s Al-­Khawater, being in frank disagreement with his friend regarding politics. With a brother



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married to a Frenchwoman, living in France for twenty years and producing French nieces and nephews, Gastine was an esteemed member of the Alliance Française in Mexico. He kept an eye out for antimandate sentiment in the Mahjar press, denouncing the periodical Syria Unida in 1922, routing problematic issues to consular authorities.35 Particular migrants or entire associations could be classified as dissidents during the war and the fraught beginnings of mandate administration. In May of 1918, the US consul at the port of Progreso refused to honor Allied passports issued to Syrians or allow them to travel on American boats, with ruinous consequences for their business. A group of men of the Young Syrians association led by Juan Alam in Mérida, Yucatán, complained to the minister of France in Mexico, the French ambassador in Washington, and Naoum Moukarzel, editor of Al-­Hoda in New York. They also voiced bitter resentment at attempts by a new organization in Mexico City, the Sociedad Syrio Libanesa, to have them blacklisted as pro-­German, accusing them “of promoting the annexation of Mount Lebanon to Syria and freedom of both from Ottoman rule.”36 Alam suspected that it was not the society’s leadership but someone above them who was intent on ruining migrants who refused to join. The Sociedad Syrio Libanesa was perceived by Alam as forcing the agenda of independence from the Ottoman Empire. It also had as one of its stated goals the creation of blacklists, a goal the Young Syrians refused. Appeals to French protection, Syrian nationalism, and Ottoman loyalty could still coexist in the same breath, but not for long. Reading his dispatch against those on file, the American censor drew the following conclusions, which were forwarded by the Haut Commissariat of France in Washington to the French minister in Mexico: Writer ( J. Alam) has written several times to N. A. Moukarzel, director “Al-­Hoda” periodical, New York and president “Libanian League” of New York, making much same accusations and protests an in above against new society. The foregoing enclosures are apparently intended for publication in “Al-­Hoda” (a friendly periodical). Comparing comments on file with the present, one may be permitted to conclude; that evidently Nacif O. Fadl (or Padi) and Amin Rihani are really entrusted with the propaganda of pro-­Ally sentiment, perhaps by French authorities, that they have been ordered expelled by the Carranza government; that they have established the society of “Syrio-­Libanians” to promote Allied sympathy and to liberate Syria and Liban from Turkey and to place these countries together under French protectorate. It is natu-



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The Mexican Mahjar

ral they would indicate to Allied authorities persons who should be blacklisted. On the other hand the “Young Syrians” is a largely pro-­Turkish if not pro-­German society, anti-­Ally in sentiments, as is the Syrian periodical Al-­Jawater (on MIB list). Al-­Jawater (A Letayf ) (on MIB and Enemy Trading lists) & other “Young Syrians” are financed by German authorities. The desire of France to protect Syria and Libanian is the more natural since these countries are largely French in their civilization, speaking much French language when these countries are freed from Turkish-­German rule, they will, like Palestine, naturally, become protectorates of the Allies, if only to prevent a resumption of German influence there. [sic]37

Politics were mercurial. By January of 1919, the Young Syrians had established a chapter of the New York 1911 Lebanon League of Progress in Mérida, with seventy members. Founded by Felipe Bojalil, José Dau, and Jorge Alam, it demanded autonomy for Mount Lebanon, the restitution of Lebanese territories lost at different points in time, and French tutelage.38 Dau also organized a Red Cross committee and collected funds toward the French Red Cross among Lebanese, Syrians, Cubans, and Mexicans in Yucatán. He signed off on his correspondence with “Long live France, Glory of the World! Long live Lebanon, my oppressed Homeland!”39 The Syrio-­Lebanese Union, whose members later benefited from French benevolence during the mandate, was established in Veracruz. Union members also tried to coerce unwilling Mahjaris into joining their association. In October of 1918, Emilio Mahuad and his father-­in-­law, merchants in Puebla, were detained in the port of Veracruz and deported, expelled as pernicious foreigners by President Venustiano Carranza through the application of Article 33 of the new Mexican Constitution. In his declaration to the police while in detention, Mahuad declared the following: He presumes that his capture and detention are the result of intrigues and denunciations by Mr. Domingo Kuri who has been harassing him with denunciations and false accusations, which he has never been able to prove, for a long time, and this is because the declarant has refused to acquiesce to his demands that he be part of an Allied union that Kuri has established in the Casino on Esteban Morales Street . . . in which union is imposed a mandatory monthly donation of eight or ten pesos



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to be sent to France for support in the War, and since the declarant has not been and will not be in agreement with this league, because he wants to work independently, thus the aforementioned Mr. Kuri began to persecute him and make him appear as an enemy of the state, as he does with everyone who does not join the said association, negotiating with the foreign consuls, with the French but also the American, that they be placed on blacklists if they are people of means, and if they are like the declarant, small merchants, he uses these means to harm them, as he has done in his case.40

Mahuad may not have been a wealthy notable, but he was not a lone peddler. Part of a family of traders, he was expelled despite a community petition from the Syrian Colony of Pachuca, signed by twenty-­six merchants who also telegrammed the French legation, requesting intervention. The Mahuad case lays bare perverse complicities among authorities, or at best, French officials’ questionable reliance on Francophile notables and Mexican authorities’ territoriality, indifference, or corruption. In instances pitting notables against less influential compatriots, notables, as mediators, operated as both the jury and the accused. In this case, Mahjaris objected to Domingo Kuri’s excessive influence with the French, echoing complaints voiced earlier in 1918. Consul Périer in Veracruz was instructed to ask Domingo Kuri to mediate and exert his influence with Mexican authorities to forestall the expulsion. Don Domingo claimed that unfortunately he had no way to sway Mexican officials. When queried, Mexican authorities responded that the French had dismissed the case as it was beyond their jurisdiction. Mahuad relocated to Quetzaltenango in Guatemala.41 Other merchants who were not interested in funneling money into associational funds that accrued French benevolence to association authorities had better luck. Alejandro Afif, owner of the shop La Mascota, contributed independent donations for the orphans of French soldiers in December 1917; Said Harfusch donated money toward French wounded in January of 1918.42 At the close of the war, the political moment was ripe for mushrooming new associations. Among Mahjaris, new political projects were afoot, and French consuls did their best to channel migrants into associations loyal to France and supportive of their forthcoming mandate. French authorities oversaw the formation of most associations that called themselves Syrio-­Lebanese, though relationships between consuls and Mahjari notables were not necessarily transparent. In Mérida, the Lebanon League of Progress turned more Francophile than the Syrio-­Lebanese



64

The Mexican Mahjar

society, 100 of whose members favored a French mandate while the other 170 argued constantly, at times supporting British tutelage and at others an international mandate.43 The French consular agent in the port of Progreso, Yucatán, Etienne Ailhoud, set to work. He reported on January 17, 1919: “I am doing my best to get two of the most notable people of the Lebanese League elected as ‘Sirio-­Lebanese’ members; one of the two is certainly the best orator that the colony possesses in Yucatán. The goal is to counter the heads of the other group, to completely dominate them through speech and thus rally the undecided, the timid. The whole business is well under way, and it is almost certain that this effort will come through.”44

Portrait of the Community 1921 In order for French authorities to develop official policies for the administration of their subjects in the Americas they had to know them. Censuses of migrant colonies throughout the Americas—throughout the world, in fact—were commissioned as part of the 1921 census in Lebanon.45 Consuls were requested to determine which migrants intended to maintain links to their country of origin and to re­cord the name, age, and place of birth of those who wished to be registered. They were also instructed to inquire as to “the motives due to which certain elements would abstain [from registration].” Consuls were to rely on migrants’ declarations but should also collect relevant information from other qualified sources. A format for recording and reporting the statistics was provided, and French authorities complemented the accounts of influential migrants with almost ethnographic observation. As institutions favorable to the mandate became mediators between migrants and French authorities, they informed French visions of the Mahjar. Consul Maurice Charpentier was in charge of applying the census and producing a general report for Mexico. A window on the mandate administration’s perception of its migrating subjects, his report provides detail on the size and geographic distribution of the Mahjari population and its composition at the onset of the mandate. Charpentier cited the Syrio-­ Lebanese League’s estimate of twenty thousand Syrians and Lebanese living in Mexico and their claim that most Mahjaris were Lebanese as authoritative, though he conceded that rival sources calculated a total of thirty thousand Mashriqi migrants.46 Charpentier described Mahjaris in Mexico as divided into two categories or classes:



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Having established this question of population, a second observation imposes itself immediately, namely, the distinction between the Syrio-­ Lebanese established and living in cities or the “pueblos” (towns), and the ambulants or peddlers. . . . In fact, the Syrio-­Lebanese class of urban centers represents a wealthy nucleus, the element that “arrived.” It generally possesses, along with its language of origin, knowledge of French and Spanish. It exercises, politically, a dominant action on compatriots directly dependent on it in urban centers. In contrast, the ambulant peddlers that constantly move from one end of Mexico to the other penetrating in the most remote places, often on foot and carrying packs of merchandise themselves, on their backs, appear in a number of cases to be reluctant to engage with this enterprise. It follows from this, and I would go so far as to argue that the means to be employed to make each of these categories of protégés understand the feats accomplished by France in their country should not be identical, given that the first possess a certain culture, and the others little or none.47

We glimpse an early divide between migrants with wealth and those seeking it in faraway corners through backbreaking effort, and the different economic, cultural, and linguistic resources of each group. We also get a flavor for the French categorization of a sector of the migrant population as possessing some (French?) culture, that is, as being somewhat civilized subjects, while the rest are tossed into the savage slot. Charpentier estimated Mahjaris settled in Mexico City to be more than three hundred families, including an average of seven to eight people each, and five hundred ambulants. He described the population in the capital as the most heterogeneous and the most divided religiously and politically.48 Two opposing camps of equal strength pitted those loyal to France— Francophiles, usually described as Maronite or Melkite and Lebanese— against elements “of disorder” labeled anti-­French, Faysalistes, ardent Germanophiles, and described as Greek Orthodox and Syrian. Charpentier considered both Muslims and Jews to be largely indifferent and the latter to be pro-­French elements. The consul also provided estimates of migrant-­owned shops and their relative local importance in thirty-­four provincial cities and large towns, the number of peddlers associated with each area, and the number of those who favored either France or Germany. He emphasized the importance of trading populations in Pachuca, Acapulco, Toluca, Chihuahua, Guadalajara, and Mérida. These dense and thriving communities were likewise rife with strife and political competition, and roughly divided into two opposed camps. Occasionally politi-



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The Mexican Mahjar

cally active individuals were singled out, either as potentially useful instruments of French policy or as threats to it. Shops, which indexed more established merchants, were numerous in some areas. In Puebla, for example, he estimated that there were only seventy-­t wo peddlers but forty commercial establishments. Peddlers were present in larger numbers, four or five times the number of settled migrants, in regions that were geographically isolated from the rest of the country or less densely populated, such as the state of Guerrero. As the consul acknowledged, peddlers presented problems for the census takers. Assumed to be single individuals rather than members of families, their mobility coupled with their geographical and social isolation made their number “impossible to determine with exactitude.”49 It was difficult to estimate numbers for migrants who settled in rural areas in general, especially for those who took up agriculture and herding instead of commerce. Charpentier mentioned that this was especially the case for people who settled in the north, in the state of Nuevo León, for example. Mahjaris clustering in northern Mexico were mostly Shia from southern Lebanon in the Torreón and Laguna region and Palestinian Greek Orthodox in Saltillo and Monterrey. Showing little interest in either local or Mashriq politics, they were consistently labeled as indifferent to the mandate in his report. Regarding how Mahjaris might be reached by French authorities, the consul suggested that the “superior class” could become legitimate interlocutors for the high commissioner of the French Republic in Beirut, who could address them periodically. The main Arabic-­language journals published in the Mashriq as well as official statements in Arabic regarding French-­led progress in the region should be circulated among them. The systematic distribution of these to peddlers in the main urban centers could also be arranged through the Syrio-­Lebanese League. Periodic conferences and film screenings were also recommended, to be organized by “a number of Syrio-­Lebanese who have studied in Beirut, Paris, etc. and are of confirmed loyalty.”50 Cooperating Mashriqi migrant elites were thus granted the high commissioner’s ear, and their local mediation of the mandate Mashriq was consolidated. Their institutions would distribute official information in Mexico and Central America and represent migrant interests to the mandate authorities. Two axes of distinction sorted migrants according to their proximity to French ways and the colonial project. A class axis differentiated migrants according to their closeness to France as cultural apex of a civilizational



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hierarchy. Migrants either belonged to an urban bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie of established merchants and small shop owners or to a nebulous mass of wanderers who subverted the French colonial project and the concerted efforts of the migrant elite to collaborate with it by taking little interest in their politics. Capitalist and middle-­class positions were equated with (French) civilization and marked by its trappings: competence in European languages, active participation in public life, and belief in the moral soundness of European imperial practice. Charpentier’s description of peddling ambulants recalls nineteenth-­ century narratives on Europe’s “undeserving poor,” a suspect, footloose domestic savage.51 This class-­civilizational distinction, echoed by the migrant elite, contributed to legitimizing the differential relationships established by the mandate authorities with the migrant notability and the peddling majority. It also justified and in fact called for the migrant elite’s institutional leadership and cultural and economic mediation. A loyalty axis sorted migrants according to their allegiance or not to the mandate project. A final note in the document requesting the 1921 census instructed: “You will attach, as a confidential document, indications on the sentiments of Syrians in regard to France, their opinions relative to the regime which they wish to see established in their country; finally, on the various committees and leagues which they might have already constituted and the relevance of these committees to other more general groups having their headquarters outside of your country of residence.”52 The crucial political rift among Mahjaris at the onset of the mandate was between Francophile and Germanophile factions. These categories were only secondarily associated with confessional labels and geographies of origin. Maronite, Melkite, and Lebanese subjects were more likely to be Francophile. Yet Don Antonio Letayf was a Maronite Ottoman migrant notable with strong German ties; their consequences are explored in chapter 4. Greek Orthodox and Syrian subjects were more likely to be Germanophiles. Jews and Muslims were politically neutral, perhaps because Islamophobia was rampant and anti-­Semitism robust. Jewish Mashriqis increasingly diverged institutionally from the rest of the Mahjar, their associational landscape framed by growing enthusiasm for Zionist projects across Mahjari and Ashkenazi communities and rising Mexican anti-­Semitism.53 As the mandate progressed, emerging national labels aligned with the confessional boundaries that came to dominate access to political power in the confessional balance of independent Lebanon and to citizenship in Israel.54



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The Mexican Mahjar

From Protection to Citizenship The institutionalization of the French mandate in the Mahjar was closely tied to the surveillance of mobility and the normalization of passports. Until 1919, a Mashriqi passport was an Ottoman certificate, issued in the name of His Imperial Majesty, the Sultan. Passports bore the sultan’s seal, the tugra, and two columns of text, one in French, in Roman script, and the other in Ottoman Turkish, in Arabic script, identifying the individual and granting him or her permission to travel between specified dates. Migrants could also obtain letters of protection and certificates of good conduct from European consuls. In Mexico, they received these from American, French, German, or British consular authorities. As early as January 1919, French consuls throughout Mexico—in Mexico City, Tampico, Veracruz, and Guadalajara—received instructions that they could issue passports for Beirut via France only to honorable, Francophile Syrians who had serious motives for travel to the Mashriq. After 1920, the French Republic extended an identity document to mandate subjects. The regulation of mobility was politically motivated but cast through economic claims. The high commissioner in Beirut issued a decree on June 18, 1920, making administrative permission and payment of a deposit mandatory for maritime transport companies recruiting migrants from the Mashriq. Special port commissaries and advisers were to enforce surveillance of migration.55 Boats were required to have adequate food supplies and medical personnel aboard on pain of fines, even imprisonment. Forty-­eight hours before departure, migrants were compelled to pass medical examinations provided at no cost by port authorities; their belongings were searched in the process. Arguing that the Syrian economy underwent a precarious moment, in October 1920 authorities decided to restrict returns to the Mashriq to subjects who had “proven their loyalty to France.”56 Only Mahjaris who had the means to support themselves during the long and unpredictable transit through France and their stay in the homeland received visas during the early 1920s.57 In January and February of 1921, Paris informed consular agents in the Americas that “The mandate for Syria and Lebanon which should be shortly conferred on France by the League of Nations will lead us to take more careful interest in the numerous Syrian and Lebanese colonies of America. As of the recognition of the mandate, we will have to accord them a protection no longer officious and based on tradition but official and resulting from a treaty. A variety of questions will arise on which I



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wish to receive complete reports as soon as possible, as well as your opinion.”58 In January 1921, the president of the council of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs notified all consular and diplomatic agents abroad that “République Française mandatée en Syrie et au Liban” should replace “Ottoman Ministry of the Interior” at the head of all identity certificates and passports and “Ottoman nationality” should be replaced by the nationality of origin.59 The passport service was created by decree, arrêté, in 1922, centralizing passport issuance under the direction of the Beirut police. Reforms in 1928 afforded better tracking of passport holders. Anyone requesting a passport was required to compile a dossier filed with police inspectors, who were instructed to carry out background checks on all passport candidates to ensure identity falsification was avoided. During the early years of the mandate overt continuity with earlier protection practices was visible in consular concession of travel permits to subjects who had been protégés or consular employees in the Mashriq before the mandate and wished to migrate. In February of 1923, for example, a French consul in Veracruz interceded with French authorities in Paris, facilitating travel to assist the son of a former cawas, or consular guard: The Consul of France at Vera Cruz to His Excellency Monsieur the President of the Council, Minister of Foreign Affairs I have the honor of begging Your Excellency to please request French authorities in Lebanon to allow M. Fyllod Aldahil of Tripoli (souk Almelcha) to come to Mexico, to Papantla, to join his relative M. José Sabourne, my resident, who needs his help in his business. The father of M. José Sabourne was for a long time cawas of our consulate in Tripoli and he himself before his departure for Mexico, was employed during a year in the police force of this city.60

The mediation invoked not only the migrant’s good standing in Mexico but an entire family’s Ottoman history of collaboration with France. In the transition from a praxis of protection associated with European intervention in the Mashriq to the transparency of the rule of law, it was not difficult for migrants to claim, and perhaps believe, that documents issued by French authorities indexed French favor. Individual protégés’ claims to French citizenship and the practice of extending French and British passports to notables, particularly those with family histories of collaboration with consular agents, caused further confusion. British agents complained about the ambiguity of French protégé status, request-



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The Mexican Mahjar

ing clarification on whether protégés should be treated as French citizens or not. The political productivity of maintaining ambiguity in this area was apparently more important to many migrants and French administrators than rational systematization. In 1923 and 1924, the high commissioner extended passports in the name of the French Republic, mandated in Syria and Lebanon. Yet passports identifying migrants as French protégés were still being issued at the French consulate in Mexico City as late as 1926. Eventually passports were issued to citizens of the Hukuma Lubnan al-­Kabir (État du Grand Liban; State of Greater Lebanon). When authorities in Mexico and Guatemala complained of mischief by a band of migrants masquerading as “Oriental priests” who toured Middle America in 1923, collecting money to ease the suffering of “thousands of children dying of hunger in Turkey, Armenia, and Syria,” the French commissioner’s response to the minister of foreign affairs is instructive.61 To demands that France exercise better control over mandate subjects, he countered: Your Excellency will recognize that it is impossible for me to control the acts committed in America by diverse Syrians who go there with whatever excuse. I can’t refuse to extend a passport for traveling to Guatemala or Mexico to Syrians without criminal records, who request authorization to travel to these countries invoking reasons that it is not possible for me to verify. . . . In any case, the extension of a passport does not constitute a recommendation. . . . It is useless to add that if I can, by any index whatsoever, foresee that a Syrian traveling to Central America fits the category of undesirable noted by M. Revelli, I would refuse him his passport, but I can’t interrupt the circulation of the inhabitants of this country toward a region where they often travel for diverse motives or to settle.62

The French commissioner stationed in Lebanon adhered to transparency, but midlevel officials often took such administrative decisions into their own hands. In regulating mobility, mandate authorities were caught between the divided opinions of officials, accountability to the League of Nations, the interests of French transport companies, and Mashriqis intent on migrating. A commission formed in November 1924 to revise the initial decrees curtailing mobility passed two additional ones within a month. One required passports and ship tickets to be delivered directly to migrants in order to remedy abuses by multiple mediators flourishing under restric-



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tive conditions. The second conditioned the deliverance of passports. The French consul at a migrant’s intended destination must first vouch that a family member or friend capable of providing financial assistance or work to the person traveling and all the people traveling with them had extended an invitation. Before departure, the total cost of travel must be deposited to a special emigration fund.63 Attempting to restrict legal mobility to chain migration and financing official repatriations when migrants ran into hard luck, the decree was suspended in March 1925 under pressure from boat transport companies and migrants. Surveillance stiffened again in April, when in the midst of the Great Syrian Revolt consular agents received instructions from Paris to condition the issuance of passports on previous consultation with French authorities at the protégés’ jurisdiction of origin. After protests from the high commissioner in Beirut and consuls in Buenos Aires and Veracruz noting the complications this generated for businessmen traveling constantly to acquire merchandise, the minister reduced vigilance to suspects, encouraging travel documents to be extended only to those migrants in favor with mandate authorities.64 Conflating Germanophilia (“treason” to the French cause during the Great War) and support for the Great Revolt (contestation of France’s jurisdiction over its mandate) when accusing suspects as enemies of France, wary diplomats received help from notables in filtering applicants. During the Great Syrian Revolt, Mahjari notables acquired unprecedented power to define and displace clients and renegades. The Syrio-­ Lebanese Union in Veracruz, organized and enforced by a handful of Mahjari notables under the auspices of the French consulate during the Great War, had served the Allied cause efficiently. They contributed to humanitarian efforts, donating funds to the French Red Cross and shipping cases of cigarettes to wounded soldiers through the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.65 Founding member Don Domingo Kuri coerced fellow migrants into financing the French war effort, and did his best to cleanse the Mexican Mahjar of migrants unwilling to do so, as the Mahuad case exposed. During the Great Revolt six years later, a letter of recommendation from the union became unofficially mandatory for all Syrians who were not registered in Veracruz to be extended passports at the consulate. In June 1925, Consul Raoul Spitalier instructed his consular agent in Mérida to extend passports only to those migrants personally known to him and to transmit the rest to Veracruz, where he relied on Don Domingo Kuri to help him identify suspect applications.



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The Mexican Mahjar

As mediators, notables gained the favor of consular authorities who were willing to question, or disregard, French imperial policy in their benefit. Spitalier tried to shield his notables from travel restrictions: [The union’s] members, all established merchants, make several trips a year to the United States and even Europe, for business purposes. Is it fair, and good policy, to make them wait several months for a passport, and to carry out prior consultation with our Haut Commissariat regarding people known to the consulate and who have provided definite proof of their loyalty and attachment to our country? If the members of the Syrio-­Lebanese Union find themselves treated as severely as their more or less anonymous compatriots overrunning the country, they will surely dissolve their society. How could I in these conditions transmit to Beirut the demands of those other Syrians, who for the most part can’t read or write and are incapable of providing civil status information, that would allow the French authorities of Syria to pronounce themselves? It seems to me that the strict dispositions of the said memo from the department are in the first instance directed to European countries where the surveillance of suspect protégés imposes itself and where these dispositions should be applied to the letter, but I think it is possible to reconcile the spirit of this memo with local needs and to continue, without violating the rules, to extend passports to the members of the Syrio-­Lebanese Union as in the past.66

Liberalizing migration after 1925 was a double-­edged sword, since mandate authorities were responsible for protecting Mashriqis in the Mahjar. Mashriq public opinion was shocked by the mounting deportation of migrants from many American destinations after 1929. This led to new attempts at regulation with Decree 2676 in July 1929, banning the recruitment of migrants. Despite the high commissioner’s hopes, institutions following migrants into the Mahjar to ensure that they sent their savings home and eventually returned did not materialize in formal administrative offices beyond the Service Special D’Emmigration, established in Lebanon in 1925.67

Registering Lebanese and Syrian Nationals: The 1926 Scramble Passport issuance in the Mexican Mahjar became entangled with the greater process of nationality assignment after the Treaty of Lausanne formalized Turkish independence in July 1923, stipulating the transi-



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tion from Ottoman to Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian citizenships. With the treaty, France renounced the Capitulations negotiated with the Ottomans in the early sixteenth century and the privilege of protecting selected Ottoman subjects. The treaty specified that in the Mashriq, all subjects living in the new states of Lebanon, Syria, Jebel Druze, and Jebel Alawi would acquire the nationality of their place of origin automatically, while those wishing to be registered as Turkish must request so. In the Mahjar, the opposite applied. All subjects wishing to acquire Lebanese and Syrian nationalities had to register at French consulates in timely fashion. They were otherwise considered Turkish and lost all privileges of French protection, including the issuance of travel documents at French legations and consulates. Migrants who had already registered with the French consulates during the 1921 census had a voice in appointing compatriots as consular aides. Funds were allocated to hire a drogman or translator for the French consulate in Mexico City in 1924.68 The role played by M. Meuregh, who took up the post, in helping determine how many Mahjaris would opt to keep their Syrian or Lebanese nationalities was underscored by Minister Périer in December of 1926.69 French authorities advertised the procedures involved in the mainstream Mexican press and regional newspapers, as well as in the Mahjar press and the French colony’s Courier Franco-­ Mexicain. Consuls and consular agents gathered Mahjar notables and explained the importance of opting for Syrian and Lebanese nationality. They notified the Syrio-­Lebanese Chamber of Commerce. In Veracruz, the Syrio-­Lebanese Union presided by Domingo Kuri was instrumental in printing the news in bilingual Arabic-­Spanish classified ads. Consul Spitalier persuaded heads of family to print thousands of leaflets in Arabic and distribute them among migrants living in small towns of the interior through their commercial intermediaries. Mahjaris were addressed in the old terms of contingent protection: “registration is necessary for the mandate power to know the people relevant to its authority, and wishing, in the future, to benefit from its protection.”70 In spite of changing international norms, the relationship to France was still imagined and imposed as a relation of patronage. Registration got off to a slow start, perhaps given the local history of French consular refusal to register Ottoman subjects and the colonial language of the call. Though the treaty went into effect on September 6, 1924, the first registrations began to trickle in around October 1925. A number of obstacles surfaced, from the banal through the paranoid. Some migrants had trouble filling out the forms because they could neither read



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nor write in any language, and they met with disdainful consular officials unwilling to take the time to help, as Antonio Letayf denounced in his newspaper Al-­Khawater. He printed complaints about steep registration fees and demands for registration to be free along with scandalized warnings that migrants were being registered as Syrio-­Lebanese, stripping them of their rightful Lebanese nationality and tricking them into accepting Syrian nationality. All those unable to read French were warned to beware and make sure to have someone trustworthy verify their correct registration. Consular authorities, in particular Drogman Meuregh, were accused of refusing travel documents and being dismissive even to Lebanese journalists, like young Selim Neyfe of the newspaper Al-­R afiq. Letayf ’s virulence might be taken with a grain of salt, since he was furious that Al-­Ghurbal, his competitor in the Arabic-­language press, had been chosen over Al-­Khawater to publish calls for registration. He also demanded that the call be published in Spanish in mainstream Mexican newspapers.71 The scramble to register migrants in Mexico began in earnest in early 1926, a few months before the August deadline stipulated by the League of Nations. Bitter arguments crisscrossed the Mashriq-­Metropole-­Mahjar triangle as consular agents in Mexico attempted to comply with superiors while sustaining their notable networks. In May 1926, the Mexico City legation had a paltry 184 registrations. They were under pressure from the high commissioner in Beirut, who was displeased. He had complained on April 8 of having no more than 150 files in his possession, “an insignificant quantity given the numerical importance of the Syrian and Lebanese colonies, in particular in the two Americas.”72 On May 18, Consul Spitalier in Veracruz was forced to report to Paris that he had only 36 requests for citizenship. He complained to M. Ernesto Lagarde, chargé d’affaires of the French legation in Mexico City, “most of our protégés are so defiant and so indolent at once that one must encourage them incessantly.”73 Félix Tellier, consul in Mexico City, commented to Lagarde that the hesitant registration process was due mainly to “Syrio-­Lebanese apathy in administrative affairs.”74 Spitalier justified the negligible number of requests through the scant infrastructure in the coastal states yet he Orientalized migrants’ informed choices: “Our protégés, as good Orientals, generally mistrust every new mark of solicitude in their regard and many imagine that in subscribing a declaration of option, they sign their annexation to France. Others remain expectant before the events unfolding in Jebel Druze, awaiting the



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conclusion of the insurrection to pronounce themselves.”75 He noted that many Mahjaris imagined that the registration was a census, a preliminary to mandatory military service in Syria and Lebanon. By July 1926, his consulate in Veracruz, which concentrated registrations from the Atlantic coast, happily reported that a total of 439 declarations relative to 1,298 persons had been achieved. In the state of Yucatán, 100 out of 1,000 estimated Syrio-­Lebanese had registered; in Tabasco there was not a single registration. Consul Spitalier expected no more than 250 additional registrations from the approximately 1,900 migrants who had yet to register in his jurisdiction. On August 2, 1926, Lagarde explained to Aristide Briand, minister of foreign affairs in Paris, that no effort had been spared to encourage registration. Two obstacles in the process had been the widespread opinion that registration was meant to prepare conscription and the fact that many of the Syrians and Lebanese “dispersed in the interior of the country, have no fixed address—they are peddlers—or fixed identity—they take Spanish names, and even change them frequently.” He was proud to report that against these odds, a total of 1,500 declarations concerning 6,000 people had been received.76 On July 18, 1927, Minister Briand addressed M. Périer, noting with interest his announcement of the establishment of a friendship agreement between Mexico and Turkey. He was concerned by the fact that the new Turkish legation would be technically responsible for all Syrio-­Lebanese who had not registered for citizenship, since French attempts to negotiate a second extension of the registration period with Ankara had been unsuccessful. Briand worried that the Turks’ main interest in establishing this diplomatic tie was to engage in antimandate propaganda, perhaps under Russian influence, since the Soviet legation had supported the Druze and the Orthodox in their movement against the mandate in the Levant. The minister recommended: “It would certainly be advantageous from the point of view of our moral influence to continue to assert our protection of those among them which it may seem interesting to maintain in our orbit.”77 He was anxious that the two conditions necessary for this to be possible, the indifference of the Turkish legation and the tacit compliance of local powers, would not be met in Mexico. President Plutarco Elías Calles was said to have a naturalized Druze in his entourage. The minister counseled Périer to take inspiration in the circumstances, to sustain French moral influence over the bulk of the Syrio-­Lebanese colony and make sure that French protection of those who had registered remained beyond all contestation. In this spirit, Périer recommended



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to Etienne Ailhoud, consular agent in Mérida, that French protection should not be refused to those who had not registered, and all documentation except passports and certificates of nationality should continue to be extended to them. As late as August 1927, Périer authorized Raoul Spitalier, consul in Veracruz, to extend passports to Syrians and Lebanese who had failed to register, as long as they had done so in good faith, he knew them to be honorable, and they did not have a reputation of being hostile to the mandate.78 Among them were not only Syrian and Lebanese, but also Israelites of the Levant, as the French labeled Sephardi Jews from Smyrna and Istanbul.79

Containing Dissidence The Great Syrian Revolt—large-­scale, sustained, organized armed resistance to the French mandate—reverberated in the Mahjar from 1925 to 1926 and beyond. Alerted by a flurry of visa requests in British and American consulates in December 1926, mandate authorities commissioned a Russian officer turned French marshal, Zinovi Pechkoff, to discreetly follow dissident Amir Arslan to the United States in January 1927. Arslan’s visit was organized around an antimandate convention convened by the Detroit-­based New Syria Party, a Syrian nationalist organization. Its members supported the Syro-­Palestinian Congress, which Arslan had been instrumental in founding in Geneva in 1921, to lobby the League of Nations against the French mandate. The New Syria Party claimed to have forty chapters throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico, which Arslan was scheduled to visit in the company of Nassim Saybaha, his companion Toufic Yazji having been expelled from the United States after Maronite agitation. The international legitimacy of the mandate was threatened by the Syro-­Palestinian Congress’s peaking popularity during the Syrian Revolt and ensuing French censorship in the Mashriq. Pechkoff was to carefully investigate the migration, report on Arslan’s activities, and facilitate a counterpropaganda campaign.80 Pechkoff was in close contact with French consuls in Detroit, Chicago, and New York. In his quest to sound out Mahjar alignments and sentiment he met with migrant notables like Najib Barbur and Naoum Moukarzel, mostly Maronites who were critical of Arslan because of his proximity to Jamal Pasha of the Young Turks during World War I.81 Moukarzel’s periodical Al-­Hoda ran an article on February 26, 1927, celebrating Arslan’s upcoming departure from the



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United States and warning liberal members of the colony in Mexico that he would “spill the poison of discord among you.”82 Urging them to organize a committee to warn Mexican authorities against Arslan’s arrival in the name of the entire colony, they described the man as an assassin, a nefarious character, a dangerous fanatic, and a communist. Al-­Hoda’s readership in Mexico, members of the Lebanese Nationalist Party, acted quickly in concert with French authorities. Journalist Elías Torbay’s tour of Mahjari communities in Mexico, which had coincided with Arslan’s visit to Detroit, was instrumental as pro-­mandate, anti-­Syro-­Palestinian Congress propaganda. Torbay, owner of the periodical Al-­R akib, had drawn people to the French, supporting the plea to deny Arslan entry. On March 18, Aaron Saenz, the Mexican minister of foreign relations, informed Minister Périer that immigration officers had instructions to stop Arslan at the border, as “one of the initiators of the massacres of Christians and one of the factors of rebellion against France in Syria, who now tries to come to Mexico in order to continue his seditious labors, recruiting followers and collecting funds.”83 Mexican authorities were freshly sore from Chinese riots and massacres in northern Mexico, which had been blamed on Chinese homeland politics, and happy to preclude fighting among Mahjaris. Saenz’s ventriloquist moment as he quoted Périer’s slander of Arslan lays bare the fact that in the Mexican Mahjar, Mexican Islamophobia could be effectively harnessed through French-­Maronite collaboration. Arslan was denied a Mexican visa and had to cancel his intended travels. Fundraising for his cause and for the Syrian Revolt in Mexico persisted, however. It was denounced by Mahjari periodicals and resulted in violence and Mahjari demands for expulsion of compatriots from Mexico, as we will see in chapter 4. A vicious anonymous note, directed to M. Périer in 1927, tried to make Périer renounce his honorary presidency of the Lebanese Chamber of Commerce, accusing its soon-­to-­be-­named president Jacobo Simon of being an enemy of France because he had been an agent for German Consul von Ekhart in Yucatán and Campeche during the Great War and because he was guilty of sending five thousand in gold to the Druze toward weapons for the Syrian Revolt. The Druze had apparently given a grand banquet in Simon’s honor and “named him honorary president of the league of resistance against France.”84 By July of 1927, a new set of concerns displaced lingering worries over Mahjari support for rebels in the Mashriq. Armenians, Syrians, and Arabs were banned from entering Mexico. Under pressure from local mer-



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chants, Mexican authorities argued that migrants presented various economic threats to the nation. A new set of negotiations came into focus. Migrant notables organized against the ban, and French authorities supported their outraged petitions before the Mexican government, with limited outcomes, as chapter 3 tracks.

R ace and Patronage

Chapter 3

Between 1892 and 1897, three Maronite priests—Yusef Zghieb, Daoud Assad, and Elías Karam—complained about life in the New World in their letters to the patriarchate in Mount Lebanon. They lamented the lack of French and Arabic-­language instruction among migrants, and the fact that though they estimated between eight hundred and two thousand parishioners in Mexico, the “numbers of community members and their poverty don’t allow us to establish a private chapel to practice our ceremonies.”1 Migrants’ spaces of life and labor in the popular quarters of downtown Mexico City indexed their lack of access to local elite habits and places. An early Jewish Mahjari described his social horizon: “I wasn’t very impressed with Mexico [when I arrived] . . . in those days, it was a small town, where everyone went around in mantas and calzones (dressed like Indians).”2 Barely thirty years later, in 1927, migrant notables’ response to the Mexican ban on Middle Eastern migration told a vastly different story, in which migrants shared social space not with local subalterns, but with local elites claiming descent from Spanish colonizers. In November of 1927, two months after the Mexican state banned Armenians, Syrians, and Arabs from entering Mexico, in neighboring Guatemala “an imposing group of merchants of all nationalities” organized a campaign against Levantines. They lobbied the General Department of Labor, blaming “the Orientals” for economic debacle. They sought guarantees for the public and for themselves and requested the expulsion of peddlers, the regularization and high taxation of Levantine shop owners who had anything to do with peddlers, and the routine registration and identification of Orientals.3 Mashriqis were targeted on a number of counts: “In addition to frequent acts of fraud and smuggling which prevent the honest merchant from competing with them on a level playing field, the plaintiffs complained that the Levantines operate as street vendors, and profit from credit extended to the inhabitants of rural areas and the insignificance of their overall costs, to reap usurers’ gains to the detriment of their national and foreign competitors.”4



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The accusations were valiantly countered by a group of notable Lebanese merchants. They, like migrants in Mexico, claimed that there were no peddlers among the Lebanese. They adamantly denied tax evasion and argued that “contraband is not the monopoly of any foreign colony.” They attributed their own success to their willingness to offer lower prices, the simplicity of their lifestyle, and their aversion toward the luxury beloved by “certain merchants,” which is always paid for by consumers.5 Similar debates raged throughout the Latin American Mahjars, threatening to halt migration and expel established migrants, suddenly recognized as members of undesirable races. This chapter explores the production of networks of patronage and racial equivalencies in the Mexican Mahjar during the Mexican Revolution and the postrevolutionary period (1910–1940). Both practices contributed to the translation of Mahjaris’ initial precariousness into collective prosperity and were mobilized to counter the ban of 1927. Despite the racialization of certain Mashriqis as Orientals, Mahjaris and French authorities contributed to the entanglement of French practices of protection and Mexican postcolonial racial taxonomies of prestige. The result was a local reading of Mahjari bodies as Spanish if they could claim to be French, an alchemy equating the racialization of migrants as white with their right to postcolonial privilege in Mexico.

Racialization, Patronage, and Class The racial practices and debates instituted by colonial Spanish administrations, revised and revived in independent Latin American nation-­states during the nineteenth century, had acquired new vocabularies in Mexico during Porfirio Díaz’s regime (1875–1910).6 As eugenics gained ground in the Global North, modernizing Mexican elites found scientific basis to their preference for white populations and produced policy with the intent of transforming Mexico into a prosperous nation through the reception of white (European) migrants. Mahjaris were well placed to profit from opportunities extended by policies of whitening Mexico through desirable immigration. Their status as Ottoman protégés of France was instrumental in consolidating their whiteness in Mexico. The reading of Mahjari bodies as white was crucial to collective upward mobility. After the Mexican Revolution, state agents produced a new criollo nationalism shot through with contradictions, however. Attempting to both distance the revolutionary state from Porfirian practice and demonstrate equal standing with Europe in the international arena, criollos validated

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the racial knowledge of Euro-­American colonial modernity, including Western distrust of the Orient. At the intersection of French and Mexican Orientalisms, the new racial ideologies defining the Mexican nation and access to national wealth spurred ambivalences. The Eurocentrism of the conservative criollo elite that remained hegemonic after the revolution supported marking class distinction through racialization. With the formalization of the mandate, Mahjaris were systematically racialized as white by Mexican state officials. Their French status and their Oriental whiteness made Mahjaris both intelligible as elites and vulnerable to xenophobia. The evolving ambiguities of Mahjaris’ standing as mandate subjects and the socioeconomic diversity of the early migration encouraged Mahjaris to cultivate various forms of patronage within and beyond the migrant population. Patronage, access to resources granted to networks of clients who are thereby produced as subaltern and politically loyal to their patron, was a common political idiom across the three poles of the Mexican Mahjar. Patronage emphasizes reliance on private networks for access to public services, opportunities, and resources, introducing intimate relationships into the organization of the public domain.7 The caciquismo or clientelismo of Mexican political culture, Mashriqi traditions of wasta, and French customary protection of Ottoman subjects intersected in the Mexican Mahjar. Intelligible to all, the politics of patronage became central to migrant trajectories. Not all patrons were equal in this web. As representatives of a global imperial power, French officials treated Mexican authorities as sovereign yet subaltern in the global scheme of things. Though state sectors officially challenged French imperial entitlement, in the realm of popular perception and aesthetics, France and all things French operated as markers of cosmopolitanism, prestige, and good taste for Mahjaris and Mexicans alike. Wealthy and Francophone Mahjaris managed to insert themselves into criollo elite spaces and even kinship networks. Other migrants exhausted their resources en route, however. Those who counted on joining established family members or fellow villagers were sometimes disappointed and became vulnerable or even destitute when they failed to locate them, refused assistance, or were denied it. Migrants who spoke only Arabic, brought fewer assets, or ran into bad luck found themselves dependent, increasingly subordinated, and even deported or repatriated. The economic crises of 1921 and 1929 complicated the revolutionary state’s efforts to reconstitute the social contract. Mahjaris faced increasing rejection from Mexican state and popular sectors during the economi-



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cally difficult 1930s. Attacks against them as foreigners became increasingly frequent. Popular sectors mobilized a xenophobic nationalism to exclude migrants from scarce resources, labeling them Semites and undesirable races in press and activist narratives. Official and popular sectors developed complementary rhetorics that reaffirmed an exclusionary, paternalist national project as the materialization of the revolutionary social contract, rejecting Mahjaris and accusing them of moral turpitude. Legislation curtailing movement targeted impoverished migrants but threatened to extend to entire communities and even to notables. In this context, the migrant intelligentsia developed two narratives situating Mahjaris as rightful conquerors of Latin American geographies and populations. The first negated destitute migrants their status as Mashriqis, displacing them morally and physically from community institutions and the public landscape. In the census report discussed in chapter 2, Charpentier had carefully noted that peddlers and settled merchants were often part of a single domestic and kinship unit, but he also described them as different classes. Through claims to be unrelated to peddlers, refusing identification with impoverished compatriots, Mahjari notables insisted on recognition of class distinctions within the migrant population. The second narrative, which fed on Arab modernism and its recovery of Ottoman imperial imaginaries of the New World, is the subject of chapter 4. Casting class difference in terms of race, sect, and nationality, notables argued that those who were not part of the elite had no claim on the Mashriq at all. Only white—that is, wealthy Christian—Mahjaris, could claim continuity with the Mashriq. The contrast between notables and ambulants became a Maronite distinction used to deny the Mashriqi poor access to Lebanese belonging. The Mashriq was also denied to Muslims and Jews, who were most likely to be described as Semitic and demonized in Mexican Catholic mythologies. A number of efforts worked to remove poor Mashriqis from Mexican public space. Migrant elites developed charity associations that succored compatriots in need, effacing the visibility of Mahjari poverty. They also encouraged the practice of repatriating indigent and vulnerable migrants. This population management effectively cleansed Mexican perceptions of Mashriqis through the physical, moral, and national displacement of migrant bodies undesirable to migrant notables.

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Mejorar la Raza, the Porfirian Preference The transformation of early modern notions of race into the modern scientific idea of races as natural human groups coincided with French and British imperial expansion.8 In the late nineteenth century, industrial colonial projects made whiteness a condition for the progress of nations. These colonialisms and their traffic in peoples inflected the emerging social scientific study of race, contributing to the definition of the colonized subject as biological, civilizational, and moral Other.9 The study of race resurrected the ancient Greek science of physiognomics, allowing the trained expert to deduce a subject’s moral characteristics from his or her morphology. The fusion of Enlightenment and ancient classical logics made physically and thus morally flawed subjects disposable, since their deviance was read not as an unusual form in a divine order, but as resulting from immanent imperfection. The development of racial and physiognomic studies went hand in hand with the birth of eugenics. Porfirio Díaz’s thirty-­four-­year presidential term, known as the Porfiriato, brought conservative factions of the criollo elites to power in 1879. As gilded age bourgeoisie, conservatives wholeheartedly embraced the colonial and industrial modern, including emerging scientific-­eugenicist racial ideologies, imagining themselves as biologically and civilizationally European. Given the demographics of privilege inherited from colonial administration and inscribed in the new Mexican Constitution, criollo elites grafted the new notions of whiteness as an index of moral, physical, and intellectual superiority onto racialized class distinctions. Modern racialization differed fundamentally from Spanish colonial practice in its naturalization of racial categories, which became much harder to subvert, though it was said of Don Porfirio himself in polite society that his marriage to Carmelita, the daughter of a family of Catalan merchants, had whitened or civilized him, by introducing him to European aesthetic preferences.10 Mexican perceptions of France as an ideal of progress and civilization dating from the eighteenth century held new sway during the thirty-­odd years of Porfirian rule. José Yves Limantour, the son of a French merchant, was secretary of finance from 1893 to 1911. He was also at the head of Don Porfirio’s technocratic team of advisers known as the Scientists. When the dictatorship was overthrown in 1911, Díaz exiled himself to Paris, where he held court for visiting criollo families until his death.11 Francophone and Francophile, Porfirian elites, often schooled in France, Germany, or Britain, infused postcolonial Mexican cartographies



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of race with these new dimensions imported, like all good things, from Europe. Though racial sciences were also on the rise in the United States, the encroaching neighbor to the north was still viewed more as an unrefined rival than a source of intellectual inspiration.12 Throughout Latin America immigration was fantasized as the answer to productivity and governance through the creation of small landholders and citizens.13 Porfirian elites believed that industrial and social modernization could only be buttressed by a biological shift in the national racial stock. A many-­ layered project for whitening the nation, legitimized by the new global colonial racial common sense, was set in motion. Whitening through immigration was pursued through incentives and benefits. The Colonization and Naturalization Laws of 1883 sought to attract agricultural laborers by facilitating settlement and offering small land grants. The Foreignness and Naturalization Law of 1886 allowed foreigners who had resided in Mexico for two years to petition for citizenship and migrants who came to work for the Mexican government to be treated as Mexican citizens. The law also conferred Mexican citizenship on foreigners who owned property.14 State policy favored European foreigners, Catholic ones in particular, as investors, settlers, and harbingers of progress and civilization.15 European settlement in sparsely populated areas was encouraged para mejorar la raza, in the hope of improving Mexico’s indigenous stock with physically hardier, more industrious, and morally sound white races. The stimulation of massive European immigration to rural regions was abandoned by 1896, when the state reevaluated the project as costly, inefficient, and slow. Rural settlement schemes backfired as they collided with migrant expertise and expectations. Europeans and other migrants came to Mexico, but they clustered in urban centers, where money was to be made. Spanish, French, German, and British migrants dominated the nineteenth-­century entrepreneurial landscape, especially mining, moneylending, and wholesale trade.16 Ignacio Mariscal, Porfirian minister of foreign affairs, reported that fifteen hundred Syrians lived in Mexico City in 1906, the majority of them illegally.17 The number climbed steeply in the final Porfirian decade and picked up again as soon as the Great War was over. Accepting a small land grant in order to settle legally, one Lebanese family quickly sold off the land and some goats they had received as part of the package and made for the nearest commercial hub.18 Statesmen, the media, and public opinion continued to evaluate some migrants as more desirable than others during and after the revolution. Even though the Mahjari relationship to the French was always a work in

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progress—shaped by divergent discourses among French authorities as to the nature of their patronage, international negotiations of mandate obligations, and the ambivalence of coloniality—in Porfirian Mexico, Mahjari access to French customs and language, as well as French identity documents and diplomatic protection, represented enormous potential advantages. By late 1924, Minister Jean Périer of the French consulate claimed that there were thirty thousand Lebanese living in Mexico, “which makes them by far the most important foreign colony after the Spanish.”19 Cultivating foreignness through French patronage made Mashriqis vulnerable after the 1927 constitutional amendments. During the global crisis of the Great Depression, rival merchants and small traders targeted them across the Americas, mobilizing the modern racial discourses popularized by elites to call for restrictions to the immigration of “undesirable classes and races.”

The Revolution and the Social Contract In spite of aggressive agrarian reform and the nationalization of natural resources and industries, the revolution did not unravel the Porfirian elite’s wealth.20 Though many families lost landed estates when they took refuge in the capital, Porfirian policy had already encouraged the urbanization of elites and the diversification of investment.21 Criollos had built the incipient national banking system and industry; they continued to play important roles in state bureaucracies. The institutionalization of the revolution displaced some into the private sector, where they benefited from protectionist import-­substitution policies designed to strengthen the nation through a planned economy over the next four decades. They remained central as ideologues and in new state institutions through which (European) high culture was made available to the masses. The revolution brought new notions of the nation to power, however. While provincial military strongmen competed for political control, modernist ideologue José Vasconcelos sang the glories of the new nation, a “México mestizo.” A mixed nation, deriving its strength from the singular fusion of the greatness of Indian civilization and the Spanish tradition.22 Though the state built by the Institutional Revolutionary Party over the next seventy-­three years provided unprecedented avenues for social mobility, especially through education and employment in the ever-­expanding state bureaucracy, it did not undo everyday practices of racialized hierarchy. The celebrated mestizo could be—as were many of those climbing through the ranks of the military and the bureaucracy—



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racially mixed or of unknown or varied parentage, but a condition of his or her mobility was being culturally European. Indian populations continued to exist and were officially managed and marginalized by the postrevolutionary state. The contrast between Indians, mestizos, and criollos continued to discipline boundaries, indexing class through race.23 The revolution involved destruction and upheaval, yet it also provided unusual opportunities, and some Mashriqi migrants did well. Accounts of their rising fortunes in different regions of Mexico provide different rationales for their prosperity in times of trouble. In 1924, Minister Jean Périer described Mashriqi commercial establishments as blooming in Yucatán, Mexico City, and rural areas during and after the revolution: Their enterprises have acquired a remarkable vitality, flourishing in the past fifteen years. From Yucatán, especially the cities of Mérida and Progreso, where they set up their first establishments, which the isolation of the region kept safe from competition, over the past fifteen years, they have cast their net over the entire Mexican territory. Their disloyal battle against French commerce, additionally favored by the war, has borne its fruits: little by little, French commercial houses have been driven from the cities of the interior and Syrian or Lebanese houses have taken their place. In Mexico City itself, where our compatriots have fortunately long defied their efforts, our protégés start to become menacing: an entire quarter of the downtown, the quarter of La Merced, now almost completely consists of cloth shops belonging to Turks, as they are still called here.24

Périer confirms growing Mashriqi affluence across Mexico but does not explain it.25 The euphemism of a disloyal battle might refer to the discretionary pricing and smuggling spelled out in similar complaints, which also mention Mahjari reliance on unpaid family labor as an unfair source of profit. Mashriqi replacement of European merchants during the revolutionary wars, their insertion into lucrative regional economies, and flexible business practices provide part of the answer. Mahjaris stayed on when other Porfirian foreign merchant communities fled the revolution, returning to Western Europe, North America, and Cuba. Stepping into commercial and industrial niches left vacant by more affluent Europeans, many Mahjaris were able to profit from the chaos and emerge as upwardly mobile in postrevolutionary Mexico. In northern Mexico and the Laguna region, French identity papers and access to Mahjari networks that spanned the US border gave Mashriqis an edge in smuggling

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and black-­market commerce during the revolution.26 In constructing the border after the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-­US wars of 1846– 1848, American authorities were mainly concerned with problematizing the movement of subjects that they recognized as Mexican; other passport holders flourished on the value created through the border’s reification.

Translating Notable Privilege into Community Institutions The revolution made only some Mashriqis richer, yet observers narrate a collective ascent. Patronage is crucial to understanding how economic and political advantages secured by notables translated into community benefits. Migrant elites were well placed to mediate between the French, their poorer compatriots, Mexican elites, and other migrants. Relationships of friendship and camaraderie cultivated by powerful men and women allowed them to accumulate further power and resources, and these benefited their compatriots when they facilitated community institution building. Don Jacobo Granat, a pioneer of the theater and movie industry, owned numerous performance venues. He was an active supporter of Francisco Madero, who challenged Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship by running for election and briefly became the president of Mexico before the country descended into revolutionary violence in 1910. Don Jacobo lent Madero his theaters for campaign speechmaking. During his short presidential term, Madero granted Granat—a Belo-­Russian Jew and founding member of the first Jewish association in Mexico, Alianza Monte Sinaí—the permit to buy land and establish a Jewish cemetery, a decisive step in the early institutionalization of the Jewish community in Mexico.27 Don Antonio Letayf provides another example. The lunches hosted at his Rancho San Joaquín property were legendary, attended by President Carranza, members of the diplomatic corps, and select Lebanese merchants.28 We may be tempted to think of him as a self-­made man fraternizing with the Mexican postrevolutionary elite. Testimony recorded from Alberto Bitar Letayf, his nephew, reveals more to the family story: My father, Don Abraham Bitar, was a man with a temperament of steel. [Being] from a very wealthy Lebanese family, he came [to Mexico] from Paris, where he was studying, to spend a holiday with his cousins, the Letayfs. He never lived in Lebanon again, first because shortly after his arrival the revolution broke out, and then because he fell in love



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with Mexico and with the fiesta brava (the bullfight). In contrast to the majority of migrants, he never engaged in commerce, he went through a thousand hardships to create and sustain El Redondel.29

Don Antonio was enshrined in community memory as the first celebrated case of a Mahjari marriage into the Porfirian elite.30 What we see at Don Antonio’s table is a Mashriqi notable cultivating his wasta with the postrevolutionary Mexican authorities—many of whom, like Carranza, were former Porfirian administrators.31 Letayf ’s practical application of his influential intimacies is explored in detail in chapter 4. Socializing in private settings provided opportunities to cross men’s and women’s networks. Silvia Kuri de Ayub’s house was also renowned for connections to be made and wasta cultivated. Silvia was married to Antonio Ayub, a Melkite merchant from the village of Douma in Lebanon. Her table is remembered as central to women’s patronage circuits, open to migrants of all sects and fortunes. It was through her hospitality that Melkites got their own church in Mexico City: I’m going to tell you about Porta Coelli. . . . My father [had] a bunch of friends which came to our house a lot . . . Melkites, but they call them Kwetlis. They used to play gin, even though my father wasn’t a gambler. They played, or they just came [to visit]. My mom was friends with the ladies. . . . A priest came from Lebanon; his name was Father Chami. . . . Very nice man, a lovely person, but he didn’t have a church. . . . There was a lunch at Silvia Ayub’s house. Silvia always supported everyone. . . . A very nice, a very fine lady. So she hosted a lunch at her house, with President Alemán and the ministers, and as the representative of the Lebanese colony, my dad . . . people said he had a personality. . . . The Archbishop of Mexico was there, such a charming man, ugly as hell, but so funny, he was the one who opened the way for the church, Luis María Martínez. . . . So there they were and Monsignor asked my dad, “Don Luis, how is Father Chami?” “The poor guy,” my father said, “from here to there and from there to here. Mr. President, couldn’t you give me a little church that is over in Venustiano Carranza? It’s [housing] an archive of yours.” “Don Luis, the national assets guy is sitting right there.” So my dad turned around to the national assets guy and told him about the priest’s case. “Yes, Don Luis, I’ll be expecting you tomorrow.” My dad’s office was next door to the ministry in those days. So he went to see the guy, they were very nice and told him yes they just had to remove the archive . . .

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so all the Kwetlis got together and got some money together . . . at the dinner in our house, they came and said “I’ll give this much,” the Hajj [family] and everyone . . . the place was pretty run down. They cleaned everything and fixed everything. And they decided to keep . . . a Christ [figure] that was really famous. All these people from the provinces came to La Merced every Saturday to visit him . . . you see, in that environment, that’s how it could be done.32

Miguel Alemán was president of Mexico between 1946 and 1952. The case for patronage is clear in the story of how a state-­owned colonial building was entrusted to Melkite migrants for their use as a religious community.

Undesirables In the 1920s and 1930s, Mashriqis met with increasing hostility in the American Mahjars as states moved toward restrictions on migration.33 Restrictions had specific economic, political, and demographic contexts, though the trend spanned the continent. Migration, like urban poverty, was debated in the racial terms of eugenics. The United States introduced immigration quotas in 1921, when a recession and the saturation of its industrial labor market made large incoming flows of workers redundant.34 Under the leadership of experts like Madison Grant and eugenicist Charles B. Davenport, who had organized the Galton Society in 1918 “in order to foster research, promote eugenics, and restrict immigration,” labor saturation translated into hostility toward supposedly inferior and therefore undesirable Southern European races.35 Eugenic language and logic seeped into public usage as authoritative modern science and was incorporated into public debates in Latin American contexts. In Central America and the Caribbean—Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, and Venezuela—merchants organized, requesting governments to restrict immigration and expel resident foreigners. Governments responded to national lobbies. Anti-­ immigration legislation across the Americas specified the exclusion of particular national categories. The extent to which race and nation were conflated and naturalized was variable. Eugenics-­inspired virulence was particularly strong in Colombia, where impoverished Arabs, Jews, and Eastern Europeans were collectively known as la polaqueria, “that bunch of Poles.” Labeled Semitic, Arabs and Jews were indistinguishable from Eastern European migrants in popular discourse and the press in Mexico as well. In 1923, an article in the El Universal daily reported that a girl of



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humble background had stabbed “an Arab of Ukrainian nationality” to death when he tried to rob her of her virtue.36 This tragic statement indexes the identification of Jews and Arabs through peddling and poverty in Mexican popular imaginaries. Mexico passed restrictions in 1927, Brazil and Colombia in 1937, and Bolivia followed suit in 1940.37 The Mexican ban of 1926–1927 followed a large and confessionally diverse influx of migrants in 1924 and 1925, two years that together account for the largest numbers of Mashriqi migrants to Mexico ever recorded. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Ottoman bans on emigration were no longer enforced.38 Mandate authorities struggled to impose limits on departures. The 1920s marked a period of more rural Lebanese migration and more urban Syrian migration to Mexico than in earlier decades. The Lebanese cities of Beirut and Tripoli together sent only 19 percent of migrants, while Damascus and Aleppo accounted for nearly 60 percent of Mahjaris born in Syria.39 Growing numbers of Arab Jews and Palestinians left the Mashriq as tensions mounted in British Palestine and the harassment of Jews in neighboring Arab countries intensified.40 The early 1920s were also a time when migrants were extraordinarily mobile, as noted in chapter 2. In Mexico and Central America, restricted national categories of people were required to have mounting amounts of capital with them in order to be allowed past immigration authorities. Policy followed the local logic of defining race through class and the liberal tradition of restricting citizenship through property. Racial and national categories were enforced, and therefore produced, as economic categories. In October 1922, immigrants had to carry the sum of fifty pesos or the equivalent in another currency, as well as enough money to cover the cost of reaching their destination in Mexico. “Chinese” and “Negroes,” however, were required to carry the sum of five hundred pesos.41 This meant that most Asians and blacks were in practice excluded from immigrating. This stipulation can be read as discriminating against two racial groups, or as the overt conditioning of race on property. Increasingly, only passengers traveling in first and second class, and eventually only passengers traveling in first class, were allowed to disembark in Latin American ports.42 A French observer described Mashriqis as the majority of these authorized immigrants in 1924: The importance and activities of the Lebanese colony in Mexico grow constantly. No boat arrives from Europe which doesn’t bring a new contingent of our Near Eastern protégés here: the Compagnie Géné-

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rale Transatlantique profits particularly from this emigration since the Syrio-­Lebanese make up about three quarters of the first- and second-­ class passengers that disembark from its steamships at Veracruz.43

Mashriqis were resented by Mexican nationals, but also by other migrants who had historically monopolized the textile sectors in which they were a growing presence. Consuls had cast Mahjari business as a threat to French merchants in Mexico since 1905. Consul Périer reported in 1924: They have been very successful; specializing almost exclusively in the trade of textiles, silks, and seamstress supplies, they are very fierce competitors to the Barcelonnettes and represent a serious menace to the prosperous activity of our compatriots. The frequent complaints that I receive about them leave no doubt in my mind regarding their behavior. Completely devoid of commercial probity, they don’t hesitate to shirk their commitments when they perceive that such an attitude can raise their profits substantially. Most of their profits come from the smuggling of silks and luxury textiles. Their frequent travels to France have no other objective: the slight volume of these goods allows them to easily transport them in their personal luggage, evading the enormous tariffs that fall on these products. This assures them, besides certain profit, the possibility of drawing a clientele through prices that are impracticable for honest merchants. First-­class passengers in our steamships, through their intrigues and their sense of corruption they develop complicities among the staff on board as well as among the customs officers, so that in practice, they import for free a large part of the merchandise that is the object of their traffic. It is on this improbity, of which they have made a rule, that the prosperity of their businesses rests.44

Périer’s report is problematic in extending the practices of some to the entire migrant population, naturalizing doubtful morality as an attribute of “Oriental character.” Despite the prevalence of informal economies in the region, failing to declare goods brought into the country for sale is singled out as an attribute or propensity of a particular nation. French administrative Orientalism fused “habits,” “tradition,” “history,” and “blood” in the category of race, reducing what appeared to be detailed observations of behavior to a caricature Oriental: If settling in Mexico has not made them lose the deplorable habits which they owe to the long tradition of their past, it hasn’t made them lose the characteristics which they derive from their Oriental blood and the per-



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secutions they were subjected to either. The characteristics of the race can also be found here, exalted rather than attenuated: wily and tenacious, lacking scruples and dignity, insinuating, lusting for profit, particularly, if not solely through trade, the Syrio-­Lebanese are remarkably well equipped for business.45

Some of these features were appropriated by migrants and revalued as their attributes in Middle American popular culture. Contraband arguments would be mobilized a decade later to condemn Mahjaris as irresponsible and unconcerned with the Mexican nation’s welfare. Migrants were increasingly described by immigration authorities and the popular press as carriers of dirtiness and disease. The tropes of dirt, disease, and crime provided excellent rationales for policing borders, which were thereby reified, and for instigating moral panics.46 In March of 1926, Mexico passed an immigration law expanding the list of medical reasons for which migrants could be refused entry. French officials noted the growing vigilance at Mexican ports and recommended that inspection of migrants before departure be more systematic: Mexico, July 13th 1926 Once again, Mexican authorities have refused entry to forty-­seven Syrians or Lebanese who arrived on the . . . Hollande-­Amérique. Sanitary prescriptions and other requirements of the new laws being strictly applicable, a severe inspection of emigrants is necessary on departure. Eye diseases, particularly trochonia, are sure causes for refusal of the Lebanese.47

The same law stipulated that migrants should pre­sent official documents when entering and leaving Mexico and demonstrate that they held ten thousand pesos to cover basic living expenses while in the country. While authorities in Latin America were busy making borders and racializing incoming migrants, authorities in the United States were racializing Mexican citizens through disease. As early as 1916, epidemics were cited as the reason for making bodily inspection tighter at the US-­Mexico border, where a border patrol was put in place in 1924. As the racial dimension of objectionable classes became palpable in the global zeitgeist, Mexico passed stringent legislation barring the immigration of “Semitic races” in 1926. Citizens of Turkey, Syria, and various Eastern European countries were refused entry whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. French consuls interpreted the logic of exclusion for mandate authorities:

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If the Department allows me to write frankly once again, I would reveal to you, in case you don’t already know it, that our protégés are quite looked down upon abroad, whether in Haiti, in Mexico, in Trinidad, in Venezuela, in Costa Rica, etc. They are in fact considered, just as the Chinese and the Japanese, a scarcely assimilable element. Generally very frugal, illiterate, having left their countries without documents, they take from their Semitic origins cleverness in trade and the love of gain. Most are traders, even peddlers. They live with little and thesaurize; in any case, when they are generous it is because they are making a deal or wish to attenuate the hostility of the people among which they live. However, it must be recognized that their sense of family is quite developed; after the war, the notable Syrians of Costa Rica did, in fact, send some sums of money to their unfortunate relatives who had stayed in Lebanon.48

Descriptions of Mahjaris as Semitic linked visible poverty, Orientalization, and racialization, depicting the moral characteristics of Semites as greediness and a compensatory altruism toward kinsmen. Those fragments of the migrant population that could successfully pre­sent themselves as European, or as white rather than Semitic, were likely to avoid exclusion. In July of 1927, Armenians, Syrians, and Arabs were banned from entering Mexico. Authorities argued that they presented economic threats to the nation. Migrants of these nationalities were said to compete with locals in commerce without contributing to the creation of national wealth, overcrowding urban centers and entering the country under false pretenses. The Mexican Department of Migration stated: FIRST: Beginning in the last four-­month period of the present year and during the years of 1928 and 1929 the admission of laboring immigrants of Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Arabic, and Turkish origin is suspended; considering as laborers those persons who on their arrival in the country do not possess a capital of at least ten thousand pesos. SECOND: Excepted from the foregoing restrictions are: a) Husbands and wives of those who have immigrated legally b) The ascendants and descendants of persons who have legally immigrated, provided that the latter have an honest means of earning a living and are in good financial positions. THIRD: During the period referred to in the first part of this order Mexican consuls will refrain from granting visas on passports and issuing identification cards to the persons affected by the same.49



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With only 1.4 percent of Mashriqis declaring themselves farmers between 1920 and 1929, accusations that migrants entered the country falsely claiming to be rural laborers were unreasonable. Some claims in the government’s argument were false, others feeble, but they were the law. The ban caused a commotion, spurring a flurry of reactions from French authorities and Mahjar notables, who were indignant. Plots were hatched to prevent it from coming into effect. The affect prevalent in the colony and the French strategy for intervention were described by Minister Périer on August 6, 1927: A decree issued by the Ministry of the Interior has just suspended the immigration of Syrians and Lebanese, effective as of September 1st and for twenty-­eight months. Vivid emotion reigns among our protégés established in Mexico, who fear that the government might soon decide their mass deportation. I will make urgent appeals to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of the Interior. I have assembled the facts and arguments which will allow me to demonstrate that Syrian and Lebanese immigration has been, on the whole, profitable to this country and that no good reason can be invoked to justify such exceptional measures.50

Mahjari concern was not unfounded. Even Périer only managed to get the Mexican minister of the interior to say that he would reexamine the question.51 Though he insisted, prompted by Mahjaris and the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, Périer only secured an exception for migrants to board the steamship Cuba and was told that “the abrogation of the decree could not be immediately envisaged.”52 In order for potential migrants to be better informed about restriction updates and visa requirements, a Mexican consulate staffed by a career diplomat was established in Beirut in 1927. M. Lera, who had been posted as consul in St. Nazaire, was sent by the Mexican government in response to a March 1927 request by the French minister of foreign affairs. News of his impending arrival was sent to the high commissioner and to the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique by Périer.53 Mashriqis used a modernist racial taxonomy to establish their desirability as citizens. Representatives of the Lebanese Nationalist Party, founded by Don Julián Slim, sent the following letter to the Mexican minister of the interior on August 9, 1927: Minister of the Interior, Sir, Because we owe it to the Mexican people, we offer you this plea. . . .

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May we be allowed to pre­sent the considerations that underlie our request; allow us to examine the section on which the limitation agreement is based: “That the immigration of individuals of Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Arab, or Turkish origin has reached its limit in that its influence can be felt on the national economy in an unfavorable manner due to their agglomeration in urban centers.” It is true that numerous peddlers can be found in urban centers. Those merchants are not of Lebanese origin, we have no relationship of any kind to them; on the contrary, they damage our line of business. We will take the liberty of noting that the few Lebanese who are coming into the country (since in recent times this migration has been very limited), arrive by recommendation of relatives or friends who employ them in their businesses or industries. The Lebanese [man] is a useful settler, advantageous for commercial development, and we demand the right to be treated fairly. The Lebanese [man] is of an aesthetic race; he is part of the white Caucasian race. He has always lived independently, preserving his moral traditions, being monogamous, leading an austere life, and possessing an ardent and profound love of freedom. We hope that you, sir, on . . . closely perusing our way of being and of living in public and in private . . . we are confident, because you are noble in your actions and honest in your proceedings, that you will have the dignity of modifying your limiting agreement in so far as the Lebanese are concerned.54

The document pro­jects as fact the fiction that the Lebanese could and should be recognized as different from other Mashriqis on the grounds of class, religion, and race. The claim that Lebanese were Caucasian whites was instrumental in the postcolonial Mexican context, where whiteness is an attribute of the colonizer. Immigration restrictions could be circumvented and legislation differentially enforced. A French consul stationed in Costa Rica reported: “I am told that an arrêté, some say a law, somewhat fallen out of use, places obstacles on the entry of Syrians, Turks, Hungarians, etc. in Costa Rica; this allows government functionaries at the ports to profit discreetly.”55 Wadih Bulhosen, who grew into a Druze notable of the Mexican Mahjar, was initially refused entry as a young man. With a keen eye and a sharp tongue, he testified: Whoever paid well was allowed through without any problems. When the family wasn’t there to help, the doctor declared that the passenger had trachoma; it was all lies, because whoever paid was healthy and those who didn’t were not. I came to Mexico in 1928; I arrived at the



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port of Veracruz. I had a doctor’s certificate with me from Lebanon, stating that I didn’t have any diseases, especially no eye diseases. My father and my brother were supposed to be at the boat at noon to speak to the doctor in Spanish, but they arrived an hour late and the doctor had already refused me entry. . . . I had to go back. I was in Marseille for a month with some relatives but afterward I went to Lebanon. In 1934, I traveled to New York. I was there with the Aboumrad family; they were good friends of my father. Don Amin sent for me to the boat, they set up a bail fee at the Mexican consulate in New York, and they sent me on the train.56

Multiple mediations were necessary to circumvent restrictions: the intervention of patrons, kinsmen on both sides of the Atlantic, time, geography, and money; given access to all of those, entry was still possible.

Repatriation Not everyone was able to ride the revolution to prosperity, and the global economic crisis created by the Great Depression pushed many into indigence. Repatriation, the assisted return migration of Mahjaris who had run into trouble or economic difficulty, was facilitated by private associations and by mandate authorities. The contrast between two mandate interventions regarding subjects in Mexico, one a moving account of misfortune, the other a scathing portrayal of a large group described as a band of scoundrels posing as priests, illustrates how mandate authorities mobilized a moral grammar to sift through repatriation requests. In spite of a fund built up through fees charged Mashriqis wishing to migrate, assistance was granted only to those found morally worthy, conditioning access to public resources on loyalty to the mandate. Registration in French consulates as Syrian and Lebanese nationals, a process described in chapter 2, became an active filter for repatriation aid. Assistance was forthcoming to those who satisfied French bourgeois criteria of decency, which included loyalty to France as polity and cultural beacon. Witness the kind words of the French consul in Mexico City regarding the case of Georges Hajj: Consulate of France in Mexico, Mexico City, March 18, 1930 To Monsieur the High Commissioner of the French Republic Regarding the States of Syria, Lebanon, the Alawites and Jabal Druze Beyrouth Through correspondence dated 18th of October 1929, you requested from me various inquiries regarding the morality and the state of [mis]

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fortune of M. Henry Georges HADJ, identified as a resident of Mexico City, Mexico, Calle de la Soledad No. 52. The interested party, duly requisitioned, appeared at my Chancellery and stated that he finds himself in a most precarious situation, which was confirmed by the investigation to which I proceeded. Henry Georges HADJ is of sound morality, and the very critical situation through which affairs in Mexico are currently traversing is the cause of the indigence in which he finds himself. In these conditions, I can only emit a very favorable recommendation for the repatriation of this Lebanese [man] who seems to merit the support he requests.57

We don’t know if Hajj made it back to Lebanon safely, but French authorities benevolently evaluated him as a case of poverty through misfortune. He was clearly a member of the deserving poor. The second case pre­sents a stark contrast. The letter opening the dossier in 1931 is signed by two men, Elia Lavan Audisho and Zacarías M. Galiana. It is written in awkward English:58 To the Minister of Foreign Relations, Paris, France The undersigned, representing a group of forty Syrians who are at present living in this Country, take the liberty of writing to you to put before you the following proposition: We have been living in this Country for some time, but the situation in general is so bad that we can hardly live and our position is very difficult. As we have no money for our trip back to our country, we would like to have your Government to take us back to France, as we are willing to help the French government in any possible way. We would work as farmers and our young sons will be willing to serve in the French army. If the French government accepts our proposition but does not want to take us to France, then we can be sent to Syria, and we will also be glad to serve in the French army. We hope to receive a favorable reply from the French government to take us back either to France or to Syria. Puebla, Pue., Mexico, 11th February 193159

Since migration often stemmed from a desire to avoid conscription in the Mashriq, the statement is a moving example of capitulation. The tone of the text is not abject, however; the migrants are proposing a fair exchange, a deal; they are not begging for imperial grace. The response to this request for official repatriation was very different from the response to M. Hajj. Minister Périer identified the plaintiffs as Mesopotamians-­Iraqis, and therefore under British mandate:



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According to the investigation to which I proceeded, as well as inquiries made in the archives of my Chancellery, none of the people involved is worthy of interest . . . of the forty people on whose behalf those signing the request demand repatriation, only two opted, one for the Syrian nationality and the other for the Lebanese nationality, and even then they did so providing false information on their place of birth, as two witnesses verified . . . the people in question are false missionaries, born in Zirini (Mesopotamia), who live off of contributions they collect supposedly toward the support of war widows and Christians massacred by the Turks. . . . Lavan Audisho (called Manuel, also Elías Audisho), name under which he opted, declaring himself born in Deir el Zor (Syria) while he was born in Zirini, did not wait for Your Excellency’s response, having been forced to leave Mexico City, where the police were looking for him to expel him as well as several of his compatriots. I hereby attach for Your Excellency, for any practical purposes, the photograph of a document, which was delivered to me by the Ministry of the Interior of Mexico. Given the background of the petitioner and the scarce interest offered by the group of people for whom repatriation is requested, my opinion is that there is no need to take into consideration the request which was the object of Your Excellency’s correspondence.60

While Audisho may have been a questionable character, the request involved forty people, families in desperate conditions willing to sacrifice their sons to military service in exchange for repatriation. That the delegate finds all forty of them “of little interest” underscores just how destitute they were, lacking the moral and political resources of wasta. They are portrayed as despicable, fleecing compatriots and probably naïve locals by appealing to two striking figures embodying vulnerability and fitting nicely with French and Mexican Orientalisms, war widows, and Christians under attack by ferocious (Muslim) Turks.

Revolutionizing Foreigners and Nationalization Mirroring the 1828 expulsion of Spaniards from Mexico in the wake of independence, foreigners became vulnerable in revolutionary Mexico as authorities sought legitimacy through reversal of Porfirian policies. In his work on the development of Mexican nationalism during the revolution and in the postrevolutionary decades (1911–1940) and the period’s concern with undesirable immigrants, Pablo Yankelevich notes that Middle

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Easterners were accused of smuggling contraband. The presidential administrations of Pascual Ortiz Rubio (1930–1932) and Abelardo L. Rodríguez (1932–1934) were especially concerned with the surveillance of immigrant commercial activities, as we shall see in chapter 4.61 Since Ortiz Rubio was a member of the former Porfirian elite, as were members of his cabinet and diplomatic missions, many of them of Spanish or French origin, the administration’s aggression against immigrant commercial activity can be read as an attempt to consolidate its own legitimacy at the expense of migrants with a more recent presence in Mexico. The postrevolutionary social contract was exercised through official action. The National Registry of Foreigners, in which foreign nationals over fifteen years old were required to register, was established in 1932. It generated thousands of individual registration cards gathering a wealth of information: date and port of entry, address in Mexico, and physical constitution. Height, eye, hair, and skin color, the shape of facial features: eyebrows, forehead, mouth, mustache, beard, and nose. Cards also requested date and place of birth, marital status, occupation, native language and other languages spoken, and then in a cluster, current nationality, religion, and race. A photograph is attached to each registration card. Migrant bodies were carefully described. Even when all of a Mashriqi migrant’s colors are identified as dark, and in spite of skin being described as morena (tan), the racial category assigned was white. As Mashriqis interacted with registry bureaucrats, who constituted the wide surface of contact between migrants and the state, 93 percent were labeled white. Though some officials may have been persuaded by bribes, the near-­universal assignment of Mahjaris to whiteness suggests that, between 1932 and 1952, registry officials followed local common sense in reading their bodies as white. In spite of this, in 1934, President Rodríguez extended the 1927 ban on Middle Eastern migration. Immigrants were required to hold ten thousand pesos or possess technical skills approved by the Ministry of Economics to enter Mexico. Investors holding over twenty thousand and intending to specialize in agricultural or industrial pursuits were acceptable, but merchants would not be allowed to enter Mexico “by any means.”62 In October of 1935 the Ministry of Economics prepared a survey of foreigners’ property in Mexico. It cited the twenty-­seventh article of the 1917 Constitution, which stipulates that only Mexicans born in the country or naturalized citizens had the right to acquire property in Mexico.63 As means of enforcing the boundaries of the nation, postrevolutionary



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Figure 3.1 Wasela Abuali and her husband Assad Salman Abuali, Druze couple of the Mexican Mahjar, who returned to Lebanon in the 1940s.

bans on migration had a correlate in restrictions to naturalization. The new Law on Foreignness and Naturalization stipulated that the following were foreigners: II. The children of a foreign father or a foreign mother and unknown father, born on the national territory, until they reach the age of legal adulthood, if they remain under parental supervision.

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VI. Mexican women who marry a foreigner, retaining their status as foreigners even if widowed.64

Nationalized or naturalized foreigners and their children were considered Mexican. In 1939, foreigners wishing to naturalize had to file their request at the Ministry of Foreign Relations in Mexico City, and Middle Eastern migrants were rarely granted naturalization.65

Morality and Race in Postrevolutionary Popular Practice Mounting complaints addressed to the Mexican government by an array of local agents as the global economic crisis deepened suggest a link between requests for the expulsion of Mahjaris and the exceptional economics of the period. Beginning in the late 1920s and escalating in the early 1930s, complaints coincided with the peak of the Depression.66 Groups of merchants, unionized workers, and other groups of citizens gathered signatures and filed complaints against Mashriqis. Cases were documented in Chihuahua, San Luis Potosí, Nayarit, Sinaloa, Veracruz, Mexico City, and Chiapas. Mahjari prosperity was an obvious source of tension between local populations and the migrants. Mahjari encroachment on commercial establishments and networks and their vulnerable visibility as rich foreigners in the postrevolutionary context made them targets for policy designed by rival elites and retaliation by workers, who drew on new weapons provided by the revolutionary social contract. Migrant enterprise and migrant labor were perceived as competing with locals at all levels of the social structure. Less-­fortunate migrants were said to pre­sent competition to the Mexican urban poor, since, according to a right-­wing newspaper in 1934, Mahjaris participated in “humble” commercial niches traditionally dominated by working-­class women, such as the sale of tamales.67 Affluent merchants threatened elites and the middle class through their commercial activity and their display of class distinction. Complaints made use of revolutionary rhetoric on the democratization of rights to the nation and its riches, denouncing Mashriqis as outsiders and their harvesting of national wealth as illegitimate. Increasingly, they adopted the modern scientific discourse on race. Learned middle-­class Mexicans first called for official intervention, invoking apocalyptic racial perils and other contaminations. In 1932, the Pro-­Nation National Defense Block was established in San Luis Potosí. It sought for Mexicans to control Mexican commerce and to prevent racial



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degeneration, both of which could be accomplished by restraining the immigration of “Turks, Syrian-­Lebanese, Czechoslovakians, Poles, and Jews, or of any nationalities of the many that are invading the market with serious injury to national commerce.”68 Subalterns quickly adopted this discourse. Five years later, the Cámara Sindical Obrera (Unionized Workers’ Chamber) of Ciudad Juárez was making similar arguments. Not only did workers judge foreign competition in petty commerce unfair, they claimed that fruit, vegetables, and meat sold by foreigners such as Jews, Arabs, and Japanese was infested with contagious diseases that could infect Mexicans. In 1933, a Pro-­Race Committee lobbied in Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Mexico City for curbing the entry of undesirable immigrants such as Chinese, Turks, Arabs, and Lithuanians because of the immorality of their payment schemes and mafia connections.69 According to Torreón’s municipal archive, of seventy-­four Middle Eastern merchants registered in 1938, a third had Mexican employees, some as many as twenty-­five of them. An employee of the national Ministry of Economics wrote to President Lázaro Cárdenas, lamenting the fact that “Middle Easterners control the clothing market and employ Mexicans as servants.”70 A Nationalist Committee in Nueva Rosita accused Mahjaris of inflating prices and sucking away scarce savings. Both of these parties argued that Middle Easterners were violating Article 123 of the Constitution, which stipulated equal pay for equal work regardless of nationality, in reversal of the Porfirian practice of giving preference to foreigners.71 Why were criollos and mestizos enraged by the fact that Mahjaris employed Mexicans? In employing Mexicans, Mashriqis created jobs, but they also performed a hierarchy in which Mexicans were subordinate. In the United States, one could attempt to be modern “on the backs of blacks.”72 Becoming American by asserting white superiority over African Americans was a lesson that many immigrants learned.73 In Mexico, one can gain status by asserting white superiority over mestizos and Indians. The revolutionary social contract negated this, but the practice persisted. The visible subordination of working Mexicans to Mahjaris became a source of outrage, a publicized portrait of servitude. Mashriqis’ defense of their whiteness was a thorny affair, and their vulnerability was complicated by the contingency of patronage and tensions between Mexican and French authorities, as the next chapter will illustrate.

Migr ants and t he Law

Chapter 4

At five o’clock in the afternoon of January 8, 1923, lawyers and staff of the Fifth Court of Civil Affairs descended on Don Antonio Letayf ’s business practice at 15 Pino Suárez Street, Mexico City. They sealed the large safe and a regular-­sized one, placed seals on five doors, and turned in the nine keys to external merchandise showcases to the executors. At 5:40 p.m., the lawyers moved on to Rancho San Joaquín, a rural property in the town of San Joaquín, municipality of Tacuba, also listed among the failed partnership’s assets. The rancho was built on the orchard grounds of the former Convent of San Joaquín and included part of the convent itself.1 In the presence of Antonio’s brother Jorge Letayf, at 5:45 a safe found in the office was sealed; seals were also placed on four windows and several doors. At this point, a man appeared, a foreigner judging by his manner of speaking. Before storming out without having provided his name, he stated that he strictly opposed the procedure and that if they continued placing seals he would call the authorities, for he was controller on the rancho and the property was mortgaged. The party, including Don Antonio’s legal representative and the executor, decided to do the rounds of the exterior of the main hacienda building. They noticed a mortgage warning extended by the Second Court of Civil Affairs attached to the façade, above the main entrance. They immediately suspended the operation and didn’t remove the other seals only because the controller was nowhere to be found. They came back to the rancho the next morning, found everything intact, and proceeded to destroy all seals.2 Seals were also found intact at Pino Suárez, where exhaustive inventories were drawn over the next couple of days. The team then moved on to a house at 32 San Marcos Street, where they drew inventories in the presence of Antonio Letayf. Fifty years old and a naturalized Mexican citizen since 1898, Don Antonio was among the most successful Mahjar notables in early twentieth-­century Mexico. When, between June 1922 and July 1924, nine-



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teen judicial attacks accused him of fraud, judicial calumny, and swindling in short succession, his case looked bleak. French consuls had blacklisted him as a Germanophile during the Great War, agents of the Banco Germánico (Germanic Bank) coveted his bankruptcy, and Article 33 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution enabling the expulsion of undesirable foreigners was applied to him. His ruin and its resolution shed light on the dark underbelly of the Mexican Mahjar. Conceptualizing the Mahjar as a transnational formation underscores the relevance of concurrent jurisdictions—their confrontations, synergies, and ambiguities. Trajectories in the Mexican Mahjar developed at the crossroads of three political and social formations. In their encounters with the law and lawlessness, Mahjaris were vulnerable to tensions between Mexican rebels and officials, French mandate administrators, and the migrant politics of notables. Legality, though constantly invoked, was malleable for all participants. These three clientelar cultures of power interacted on the uneven ground of global politics—mediated by notables, instrumentalized from the top down to implement state and notable projects and from the bottom up as safety nets. Targets for pillage during the revolution, Mahjari credit economies were also particularly vulnerable to the global economic depressions of 1921 and 1929. Suspicion of foreigners blossomed in postrevolutionary political discourse, in contrast to Porfirian policies welcoming desirable others. Foreigners were protected by the 1917 Constitution, which guaranteed them the same rights as Mexicans. Yet Article 33 enabled the president to expel nonnationals identified as inconvenient with no previous warning or legal process. Xenophobia flourished as subaltern Mexicans complicit with local and federal government agents denounced “pernicious foreigners” for expulsion. Religious difference often accounted for suspicion; the specters of terrible Muslim Turks and baby-­eating Jews were potent phantoms among popular and elite audiences. The two Others were often indistinguishable to the Catholic eye.3 Many Ottoman Mahjar fortunes were lost in the transition to French administration, whether through deliberate targeting by French authorities, through French officials’ rackets, or through studied neglect of Mahjaris judged disloyal to France when they required support. Orientalism and Islamophobia, characteristic of French patronage in the Ottoman Empire, informed evolving mandate administration. Sequential filters systematically sorting migrants conditioned who could claim French protection in Mexico. During the Great War, French imperial alliances worked against merchants blacklisted through Franco-­British-­



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American collaboration. Procedures like the 1921 census and the 1926 citizenship registry, designed to solve administrative tasks and comply with the Treaty of Lausanne, conditioned favorable review of dossiers by the Franco-­Mexican Reparations Commission a decade later. Notables cultivated patronage networks with officialdom through personal relationships, private reputations, and encounters in intimate settings. These practices lent themselves to many shades of gray: French and Mexican interventions for or against Mahjaris spanned the official, informal, and even illegal. Some subjects could mobilize enough resources, including prestigious local marriages and networks, to work the system. Many others were not so lucky, losing access to the fruits of their labor. Making the vulnerability of even exceptionally successful Mahjaris visible, this chapter is crucial to revising the narrative of unproblematic migrant social ascent that has characterized histories of national reception. In order to secure French favor, notable families, speaking for the colony, cultivated political and affective ties to French authorities through constant demonstrations of loyalty. This migrant elite of model subjects went as far as funding pacification efforts in Syria, requesting direct colonial subjection, clamoring for the status of Lebanon to be the same as that of Algeria. Such requests occurred at a crucial moment, from 1926 to 1937, when the Reparations Commission negotiated government compensation to French citizens who had suffered material losses during the Mexican Revolution. French authorities’ ambivalent protection of mandate subjects during the commission’s work sparked debates about the rights of protégés and the rights of mandate powers to negotiate with sovereign postcolonial governments on their behalf. These processes consolidated the exclusion of subaltern Mashriqi populations, pushing them out of the Mahjar—the social formation spanning Mashriq and diasporic space—leaving them stranded in Mexico.

Don Antonio and the Depression of 1921 Don Antonio Letayf is remembered as the first Mahjari to marry into the Porfirian aristocracy, accessing the top rungs of the Mexican elite with all that such a stellar match provided for him personally but also for “the colony.”4 Born in Beirut to the Deir al-­Qamar family formed by Maron Letayf and Susana Jahel, Antonio migrated to Mexico and went into commerce. Two younger brothers, Georges and Latif, also migrated and initially set up a successful business in Durango but moved to Mexico City after losing their venture to rebel violence during the revolution.5 A



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man of twenty-­eight, Antonio married twenty-­seven-­year-­old Guadalupe Bourge in January of 1897 and was naturalized as a Mexican citizen the following year. Guadalupe was Franco-­Mexican; her father Juan Bourge was from Lyon, and her mother was Dolores Fuentes.6 In 1909 Antonio Letayf presided over the Ottoman Committee for the Hundredth Anniversary of Mexican Independence, which orchestrated Mahjari participation in the lavish official festivities marking the occasion. He also headed the briefly circulating periodical Al-­Etedal in 1912–1913, in collaboration with José Gastine. Don Antonio—Uncle Antonio to the children of prosperous migrants—sat at the crossroads of many avenues to wealth. He did business with fellow migrants—among them Alejandro Kuri, with whom he established a six-­year business partnership, Kuri Primos y Sucesores, in March 1916.7 He was well connected to other prestigious foreign colonies reaping profits in the 1920s: the Banco Germánico of South America, the French Ollivier & Cía. Sucs., the Spanish Banca Asturiana, and the American National Paper and Type Company. Business went well; he was a rich man who worked with the Lebanese model of credit. He was able to help his brothers, facilitating Latif ’s business travels to Japan.8 With Ottoman designation of Germany as protector of its migrant subjects in Mexico during the Great War, Don Antonio became a known Germanophile. Problems began when in December of 1917 he was blacklisted through French and American vigilance of his contributions to the newspaper Al-­ Khawater, edited by José Helú, almost dragging his brothers Georges and Latif onto the blacklists with him the following year.9 With a year of their partnership left, Don Antonio and Don Alejandro Kuri held nearly 100,000 pesos in credit documents extended to various partners and ventures when the economic depression of 1920–1921 hit and US markets went into recession. Mexico resented the swift if brief collapse.10 As unemployment skyrocketed in the United States, migrant laborers, including Mexican workers, were deported.11 US markets for Mexican agricultural produce and raw materials dropped, affecting productive activity and therefore commerce and consumption. Financial markets contracted and creditors grew nervous. Cash became scarce, affecting the peddler credit economy particularly, as memoirs recall. As peddlers’ clients became unable to pay, peddlers were unable to meet debts with the wholesale merchants who extended them credit, and a good number of both were soon out of business.12 Between June of 1922 and July of 1924, business partners sued Don Antonio in various city courts, including the Tribunal Superior de Justicia



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del Distrito Federal, for a total of over one million Mexican pesos.13 Lawsuits piled up. Carlos Minne, a German engineer, sued him on the unpaid sale of an expensive house on the Calle del Clavel, in today’s Colonia San Rafael, a mortgage suit.14 Luis F. Madrid filed another mortgage lawsuit, and Madame Piedad Pacheco de Nájera demanded property confiscation; both claims concerned the house at 32 San Marcos Street, Mexico City.15 Banca Asturiana filed suit on a personal loan.16 Ollivier & Cía. Sucs. presented executive mercantile suits.17 Don Antonio was familiar with the practice of taking debtors to court; he had done it recently himself. When Antonio Ledoyen proved unable to pay back a loan in 1919, Letayf had pressed for the sale of the mortgaged Quinta Julio. After several rounds of public auction yielded no buyers, Letayf eventually bought the mortgaged property himself.18 Ledoyen had struggled to hold on to his house, filing recourses to stall foreclosure: recurso de nulidad, rebeldía, amparo. He argued that the loan contract was invalid, that he had not received citations, that the address of notification was invalid because it was not his legal address, and that Letayf plotted against him with third parties. Ledoyen went so far as to claim that the loan had only been promised, never delivered.19 He refused to sign court documents when they were delivered to his home, claiming to know nothing of the matter at hand.20 When he came under attack, Don Antonio Letayf and his subordinates also arranged for him not to be around when tribunal citations were delivered. They refused to acknowledge receipt of such documents. On the single occasion when Don Antonio was “present and informed,” he said: “He hears and does not sign, for he does not consider it necessary.”21 This evasion exasperated the legal representatives of his former business partners. Especially vocal in his complaints, José Rosenstein—representing Carlos Minne—repeatedly accused Don Antonio and his lawyers of stalling, of toying with the letter of the law. Luis F. Madrid also argued that Don Antonio displayed bad faith by trying to “accumulate” his lawsuit and that of Madame Pacheco.22

Wasta in the Mahjar The situation became more complicated when Guadalupe Bourge de Letayf, Don Antonio’s elegant wife, sued both him and the Banco Germánico in November of 1922. Guadalupe sued the bank on the grounds of “nulidad de contrato and nulidad de hipoteca.”23 Rancho San Joaquín, a property bought from the three daughters and heirs of American gen-



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eral William Jackson Palmer for $25,000 in October of 1916, had been acquired under conjugal joint ownership.24 Formal ownership transfer of the rancho in August of 1917 made it subject to the new Ley de Relaciones Familiares (Family Ties Law), in effect since April 9, 1917. Doña Guadalupe claimed to be unaware that on April 6, 1921, her husband had double-­mortgaged the property to the Germanic Bank as collateral on two large sums of money. Credit extended to business ventures backed by Kuri Primos y Sucesores was absorbed by the bank for $99,904.73 and transactions between the bank and Kuri Primos amounted to $68,771.73 lent to this business partnership. In mortgaging joint property without her knowledge or consent, Doña Guadalupe argued, Don Antonio had acted in violation of the Family Ties Law, which prohibited the acquisition or transmission of such real estate or rights. The contract between Don Antonio and the bank was not binding to her and therefore did not affect the rancho.25 She requested that a different judge take the case on. The Germanic Bank retaliated by filing a vicious mortgage suit against Don Antonio, which escalated into additional lawsuits by late 1923 on the grounds of fraud and judicial calumny. According to the bank, Guadalupe colluded with her husband, suing him in order to retain some of their joint property, specifically Rancho San Joaquín, bought by the conjugal legal society Letayf-­Bourge de Letayf.26 The bank tried to discredit Doña Guadalupe’s lawsuit: “How believable can questions posed by the wife to her consort on this point be, when they live as husband and wife and their interests and intentions walk parallel to the same goal? Not at all, as Article 2020 of the Civil Code recognizes.”27 Don Antonio and Alejandro Kuri appeased the plaintiffs with the expectation that debts could be met through the sale of property in the city of Nabatiyeh. The Tribunal of Commerce of Beirut was requested to provide inventories of both partners’ property in Syria.28 Alejandro Kuri traveled to the Mashriq, hoping to sell and mortgage goods in order to meet debts contracted in Mexico.29 Creditors were willing to wait for payment, except for José González Ortega of the Germanic Bank, who pressed the partners to declare bankruptcy so that their property could be confiscated. According to Letayf, González Ortega constantly extorted them unduly, and what lay behind his ungentlemanly insistence was an obsession with acquiring Rancho San Joaquín at any cost. Alejandro Kuri and Don Antonio requested the benefit of judicial liquidation for Kuri Primos y Sucesores in February 1924, declaring their mercantile society bankrupt in order to avoid personal bankruptcy.30 The fifth judge of civil affairs, José María Rincón, had approved the request on January 8,



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1923. The society’s goods proceeded to be duly inventoried and sold off. Madame de Letayf pursued a civil suit against the Germanic Bank and Don Antonio in October 1923.31 Don Antonio in the meantime cultivated the friendship of judges, hosting lavish dinners at his rancho. This strategy spurred the more acrimonious suits when, on December 31, 1923, Don Antonio’s defense, attempting to retrieve the Letayf case from the Sixth Court of Civil Affairs’ jurisdiction, produced a photograph as legal proof that the judge had admitted invitations once the lawsuits were in course: I will allow myself to accompany the present writing, on the grounds conceived by this Honorable audience, with a photograph, in which appears the Sixth Judge of Civil Law, lunching at Rancho San Joaquín, sitting next to Mr. Antonio Letayf, in a banquet offered by the aforementioned Mr. Letayf to some people, warning that the lawsuit that this recusation addresses is pursued by the Banco Germánico de la América del Sur against the aforementioned Mr. Letayf, in the particular and as a business partner in the bankrupt house.32

The judge’s defense produced voluminous interrogations confirming the innocence of the judges who had attended the lunch party. The luncheon, it turned out, had been a spontaneous affair. Having agreed to get together for the pleasure of each other’s company and outside the context of work, a number of judges had agreed to organize a lunch outing and share its cost. José María Rincón, fifth judge of civil affairs and the only one out of the lot acquainted with Don Antonio, happened to mention that he knew of a lovely spot where they could eat and relax—Rancho San Joaquín. While these honorable gentlemen were at their food, Antonio Letayf, owner of the country house, stopped by. He was introduced, and photographs were taken: The said banquet having been offered a escote [each one paying for a proportional part of costs] among the gentlemen judges, Antonio Letayf had no part in it either as host or as guest. The judges that participated in the banquet at Rancho San Joaquín did so ignorant of the fact that the country house belonged to an individual who had pending business at various courts in this city, and who, above all, was bankrupt before the Fifth Court of Civil Affairs.33

Moreover, all witnesses agreed that it happened before October 10, 1923, and therefore before the current lawsuit was in progress. The judges and Don Antonio were absolved of complicity. The conflict had dwindled to



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a probatory suit by March 1924, but in June Don Antonio was again sued for swindling. The recourse of requesting that the case be assigned to a different judge was used so frequently by the Letayf couple that in February 1925 they had gone through five courts, from the Second through the Sixth Courts of Civil Affairs, with no judge deemed competent to take on their case. González Ortega finally requested that it go to the Tribunal Superior de Justicia.34 In March the tribunal ruled against the dismissal of the Sixth Court of Civil Affairs judge, sending the case back to his jurisdiction. In April, Article 33 of the 1917 Constitution, which allows “pernicious foreigners” to be expelled by presidential decree, was applied to Don Antonio, ordering his expulsion from Mexico.

Respectfully Requesting Justice On April 23, 1925, Guadalupe de Letayf and her daughter sent a desperate telegram to President Plutarco Elías Calles: Guadalupe de Letayf and daughter, of Mexican nationality, respectfully request justice. Our husband and father was victim of a constitutional outrage. Today, the General Inspection of Police detained him, sending him to Veracruz applying Article 33 to him. Antonio Letayf is a naturalized Mexican citizen since 1899, according to naturalization certificate we hold. We request of your justice that he be stopped in Veracruz for legal clarification to proceed. We express our respect.35

The family outcry was bolstered by a telegram from fashionable journalist Carlos Noriega Hope of El Universal, assuring the president that he had been misled, that Don Antonio was a Mexican citizen, though of Syrio-­Lebanese origin, and a businessman who didn’t meddle in politics. The next morning, Don Antonio’s son Ernesto sent a similar telegram from Veracruz asking President Calles for guarantees, assuring him that his father had been a naturalized Mexican citizen since May 1899, arguing that the expulsion was due to enemies’ maneuvers. President Calles assured Guadalupe, in a telegram dated April 24, that he had already seen to the matter with the Mexican Ministry of the Interior. Don Antonio was released on the president’s pardon, but perhaps also as a man viewed benevolently at the ministry, which he had petitioned a few years back, requesting permission to organize a raffle to benefit the Syrio-­Lebanese orphans of the Great War.36 The judge eventually ruled against Doña Guadalupe’s lawsuit in June.37 Unaware of Letayf ’s dire



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reputation with the French—he continued to be vocally critical of them through the late 1920s in Al-­Khawater—the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Relations inquired at the French legation as to Don Antonio and his wife’s status as French citizens or French protégés in September of 1925. Neither of them was registered at the legation.38 Antonio Letayf would be involved in at least one more legal skirmish, when in July of 1938 he was denounced to the Mexican Secret Service, the Oficina de Información Política y Social, as partner to two Mexican government officials extending naturalization letters to Mashriqi migrants for a fee.39 More interesting than Don Antonio’s good or bad intentions was the fact that his position allowed him to mobilize connections he had cultivated in his favor.

The Revolutionary National Pact Under the 1917 Constitution enshrining the Mexican Revolution, nonnationals were subject to expulsion from Mexico through the application of Article 33, which warns that “no foreigner should meddle in the political affairs of the country.” Pablo Yankelevich notes that the higher on the social ladder the accused, the more likely that his expulsion order could be negotiated. Wealthier foreigners had the economic and social capital to mobilize diplomatic representations, chambers of commerce, social clubs, and personalities to extend letters of recommendation or otherwise intercede on their behalf.40 Letayf was not the only one. Such was also the case of Tanos José and José Tanos, father and son, established merchants in Xalapa, who were imprisoned for expulsion and then released by President Portes Gil in March 1929 on French recommendation secured by the Lebanese Chamber of Commerce.41 In other cases, however, targets for expulsions were undesirable in compound ways, and a number of naturalized citizens were expelled. Between 1911 and 1940, Mexican presidents signed 1,185 expulsions; most were definitive, but a third of those expelled managed to have their sentences revoked.42 Expulsions peaked in 1921–1922, 1925, and 1928–1929. They correlated with tense homeland politics within Chinese communities in Mexico, anti-­Chinese rioting in northern Mexico, and the 1921 and 1929 economic depressions. In Pablo Yankelevich’s sample, the bulk of sentences were dictated against Spaniards (31.8 percent), Chinese (19 percent), and US citizens (10 percent).43 The vast majority of expulsions (98.6%) affected men, though some French and Polish women were expelled on accusations of prostitution. Only one expulsion of a Syrio-­ Lebanese woman is registered.44



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As a group, nationals of Japan, the Philippines, Korea, India, Turkey, Palestine, Syria-­Lebanon, and Arabia constituted a mere 4.6 percent of the global total of expulsions, but Mashriqis accounted for 90 percent of Asians expelled, excluding Chinese. According to Yankelevich, 75 percent of Arabs and 33 percent of Syrio-­Lebanese affected were expelled during Presidents Pascual Ortiz Rubio and Abelardo Rodríguez’s aggressive anti-­ immigrant business campaigns (1929–1934), when xenophobic tension exploded in the occasional murder of Mashriqis in rural and working-­class contexts.45 Merchants were targeted indirectly; Mashriqis who could be accused of political or delinquent activity were most vulnerable. Expulsion was linked to alleged political activity for 55.6 percent of Turks, 35.7 percent of Arabs, and 18 percent of Syrio-­Lebanese.46 Accusations of delinquency accounted for other cases. The geographical clustering of successful accusations in northern and Atlantic coastal Mexico suggests that Mahjari business was particularly vulnerable within certain regional social formations. Though the bulk of Mahjaris lived in Veracruz and Mexico City, most expulsions were dictated against residents of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Zacatecas, Tamaulipas, Tabasco, Campeche, Chiapas, and Yucatán. Palestinians in the north shared social space with wealthy Chinese merchants as model citizens entrusted with public peacekeeping.47 Their expulsions coincided with expanding antiforeigner sentiment and practice, initiated with anti-­Chinese rioting and massacres in the early 1920s. Affluent through their border business activity, Shia Muslim migrants in the Laguna region between Torreón and Saltillo and Greek Orthodox Palestinians in Saltillo and Monterrey were exposed to accusations from Maronite institutions and competitors, as had already occurred during the Great War. In the Mexican Gulf states, Mahjaris inhabited the new social landscapes of petroleum extraction and organized labor, where workers developed virulent anti-­immigrant rhetorics.48 More affluent migrants living in urban spaces where an associational thicket flourished were better protected from Mexican accusations, but expulsion requests resulted from conflictual Mahjari homeland politics, as a story covered in José Cheremonte’s El Correo de Oriente in April 1927 illustrated. Amin Cheban, owner of the textile factory La Estrella in Puebla, wrote to the Mexican Ministry of the Interior in early 1927, complaining of “These criminal Druze, who finding themselves in trouble with the law, met with their compatriots, potent in money and scams, and filed an expulsion request against my nephew in order to foil Justice.”49 The Ministry of the Interior responded that no such request had been



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filed against the journalist Baclini, who according to his uncle was fearful and in hiding. He had been assaulted by three Druze men after attacking them in his newspaper, La Unión, for collecting funds destined for Shekib Arslan in support of the Syrian Revolt: “the Revolution in Syria against France’s Mandate Government and against the Maronites, who, as is well known, have been and will always be loyal to the people of France. It is not true, as they argue, that my nephew is fostering divisions within our colony, because the division already exists, between friends and enemies of France.”50 The Druze population in Central Mexico could be morally dismissed, since the Syrian Revolt of 1924–1926 was labeled Druze by mandate authorities.51 In November of 1933, Mahjari merchants from the state of Nayarit pleaded with French authorities in Mexico City, requesting timely intervention against an ultranationalist Mexican campaign. Invoking the Chinese massacres in Sonora, they reported on a demonstration five hundred militants strong celebrating the 1910 revolution, chanting against foreigners and defending a “Mexico only for Mexicans” slogan. The Union of Mexican Merchants had distributed flyers during the event haranguing workers, merchants, and housewives: Woman: you, who have always watched over the well-­being of your home and the moral and material betterment of your family, without realizing it, you are contributing day to day to the ruin and desolation of your homeland, the humiliation of your brothers, of your parents or your husband, by consuming foreign merchandise while in workshops and factories there is an excess of production of those objects which these people, so dear to you, labor to make through the sweat of their brow. Buy no more from pernicious foreigners—RUSSIANS, POLES, SYRIO-­LEBANESE, ARABS, CHINESE and that bevy of foreign parasites that plot to conquer and peacefully invade our country, greatly violating our national integrity. . . . Are you Mexican? It is your duty to cooperate in the growth of your homeland. How? Avoid buying from Arab merchants, who mostly arrive in the country penniless and get rich in Mexico at the expense of the people, to then take their wealth to the Banks of their own land, for the progress of their homeland.52

Nayarit authorities, fearful of escalating tension, had closed down foreign-­owned shops for the day of the demonstration. Migrants were confident that if it were made clear to the locals that Mahjaris were under the protection of France—that they did have representation that would



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defend them—a tragedy could be avoided: “A word from you would calm our nerves and give us as well as our families some confidence.”53 Xenophobic activism grew through the establishment of comités pro-­ raza. Local authorities providing covert support to particularly active groups in western Mexico’s Nayarit and Mazatlán denied collaboration. Claiming all they could do was reprimand the committees, they implemented prohibitive taxes against foreign merchants. The French consul in Guadalajara made discreet inquiries through French traveling salesmen working for French commercial establishments in the region, also targeted as undesirable foreigners. Manuel Reynaud, awaiting federal authorization as French consul in Mazatlán, unofficially counseled Syrians and Lebanese to follow the example of Jewish communities and others labeled undesirable foreigners and use “all means possible” to garner local authorities’ favor.54 Complaints to federal authorities were counterproductive, since reprimands further irritated state governors, worsening the situation of nonnationals who complained. Of thirty-­two attempted expulsions of Mashriqis through Article 33 between 1922 and 1949 registered at the AGN, few list the cause prompting expulsion. Only 12.5 percent of those expelled were considered pernicious.55 Even fewer, barely 9 percent, were accused of specific crimes: two brothers were accused of tax fraud; other cases involved swindling and engaging in unspecified “illicit activities.”56 In over 53 percent of cases, foreigners were not accused of anything in particular; they were vaguely under investigation. Wealth was decried as injustice by Mexicans resentful of prosperous foreigners. Class-­based grievances often fueled legal complaints, feeding Islamophobia and anti-­Semitism. Congregations of marginal Mexicans requested 22 percent of expulsions between 1935 and 1949: the Comité Pro-­Raza of Texmelucan, Ejidatarios of Villa Corso, and Unión de Veteranos de la Revolución de Múzquiz. In 71 percent of cases, their targets were marked by religious difference: two thirds were Jews and the remainder were Muslims.57 In November 1939, “sixteen Jews and one Arab” were investigated for expulsion. In April of 1942 the expulsion of Jacobo Cojab, “Arab or Jew,” was requested.58 Though claiming Christianity was a way to protect oneself from the evil (presidential and popular) eye, Christian Mashriqis were also the object of popular protest. Basic rules of capitalist lending practices became morally suspect when applied by foreign nationals. In 1940 Don Julián Slim was denounced to President Lázaro Cárdenas by Bernardino Mena, member of the Centro de Comerciantes Mexicanos de la Merced, for “in-



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justices committed against merchants of La Merced.”59 Of twenty-­t wo lawsuits and legal encounters Julián Slim was involved in between 1930 and 1947, he was the one filing the suit ten times out of ten—evicting tenants, establishing new leases, suing people who owed him money.60 The Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Industria Textil filed complaints about Carlos Kuri Karam with the Secret Service in 1941.61 Guadalupe Olvera accused two pernicious foreigners, Arabs, of trying to cause her an irreparable loss, “un despojo irreparable.” Felipe Schoucair and Juan Tarjat Nemer threatened to take her house to compensate for an outstanding debt. Olvera described herself in terms perhaps too moving: “I am Mexican, aged, a widow, have been paralyzed for thirty years, my only assets home, children and little grandchildren, it is a house.”62 Complaints placed by quarrelsome neighbors were sometimes investigated and dismissed. One juicy note filed with the Mexican Secret Service in 1941 denounced a dangerous band of Syrian Jews living in downtown Mexico City: Various complaints have been received against the foreigners Faride Gelo or Hello Asís, José Hemse Oyuma, David Cufty (a) “The Bomb,” Amelia Faena Widow of Smeke, Elías Eskeme (a) “Elico,” Eduardo Eskeme, Isaac “The Tie Seller,” José Elías Yohma, Raquel Salame, Abraham, Isaac and José Salame, Moisés Misrache, Filomena or Alicia Out or Audet, Elías Yaudet, and David Lefti Hamoui, which consist in that they live off of robbery, gaming, and exploiting the public in various ways.63

On police investigation, the migratory status of the accused turned out to be in perfect order. Carolina Rivas, their landlady, confirmed that they were long-­term, stable residents of her premises; all had lived there for over a decade, they were punctual with rent payments, and she had no objection against them whatsoever. The case was dismissed, authorities glossing recurrent complaints in the building as the product of overcrowded living conditions breeding tensions and disputes.

Intrigue and Illegality: French Consular Staff in Mexico Mediation flirting with illegality and white-­collar crime was part of Mashriqi experience in the Mexican Mahjar; not only through Mexican clientelism and Mashriqi wasta, but also in French consular practice. Operating through the logic of protection rather than rights-­based governance, the



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French consular world was unpredictable, rife with intrigue and disputes among consular agents. Intrigues obscure the conflict between Consul Maurice Charpentier, the man charged with applying the 1921 Mexican Mahjar census, and Raoul Spitalier, who held posts at several French consulates. In June of 1922, six months after Spitalier had left the Mexico City legation for a consular post in Brazil, Charpentier notified his superiors that the irregular matriculation of an American citizen by Spitalier in March 1921 had driven the legation to political difficulties. Charpentier noted that this was not the first occasion on which Spitalier had proceeded selectively in his administrative duties; he had apparently failed to register a number of young men from his Basses Alpes commune of origin in the consular conscription census. Madame Spitalier’s Mexican citizenship had facilitated his appointment to South America in November 1921. Despite having left Mexico City, Raoul Spitalier continued to operate commercial affairs for compatriots, engage in business, and maintain an apartment. According to Charpentier, Spitalier represented personal interests incompatible with holding French office in Mexico. Spitalier moved quickly to clear his name, refuting all of these accusations as false. On March 27, 1924, he wrote to the new consul—Jean Périer, envoy extraordinaire and plenipotenciary minister of the French legation in Mexico City—from his post as French consul at the port of Veracruz. A younger man, Spitalier had a family, a wife and two children whom he had taken with him to Brazil. The return voyage had dragged them to New Orleans, with an unexpected and lengthy stop in Havana. Spitalier paid five thousand francs in travel expenses out of his own pocket to take up the Veracruz post in early February 1924, as he waited for the position of secretaire archiviste in Mexico City. Charpentier was pulling many strings to prevent Spitalier’s return. Spitalier had friends in high places in France, however, where Senator André Honnorat and Deputé Paul Reynaud both kept a friendly eye on his career. He pleaded with Périer, requesting advice: “I could well see that two functionaries abroad should not make a spectacle of their differences.” He defended himself, however, against his former superior. Should he prosecute Charpentier for libel in French courts? What would be the consequences of such action? Should he let silence take care of this unfortunate affair? In any case, he would stay out of Charpentier’s way when he passed through Veracruz on his way back to France, as Périer demanded. Consul Charpentier’s health had deteriorated severely due to Mexico City’s altitude, and he was homebound.



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Spitalier didn’t miss an opportunity to soil his rival’s reputation. He reported that Charpentier, his Japanese mistress, and their companions J. Ottavi and Alphonse Dupuy had registered under false names at the Hotel Imperial in Veracruz while waiting to board ship in April 1924.64 Providing their aliases and room numbers, the hotel owner quickly alerted Spitalier, who had stopped by to deliver a package that had arrived from Mexico City for Charpentier. Spitalier’s insinuation of the party’s secrecy is rendered suspect by the fact that Ottavi had written to him announcing the dates of his stay at the Imperial, inviting his former colleague to stop by if he wished to sort out their disagreements and reprimanding him for falsely accusing Ottavi before M. Périer of working in the shadows to set Charpentier against Spitalier. “Why would I concern myself with the administrative and personal differences that you have had with M. Charpentier?” Ottavi queried.65 A month later, on May 8, 1924, Minister Périer requested an appointment with Genaro Estrada, Mexican subsecretary of foreign affairs, who noted Raoul Spitalier’s ties with the Porfirian elite now out of favor, in particular with Félix Díaz, through his Mexican in-­laws. Estrada underscored the discomfort of Mexico’s revolutionary government with Spitalier’s intended posting as secretary-­archivist in Mexico City. Later in May, French businessman E. Dubois, a resident of Avenida Madero No. 1 in Mexico City, accused Charpentier of taking part in a consular racket targeting the Syrio-­Lebanese in Mexico. Raoul Spitalier was invoked as a witness of Charpentier’s illicit proceedings along with a long list of French and Mexican officials and businessmen that included the president and director of the National Bank of Mexico, as well as women clerks. Charpentier had been consul in China before being appointed to Mexico and, according to Dubois, had developed a dubious reputation during his Chinese tenure. Rumor had it that he lived conjugally with a Japanese woman despite having a family in France. His partners in Mexico were denounced as Alphonse Dupuy, who represented the French Havas news agency pretending to be a lawyer, and M. Ottavi, secretaire archiviste of the French legation in Mexico. The trio were accused of operating as follows. When a Syrio-­Lebanese arrived at the French consulate to take care of administrative business—in need of a passport, for example—he was instructed to go to Dupuy, who demanded a steep fee in order to “register” the migrant in his books, an alleged first step to any bureaucratic process. Dupuy would then fill out the passport, having many at his disposal at all times, and personally take



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it to be signed by the consul, who charged a second considerable fee. The day’s proceeds were parceled out in the evening, at the home of Madame Homel, Ottavi’s married mistress and owner of a restaurant.66 According to their accuser, profit from this little side business allowed M. Charpentier to return to France with a check for ten thousand dollars in his pocket. Dupuy and Ottavi were also accused of using the diplomatic valise to import contraband silk, weapons, and boxes of sweets for Madame Homel. The racket was only suspended with the arrival of M. Jean Périer in late November of 1923, when members of the French Chamber of Commerce in Mexico protested against Dupuy’s appointment as temporary consul in Monaco given his antecedents and reputation. The fact that he had become a naturalized Mexican citizen in 1912 was also used to disqualify Dupuy’s representation of French interests in Mexico, since “a Mexican could not represent the interests of the French.”67 In July 1924, Spitalier wrote to Périer and traveled to Mexico City to meet with him. Subsecretary Genaro Estrada had accused Spitalier of political meddling after a French journalist informed him that, along with his in-­laws, Spitalier sympathized with the revolutionaries. After several interviews with Madame Spitalier and a thorough investigation of the case that cleared Spitalier’s name, Mexican foreign minister Aaron Saenz assured him through a common friend that he was not unwelcome in Mexico. When Spitalier met with M. Jean Périer, he requested Périer meet with Saenz and report his clean reputation to the French Foreign Ministry. He also offered to resign from his post as secretary-­archivist in Mexico City and requested he be retained at the port of Veracruz, where his presence would not be inconvenient. By September 1924, he writes from that post. Charpentier disappears from the historical record, but not before giving us more details on Spitalier’s antecedents and ambitions. A man of minutiae, Charpentier noted in his careful, angular, and tiny script that Spitalier claimed to have arrived in Mexico before the Great War to exploit a gold mine in Oaxaca belonging to his cousin. He was also involved in his cousin Adrian Spitalier’s import business. When he heard of the war declaration in August 1914, he traveled to Mexico City with his wife and a four-­month-­old baby, having to walk the last few kilometers because rebels had taken the roads. After a few months of military training he traveled to fight in France. He suffered gassing at Verdun and received war honors. Once demobilized, he learned of an opening at the French legation in Mexico City and prepared to compete for it while working a job in a bank in Paris.



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Charpentier claimed to hold documents proving Spitalier’s moral bankruptcy: lack of morality in his private life and complete lack of scruples, as well as a bad habit of attacking people behind their backs. As an example he cited Spitalier’s proposition to a Russian artiste on the boat to his São Paulo posting, suggesting she borrow his uniform for a costume ball on board. A French traveler and courageous combatant of the Great War had reported the conversation to the colony in Mexico. Charpentier also complained of an attempted defamation campaign conducted against him by Madame Spitalier in the French press in Mexico, which had failed only because the newspaper she approached was funded by the French legation and could not print anything that dirtied its reputation. The clash between Charpentier and Spitalier—two officials with very different styles—reveals the gaps in mandate and consular administration, which afforded translation of official policy into discretional practice, anchored in human ambitions and networks of affectively and morally loaded mediation. The tight weave of traffic in influence spans patrons and subalterns across a wide array of institutions, from French and Mexican officials through hotel managers and minor bureaucrats, including women bank clerks, elegant local wives, and imported mistresses. It’s hard to sympathize with either man. Charpentier comes across as a punctilious administrator at the end of a global career, his Japanese lady consort an Achilles heel that made him slightly paranoid. Spitalier, younger and more playful, was an ambitious adventurer who found opportunities to bend rules and make small exceptions for friends. Perhaps the bad blood between them boiled down to a business deal gone sour. Charpentier, who had purchased a building in Veracruz on Spitalier’s expert advice, found himself compelled to sell it at a 75 percent loss.

Citizens and Subjects: Securing French Intervention Mahjaris sought the intervention of mandate powers in individual cases of need or misfortune, requesting permission to migrate, repatriation, or help in locating migrant relatives who disappeared. Collective emergencies were also brought to the mandate authorities, who embarked on negotiations to secure protection in the face of changing legislature in the Americas. Mandate subjects were not citizens of France, however, and the distance between the rights of protégés and those of citizens remained the source of much debate within the French government throughout the mandate. Mahjaris also debated the adequacy of French protection in the



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early 1930s. José Helú noted its failures in his newspaper Al-­Khawater. Others went out of their way to express gratitude. Antonio Ayub, a Melkite Christian who came to Mexico City from the village of Douma in the Metn, was the president of the Liga Sirio-­Libanesa-­Palestina-­Mexicana in 1932.68 He wrote to the minister of foreign affairs to thank him profusely for the protection extended to migrants by the French legation in Mexico, in particular for help provided by M. Meuregh, the dragoman or interpreter from chapter 2.69 Notables played a key role in securing French intervention for themselves and for others, yet their strategies betray their mediations as investments in their own benefit. The brothers José (Joseph in French sources) and Julián Slim are repeatedly mentioned in mandate correspondence as model subjects. Julián got on the wrong side of officials occasionally. José, however, carefully and generously cultivated his wasta with the French. A number of telegrams document his interactions with high-­ranking officials between 1926 and 1929: May 27th, 1926 Mexico City. Maronite Lebanese Colony Congratulates Government armed victory and capture of Abdel Krim. Joseph Slim70

Not only did he celebrate France’s military victories over her Mashriqi mandate subjects, he financed French colonial wars and administrations in Syria and Algeria: Mexico, 8 December 1927 [I hereby forward] a check of 2000 on the Bank of Montreal, remitted by a Lebanese citizen, M. Joseph Slim, who destines the amount to victims of the disaster which lamentably desolated Algeria. I did not fail to thank M. Joseph Slim, who constantly offers solicitous proof of his attachment to France, for his generosity. The Department surely has not forgotten that last year, our Legation sent, on his behalf, an initial sum of 1000 francs to be paid to the first French soldier to penetrate a reconquered Soueida, then a sum of 50,000 francs toward the amortization of public debt.71

These material gestures projecting Slim as loyal French subject, citizen not of the world but of the empire, as concerned with the fate of metropolitan France as with that of her multiple colonial territories, accrued French favor. When José Slim traveled to mandate Lebanon, he was preceded by his



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reputation. Minister Périer requested that the minister of foreign affairs himself, Msr. Aristide Briand, recommend him to the high commissioner: M. Joseph SLIM . . . intends to travel to Greater Lebanon, his homeland, during the course of the coming spring. Belonging to a Maronite family which has distinguished itself by its loyalty to the French cause throughout the war and which, given its interests and its situation, figures among the most notable of those of our protégés in Mexico, M. Joseph SLIM has never ceased to offer sincere testimony of his attachment to our country, and his gifts, constantly reported to the Department, are exemplary. Thus, I would like to very specially recommend this Lebanese [man] with interests in Djezzine, to M. Ponsot.72

Périer and Briand debated in January of 1928 whether José Slim, who as French bureaucrats at all ends were well aware, “has given proof of his sincere attachment to our country in diverse circumstances,” should be honored with the Croix de Chevalier de la Légion D’Honneur, the Knightly Cross of the Legion of Honor.73 The case got as far as the president’s cabinet before being dismissed, since in spite of his devotion, loyalty, and generosity to the French cause, it was “absolutely impossible to confer the Cross of our National Order on a French protégé.”74 Not to de deterred, José continued to lavish gifts on the French and to express congratulations for all kinds of feats and accomplishments: February of 1928, Mexico City Mex On the happy occasion of Costes and Lebrix’s arrival which produced a marvelous effect in this country as Lebanese citizen I ask you to accept ten thousand francs to support development of French aviation veritable messenger of science and peace of our France in the world. Respectfully José Slim75

The gift was accepted and the French government thanked M. Slim. In March of the same year, the gentleman donated two thousand francs toward alleviating the suffering of Algerian flood victims. This time he was thanked even by the governor general of Algeria: “You were kind enough to send me, on behalf of M. Joseph SLIM, notable of the Lebanese colony in Mexico, a check for 2,000 F, a sum which he intends for the flood victims in Algeria . . . I have the honor of asking you to kindly communicate to M. SLIM the heartfelt thanks of the Central Aid Committee.”76



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When Rene Lefevre, Jean Assolaut, and Armand Lotti flew across the Atlantic, M. Slim again conveyed his florid admiration: 17 June 1929, Mexico City In the name of the Lebanese colony and my own be so kind as to accept our respectful congratulations on our glorious aviators’ raid; they have added another jewel to the immortal French army. José Slim.77

When José needed to collect payments in Lebanon, as in the case of mortgage and water use dues owed him by Madame Jaula Rahaim of Djezzine in January of 1930, Périer wrote to High Commissioner Ponsot on his behalf: “a notable of the Lebanese colony in Mexico. The numerous and important services that he has rendered to the French cause in this city made him the recipient, on my recommendation, of the cross as Knight of the Legion of Honor. I would therefore be very pleased if it were possible for you to receive this request and give it a favorable follow-­up.”78 By then the Legion of Honor had finally been conferred on him. Perhaps José could afford to be so generous because he was childless. His gifts and other expressions of attachment to France were investments harvested by other members of his family, since French administrators treated migrant families as loyal or disloyal units, especially in the case of notables. As noted in Charpentier’s 1921 census discussion from chapter 2, the fact of constituting a family was already a sign of moral probity contrasted with lone peddling vagrancy. José’s brother Julián had six children, among them Carlos Slim, the richest man in Latin America and until recently the wealthiest in the world.

Targets of the Revolution The question of French citizenship versus subjecthood, ambiguously managed through patronage and identity documents, became particularly crucial and sparked heated debate in regard to the reclamations committees (1920–1947) restituting to Mahjaris losses incurred during the Mexican Revolution. Mahjari merchants had been frequent targets of pillage by soldiers and military authorities. Some were repeatedly attacked by warring factions or seriously wounded as their shops were sacked, incurring vast losses. As Ottoman subjects at the crossroads of French, Mexican, and American domains of sovereignty, many were unsure of where to file their claims. José Gorayeb and his brother Jorge owned a restaurant, saloon, and wholesale liquor and dry goods business in the city of Durango in 1913:



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During that later part of the year 1913, the Constitutionalist forces of Mexico, owing allegiance to the then Primer Jefe [First Commander] Venustiano Carranza (now President of Mexico) and led by Domingo Arretta (afterward governor of the State of Durango), General Tomás Urbina, and General Calixto Contreras, with eight or ten thousand soldiers, entered the city of Durango, which had been evacuated by the forces of the Huerta government, and the said generals permitted, as a tribute to the soldiers, so many hours of looting and sacking of the town; and the Constitutionalist soldiers with permission, and without any restraining whatsoever, committed depredations of pillage and theft, besides other things of an atrocious nature.

Some forty of these soldiers approached the brothers’ shop, knocked on the door, and opened fire on José as he emerged, putting a bullet clear through his chest. One soldier struck Jorge on the head with the butt of his gun, sending him to the hospital for forty days, and they barged in to loot: José Gorayeb lay at the threshold of death for many months, was attended by physicians and incurred great expense in physician’s fees, drugs, nursing and medical attention, loss of time, suffering and mental pain and anguish.

The soldiers took twenty-­three boxes of cognac, four of whiskey, twenty-­ one of aniseed liquor, one of gin, twenty-­five of champagne, ten bottles of tequila, and an astounding two hundred and fifty bottles of mezcal with them. They also took five hundred pounds of sugar, four large looking glasses, cash, chairs, a watch, and a diamond ring. They sold some of the alcohol and drank the rest. In December 1913, with federal troops garrisoned in Guaymas and their commanders short of cash to cover their payroll, General García, provisional governor, demanded forced loans from all merchants on pain of having their goods confiscated if they did not comply. Salomón Saba disbursed $750 in three payments, amounting to 5 percent of his total property. As an Ottoman subject, in September 1914 Don Salomón petitioned the French consul to intercede for the recovery of his loan. Having settled since 1916 in Nogales, Arizona, where he owned the Manchester Store, selling “goods, shoes, notions, etc.,” Salomón learned in 1926 from the consular agent at Guaymas that he needed to register as Lebanese in order for his reclamation to proceed through the French legation.79 Having naturalized as an American citizen, he could no longer register



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for Treaty of Lausanne citizenship or follow up on his claim through the legation. He tried to do it through the American consulate. On January 5, 1915, when Carrancist troops recovered Puebla, a brigade of these forces stayed at the stable owned by Amin Cheban and his business partner, stripping it of dry fodder destined to feed the stable’s animals. The soldiers showed up again on January 12 and took a Texan mare, two mules, and a harness by force. On January 15, a troop of Carrancist soldiers commanded by a captain burst into Cheban’s house and with gun in hand took a Texan mare and a horse. Cheban and his partner Jattard denounced the looting before the French vice consul in Puebla on January 31. In June 1916, the Gorayeb brothers’ dry goods store was raided again, this time by Colonel Cuevas—who belonged to the forces of General Máximo García, Villa’s military commander for the state of Durango— and an escort of twenty-­five armed men. The men loaded up on luxury goods: embroidery, perfume, fine combs, ribbons, silk handkerchiefs, eight hundred pieces of lace, fifty dozen stockings, 200 meters of silk, 260 meters of silk lace, 1,000 meters of muslin, 1,400 meters of cashmere, powder puffs, soap, corsets, and quilts, among other items, running to $9,876.10 US, for a total of $36,354.10 US in losses across the two incidents. In late November 1916, Villa’s troops took the city of Chihuahua; local authorities were unable to resist the attack or defend the city. El Monte Líbano, a shop owned by Kellel and Azar on the corner of Juárez and Sixth Streets, was sacked by the incoming troops. Pablo, Salomón, and Antonio Ayub from Douma, affected by the same episode, initially contacted the French embassy in the United States where they waited for a civil government to reestablish itself in Chihuahua before taking up their business again. The French consul in Mexico City juggled correspondence on the Ayub brothers from Washington and the French consular agent in Chihuahua in June 1920. The brothers later filed through the National Reclamations Commission at the same time as Kellel and Azar, in January of 1922. José Gorayeb let the Mexican embassy in Washington know that he wanted his case to be presented to the Mexican government, to an international commission, or to the League of Nations.80 Once the mandate was conferred, migrants increasingly relied on French authorities to intercede on their behalf. As early as August 29, 1919, the Gorayeb brothers petitioned the French embassy in Washington, DC: “the claimants pray that the French Ambassador, through the



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proper diplomatic channels, may at the proper time, or when he may deem it advisable, submit in the form provided for, either through the proper Chancellery or through any claims commission provided for and which mode or form shall be satisfactory to the French government, under whose protection claimants, as Syrians of Mount Lebanon, Syria are placed, so that full and proper reparation may be made to the undersigned, in law, justice and equity.”81

The Reclamations Committees In August of 1920 President Carranza created a National Reclamations Commission amending the Reclamations Law passed in 1913 and modified in 1917.82 In July of 1921, President Obregón invited governments to create international mixed committees to evaluate and report losses suffered as a result of revolutionary violence perpetrated between November 1910 and May 1920, committing the Mexican government to reimburse losses.83 In order to respond to claims made by French citizens and protégés, the presidents of France and Mexico named M. Jean Périer (envoy extraordinaire and plenipotenciary minister of the French Republic in Mexico) and Mexican minister of finance Alberto J. Pani to lead a convention. They created the Franco-­Mexican Claims Commission, adopted in March and formalized on September 25, to go into effect December 29, 1924, in Mexico City.84 The commission responded to emerging international law protocols; it was duly ratified by the presidents of both countries and approved by the Mexican Senate. It established that three commissaires would oversee the process of validation of dossiers over a period of six months. Of sixty-­three Mahjari attempts at restitution documented in the French archive, only twelve received compensation; 81 percent of Mashriqi claims were unsuccessful. Half the cases presented to the Franco-­ Mexican commissions of 1924 and 1930 were dropped before negotiations began, some by the plaintiffs themselves and others by M. Delange, agent of the French government. French citizens fared better; 53 percent of their dossiers were successful. Initially, it seemed that all was well for Mashriqis. In a telegram of October 1, 1924, a French official recommended that the good news be advertised: “I consider that it would be good politics to call the attention of both the Syrio-­Lebanese populations and the French press to the fact that, thanks to our constant efforts, we have obtained of the Mexican government that the commission place



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the interests—so considerable here—of our 30,000 French protégés, on a perfectly equal footing with those of the French.”85 A flurry of activity set Mahjaris and French officials in motion. M. Eugene Pepin of the French legation in Mexico City proceeded to contact the Syrio-­ Lebanese who had filed reclamations denouncing losses, confiscations, and forced war donations with the legation. They were instructed to provide additional paperwork, some form of proof of their losses and their monetary value and to designate a representative in Mexico City. The commission’s technical requirements—timely submission, proof of damages, and amounts—were hard to meet for Mahjaris whose addresses had changed, who traveled on business, or whose files and inventories had disappeared in fires and other accidents. Committed notables did their best to reach migrants in the provinces, alerting them to changing conditions as they passed through Mexico City on business, contacting relatives who might be able to provide updated addresses in Mexico and beyond. Neguib Chami was particularly active, reporting to the French consulate as news of mobile migrants rolled in to Casa Chami at Correo Mayor #53.86 By late December of 1928, the situation had deteriorated. At the heart of difficulties was Mexico’s reluctance to recognize the French mandate over Syria and Lebanon and therefore French protection of Lebanese and Syrian subjects.87 Aquiles Elorduy, the Mexican lawyer in charge of the case, argued that certificates of registration as Syrian and Lebanese were not official proof of nationality; that if migrants were of the said nationalities they could not be considered French protégés because they were not colonial subjects of France but nationals of mandated territories; and that in any case their reclamations could not be filed as French protégés retroactively since at the time of the revolution all migrants were Turks.88 French attempts at negotiation throughout 1929 were not productive. On January 14, a report offered new hope based on the Helú case89: “At the beginning of the session all reclamations were considered unviable. Today, a sentence concerning a French protégé made the reception of Syrian and Lebanese having opted for one or the other nationality feasible. On this principle, 25 of 31 reclamations will be viable.”90 According to April updates, the Mexican government had remained firm in its refusal of French negotiation on behalf of Mahjaris. The situation generated unrest among mandate subjects. Rumors circulated of Mahjaris organizing to request the formal colonization of Lebanon:



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Mexico, May 2nd 1929 It has come to my attention that the Lebanese colony of Mexico is preparing to address a petition to the French government, noting the precariousness of their situation in this country and requesting, in order to put an end to it, the attachment of the Republic of Lebanon to France in conditions analogous to those that unite Algeria to the Metropole. Under these conditions the Lebanese will become French citizens and will be able to avail themselves of the protection of France on the same footing as our nationals.91

Mexican authorities resisted signing a new convention in August 1930. The commission had failed. The Lebanese Chamber of Commerce in Mexico submitted a petition to M. Raymond Poincaré, president of the Council of Ministers, with copies to the French ministers of finance and foreign affairs.92 The petitioners complained of being ill-­t reated by the French representative conducting negotiations. They accused him of corruption and trafficking in influences, noting the injustice of his disdain for Mashriqi interests. Their grievances, though personalized, underscored the limits to French protection in a world of uneven global governance. They are confirmed by the demographics of restitution. Mashriqi dossiers were about one sixth of the total processed by the French for the Franco-­ Mexican commission.93 Once Mexico was invited to join the League of Nations in September 1931, Mexican authorities were forced to recognize the French mandate conferred by that body. Legation officials observed: One of the points to which they return . . . is the inefficacy of the protection that France can extend to the members of Lebanese colonies abroad. As far as this country is concerned, and until Mexico’s entry into the League of Nations, facts unfortunately somewhat supported their claims since Mexican governments sought to avoid recognizing or only reluctantly recognized to Syrians and Lebanese their character as French protégés, since it derived from an international institution from which Mexico was excluded. Today the situation is quite different, since this Legation presented the reclamations of the Lebanese and Syrians who suffered losses as a consequence of the revolutionary wars, she is opposed but by the penury of the Mexican budget, no longer by objections of principle. This is in fact the reason that bringing these reclamations to a favorable conclusion was so valuable, since if she succeeded at it, a very tangible form of protection would have been extended to Syrian interests in Mexico.94



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Intervention on behalf of the migrants represented an opportunity to legitimate the French mandate over the Mashriq in the eyes of an influential and wealthy diasporic population. Reparations had already begun to be disbursed to American and British claimants when in 1936, the French plenipotentiary minister M. Goiran, under pressure from the French Ministry of Foreign Relations—­ constantly pestered by claimants seeking updates on the reparations process—finally managed to hold President Lázaro Cárdenas to his commitment to French reparations.95 When in January of 1937, French authorities were finally notified that the Mexican budget for that year included an allocation of “123.856 piasters 88” in favor of French reclamations and “5.675 piasters 06” for the Syrio-­Lebanese, the problem of how these were to be shared out surfaced.96 Since the Mexican government had refused to consider Mashriqi claims as protégé reclamations, their files had never been reviewed by the Franco-­Mexican committee.97 The high commissioner of the French Republic in Beirut created a Mixed Allocations Committee so that indemnities finally available could reach the Syrio-­Lebanese. The participation of a Syrian in the sessions was recommended as a way to make committee decisions legitimate and uncontestable.98 On July 31, 1937, after six months of negotiations between the sub-­ directions of America and Asia, decree 108 L.R., issued by the high commissioner on July 21, was published in the High Commissariat’s Official Bulletin in Beirut. The decree determined the composition of a commission that would allocate the compensations granted by the Mexican government to mandate subjects.99 Lionel Vasse, vice consul of the French legation in Mexico, presided over the Mixed Allocations Committee. He worked with three Mahjari notables in the revision of migrant files: M. Julián Slim, president of the Lebanese Chamber of Commerce in Mexico; Emilio Smeke, president of the Syrian Jewish Society Monte Sinaí; and Neguib Chami, former president of the Syrio-­Lebanese Chamber of Commerce in Mexico. Gabriel Galant, administrative secretary of the French Chamber of Commerce in Mexico, joined them, and Bernard Hardion, chargé d’affaires of France in Mexico, inaugurated the working sessions. The committee met in eleven sessions at the French legation in Mexico City between August 12 and September 30, 1937, basing its deliberations on the study completed in February of 1932 by M. Delange. They read through sixty-­three reclamation cases, thirty-­t wo of which were discarded following Delange’s recommendation.100 Of the thirty-­one remaining



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cases, twenty more were eventually invalidated. Most dossier dismissals were due to one of two reasons: claimants had already taken their case directly to the Mexican authorities, or their losses were due to violence falling outside the official definition of armed conflict as articulated by the government defendant, Aquiles Elorduy. When on completion of payments, the Mexican foreign ministry inquired about the proportion of reimbursements paid out to Syrians versus Lebanese, the French were compelled to explain that “no discrimination had been established between Syrians and Lebanese by the services of the Chancellery or the Embassy,” reparations having been paid out with no distinction of origin.101 Yet all twelve cases that received compensation through 1941 were Lebanese. Their dossiers were transmitted to the Legation du Liban in Mexico in late January 1948 on that legation’s request.102 Two Mahjari cases, those of Alexandre Athie and Fèlicien Chabot, were processed with the more successful French dossiers, because subjects could produce French birth certificates.103 M. Julián Slim, initially designated as secretary, soon made such a nuisance of himself in the eyes of Lionel Vasse, the man who took the project to term, that tensions escalated to the point of Slim renouncing “due to health concerns.” Vasse, the commission, the French legation, and the Haut Commissariat thanked him for his conscientious work and wished him speedy recovery, immediately replacing him with Neguib Chami. Vasse attributed Slim’s attitude to “a mental slowness that prevents him from understanding and following the study of questions with a juridical aspect; a fear of the responsibility that he will incur and the recriminations to which he thought he would be exposed on the part of his compatriots whose reclamations he would be forced to discard; a certain despair at not having been able to exercise the ponderous influence which, in his vanity, he no doubt expected to be able to hold in the commission’s bosom.”104 Don Julián was struggling with the limits to his wasta within the commission and the consequences it would have for his clientelist leadership within the Mahjari community.

“It is like giving back a camel’s ear!” 105 The process through which dossiers were compiled and defended before the commission provided room for maneuver. The committee used Mexican lawyer Aquiles Elorduy’s rationale restricting recognizable violence, which the French had been arguing against for a decade, to discard particular cases. Shadow criteria of residence, Francophilia, and Islamophobia



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surfaced again, affording the dismissal of files. Though many French recipients of reparation lived in France and special provisions were made to get their money to them, none of the Syrio-­Lebanese residing outside Mexico, whether in the United States or Guatemala, were successful claimants. Negative evaluations of a plaintiff’s Francophilia or that of his representative informed some dismissals. Ramón Fares, whose business in San Andrés Chalchicomula, Puebla, had been attacked by an armed group in 1918, was felicitously represented by Jacobo Dib, a “known Francophile.” The Ayub brothers, on the other hand, whose case was painstakingly documented and one of the larger claims, for a total of $129,967.31, was put on hold with a brief note calling attention to the fact that the brothers’ Francophilia during the war had been dubious and stating that the case need not be pursued.106 Emilio and Manuel Nassar’s reclamations were dismissed; the brothers had been blacklisted during the Great War as Muslim Germanophiles. The conjunction of French, British, American, and Mexican Islamophobia was devastating. Not one reclamation from the Muslim majority migrant cluster in the Laguna area of northern Mexico survived the dossier evaluation process. Claims by Simón Almochantaf in Zacatecas; Antonio Bujaidar in Torreón; Julián Nuñez in Gómez Palacios; and Hattel Barbar in Tlapacoya, Veracruz were discarded. They were all Muslim. Almochantaf ’s case was symptomatic. Almochantaf had married Amalia Flores in Lerdo, Durango, in June 1914. He was the owner of a small shop, El Rayo, in Sombreretes, Zacatecas, that was robbed by revolutionaries in February 1919. His business in Parras de la Fuente, Coahuila, was sacked by federal forces in 1921. Almochantaf immediately alerted the authorities; he consulted with various lawyers. The unfortunately widowed father of three small children at age thirty-­five, he had to peddle in order to support his family, and the speed of his correspondence suffered. His mobility also worked against the completion of his file; he was registered in Torreón but had moved to Chachihuites, Zacatecas, for business. French agents constantly got his name wrong: Almontachaf, Almonchantaf; different documents identify him as Turk, Syrian, or Lebanese. Charpentier had followed his case in 1921, noting that he was a French protégé. Almochantaf constantly inquired with the French authorities regarding his reclamation. In 1934 he was not doing well in business and could not afford to return to Lebanon with his Mexican family. He became bitter and angry when, after years of holding onto the hope that some of his losses might be restituted, in 1937 he was notified of a refusal affording no



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appeal. Almochantaf ’s rebuttal of the legalist rejection parroted by the Allocations Committee was lucid, though his Spanish was faulty:107 The resolution of the Honorable Franco Mexican Claims Commission says that the robbery in Sombrerete was caused by bandits. On this point I protest and say that All Constituted Governments so call those who rise against the constituted regime Bandits! For that reason the decision of the commission in discarding my legal Docoments is not fair/ and about the police getting back some of the spoils of the looting, I reply to that point that the Pulice took back something insignificant after the rebels left, what the Pulice gathered and gave to me is no more than 300 pesos, no more than that!! It is like giving back a camel’s ear! The note must be with the Docoments, you Sir can take a look at it. In that case three hundred pesos erase the tenthousand five hundred? In what Homan Justice or divine one is there that law? [sic]108

Almochantaf, by then living in Villa Vicente Guerrero, Durango, was furious. His documents had been legalized with notaries, signed by all the relevant authorities of every city and state; they were all in order; the dossier was timely and complete despite the considerable cost and difficulty this entailed for a man with few resources like himself. The robbery had been a violent affair that threatened his life as well as a gross financial loss. After sacking his shop, the rebels had dragged him out of his house to the outskirts of town, where five insurgents fired on him and another man. Both men fell to the ground. The poor Mexican fellow took a bullet in his heart and lay dead, his blood running on the ground next to Almochantaf, who lay facedown on the dirt too distraught to know if a bullet had hit him as well. The aggressors were about to fire again when “God sent them a young lady” who threw herself over the two men to shield them from the second round of fire. The parish priest also came to their defense until federal troops evacuated the rebels, while Almochantaf and the dead man still lay on the ground. Almochantaf suffered from what he called neurasthenia for eight years and then developed asthma, both of which he attributed to this traumatic violence at the hands of revolutionaries. From February 1937 through June 1947, the Mexican government paid the French embassy in Mexico $1,362,425.64 in eleven annual installments disbursed to plaintiffs by the French. Of this, $62,425.64 went to Lebanese protégés.109 Payments were disbursed in two checks, one for the French claimants and the other for Syrio-­Lebanese. In July of 1942, the



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Figure 4.1 Left to right: Ninfa Sabag Cedillo, Mohamed Hassan Sabag (Salomón Sabag ), and Norma Braham Sabag. Courtesy of his great-­g randson Antonio Nassif, Saltillo, Coahuila.

Mexican government decided to reserve the Syrio-­Lebanese check “until the situation of the mandate is regularized insofar as the nexus between France and Syria.”110 The French legation responded that British occupation of French territories in the Levant did not change the juridical status of those territories, and the French government remained the only one qualified to receive and deliver funds destined to the Syrio-­Lebanese. As the mandate drew to a close in the 1940s, Mahjaris developed new arguments defending their desirability as migrants and the legitimacy of their wealth in Mexico, addressing Mexican authorities and Mexican imaginaries, sidestepping French mediation. These debates turned to Mashriq history and national specificity to defend migrants’ legitimate place in Mexico and their role as conquerors equivalent to criollo elites.

Modern ism

Chapter 5

Mahjaris were increasingly defined as undesirable foreigners and cast outside the boundaries of the nation throughout Latin America in the wake of the 1921 and 1929 economic crises. Restrictions to migration legislated in Mexico in 1926 had turned liberal migration policy on its head, and efforts to curb arrivals multiplied over the next decade given the scarcities generated by the Great Depression. Mahjaris were targeted by discretionary expulsions and popular violence. As they moved to counter state and popular discourse, they initially used their status as French protégés to secure privilege. With Lebanese and Syrian independence in 1943, Lebanese nationalists like Alfonso Aued and William Nimeh, writing within the academy or on its fringes in the Mahjar press and community chronicles, crafted a role highlighting not only established Mahjari whiteness but their civilizational equivalence to the Spanish. The migrant intelligentsia used Nahda themes of Phoenicians as conquerors and vectors of universal civilization to legitimate dominance in the Latin American Mahjars, recovering an Arab past suitable for the migrant present. Alfonso Aued, longtime editor of the Mexican Mahjar periodical El Emir and author of Historia de Líbano (History of Lebanon), which chapter 7 explores in detail, had already observed in May 1939: “it is to the traveling, colonizing, seafaring peoples that humanity owes its progress. The Phoenicians, Portuguese, and Spanish worked for the unification of culture and civilization.”1 His conquest claims were rooted in an Ottoman imperial history of representing the New World and its modernist anticolonial recuperation. At the turn of the twentieth century, elites in geographies subaltern to Europe had begun developing the nationalisms that launched decolonization, establishing foundational fictions for postcolonial states. Even as each struggled to dismantle European hegemony locally, anticolonial nationalisms rooted in distinct colonial histories complied with an overarching Eurocentric narrative. Colonized elites based their nationalist claims to the state on familiarity with a global European modernity, often



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acquired through migration and education in metropolitan centers.2 The modern Middle Eastern intelligentsia generated by Ottoman reform and integration into the world economy during the long nineteenth century was active in the migratory circuits, extending mobility across the Arab and European Mediterranean to the American Mahjars. Public debate on the question of Ottoman relations with Euro-­America surged across Mashriq and Mahjar, producing Nahda renaissance narratives concerned, like other anticolonial nationalisms, with situating Arabs as both heirs to a glorious ancient civilization and cosmopolitan moderns. In formulating an Arab modern, reformers operated within European discourses of nationhood whose ideologues were often enthusiasts of empire.3 Perverse Trojan horses, the categories of modernity—of its political thought and emancipatory rhetoric—contained assumptions that enforced Europe as omnipresent referent, conditioning Arab views of non-­European others.4 Modernist Nahda claims had emancipatory as well as subordinating effects as they intersected with criollo postcolonial modernism in the Mexican Mahjar desirable-­undesirable debates. Arab Nahda (1860–1920) narratives recovered Ottoman translations of New World literature, erotic poetry, and travel accounts producing New World populations as savages, allowing Mahjaris to legitimize their conquest of the New World.5 This chapter argues for a connected history of Mexican and Middle Eastern modernisms as anticolonial ideologies enforcing a common Eurocentric civilizational hierarchy. Though developing out of Ottoman visions, Mexican Mahjar perceptions of New World peoples took on a decidedly Christian Eurocentrism. Between 1936 and 1946, mutual recognition was negotiated between Mahjar intellectuals and Mexican elites. Mahjaris and criollos became intelligible to each other as subalterns complicit in a common desire to emulate Europe in the postcolonial global. Filtered through the European colonial sciences of race and Arab nationalism, the Ottoman production of savages was mobilized in the Mexican Mahjar to situate Mashriqi migrants as equivalent to Spanish-­descent criollo elites and rightful civilizers. The Mexican postrevolutionary intelligentsia’s championing of the criollo as a civilizing force enabled Mahjari and local elites to bisect Latin American nations into civilized criollos and inadequately civilized savages, making notables and criollos into partners in a civilizing mission.6 Invoking the universalist hierarchies integral to global modernism, criollo nationalism and the discursive decolonization of Arab civilization afforded the subalternization of mestizo and

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Indian populations at the crossroads of Arab and Mexican postcolonial modernisms.

Arab Modern Subaltern incarnations of modernism were conditioned by the violent emergence of modernity through Euro-­American colonial expansion. The Nahda constituted the subaltern process in the unfolding of twin renaissances; the renaissance of the Orient as an object of knowledge and extraction for Euro-­America and the renaissance of cultural forms, public debate, and the will to political autonomy in the Arab world.7 Voices concerned with regulating the multiplying unequal encounters and reclaiming a specifically Arab heritage merged in the Nahda. Sayegh notes: “The diverse movements in which the Arab revival manifested itself were initially neither uniform in character nor identical in inspiration, motivation and aspiration.”8 He includes Saudi Wahhabism, Egyptian attempts at economic modernization, rebellion against Ottoman rule, and the literary and intellectual renaissance of the Fertile Crescent rediscovering a classical Arabic civilization through modern Western traditions of science, technology, and literature. The many-­layered process of the Nahda was rife with the productive tensions of a Mashriq coming unbound geographically, politically, and ideologically in the age of European high colonialism. Arab middle classes and elites were concerned with appropriating technologies along with Enlightenment political, social, and cultural forms to avoid subalternization. Arabs of diverse social origins and political alignments wrote about Europe, translated European texts, formulated strategies for interaction, and defined boundaries. Compared to a Nile flood, the Nahda is presented as complex and bursting with dissenting visions, yet a derivative discourse: “the history of the Nahda is identified with the history of the influence of the West over the East and reflects the quarrel, complex and tangled, which pitched against each other not only Westerners and Easterners, but diverse groups of Easterners opposed among themselves by their literary, religious and political conceptions.”9 Euro-­American patronage of Christian Arabs as mediators for their interests in the Mashriq had intensified during the nineteenth century along with economic, military, and missionary intervention, and often the first students shaped by modern missionary educational institutions were Christian.10 Many became journalists, living in Beirut, Egypt, and



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the Americas, concerned with modernizing and standardizing the Arabic language for the new mass media. They borrowed from the new European science of philology to define and defend the richness of Arabic as core of a glorious Islamicate civilization shared by Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Muslim modernists struggled to redefine Islam. Reformers were caught in the tension between emulating the global model and defending difference and projects of autonomy from its agents. European certainties regarding hierarchies among peoples and traditions were adopted by reformers scrambling to define a middle ground for the Arab. Qassim Amin, remembered as champion of gender reform in Egypt, reflected in 1899 on the play of force between the European, the Arab, and the savage: European civilization advances with the speed of steam and electricity, and has even over spilled to every part of the globe so that there is not an inch that he [European man] has not trodden underfoot. Any place he goes he takes control of its resources . . . and turns them into profit . . . and if he does harm to the original inhabitants, it is only that he pursues happiness in this world and seeks it wherever he may find it. . . . For the most part he uses his intellect, but when circumstances require it, he deploys force. . . . What drives the Englishman to dwell in India and the French in Algeria . . . is profit and the desire to acquire resources in countries where the inhabitants do not know their value or how to profit from them. When they encounter savages they eliminate them or drive them from the land, as happened in America . . . and is happening now in Africa . . . when they encounter a nation like ours, with a degree of civilization, with a past and a religion . . . and customs and . . . institutions . . . they deal with its inhabitants kindly. But they do soon acquire its most valuable resources, because they have greater wealth and intellect and knowledge and force.11

For Arab moderns, the European pursuit of industrialization in colonial practice did not pose moral quandaries but a legitimate model to be emulated by those who wished for wealth and happiness, a tested recipe for global success. The many strands of the Nahda converged against what Zeynep Çelik has labeled the Ottoman civilizing mission, the policies and projects through which Ottoman modernizers tugged the empire’s Arab provinces toward Turkification. The unequal encounter with industrial Europe and Ottoman modernization coincided with massive human mobility out of

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the Mashriq by the 1870s and the Arab discovery of America. Representations of European, American, Arab, and Muslim difference multiplied, refocusing a local history of representation through the lens of colonial modernity.

Ottoman Arab Representation of the Americas in the Age of Exploration During the Nahda, Ottoman Arab representations of the Americas were recovered and recirculated, informing modernist discourse on difference.12 Though it is impossible to determine the scale of circulation of these texts and to what extent modern migrants were aware of them, they circulated at least among the intelligentsia who produced and consumed such editorial ventures. Even as strategic aims in the Indian Ocean during the 1400s and 1500s overshadowed Ottoman officialdom’s interest in the New World, representations of American geographies and populations inserted the empire into a global narrative of expansion and discovery as a distinct imperial domain aware of and equivalent to European empires.13 The earliest Ottoman text on the Americas is the anonymous Tarikh-­i Hind-­i Gharbi (History of the West Indies) that circulated in Istanbul by 1580, remaining popular in manuscript form until it became the fourth book to be printed in Arabic script in the late eighteenth century.14 Its author compiled and commented on the New World literature, an avalanche of production in Spanish, Italian, and other European languages narrating the discovery of the Americas. It is hard to decide whether the Tarikh and its popularity responded to imperial concern with Frankish expansion in lands of fabulous wealth or to Ottoman participation in the fashions and fascinations of a Mediterranean in motion.15

Fazil Bey’s Erotics The Zennaname (Book of women) authored by Fazil Bey, also known as Fazil-­i Enderuni (1757–1810), circulated as an illustrated manuscript by 1793.16 Ottoman state censors banned the printed text in 1838. The grandson of a notorious Arab strongman hanged for rebelling against the Ottomans in Akka, Fazil was brought up in the Imperial Palace in Istanbul. He “became famous for his erotic poems and, in particular, two lengthy poems, one on girls and one on boys, describing them by nationality with enumeration of the good and bad qualities, for the purposes Fazil Bey had



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in mind, of the various national groups.”17 Women of the New World are among those listed and assessed. The Book of Women was reprinted in Ankara in an English-­Turkish bilingual edition in 2006, rendered from Ottoman into modern Turkish and English by Filiz Bingölçe, who notes that the text mirrors common sense in Turkey in the early twenty-­first century. The final description in the long masnavi: On the New World (American) women oo the swaying of the hope vineyard new world in coy world women of the new world is ugly faced a woman in the figure of beast her little child stay seven months in her womb as if she gives birth two times a year most of them do not live but die however they have no soul their body become scrap but she is applicant to mate lust is victorious to that weak body [sic]18

One of the briefest sections, it is also the only one in which women are said to be “in the figure of beast,” or to produce offspring that lack souls.19 These echoes of the Spanish monarchy’s early debates regarding the humanity of its American populations suggest that Fazil’s erotics bear the imprint of the New World literature through the Tarikh. The images in surviving Zennaname manuscripts presenting various degrees of illustration provide a sample of the late eighteenth-­century Ottoman pictorial imagination.20 Bingölçe describes illustration with miniatures as both a measure of the popularity of a text and a way to make it more attractive to the public. Bernard Lewis reproduces plates representing Persian, Ottoman, English, French, Austrian, and Dutch court ladies and a woman from the Yeni Dunya, the New World. She is distinct from the others, hatless, though her hair is draped with ropes of pearls. Instead of their eighteenth-­century garb, she wears a fitted knee-­length tunic that exposes her full breasts and appears to be made of fur. Unlike the other women, who mostly avert their eyes demurely, she stares provocatively at the viewer. In the manuscript reproduced in Sema Nilgün Erdogan’s Sexual Life in Ottoman Society, Moroccan, Spanish, and Polish

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women also pre­sent partially exposed breasts; in Bingölçe’s edition, Ottoman and Persian women likewise.21 They all display the trappings of their respective civilizations in dress and decorum, however. The contrast between them is not in their sexualization—this is, after all, a catalog of their differential sexual charms—but in the representation of the New World as savage.

Early Travelers to the Americas Three accounts by early Ottoman Arab travelers offer textual representations of Latin America peoples. Elias al-­Musili, a Chaldean priest resident in Europe, journeyed through the New Spain in the seventeenth century. Elías Cheik Chedid and Kassen of the House of Kassen, a “Christian prince of Mount Lebanon, Maronite by nation,” apparently an impostor belatedly exposed, traveled throughout France and to the French islands of the Americas in 1744, collecting charitable donations supposedly destined to buy his older brother’s freedom from the pasha of Mount Lebanon and rescue his family from oppression by the Turks.22 Abdurrahman bin Abdullah al-­Baghdadi, an imam traveling on an Ottoman vessel, was accidentally stranded in Brazil in the mid-­nineteenth century.23 All were Ottomans with strong ties to Bilad al-­Sham (Greater Syria) who lived and traveled elsewhere in the empire and beyond for extended periods of time. What is perhaps most striking about the three narratives is the ease with which these travelers explored the New World and interpreted continuities with it through their interaction with local coreligionists.24 Catholic Christianity for al-­Musili and Kassen and Islam for al-­Baghdadi provided universal frames through which they situated geographies and populations encountered. Allowing them to locate the Other as intelligible, religious universalisms enabled their ease of transit and particular exclusions. Significantly, these authors perceived local populations refusing colonial authority and proselytism as savages. The document describing Prince Elías Kassen’s travels is a short denunciation by French authorities in Martinique and Saint Domingue, noting that the support extended to the traveler—horses, and ship passages gratis, recommendations, and access to charitable funds—was based on two criteria of credibility for his persona. One was his story itself, a tale of persecution of Ottoman Christians, who, Kassen reminded his hosts, had extended Christian hospitality to Europeans and risked life and limb defending a stronghold for Christianity in lands of Islam from cruel,



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tyrannical, bloodthirsty Turks. The other was confirmation of his story in Rome by a former missionary, who had been stationed in the Levant for ten to twelve years. Al-­ Musili’s text was discovered, edited, and published during the Nahda. Reverend Rabbat, a renowned Jesuit scholar, located al-­Musili’s manuscript in the library of the Suryan (Jacobite Orthodox) bishopric in Aleppo and proceeded, with the Chaldean bishop’s permission, to edit the travel portions.25 Al-­Baghdadi’s book was produced in the late nineteenth century. Intended for fellow Arab audiences, both are lengthy memoirs produced once the travelers were safely back in the Mashriq.26 Both claim eyewitness authority, their gaze full of curiosity yet firmly anchored in particular visions and traditions. The two men traced their roots to Iraq, grew up in Aleppo and Damascus respectively, and lived itinerant lives made possible by their religious erudition. Al-­Musili made use of the Eastern Uniate churches’ ties to Rome to study and then travel in the service of the pope and later under the auspices of Catholic monarchs. Al-­Baghdadi requested a post as imam in the Ottoman navy. Both narrate their travels through the Americas as the result of a series of accidents. Following extensive consultation with friends in the Spanish court, al-­Musili sought permission to travel from the queen of Spain as compensation only after her viceroys in Sicily and Naples refused to honor her debt to him. Al-­Baghdadi’s fleet was blown off course during a trading expedition and accidentally drifted into Rio de Janeiro.

Al-­M usili Travels through Spanish America The text attributed to Reverend Elias al-­Musili, “a priest of the Chaldean Church,” from the family of Amuda (some say Amuna) that hailed originally from Baghdad, first appeared as The Journey of the First Eastern Tourist to America 1668–1683, and was selected and edited for publication in 1905 by Reverend Antun Rabbat from a larger manuscript presumably written or compiled by al-­Musili.27 It was translated from the Arabic by Caesar Farah and published in English in 2003 as An Arab’s Journey to Colonial Spanish America: The Travels of Elias al-­Mûsili in the Seventeenth Century.28 Al-­Musili describes American peoples as wild and barbarous prior to their return to the Christian Church through European colonization. The categories he uses to differentiate human populations are those of Spanish colonial administration. A story emphasizes the powerful if mys-

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terious difference between Indian “red men,” “blacks,” and Spaniards or “whites”: I, the humble one, resolved on accompanying those merchants to Peru. So I rented three mules for ninety piasters, but the governor did not want me to proceed by myself because of the mountains where grows a type of grass resembling bamboo. When a white man steps on it, it rises from the ground like the shaft of an arrow and strikes him. One thus smitten does not recover. He dies. It does not strike Indians or blacks, nor does it harm them in any way.29

As the story unfolds, the magically violent bamboo proceeds to racialize Arabs as white, or at least equivalent to the Spanish in their vulnerability to the aggressions of New World geographies: When the governor told me this story, I said to him that I do not believe what I do not see with my own eyes. He rose and sent an Indian servant to point the weed out to me. When we reached where it was located, the Indian came around to my side of the horse and quickly disappeared. Lo and behold, the weed, still at a distance of ten yards from the road, rose and headed in my direction as if intending to strike me. The Red man came out [of hiding] and shouted at it: “Beware O dog!” and it immediately fell back onto the ground. I witnessed this with my own eyes!30

Al-­Musili describes blacks as slaves working as personal attendants, in sugar mills, as field laborers, and in mint houses and mines.31 He notes that some marginal populations were mixed, recalling that one of his treacherous muleteers was a mestizo, “that is a half-­breed, of an Indian mother and Spanish father.”32 He also mentions visiting a village inhabited by mulatos in Guatemala, “that is, the offspring of white father and black mother.”33 Al-­Musili encountered Indians that were merchants and bishops, or pagan infidel non-­Christians.34 Some were rich, like the Indian inhabitants of Piura, even of noble descent. Some “true Christians, the rest Christians out of fear.”35 Even when they shared the same urban space, al-­Musili accounted for Indians and Spaniards separately, defining them as attending different institutions.36 Though he visits the New World with the permission of the Spanish queen, as the guest of a string of Spanish administrators, churchmen, and notables, in some passages al-­Musili suggests that Indians resist Christianization and the Spanish presence in a legitimate attempt to retain their land and autonomy.37 He even draws a parallel between rebellious Indians and Arabs:



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In this town resides also a bishop and the king’s council of state . . . they are always at war with the Indians and pagans, before they [the latter] even knew the ways of war, which they learned after associating with the Spaniards. They had no horses at first, nor did they know how to ride them. Now they ride horses bearing spears, like Arabs, and constantly combat the Spaniards. Should they capture one, they would barbecue and eat his flesh. As for the head, they hollow out the skull and make a drinking vessel out of it, and drink one of the wines of their country out of it. They are defiant, fierce and cruel.38

Al-­Musili considers that the colonizers have brought faith and civilization to the land. Yet he seems to identify with and admire native defiance of European universalism and, like Qassim Amin later, to situate the Arab halfway between the European “civilized” and the American “savage.”39

Al-­Baghdadi’s Visit to the Empire of Brazil Al-­Baghdadi’s title, El deleite del extranjero en todo lo que es asombroso y maravilloso (The foreigner’s delight in all that is amazing and wonderful), echoes the classic rihla tradition of Muslim travel in quest of knowledge. His text circulated widely in Ottoman contexts in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish.40 Abdurrahman bin Abdullah al-­Baghdadi al-­Dimachqui was born to a prosperous family in Baghdad and grew up in Damascus, where he studied Arabic, Persian, literature, jurisprudence, and theology.41 After al-­Baghdadi was imprisoned due to trouble related to the 1860 massacres, Muhammad Salih Ates Pacha recommended him as imam for the Ottoman army. He was appointed to a ship sailing for Basra from Istanbul, but a series of storms blew his craft off course from Cadiz. The vessel managed to anchor in Rio de Janeiro, where they negotiated a loan to make repairs to the ship in July 1866. Al-­Baghdadi’s garb as imam caught the attention of local Muslims, most of them African or of African descent, and communities sent delegations with translators to the Ottoman ship requesting visits from the imam and instruction in the faith. Al-­Baghdadi agreed to stay despite his captain’s misgivings about sparking a diplomatic incident. The Empire of Brazil had been vigilant of local Muslims since the slave revolts carried out in the name of Islam in northeastern Brazil during the first half of the nineteenth century. Al-­Baghdadi was invited to visit communities in Bahia and Pernambuco. The imam spent three Ramadans traveling throughout the well-­ organized Muslim communities and doing his best to bring their West

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African practice closer to Mashriqi orthodoxy, with occasional resistance to his leadership.42 In 1869 he returned to Damascus via Lisbon, Andalusia, North Africa, and Mecca. After visiting his family in Damascus he settled in Istanbul, where he presumably wrote his memoir.43 He describes the African Muslims who approached him as “a group of respectable black men” who addressed him “with good manners.”44 Al-­Baghdadi noted hierarchies within the Muslim community and African titles by which venerable men were addressed, recognizing that there were nobles among them.45 Arabs are racialized as white in his narrative through the voice of one of the delegations requesting al-­Baghdadi to teach them more about Islam: We thought we were the only Muslims in the world, that we followed the right path and that all white people belonged to the Christian communities, until by the divine grace of the Sublime we saw you and we knew that the creator’s world is immense and that the world is not a desolate land, but one full of Muslims.46

Most Africans in Brazil were slaves. Al-­Baghdadi’s description of African populations does not emphasize their condition as slaves, though it mentions slavery as a source of restrictions on the overt practice of their faith, and that blacks who became free returned to Islam.47 He observed that having left their own lands very young and without adequate religious instruction, Muslims were a small group and knew very little about their religious tradition. Al-­ Baghdadi sometimes seems to echo al-­ Musili’s descriptions of American populations, suggesting that al-­Baghdadi was familiar with that text or other New World literature.48 Flirting with the fantastic, other passages evoke Fazil-­i Bey’s erotic poetry: They seek the shade of trees as if they were avutardas, their bodies naked, their constitution is large and their feet extremely broad, out of proportion to their bodies. I have been told that when it rains they put their heads to the ground, raise their feet and use them as umbrellas to shield themselves. . . . The women are of extreme beauty; their hair falls down beyond their knees and is often silver or golden. They wear no clothes other than their hair, and pubic hair covers the men’s nudity.49

About Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro he comments that, though they are very civilized, they haven’t attained the same level of refinement as Europe.50 This civilizational evaluation, along with al-­Baghdadi’s dismissal of the



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constraints placed on Afro-­Brazilian Muslims by their condition as slaves, situates him as complicit with the hierarchies of global imperial practice.

Ideologies of an Arab Awakening The metaphor of nations awakening from a long period of slumber separating their ancient glory from modern subalternity was common to many regions of the colonial world. Such narratives became vital to a global subversive modernist discourse of civilization in which African, Arab, Asian, and Euro-­American critics of the West converged. Anticolonial nationalists justified their mobilization and transformation of the people by appealing to an alleged ancient unity and describing the nationalisms they sought to build as national awakenings.51 Arab nationalisms were founded on the trope of decline during the period of Ottoman administration; the awakening was embodied by the Nahda, or renaissance. Arabs were jostled awake from their medieval condition or ossification through an unsettling but felicitous encounter with Euro-­American modernity on the brink of the twentieth century.52 Emphasis on an Arab literary renaissance as crucial precursor to political consciousness conditions the awakening narrative of missionary-­ educated Christian nationalists, who attributed the Nahda to Christian Arabs of Bilad al-­Sham.53 Scholars who embraced the Euro-­American presence in the Mashriq extended credit for the Nahda to particular imperial nations, reflecting personal patronage circuits: “It is hardly necessary to say that it [the Nahda] owes much to the work of Orientalists. We recognize our immense debt to them . . .”54 Or “It was America’s knock that awakened the Arab East from its medieval slumber and set it on the road to modernism and national progress in the 1870s.”55 The Mexican Mahjar press presented variations on this theme in the 1930s and 1940s. Lebanese Christians were attributed a stellar role in the Nahda based on the Uniate churches’ historical ties to Rome, detaching Lebanese experience from that of Syrians: As of that time [Arabic language and literature] sank into the dark depths of a lethargic slumber which would have been eternal but for the indefatigable efforts of the Lebanese and the missionaries, both French (who arrived in 1625) and American (who arrived in 1820).56 Syria had its flourishing in the time of the Greeks and the Romans and later in the time of the Arabs. Its decadence began with the arrival of elements that neither had a culture nor knew how to assimilate: The Kurds, Turks,

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Mamlukes and Turcomans, who under the banner of Islam dominated the Syrian people, far superior to them in culture and civilization. And thus the torch that illuminated the ancient world went out. The decadence of Syria was followed by the decadence of Phoenicia, because the rulers—Mamlukes, Turks—did away with everything. The schools of Aleppo that existed during the reign of Saladdin disappeared. Fanaticism and ignorance reigned during several centuries. This lethargic life—which went on for a long time—was followed by a renaissance, slow at first but which later accelerated, and the movement which began as a religious one, became a social one. The achievement is due to the popes of Rome, who in educating young Lebanese men later caused them to found national schools and spread culture in the Orient.57

Syrian civilization was given a Greek, Roman, and Arab pedigree, distinct from the Lebanese Phoenician past. The Nahda was imagined as originating in the Uniate churches’ cultivation of links with Rome since the sixteenth century.58 Crafting respectability in overwhelmingly Catholic Mexico, Maronite Mahjaris recruited the pope as suitable Nahda patron.

Genealogies for Travelers and Conquerors Histories of the Nahda mingled with debates defending Mahjaris as desirable conquerors in one of the two most long-­lived Mexican Mahjar periodicals, El Emir, printed from 1937 through 1968.59 Publishing political and cultural briefs, interviews, and editorials covering news in Mashriq and Mahjar, it included notable obituaries like Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s; the text of the new Syrian and Lebanese constitutions; text and music of the Algerian March; and French consular announcements regarding national status and nationalization options, calling migrants to register with the French authorities. It reported on the projects and achievements of the Lebanese League in Mexico and congratulated the community’s young men on successful university defenses and young women on their quince años, publishing flattering photographs. It printed letters and contributions from readers living in the Mexican provinces and in every corner of the Latin American Mahjar: Tucumán, Argentina; Santo Domingo; Honduras; Cuba. Intellectuals, notably Habib Estefano from Argentina and Esteban Fayad from Venezuela, contributed articles and conference transcripts. Mashriqi intellectuals’ defense of their desirability as migrants in Mexico was eventually, though not initially, validated by local state ideo-



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logues. Their modernist genealogical construction, which began with migrant celebration of Phoenician pasts, turned indignant after the publication of José Vasconcelos’s ¿Qué es el comunismo? in 1936. Minister of state and foremost ideologue of the Mexican postrevolutionary national project, Vasconcelos launched his 120-­page pamphlet dedicated to ruminations on the Spanish Civil War and the defects of the Calles administration by lamenting the expulsion of “defenseless Spaniards” during the Mexican Revolution and their substitution in the national landscape by Jews and Syrio-­Lebanese: “deaf persecution ended up replacing in our cities and towns, our own Spaniard, with the communist Jew who today exploits petty industry and a good part of commerce, but speaks English; by replacing him with the Syrio Lebanese who does not better our race, but worsens it.”60 Vasconcelos had written the text to commemorate the Día de la Raza, the anniversary of the “Discovery of America”: We are gathered to celebrate the most important event in our American history, the discovery that linked the New World with Europe, incorporating all of these territories into civilization. . . . Day of the Race; that is to say, the date of homage to the Spanish race in whose glories we have a share because we are part of Hispanic culture and because a branch of our ancestors sailed in the caravels of the immortal expedition. . . . The transcendence of Colón’s findings resides in the fact that he made his discovery as a Spaniard in the company of Spaniards . . . and since Spaniards were then the most cultured nation of Europe, they were not content to fill the deserts with half-­naked offspring like any barbarous tribe, but rather in three centuries of incomparable civilizing effort they built the twenty-­something nations which constitute the Latin world of America. . . . When they arrived in these territories, our fathers the conquerors and explorers, as well as our teachers the missionaries, were in fact the flower of the Europe of their time, and the first among races in the World.61

He identified progress, democracy, and civilization with Christianity and saw all of these incarnate in the Spanish tradition. He envisioned the empowerment of Latin America through a confederation of Hispanic nations, given Spain’s reluctance to engage in an enlightened imperialism. Mahjari journalists only responded to Vasconcelos’s statement a few years after its publication. The genealogies they constructed in the Mahjar press to situate migrants as conquerors shared two assumptions. The first, about the nature of American populations, followed Vasconcelos in bisecting them into civilized (European) and inadequately civilized

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(Indian). The second construed the Lebanese as fundamentally Western Phoenicians with a bit of Arab blood and some superficial Arab cultural markers like language, food, and music, who in their rural manifestations in fact morally surpassed Europe.62 Through both their Phoenician and their Arab genealogies, the argument went, the Lebanese were the offspring of conquerors, racially white vectors of civilization, just as worthy as the Spanish of conquering Mexico. A letter written by Miguel Zacarías to Adolfo Fernández Bustamante, author of the play El baisano Jalil (later made into a film), commending him on his portrayal of a Mashriqi migrant family, was reproduced as an editorial piece in El Emir in September of 1938.63 Zacarías lamented the short-­sightedness of Mexican immigration policy, based on loose criteria of nationality and certain economic requirements rather than on the crucial criteria of “race, religion, morality, and customs; that is, the ensemble of characteristics which make these migrants’ assimilation easy or difficult, desirable or undesirable.”64 He argued that the Spanish and Lebanese were among the migrant populations adversely affected by such policy: “both immigrants, the Spanish and the Lebanese, individuals of white race and Christians.”65 El Emir’s editor in chief, Alfonso Negib Aued, described Mahjaris either as Phoenician conquerors and colonizers in the abstract, hinting at their conquest of the Americas at large—or more specifically as conquerors of the Mediterranean, Spain, and the Americas. In their modern Latin American adventure, they were equivalent to the Spanish colonizer, given elaborately construed parallels across the histories of both peoples. Some authors went as far as attributing the origins of the universal civilization claimed by the West to Phoenicians: I take up my pen to sing the great deeds of my ancestors, who contributed to contemporary civilization the foundations on which it rests.66

Phoenicians were described as having propagated the alphabet, “a seed of civilization that cleared away the clouds of ignorance and barbarity,” among all the countries they visited. Cadmus was said to have carried it as far as the Greek islands.67 In this vision, Western civilization, including its industrial imperial permutations, was derivative of an early Mashriqi golden age.



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Parallel Histories Sometimes the emphasis is on Mashriqis as conquerors of Spain. They are cast as the conquerors of the conquerors of Iberoamerica; the Spaniards are their descendants. In an editorial titled “The Lebanese and the Progress of America,” Aued narrates the parallel and interlocking histories of Mashriqis and Spaniards in the Mediterranean: The first to dominate Spain were Phoenicians and Carthaginians—our ancestors—the Spaniard has Phoenician blood in his veins. The Leba­ nese in turn is a direct descendant of the Phoenicians. Later, Greeks and Romans conquer the ancient Phoenician land and they also impose their dominion on the Iberian Peninsula. Yet Arab blood also mixes in Spain and Lebanon. This way, indestructible parities were created which give ethnic parity to the two peoples, the Spanish and the Lebanese.68

According to Aued, the spiritual parity of Spanish and Lebanese peoples derives from the fact that they have both historically labored and battled in defense of the Christian faith. The parallels continue in their conquest of the Americas: And with the same agility with which the ancient Phoenicians sail the seas, the Spaniard crosses the pond. . . . Comes to America. . . . Conquers all and obtains all, but at the same time gives his blood, his language and his religion to the land in which he arrives. . . . In turn, the Lebanese [man] comes to America and he is not satisfied to make his fortune, but ties himself to America’s blood, establishes his house and does not forget the motherland but loves the new land.69

Spanish and Mashriqi accumulation in the Americas is portrayed as a noble enterprise, a generous surrender. Aued distinguishes the legitimacy of Mashriqi partnership with criollo nations by contrasting the noble restraint of Mashriqi profit from the rapacious accumulation of North American and European capital: And the noble character of this labor is fully understood when it becomes known that, even after twenty or thirty years, most of those merchants don’t make fortunes greater than twenty or thirty thousand pesos. . . . Big industry and mining require enormous capitals. They are exclusively in the hands of the Americans and Europeans. Culture and science are French and Spanish imports. All of this has been useful to the upper middle class, the Indian has been left aside. He is consid-

Modernism 149

ered a stranger to all these goings on . . . when the revolution came, the Indian had had no contact with the Western world other than through the Lebanese who had gone all the way to his house in order to dress him and the ancient missionary friars who taught him their religion and tried to get him to know their language. . . . But now the Lebanese is no longer a stranger who will introduce something unknown [to the people], now, because of his home already established, because of his wealth, already made in America, he is the brother who is helping to forge the new homeland. . . . The Lebanese is, in the evolution of the Americas, an unquestionable truth of civilization and progress.70

Mahjaris are made morally, racially, and ethnically equivalent to the crio­ llo elites, and thus willing, capable, and responsible partners to their modernizing mission. Careful to sustain the parallel without positing the modern migrant as a direct conqueror and potential threat, Aued argues that the Spaniards’ civilizing achievements have remained unfinished: “Three hundred years have not been enough to fully inject Western customs into the indigenous peoples.” And this is where the modern partnership between civilized peers becomes crucial to progress: Where elegant or rich commerce disdained to go he goes and begins by selling suits to the people who scarcely clothe themselves . . . not only does he change the way of dressing, he transforms footgear: huaraches (sandals) are substituted by leather shoes and tennis shoes. And the significance that dress has for the progress of a people is no secret for anyone. Peter the Great, Mustafa Kemal Pacha in Turkey, saw this problem clearly: they understood that the feeling of inferiority that their people had before the French, the English etc. was due, more than anything else, to clothing. . . .71

Ultimately, Mahjaris emerged as legitimate partners to Latin American criollo elites in the necessary project of civilizing the Indian majority of the American nations.72 It was not until El Emir’s seventy-­third number that Leonardo Kaim and Aziz Hatem took issue with Vasconcelos’s characterization of Mashriqis as undesirable. His response in May 1943: I cannot and should not take back the affirmation I made about the Spanish race being superior and more desirable as a migrant race. This does not hinder appreciation and tenderness toward people or migrants



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The Mexican Mahjar

of other races. Thus, as you have pointed out to me, I have friends whom I appreciate and respect in the Syrio-­Lebanese colony; but this does not mean that even today the Syrio-­Lebanese race could demonstrate a capacity for cultural creativity, a spiritual development comparable to the Spanish. Of my own Mexican people, it would be absurd to say that their historical level and their qualities could be compared to those of the Spanish. Therefore, I think that stirring up resentment regarding self-­evident facts does not contribute anything to the conviviality of the different races that have to coexist peacefully in democracies.73

Vasconcelos seemed unmovable in his evaluation of Mahjaris and Mexicans as less worthy than the Spanish. Their common subordination to his European ideal, however, facilitated their equivalence.

The Phoenician Civilizing Mission Two book-­length histories of Lebanon emphasizing Phoenician origins were written and published in Mexico in 1945, under the title Historia del Líbano (History of Lebanon). Their authors were William Nimeh and Alfonso Aued, intellectuals of the Mexican Mahjar with strong connections to Lebanon and the Mahjar at large.74 Both were Lebanese by birth, naturalized Mexican citizens. The 1946 reprint of Nimeh’s Historia includes a section of mensajes, an appendix to the main text in which notable figures congratulated him on his book and addressed a patriotic message to the Spanish-­speaking Mahjar, especially directed at youth. These included the Maronite Patriarch and two looming characters of the Mahjar intelligentsia, Kahlil Gibran and Habib Estefano. Aued and Nimeh invoked ancient Phoenician hegemony in the western Mediterranean to claim Phoenicians as conquerors in the European tradition, suggesting that Phoenicians shared in the European burden of spreading civilization to primitive peoples. Aued titled the eighth chapter of his History of Lebanon “The British of Antiquity—the Phoenician fleet, colonizer of the Mediterranean.”75 Nimeh contended that Phoenician conquest, moreover, was a peaceful affair: “We are authorized to assert that Phoenicians were really the apostles of peace and that, even in their colonizing enterprises they never used violence or committed barbarous acts . . . thanks to their metal weapons they conquered the primitive inhabitants, who ignored that such wonderful weaponry existed, very quickly.”76 Another recurrent claim was that of an early Phoenician discovery and

Modernism 151

conquest of the Americas. Nimeh goes so far as to attribute the great Amerindian traditions to them: The Phoenicians were the first great colonizers of History, the first colonizers who implanted their civilization everywhere, in all its aspects, beauty, love and material improvements. . . . THERE WAS NO CORNER, NO MATER HOW REMOTE, THAT THEY DIDN’T KNOW; and abandoning their Mediterranean lake, they traversed Hercules’s columns (Gibraltar), circumnavigated Africa in three years, from the shores of the Red Sea to the Cape of Good Hope, and they built the city of Dakar, reaching as far as the British Isles and the shores of America in the middle of the XII century BC. This last fact, extremely interesting, has been sufficiently revealed with the findings in Brazil and in Santo Domingo, the specialists in the matter assert that the small group of Phoenicians which conquered the Brazilian coasts probably founded the Inca, Maya, and Aztec civilizations and reached as far as the Yucatán Peninsula.77

The early Phoenician discovery of the Americas continues to be defended in the early twenty-­first century by leading community intellectuals.78 Situating Phoenician traders at the origin of great Amerindian civilizations staked two claims, one universalizing and the other localizing. Grandly, it claimed a Phoenician origin for universal civilization, regardless of where or when civilization flourished. In the context of the postrevolutionary Mexican national project, it also portrayed Mahjaris as already local. Not only were the Phoenicians at the origin of the Mediterranean civilization that conquered the New World, they were also the root of New World civilizations themselves. Phoenicians were always already there in the Spanish-­Indian fusion championed by Vasconcelos as the essence of the Mexican. Mahjari intellectuals must have been convincing in print and beyond, because by the time Nimeh’s history of Lebanon appeared, Vasconcelos prefaced it in glowing welcome: But America is a land which belongs to all men, and since we are fortunate to have among us a distinguished group of Lebanese, who by the way show themselves to be good Mexicans, it is convenient that we know what the small but illustrious nation which is the cradle of our compatriots of Lebanese origin is and has been. Dr. Nimeh’s book, “History of Lebanon” provides us with the means to access this knowledge. Dr. Nimeh is a distinguished professional. . . . An expert in his-



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The Mexican Mahjar

tory and Arab topics, this prepares him to understand the Spanish, insofar as the Arab element endures in the Spanish. Not an unimportant influence, excepting the religious aspect, which is of course antithetical in the two cultures. Dr. Nimeh’s book saves us from a common error, which is to mistake the Lebanese for the Arab, the Syrian, even the Turk. The Lebanese is distinct from all other groups of the Orient. Most Lebanese are of Phoenician origin, though some Arab blood runs in their veins and their language is Arabic. And it is well known that the Phoenicians were the first colonizing people in history. Once Phoenician power had disappeared, the Lebanese, now living in a Roman province, contributed to the glory of the Empire, were part of the Roman army and mixed with the patricians. Likewise, at the dawn of Christianity the Lebanese take the lead and contribute martyrs and saints very early on. . . . In modern times, Beirut has been a cultural center with a strong French influence. . . . Souls with affinities to our Western tradition, it is only natural that they will soon assimilate to the idiosyncrasies of the American nations and become collaborators in their progress. . . . Dr. Nimeh’s book should not then be exotic for us, but something that is already part of the Hispano-­Mexican heritage.79

Vasconcelos was finally happy to recognize Mashriqis as another conquering element in his vision of mestizaje, the racial and cultural mixing that he argued constituted the distinctive and vital force sustaining the Mexican nation. Phoenician origins and French influence over the Mashriq ensured Mahjari affinities with Mexico’s “Western tradition,” making them adequate collaborators toward national progress. The Mahjari campaign to make migration palatable to the Mexican public continued with the support of local journalists; the Unión Libanesa Mundial published journalist Enrique Castro Farías’s Aporte libanés al progreso de América (Lebanese contribution to the progress of America) in 1965.80

Mak i ng t he Mahjar Lebanese

Chapter 6

The Association for Mexican-­Lebanese Friendship is a private organization presided by a Beirut physician with business interests in Mexico. When we met in his clinic and association headquarters in Beirut in the summer of 2005, Dr. Hakim expressed interest in cultivating Mexican markets through efforts such as food expos showcasing Lebanese export products. He invited me to the opening of a traveling exhibit organized by the association. The theme was the Mexican-­Lebanese encounter, portrayed by Lebanese and Mexican children. The drawings were to be displayed at the ABC shopping center in the affluent Christian Beiruti neighborhood of Ashrafiyye and at the Centro Libanés in Mexico City a year later. Colorful and lovely, the drawings included celebrations of binationality, juxtaposed sets of national symbols, and scenes of face-­to-­ face meetings between people living in lush green scenery and an Other living in a desert. Lebanese children portrayed Mexico as desert, with fluted cactuses and a huddled sleeper in a sombrero. For Mexican children, the desert was Lebanon, camels and all. As Dr. Hakim proudly pointed out, the whole thing was widely publicized using a Phoenician statuette for a logo. Phoenicianism is embraced and celebrated by authorities at the Centro Libanés, the largest and most important Mahjari institution in Mexico City in the early twenty-­first century. The luxurious installations in the middle-­class Narvarte neighborhood are generously sprinkled with aesthetic references to Phoenicia. Publications, conferences, and public art sponsored by the center in its two locales and urban public space also privilege Phoenician themes. The choice is validated through the successful uses of Phoenicianism in the Mexican Mahjar that chapter 5 charted and through center authorities’ affiliation with Maronite Lebanon. Inaugurated in 1962, the club embodies the normalization of the Maronite vision of a Lebanese Mahjar: Christian and upper middle class. Unmooring the collective boat from tainted imageries and linking it to a Phoenician past and a French present in public culture was a strategic move



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The Mexican Mahjar

toward Mahjari ascendance in Mexico. The boat sails with this Lebanese flag and affluent Druze, Shia, Sunni, Greek Orthodox, Syrians, and Palestinians participate, silencing their differences. Those Mahjaris who can’t afford the steep yearly fee of one hundred thousand pesos per family or refuse to be labeled Lebanese have no institutional alternative. The center’s twelve thousand members constitute 3 percent of an estimated four hundred thousand descendants of Mahjaris in Mexico. “The club was made by an elite, and meant for [use by] an elite,” a Druze friend pointed out, revealing the construction of the club as a step in the inscription of class distinction within the migrant population. Families that struggle economically, are not Christian, or whose town of origin lies beyond current Lebanese national borders express distress about joining in club activities. “Everyone knew who your father was,” older interviewees often phrased it. “Most people don’t even know I’m Druze,” one teenage boy said, “We just sort of keep quiet about it, but then I get mad, because I’m proud to be Druze.” Even if marginalized given full membership criteria, Mahjaris participate if economically possible, preferring to partake of the prestige associated with this Lebanese label. Many recent migrants, especially Muslims, feel overtly ostracized. After a cookbook presentation at the club, S., the pastry chef at a well-­known Lebanese restaurant, commented: “Lebanese are nasty; they look [down their noses] at you,” imitating the disdainful gesture. His wife, who had been eager to attend, was shocked at the average age of people I introduced them to: “Kilun kbar!” (they’re all so old!) she mused, reflecting on eyebrows raised at her stylish hijab. A middle-­aged working-­class Jewish woman raised by Damascene grandparents was more blunt in her anxious appraisal of reception: “I love hearing Arabic and really want to go, but I won’t say I’m a Jew. They might eat me alive.” The Maronite owner of a rundown car-­repair shop in the popular neighborhood of Portales smirked: “Me? I’ve never been there. That place is for people who can afford to sit around and play cards, chat and do nothing all day.” Religious tradition, national identity, and class make these Others’ membership in the Mexican Mahjar problematic. Geographical mobility between Mashriq and Mahjar and across the American Mahjars waned over the second half of the twentieth century. This chapter pursues the trope of mobility in the institutionalization of differential Mashriqi social mobility through the late twentieth century. The boundaries that fractured the migrant population according to sect, class, and political affiliation were erected during the French mandate, in a public sphere that addressed two different states, claiming citizenship and



Making the Mahjar Lebanese

155

patronage from both. I reconstruct the emergence of this transnational Mahjari public sphere, following participation in associations active at the onset of the French mandate and beyond.1 Institutional life was densest in Mexico City, where most documented associations clustered. Some had their centers of gravity or an important presence elsewhere, however, and national boundaries were overshadowed by transnational processes constitutive of local dynamics. Following the logic of patronage, notable privilege was used to create community institutions that consolidated notables as mediators with Mexican and French authorities while they provided spaces of sociability, aid, and worship for their clients.2 While initially the label Syrio-­Lebanese pursued by mandate authorities included all migrants from Bilad al-­Sham, as the French consolidated their administration against the Syrian interior and British Palestine, national boundaries were naturalized as sectarian and class distinctions. The Mahjar notability emerged as cosmopolitan mediators, characterized by business and consumption habits that spanned Mahjar and Mashriq. Clients, though subaltern, could claim common national status with the elites through participation in community institutions. Undesirables were repatriated or disowned. Mandate-­era developments continued to shape associational life in the early decades of Syrian and Lebanese independence. As Mexico City grew, the spatialization of class changed in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Mahjaris, who had initially clustered in the historic core of the city, followed local criteria of status and mobility and dispersed across the expanding urban landscape according to their fortunes. Dispersion created important opportunities for redefining boundaries within the community. With the consolidation of migrant fortunes and political influence, associations developed by early migrants provided privileged niches for the national category as a whole. The migrant middle class could capitalize on the Lebanese identity shared with outlier success stories, creating further opportunities for mobility. Working-­class populations of all religious traditions became increasingly invisible as Mahjaris. In contrast to notables’ sustained transregional practice and their clients’ national (Lebanese) identification anchored in community institutions, the migrant majority lost their moorings to a Mashriqi past. Polishing a Lebanese label palatable to midcentury Mexican elites and middle classes also involved cleansing it of ties with the problematic national entities of Palestine and Syria, which were burdened with a negative valence in the global politics of the American century through their association with conflict, the Palestinian struggle, or socialism.3 Greek



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The Mexican Mahjar

Orthodox and Jewish, Syrians were shuffled out of sight for the Lebanese to emerge as (Maronite) Christian, (upper) middle class, economically liberal, culturally Western, and distinct on all these counts from neighbors—Mexican, Mashriqi, or otherwise. Though there was resistance to this vision from men of Syrian ancestry who contributed to the expense of building the Hermes Centro Libanés and later refused to participate in it, the club was named, in the end, the Lebanese Center. Given traditionally gendered workspaces and preferences for homosocial association across Mashriq and Mexico and those imposed by modernity, participation in institutions was deeply gendered.4 Women’s networks, while less visible in public records, constituted a parallel public space.5 Beyond the modern dichotomy that opposes women’s domesticity to men’s engagement with the public, women’s visiting, marriage brokering, and charity work, for instance, constituted another public, though in many ways a subordinate one.6 Women’s politics developed through associations that displayed their class status as ladies, while men dominated commercial and political institutions such as chambers of commerce, leagues, and spaces of high culture like journals written in fusha, a formal, literary register of Arabic that provided and indexed access to other kinds of resources.7 Men’s public power, notably patronage practices, often operated through intimate sites—like receptions in homes—orchestrated by wives to cross otherwise gendered networks. The boundaries between gendered politics were elastic and shifted over time. Religious associations that began as women’s charity groups and youth clubs in the 1920s were overshadowed by the late 1940s through a reconceptualization of religious practice that wrested away some of women’s control over community resources. A set of predominantly masculine projects came to dominate public religious discourse, displacing though not replacing women’s and youth organizations. By the late twentieth century, ladies’ associations were largely concerned with the practice of memory and its reproduction, which chapter 7 will explore.8

The Druze Revolt of 1925 In the early years of the mandate, attempts to protect Mahjari economic interests through chambers of commerce were launched. Regional commercial pacts were eventually brought together in a confederation of chambers.9 It is not clear why, once the cámaras were established, some were so short-lived. The colonial archive provides clues on obstacles to



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157

Table 6.1. Migrant Chambers of Commerce Cámara de Comercio de Puebla —Founders: Amado Harfusch, Lorenzo Arun, Jorge David, Vicente Budib, Jorge Bojalil

Puebla, Puebla

~16 members

1924

Cámara de Comercio de Tuxpan, Veracruz —Junta Directiva: Julián Nasr, Abraham Kuri, Ángel Visten, et al.

Tuxpan, Veracruz

~12 members

1925

Cámara de Comercio Siriolibanesa President: Neguib Chami

Mexico City

Cámara de Comercio Libanesa Initiative: Julián Slim

Mexico City

—

1926– 1938

Confederación de Cámaras

Mexico City

~14 members

1932

1925

unity among Mashriqis. In 1924 Minister Jean Périer informed his superiors that “for a long time now, they have been trying to establish a Syrio-­ Lebanese chamber of commerce which, at the insistence of the French chamber, would defend their interests. But their efforts have until now remained in vain: fragmented into a handful of groups, they are inept for common action.”10 What kind of rivalries pulled the chambers and their confederation apart? Part of the answer lies in what the French called “the Druze Revolt,” an alliance between Druze and nationalist forces known in revisionist historiography as the Great Syrian Revolt (1925–1927), which erupted in July of 1925 in resistance to the French mandate over the Levant.11 The Druze had a bad reputation with the French. Not only had they historically been British clients but also, in French descriptions of the migration to Mexico, they were cast as bloodthirsty persecutors of “the Lebanese” (Maronites): “It is the Lebanese who are the pioneers of this emigration: it began around 1860, following the hateful massacres which the Druze perpetrated in the Lebanon, which they depopulated and which brought about the intervention of France.”12 The revolt polarized Mahjaris beyond the already fractious politics of the Ottoman-­to-­mandate transition, generating agitated correspon-



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The Mexican Mahjar

dence throughout the Americas. As Mahjaris expressed support for either the rebels or the French, dense communications provided glimpses of a Pan-­American Mahjar. The Jama’iya al-­Nahda al Lubnaniya (Lebanon League of Progress) in New York spoke out in the name of five thousand migrants “in the two Americas” who had no wish to see France exit Lebanon.13 A desperate French consul in Rio de Janeiro reported tendentious publications celebrating Druze victories and the need to counter them.14 In Mexico City, M. Périer pleaded to have “frequent news about Syria” cabled to him through the Havas Agency in order to counter the flow of pro-­rebel news from a Druze agency in Buenos Aires.15 The revolt unleashed a lively succession of confrontations in Mexico.16 The Francophile contingent was careful to clear their reputation with mandate authorities. A flurry of telegrams provides insight into the question of the chambers. What a French official described as a small Druze group in Mexico—probably the Druze League or its antecedent—sent telegrams to the governments of the United States and Britain and to the League of Nations, criticizing French procedure in Syria.17 The Syrio-­ Lebanese Chamber of Commerce immediately sent their own missive to Paris: “More than twenty thousand Syrians Lebanese of Mexico protest Latin America cables and approve French policy Syria Lebanon= Chami President. Chambre Commerce Syrio-­Lebanese.”18 If Charpentier’s census report was accurate, the chamber spoke on behalf of the total migrant population in Mexico. Though such a claim should seem suspect, Neguib Chami was duly thanked by the French minister of foreign affairs.19 Two weeks later, a group from Puebla cabled a similar text: “Twenty thousand Syrio Lebanese Mexico support France mandate this medium. We alert League of Nations, Genève, enemies of ours have sent false telegrams without our knowledge or authorization. Authorized by colony Vicente Budib Alfredo Trad Miguel E Abed Luis Arabi José Ganime Alejandro Yunes.”20 It is unclear if these gentlemen spoke on behalf of another twenty thousand migrants or for the same population as Chami. Since they constituted another set of notables issuing statements from a different geographic location, it seems plausible that wild assertions inflating figures and claiming authority to speak for the Mexican Mahjar were flying about. A telegram from Mérida, marked to be shredded, was particularly severe in its condemnation of the rebels and florid in its praise of France: “Lebanese League of Yucatán protests energetically against the atrocities committed by Druze rebels and respectfully requests French government to treat them with great severity rid Grand Liban of these coscriminets conserving its autonomy with help from Glorious France.”21



Making the Mahjar Lebanese

159

Later that year the French consul at Veracruz, M. Raoul Spitalier, gathered from a reliable source that funds were sent to the Druze rebels from his area through the post, care of one Hussein Keis of Hasbaya.22 The tip was relayed to the high commissioner in Beirut. Might the reliable source have been notable Domingo Kuri, whom we’ve met greeting new arrivals on the boats and securing the expulsion of undesirables? He signed a telegram in the name of the Syrio-­Lebanese colony of Veracruz, echoing those sent from Mexico City, Puebla, and Toluca. He also made personal visits to Spitalier, assuring him of the colony’s loyalty, encouraging him to preside over an extraordinary assembly at which local migrants would solemnly confirm their allegiance to France. Spitalier declined, counseling Kuri to organize the meeting nonetheless and report to him on how it transpired. The next morning Don Domingo returned to the consulate with the local notables and two telegram drafts, one addressed to Affaires Étrangères in Paris, the other to the League of Nations in Geneva: I congratulated my visitors warmly on the dignity of their attitude and expressed to them in a few words, with numbers to support [my arguments], the oeuvre of France in Syria and Lebanon. Basing [my argument] on the report for the 1925 budget by the Chamber’s Finance Commission, I explained to them what our mandate was and the benefits their country had reaped, and will continue to reap from it. I gave them every assurance that France would not fail in its task as a tutor and would accomplish the disinterested civilizing mission that had been conferred to it by the League of Nations to its final consequences.23

The crisis provided opportunities for segments of the migrant population to publicize their loyalty and for French officials to circulate propaganda legitimating their mandate. Despite the frantic flood of migrant notables declaring allegiance to France, the idea of an independent Greater Syria had its Mahjari supporters.24 Archimandrite Antoine Bchir, thirty-­five years old, traveled on a French passport preaching for the rebels. French consul Raoul Spitalier in Veracruz and Domingo Kuri mobilized the Lebanese notables of Mérida against him before he even arrived in Yucatán. The most influential Syrians of Mérida were asked to use their authority over their compatriots “to unmask this false apostle paid by the Druze, and to create a void around him.”25 Bchir was reported as suspect to all French legations in the Americas so that his passport would not be renewed; his photograph was circulated.26 M. Etienne Ailhoud, honorary French consul in Mérida, reported



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The Mexican Mahjar

Figure 6.1 Meeting of the Committee for Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian Youth.

on the visit and provided further detail. Bchir was said to be a spokesman for two rich Syrians living in Cairo and working for Emir Faysal and the Druze Sultan al-­Atrash. Ailhoud claimed to have been informed that money had also been sent to the Druze rebels from Mérida, care of Keis and Assad Dabaguy. “As surely at this moment postal censure must have been put in place it will be easy to verify the exactitude of this information,” he concludes.27 In late November, Minister Périer again reported that the Syrio-­Lebanese Chamber of Commerce assured him of their devotion to France, this time in response to telegrams issued by a Druze agency in Buenos Aires.28 As tension mounted, responsibility for the revolt came to be associated with the Druze.29 It seems likely that the politics of reaction to French rule in the Mashriq fractured the Mahjari chambers of commerce in Mexico. People described as mobilizing and organizing against French authority were identified by sect in official discourse ever more systematically, implying causation between sectarian affiliation and political activity. Though the



Making the Mahjar Lebanese

161

diversity of those engaged in the revolt—Druze, nationalists, the Greek Orthodox archimandrite Bchir—suggests different axes of mobilization than those imagined by the French, in their declarations of allegiance, Maronites increasingly marked themselves off from other Mahjaris.30 In 1928 the chambers were involved in negotiating conditions for the Franco-­Mexican Claims Commission discussed in chapter 5, another divisive endeavor.

Protecting Migrant Devotion While the Great Syrian Revolt resisted French occupation of the Mashriq, the confrontation between secularizing political leaders and the Church precipitated the Guerra Cristera or Cristiada in Mexico.31 Plutarco Elías Calles, a revolutionary general, dominated political leadership between 1924 and 1934.32 During his presidential term (1924–1928), Calles sought constitutional amendments in order to implement the 1917 Constitution, which extended the mid-­nineteenth-­century reform project of curtailing the property and political power of the Church. His 1926 sponsorship of Article 130 of the Constitution was met with the creation and radicalization of popular armies, which clashed with the state’s military over the next three years. The conflict resulted in widespread state intervention in forms of public devotion and popular religiosity. The Guerra Cristera affected freedom of religious congregation for Mahjaris, as for everyone else. A law passed in December of 1931 suspended access to three hundred churches in Mexico City alone, with only twenty-­five churches in the city remaining in use. Minister Jean Périer wrote to M. le Ministre des Affaires Étrangères on April 7 of 1932: In response to the quasi unanimous wish of the French and Syrio-­ Lebanese colonies, I was obliged, given the conditions, to concern myself with obtaining authorization from the Mexican government for the performance of religious rites in the two churches of theirs traditionally reserved for our compatriots and our protégés of the Maronite and Melkite rites. . . . Basing my argument on a disposition of the law of January 4th, 1926, establishing Article 130 of the Constitution which furnishes foreign colonies the possibility of benefiting, in certain cases, from the services of a priest of their own nationality, I entered into negotiations to that effect with the Minister of the Interior and the Mayor, negotiations which I was able to bring to good term in spite of the disgust of the Mexican authorities concerned in conceding an



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The Mexican Mahjar

authorization which in fact elevated, contrary to the vote of Congress, the number of Catholic priests for the Federal District from 25 to 27. . . . The French church known as the Colegio de Niñas is therefore at this time in the hands of Père Joseph Roustan of the Marist congregation. The Syrio-­Lebanese church of Balvanera was returned to Mgr. Kuri, prelate of the Maronite rite.33

Two months later, the high commissioner reported the vibrant thanks of the Lebanese government. This intervention suggests the complicities afforded French citizens and Mahjaris as Christians. As early as 1921, French consuls in Mexico had reported: “Syrian children are the best students at French schools.” Among Maronite and Melkite families, private French Christian institutions where the children of affluent Mahjaris rubbed elbows with the children of the Porfirian elite were preferred for schooling.34 The Colegio del Sagrado Corazón, a girls’ school staffed by the French Sœurs du Sacre Cœur nuns, was an elite establishment exclusively for girls “of good family” who could afford the tuition. The same order established the Colegio de la Asunción in the 1950s, recruiting students among the daughters of graduates of the earlier institution. Elite boys’ schools like the Colegio Patria were under the supervision of Jesuits. These childhood interactions provided Mahjaris access to the cultural habits and the social networks of Catholic criollo elites. Mahjaris developed a handful of community schools in the 1940s, often with the goal of teaching Arabic. The schools disappeared even more quickly than the chambers of commerce, doomed by confessional and political tensions. The longest-­lived among them, the Colegio Árabe Español, was often identified in interviews as “the Orthodox school,” and former students described it as primarily attended by Syrian students.35 Arabic was taught informally in some migrant institutions. Antonio Kuri Razzi was the Arabic teacher in the evening school run until 1944 by the Sociedad Akarista. For some time, an Academia de Lengua Árabe was run within the Unión Libanesa, and from the 1990s through 2017, Nabih Chartouni has taught Lebanese ’ammiyya at the Centro Libanés. A handful of migrants who initially provided occasional private lessons in spoken and standard Arabic went on to establish themselves as Arabic professors in professional academic settings. Madame Marie Choueiry was an important figure, a Greek Orthodox woman remembered by adults of all confessions as their Arabic teacher. Unmarried and highly educated, she was assumed by some of her former students to be a nun of sorts,



Making the Mahjar Lebanese

163

Table 6.2 Arabic-­Language Schools in Mexico Colegio Árabe Español Founder Wadih Bedran

Mexico City

1945–1952

Instituto Libanés Mexicano Director Juan Estefan

Mexico City

1940s

Academia de Lengua Árabe At the Unión Libanesa Founder Juan Aaun

Pasaje Pedro Slim, Mexico City

1945

Sociedad Unitaria Arábiga —socializing (taule, domino, billar) —Arabic language and Quran Teachers Gandur, Karam, Munir Latif

Torreón, Coahuila

1990s

Centro Educativo de la Comunidad Musulmana-­Musala —Arabic language and Quran

Euclides, Col. Anzures

1992

given her austere ways and her involvement with the Orthodox Church in Mexico. Madame Choueiry taught at various community locations, as well as at the Centro de Lenguas Extranjeras of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and at the Centro de Estudios de Asia y África of the Colegio de México.36

Charity and Distinction The following historical narrative and public statement by the board of directors of an association now called the Unión Asistencial de Damas Libanesas A.C. appeared on the Centro Libanés webpage in 2008: In the year 1923 the Charity Union of Lebanese Ladies was founded in Mexico City, its founders being Ladies Samia Kuri, Zabaide Kuri, Afife Letayf, Silvia Ayub, María Hadad, Wahibe Barquet, Alice Rihan, Virginia Letayf, Waida Helú, Guadalupe Letayf, Laurice Rihan, María Zacarías, Nehle Fadel, Afife Bacha de Zakia, and Sofía Bustani. On September 15 of 1927, the first statutes were created, to help all needy Arabic-­speaking people regardless of their political or religious creed,



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The Mexican Mahjar

and especially, one of our goals is that no person of Lebanese origin should find himself or herself in need in Mexico.37

The founders of the Charity Union read as a who’s who list of migrant notable spouses. We have already met Silvia Ayub, the wife of Melkite notable Antonio Ayub, hosting wasta lunches in chapter 3, and Guadalupe Letayf, married to Don Antonio Letayf, defending the marriage’s property in chapter 4. Most early humanitarian efforts were ladies’ associations or primarily run by women in collaboration with religious figures. Charities like the Unión Asistencial were concerned with the well-­being of Mahjari poor. Such networks aided in the prevention of destitution among migrants, providing a layer of economic security. Charity also provided an opportunity for better-­off migrants to perform interventions that marked them as wealthier than those who required or accepted their help, becoming another site for the production of class distinction among migrants. They provided spaces for women’s training as organizers and strategists. While political parties and chambers of commerce continued to be dominated by men, aid associations were defined as extensions of women’s moral and affective labor in the home. Some early associations were broadly Christian—for example, the Orthodox-­ Melkite-­ Maronite Unión Caritativa. Other examples were the Asociación Mutualista de Puebla established in the 1930s, the Red Cross Lady Volunteers coordinated by Antonio Ayub in Mexico City in the same decade, and the Sociedad Benéfica established in Mexico City around 1937. Partnerships with Church figures like the Unión Mutualista Ortodoxa founded in the 1920s and the Junta de San José or Sociedad de Damas de San José, a Maronite ladies’ charity association established in the late 1930s, were explicitly confessional.38 Youth organizations, often sponsored by churches, provided opportunities for supervised interaction across genders. Essentially marriage pools, they were also actively involved in charity. Orthodox Mexican Youth was founded in the 1930s; Lebanese Youth of Mexico operated from Venustiano Carranza #136, Mexico City, in 1942.39 Youth clubs and women’s organizations constituted important sites in women’s public sphere. The Lebanese Feminine Club was organized in the 1930s as exclusively a young women’s association: The Club Femenino Libanés, we were few [girls]. And then we decided to invite everyone. Now the colony was in the Colonia Roma, one part of it was. There weren’t many neighborhoods then. And another part of



Making the Mahjar Lebanese

165

Figure 6.2 The Druze-­Shia wedding of Farid Said and Alia Yaffar, 1950s.

it was in Venustiano Carranza . . . and we called them El Centro [downtown] and La Colonia [the colony]. So it came to the point where things were, well, divided. . . . The Lebanese, who had all of their businesses downtown, because that was the only place where you had it, the gentlemen were all friends. . . . But the families were not, because they were apart. So my friend decided to start a club with one group [of girls] and the other . . . on the Colonia Roma side there were twenty of us. . . . On the downtown side, there were seventy, eighty, one hundred. . . . There



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was everything, Orthodox, Melkite, Maronite—those other girls, what were they called? . . . When we got downtown . . . and walked into the gathering . . . we thought we were going to find fifteen or twenty people . . . and they were like one hundred. And I thought—what are we going to do now? So I sat down next to a Basila family who were also Melkites. I liked them right away and we started to chat; so they asked me “Who are you? Who’s your father?” “He’s Luis S.” “Uf, we all love Don Luis around here, etc.” My father was really popular . . . on our way back—I was the only one who drove and I had six or seven [girls] in the car with me—I said to them, “Listen, one of us has to become president, girls.” . . . “What, are you nuts? There are eighty of them.” “Well, they’re not going to squash us . . . all of you were sitting together and I was a little ways away . . . one of them showed up and said—‘Oh, so the starched up [girls] are here.’ . . . You hear that? So we are the starched up girls.” What did it mean? That we were stuck up. Or that we thought we were better than them. Well, that was not in our best interest. So the next time we went, we said no more sitting like that—one to each [table]. . . . And who became the president? Olga. And after Olga, Aida, after Aida it was me, and then the Ayub [girls].40

The story traces growing distinctions between Mahjaris through the changing spatialization of migrant life and labor. Everyday work spaces were shared by men into the 1930s but interaction with less wealthy families was lost by notables’ daughters, whose friendships were structured along class lines. Mahjari girls living in popular (downtown) and elite (Colonia Roma) spaces are narrated as divided and disdainful of one another; the socioeconomically and confessionally mixed club was orchestrated and ultimately dominated by the handful of girls from the wealthier families. Christian institution building inscribed confessional boundaries only in the 1940s, organizing women’s sociability through the subordinated inclusion of non-­Christians and those more traditional or less wealthy: When Father Tobias came, he was the one who divided us . . . we were 120 in the Club Femenino. There weren’t many Muslims, and very few Druze. [But] they did come and go everywhere with us. . . . And there was none of that “you’re Druze,” not at all. When Mrs. Aboumrad started to make the church it started to get divided—on the one hand Father Tobias who was Maronite and on the other the building of the



Making the Mahjar Lebanese

167

Orthodox church—but that was in the forties. For half a century there was nothing. And many Lebanese men married Mexican women . . . especially in the states. . . . At Christmas it was in Casa Kaim, which was a big house with a hall, all fancy. . . . Father Chami went to say Christmas mass. And almost all of the colony went then. Sometimes they didn’t come from downtown, so we heard mass and afterwards we would go hand out candy or something like that. (Families downtown had fewer resources?) Yes. There were many more of them and yes—it’s not just that they were—more or less . . . over there they lived like in a village . . . you’re not going home if you marry one of them. On this side we were already French Lebanon. When we made the club, people came together much more, especially the girls . . . because women got together at Silvia Ayub’s house, and many women from downtown went there too, it was more mixed . . . Silvia’s house, which was the biggest, the best house. She was very down to earth.41

Mahjari elites identified as French Lebanon, Christian, and urban-­ modern. Class is portrayed as visible in one’s neighborhood of residence and degree of adoption of French preferences for female mobility and independence. In classic politics of notables’ form, interaction and community building occurred in particular, wealthy houses which developed patron-­client relationships to the less fortunate. The quality and rhythm of participation in these female spaces marked some as more equal than others. Another woman described her mother’s visiting patterns from a less-­fortunate position: (Your family, did they participate in the Centro [Libanés] a lot?) My father, he didn’t really go there, he didn’t like it. But my mom got along with everyone. She visited—if someone died, my mom went to the funeral. Well, if—maybe if someone was getting married she wouldn’t go—because she was always busy, we were a big family. But a funeral, or someone who got sick, she ran off to see them. All those, hiye am ta’ml wajibatha [she was doing her duty].42

A woman less well off not only had less time available to invest in cultivating social networks. Perhaps she could not afford the gifts expected of wedding guests. Or she may not have been invited to events where her services (praying, tending the sick) were not needed. The most visible humanitarian associations in the early twenty-­first century are organized confessionally and nested within the Centro Liba-



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nés in Mexico City: the Maronite Ladies with around forty members, the Orthodox Ladies of Saint Jorge with forty members, and most recently—since 2001—the Druze Ladies with twelve members. The Unión Asistencial de Damas Libanesas A.C. is currently led by Greek Orthodox women, while the Damas Voluntarias del Centro Libanés A.C. brings together Maronite, Orthodox, and Shia-­Druze women. Various informal groups meet elsewhere and are not legally constituted as civil associations. Two examples are the Maronite Ladies of Zgharta and The Cousins, a group of Greek Orthodox women. These associations provide a space to meet periodically for recounting and gossiping. Women’s associations compete with one another in consolidating and publishing collective memory in the form of books and DVDs documenting the histories of confessional communities and their institutions and in the form of cookbooks. They keep track of marriages, births and deaths, the making and unmaking of families and their fortunes, cultivating sites for community memory and its narration.

National Sectarian Institutions Institutions organized along emerging national logics acquired official scaffolding and international recognition in the 1940s. They coordinated larger numbers of people than earlier associations, with more standardized goals concerning properly national pursuits like interstate relations, market regulation, and the production of particular kinds of subjects. Among these institutions were embassies and consulates.43 The Lebanese embassy in Mexico was established in 1947, taking over administrative functions concerning Lebanese nationals and the celebration of Lebanese national holidays from the French embassy. Land and construction were donated by the colony, with a particularly generous contribution from Neguib Simon. The embassy’s diplomatic mission has regional jurisdiction, operating as the Lebanese state’s official representation before the governments of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.44 The embassy therefore functions as yet another site fostering transnational practice and classed marking of the Lebanese category. Since migrants and their descendants in all of these nation-­states must travel to Mexico City for administrative procedures, the Lebanese who are able to cultivate ties to Lebanon through this official site are only those who can habitually afford such travel. Honorary



Making the Mahjar Lebanese

169

Lebanese consulates were established in Mérida and Guadalajara. Syria did not institute diplomatic representation in Mexico, contributing to the erasure of the Syrian from the Syrio-­Lebanese migration during the second half of the twentieth century.45

The Lebanese League, the Lebanese Union The Centro Libanés in Mexico City can be traced to the Lebanese League, initially founded in 1937. The league, the true institution, as its twenty-­five founders called it, was organized by notables with a firm political project. Its board of directors consisted of well-­known Francophile merchants and bankers from across the Mexican Mahjar: Miguel Abed from Puebla, Alfredo Aboumrad, Elías Henaine, Amin Aboumrad, and Julián Slim based in Mexico City, and Domingo Kuri from Veracuz. The league’s stated goals: • [To provide] economic and political support to Lebanon and to defend its independence and its boundaries according to the Franco-­Lebanese treaty. • To unify all [people] of Lebanese origin and their descendants residing in this republic and to constitute itself into an officially representative organ that will fight for their material interests in this country. • To intervene with the relevant authorities with the goal of having the Lebanese nationality of migrants, who are considered Turks by the League of Nations because they did not register with French consulates on time as specified by the Treaty of Lausanne, recognized. • To establish relations with all Lebanese associations whose principles are compatible with those of the league, be they in Mexico, elsewhere, or in Lebanon itself, to create a force capable of facing any political danger threatening the integrity and independence of Lebanon. • To strengthen friendly ties to organisms representing the Syrians, Palestinians, and other Arab groups, to achieve our moral and social improvement, as long as such entities don’t intervene in matters relative to the limits and independence of Lebanon. • To create a public library whose holdings will be primarily made up of work regarding the history of Lebanon and Mexico. • To provide moral support to all Lebanese who request it. • The league will work toward strengthening relations between Mexicans and Lebanese. • The league will not intervene in matters of Mexican politics.46



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The league was later known as the Lebanese Union of Mexico and had delegations in Tehuacán, San Luis Potosí, Tampico, Veracruz, Puebla, Chihuahua, and Matehuala. The union’s stated goals were to facilitate government paperwork for members; to extend certificates of good conduct requested at consulates; to facilitate the entrance of Lebanese arriving into Mexico from other countries; to maintain communication with French and British consulates in order to send help to relatives in need during World War II; and to foster ties with the Lebanese associations of Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, El Salvador, and the United States.47 Transnational ties and intentions are clearly understood as tools for the consolidation of a territorial, political, and moral entity called Lebanon, defined in accordance with French political projects.48 A new kind of institution developed from the union. In 1941, founders of the Sociedad Libanesa A.C. presented striking continuity with those of the league: Miguel Abed, Alfredo Aboumrad, José Musi, Elías Henaine, and fifteen advisers described on the Centro Libanés webpage as hombres de negocios, businessmen.49 The society was established with the goal of building a Lebanese Center in Mexico City. Rumor has it that Mexican President Miguel Ávila Camacho (1940–1946) suggested establishing a community center, along with a school, a hospital, and a graveyard, on the model of the Spanish, French, and British “colonies” in Mexico. With an initial capital of one million pesos the sociedad was able to buy a plot of land on Ave. 20 de Noviembre: The 27th of February of 1959 the three gentlemen, Antonio Domit, Jorge Trabulse and Elías Fajer, as Delegates of the Assembly of the former Sociedad Libanesa, S.A de C.V., already transformed into the Centro Libanés, A.C., came before Lic. Alberto Pacheco, Notary No. 48, who . . . confirmed the aforementioned transformation. The objectives of Centro Libanés, A.C., among others, would be the following: a. To foster social, cultural, sports, artistic and scientific activities among its members, to obtain discipline, unity and intelligence from them, and achieve friendship, good judgment and understanding. b. To ingrain and publicize interest by means of talks, concerts, gatherings, tournaments, festivities and everything necessary to achieve those ends. c. To finish building and take charge of the administration of the Centro Libanés in Mexico City.

Table 6.3. Lebanese Leagues and Unions in Mexico Association

Location

Membership

Active

Young Syrians Juan Alam (president)

Merida

Union Libanaise Selim Basha (president) José Gastine (secretary) Neguib Chami (treasurer) sponsored by French foreign minister in Mexico, Viscount François Dejean

Mexico City

Union Sirio-­Libanesa President Domingo Kuri

Veracruz

1918

Société Syrio-­Libanaise du Mexique Selim Basha (president) José Gastine (secretary) Neguib Chami (treasurer)

Mexico City

1919

Lebanon League of Progress Felipe Bojalil José Dau Jorge Alam

Mérida

1919

Liga Libanesa de Yucatán José Dau (president)

Mérida

1925

Unión Libanesa de Tampico President Amado Feres Secretary Alejandro Simon

Apartado 997 Tampico

1927

Centro Libanés de Mérida President Jacobo Simon, Vice president Jacobo Mafud

Mérida, Mexico

1918

Ibrahim Basha Albert Rahaim Alejandro Gabriel José Abdo Said Adib Georges Trad Antoine Aftimos

~36 families

1918

1932



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Table 6.3. continued Association

Location

Membership

Active

Liga Sirio-­Libanesa-­Palestina Mexicana President Antonio Ayub Secretario Jorge Kuri [MAE, vol. 617, 135.]

Corregidora #16, Altos 2 Apartado Postal 7680 Mexico City

7,000 individuals

1932

Liga Libanesa Miguel Abed, Puebla Alfredo Aboumrad, Mexico City Elías Henaine, Mexico City Amin Aboumrad, Mexico City Julián Slim, Mexico City Domingo Kuri, Veracuz

Mexico City Puebla Tehuacán San Luis Potosí Matehuala Tampico Chihuahua Veracruz

25 founders

1937

Asociación Libanesa de Puebla

Puebla, Puebla

—

1937

Círculo Libanés Mexicano de Guadalajara President Jorge Karam

Guadalajara, Guadalajara

~13 families

1943

d. To carry out the labor of bringing together the Lebanese residing in Mexico and their descendants. e. In general, the execution of all acts and celebration of all contracts and operations, as well as providing convenient and necessary documentation for the achievement of the aforementioned objectives, which in no case will have the objective of profit, but to guarantee the best and least costly provision of the services which constitute the association’s ends. In no case will utilities be distributed.50

The twenty-­year delay between the founding of the Sociedad Libanesa S.A. and the building of the centro was rooted in controversies over naming. Greek Orthodox contributors to the project of a community center insisted that, given that many of them were Syrian, the club should be called the Syrio-­Lebanese Center.



Making the Mahjar Lebanese

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Confrontations led to the withdrawal of the bulk of Syrian capital from the project, further fragmentation among the migrant elite, delays in construction, and the consolidation of a Lebanese Center in which notable Syrian families refused to participate. The center currently has two locales in Mexico City. The first, located on Hermes Street in the Del Valle neighborhood, was built in 1962 with donations from members of the colony on a piece of land donated by the Fajer brothers. The second, inaugurated in 1998 on Glaciar Street in the Magdalena Contreras neighborhood, was built on land donated by A. Atalla, in memory of his son Freddy, who was tragically killed in a car accident. The list of contributing donors is displayed in gold lettering on a marble wall in the lobby and boasts about thirty prominent and wealthy Lebanese men and some women. The president of the Lebanese Center in Mexico City in September 2006, Rafael Musi, estimated the club’s membership at approximately 2,800 families, with an average of four members per family, for a total of around 12,000 active members.51 Around 250 of the families are socios patronos, or patron members of the club, who pay a higher annual fee and have a vote at club assemblies, participating in decision-­making processes. People remind waiters and other staff of this status when bills are not forthcoming or staff are hesitant to approve discounts or access to spaces. Knowledgeable middle- and upper-­level administrators were expected to be able to identify these members. Musi calculated that daily use of club facilities averages some 1,400 visitors to Glaciar and 1,200 to the Hermes installations. Administrative hierarchies at the club, which include the consejo directivo or board of trustees, the presidency, and other such administrative or political posts that rotate yearly, require individuals to pro­gress through the hierarchy before obtaining top leadership roles and remain dominated by men.52 The portraits of former club presidents line the walls of the president’s reception hall at Hermes, magnificently furnished in shell-­inlaid wood furniture imported from Syria. Hermes is where the paisanos go. The older generations, especially groups of men, tend to gather in the mornings for business breakfasts, coffee drinking, and chatting. While many of my interviewees complained that the club in general is no longer what it used to be and that there are now more Mexican than Lebanese members, everyone agreed that the Glaciar locale is socially marginal to the community and “more Mexican.” With a sweeping view of forested hills to the east of Mexico City and located near one of the largest television studios in the city, Televisa, the



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The Mexican Mahjar

Table 6.4. Lebanese Centers in Mexico, 2017 Centro Libanés

Total membership

Socios patronos

Daily users

Centro Libanés A.C. Hermes, Mexico City Centro Libanés A.C. Glaciar, Mexico City

2,800 families 12,000 users

250 families

1,200

Centro Libanés Mérida

200 families

Centro Mexicano-­Palestino-­ Libanés Monterrey (MEXPALI)

280 families

Centro Mexicano Libanés de Puebla Hermanos Serdan, 222 Real Del Monte Puebla, Puebla

200 families

Centro Libanés A.C. Veracruz

150–180 families

Centro Libanés Chihuahua

80–100 families

1,400

Glaciar locale is favored by television and film industry stars. The Residencia Cedros del Líbano, a retirement home sponsored by the club, is an extension of the Glaciar installations. It houses around fifty older adults of Lebanese, Syrian, and Mexican ancestry. Most families who participate in the Lebanese Center were proud to tell me that, of course, they are “always at the club.” Some explained that participation waned and intensified according to family cycles, with families participating more when their children are young and individuals participating most intensely as teenagers or marriageable young adults. Older people whose participation had been constant throughout their lives tended to have been born in the Mashriq and to be Arabic speakers who sought out the company of other migrants. The Lebanese Center merges athletics, art exhibits, dinner parties, dabke contests, beauty pageants, and cocktail hours with the political di-



Making the Mahjar Lebanese

175

mension at the core of the league and union. Twelve Lebanese centers exist in various states in Mexico, which according to Musi bring together between 80 and 250 families, a small fraction of the Mexico City membership. While the Centro Libanés name is standard across these associations, stabilizing a shared identity for participants in different locations, they are independently run and have local histories as well as a shared genealogy. Six centros libaneses acknowledge membership by Mexicans or other Mashriqi nationalities in the institution’s name—for example, the Centro Mexicano-­Palestino-­Libanés in Monterrey and the Centro Libanés Mexicano de Tampico. Though ostensibly concerned with sponsoring various forms of socializing, Centro Libanés is an important site for the regulation of the boundaries of “the Lebanese community” that displaced the “Syrio-­Lebanese colony,” along class, sect, and national axes. Administratively and in terms of scale, it resembles other national institutions consolidated in the independent period. Its all-­male bureaucracy provides avenues for political ascent within the Lebanese community.53

Chapter 7

Objects of Memory

This chapter explores authoritative Mahjari memory of Mashriq and Mahjar and its subversions across four textual genres anchoring migrant memories: national histories, community chronicles, cookbooks, and memoirs created in Spanish between 1945 and 2015. This textual production maps memory as differential for situated subjects.1 Genres have different degrees of authority and permanence as well as distinctive patterns of production, circulation, and consumption; they imagine time as chronological or cyclical, national, communitarian, nostalgic, institutional, or intimist. Devalued genres reference and destabilize more authoritative ones, affording a multilayered, divergent structuring of migrant memory.2 My close reading is informed by the social biographies of authors, assembled through interviews and secondary sources, and the ethnographic contexts in which volumes were shared to instruct me about the Mashriq. The history is a most masculine genre, developed by intellectuals, professionals, and diplomats between 1945 and 2015. Contributing to the construction of particular Lebanese nationalisms, histories insert Mashriq and Mahjar, a Lebanese nation and its diasporic extensions and descendants, into a global civilizational narrative.3 The genre synthesizes, offering variations on an emerging canon of Lebanese national history built on Jesuit and Nahda production in the Mashriq. None of the authors are professional historians of the Middle East, yet they are recognized, through citation and inclusion in library collections, as authoritative. These are dual artifacts: community histories and public interventions, memorializing the social and natural landscapes of intimate nostalgia and producing political interventions. Though largely Phoenician, national histories sometimes flirt with the Arab. Shifting the center of gravity to migrants, community chronicles weave histories from Mahjar to Mashriq, focusing on migrant subjects, projects, and institutions. Authored by women collecting oral history, chronicles are narrated as community memory. Difference inscribed through in-

Objects of Memory

177

stitutionalization is naturalized and projected onto the past as organizing principle of the Mexican Mahjar. Community boundaries sometime coincide with religious tradition but are often narrower or wider than faith. Phoenicianism is absent from community chronicles other than the Maronite-­centered volumes claiming to re­cord the experience of “the Lebanese.”4 Four different chronicles document Jewish migrations to Mexico—one claims to represent everyone but centers on Ashkenazim, the others on Halebis, Shamis, Sefardis. Some chronicles narrate community in a provincial urban space like Guadalajara, others span the continent—the Americas. These are expensive coffee table editions that privilege the visual, functioning as annotated photographic albums; texts are based on interviews and reproduce extracts, giving voice to model community members. Chronicles often bear the weight of memorializing family and community institutions, published to celebrate anniversaries or associations’ founding. Each chronicle privileges a time and place of departure to craft a larger narrative inserting Mahjaris in Mexican society according to community definitions of self and other. The world of Mahjari cookbooks in Mexico constitutes a third, frankly feminine genre, defined by its affect and impermanence. Don Alfonso Aued, the man inaugurating the history genre, published the first cookbook mentioned by community chronicles, Cocina libanesa, in 1957. Neither his nor the first Mahjari cookbook, published in 1952, are preserved in the institutional libraries where national histories are properly filed for posterity. They surface on the kitchen shelves of community ladies, succeeded since the early 1980s by an array of confessionally distinct efforts to preserve Mashriqi culinary practice in the Mahjar at the critical juncture of elderly women migrants’ disappearance and women’s massive entry into the paid labor force. The affective weight of food preparation and consumption in migrants’ experience of their transnationalism, establishing boundaries and continuities, the social and psychological work of food, make it the perfect vehicle for the intersection of the normative and other narratives.5 Cookbooks offer the widest variation in their claims about the tradition being safeguarded. Sometimes their content is Lebanese, but it may also be personal, familial, Arab, heritage, remote, exotic, sophisticated, or diasporic. As ephemera, a devalued genre, cookbooks offer a microsite of freedom, where memory erased by national and community logics can be smuggled into the future.6 Finally, I explore the affect of food in autobiographical memoirs, novels, and short stories of the Mexican Mahjar.7 Privately published or sponsored by community presses invested in reconstructing a shared



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past, some narrate the exemplary lives of those exceptionally successful in business or closely tied to community institution building.8 Fictionalized memoirs have appeared in the mainstream Mexican publishing industry, addressed to a Hispanophone reading public, translating migrant experience for Mexicans of other origins. Narrated through the eyes of a child that matures as textual time develops, they invite the reader into an intimist world bounded by the horizon of the family. I focus on the narrative role of food in the construction of memory across memoir forms. Food is the thread of life, entangling people of all ages and traditions in gendered distinctions. Though all memoirs highlight the centrality of food in making social bonds, women’s writing returns repeatedly to the preparation of food as women’s work and to the style and scale of its preparation as class markers. The power of food to structure family interaction, enact social reproduction, and provide bridges and links is naturalized while the narrators are children, but both Bárbara Jacobs and Rosa Nissán eventually reject women’s domestication by food. Men’s memoirs invoke food as the threshold to memory, describing the grounding pleasures of its consumption and women’s work to produce it as their main contribution to making family and sharing in patriarchal authority.

Eight and a Half Histories of Lebanon Eight histories of Lebanon circulated in the Mexican Mahjar between 1945 and 2015. On the brink of Lebanese independence, migrant intellectuals William Nimeh and Alfonso Aued presented Mahjar and Mexico with the Maronite history of the new national entity. The genre bifurcated in the 1960s. Memoir travel narratives authored by grandchildren of migrants cultivate nostalgia and flaunt erudition. Circulating beyond the community, they position their authors as natural experts, qualified to explain the region to Mexicans of other traditions. Lebanese diplomats, journalists, and political scientists focus on political commentary, supporting state policy or writing against the state or against the civil war. Anchored in the Mexican Mahjar, Nimeh and Aued addressed the Mahjar at large. Subsequent authors were globally mobile in various professional capacities: Najib Dahdah and Hisham Hamdan as diplomats; Enrique Castro Farías as a journalist; Father Emile Eddé in clerical functions; and Sofía A. Saadeh, Ulises Cassab, and Carlos Martínez Assad as intellectuals. Like the Argentine Mahjar cultural production analyzed by Christina

Objects of Memory

179

Civantos, Nimeh and Aued’s foundational texts sit astride three or four literary genres.9 Offering concise encyclopedic introductions to Lebanese geography, natural history, prehistory, archaeology, and mythology, they sweep on to ancient and modern political history and conclude with a briefing on the political economy of Lebanon at independence and Arab League politics. They define Lebanon as a natural landscape, inserting it into global geological chronologies established by naturalists trooping through the region as expert military attachés during the nineteenth century.10 The authors transition into mythological time without warning, invoking Lebanon as natural backdrop to Mediterranean mythological drama from Adam and Eve to Cain, through Adonis and Astarte, even Saint George and the dragon. The histories are also travel guides, noting natural and archaeological jewels of interest for visitors. They include appendices noting recognition from Mahjar and Mashriq: press coverage, letters of congratulation, and addresses from political, religious, and intellectual giants. Born in Lebanon, Dr. William Nimeh wrote the first history of Lebanon published in Mexico City. He traveled to Mexico in 1922 and completed the medical training begun in Beirut at the National University. He made a career as a gastroenterologist and founded the Lebanese Medical Association of America in 1945, becoming its first president. Nimeh moved back to Lebanon in 1949, returning to settle in Mexico in 1963. He was the author of Historia de la medicina árabe (History of Arab medicine), a hygiene manual for tourists, and Historia del Líbano.11 Nimeh originally published the text as a series of articles in the newspaper El Universal to balance media coverage in the midst of Franco-­Lebanese conflict over Lebanese independence and decided an abridged book-­length history was warranted in 1945. A second edition quickly followed in 1946. Nimeh intended to fill a void in the Latin American public’s knowledge of the Mashriq and to inform migrants and their children, who “are generally ignorant of the elemental truths about their homeland.”12 The small leather-­bound volume I consulted was an autographed gift to Luis Echeverría Álvarez, then president of Mexico, in 1976. Echeverría’s celebration of the Lebanese, “whoever doesn’t have a Lebanese friend, should find one,” is constantly cited at public events by Mexican and Lebanese politicians. Nimeh based his synthesis on the work of leading Lebanese national historians of the mandate years Asad Rustum (1897–1965) and Fouad Afram al-­Bustani (1906–1995). Their joint work, sponsored and published by the Lebanese Ministry of Education between 1927 and 1937,



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provided Lebanon with a national history distinct from that of Syria and the Arabs.13 In 1937, they produced Tarikh Lubnan (History of Lebanon), a five-­volume textbook series destined for students in Lebanese public schools. In spite of the fierce press controversy unleashed by the authors’ relative neglect of Arab history and their defense of the crusaders, the textbook series was used in elementary through high school education through 1946, when the sixth edition appeared.14 Al-­Bustani and Rustum exemplified common trajectories for educated Lebanese of their day. Al-­Bustani was Maronite, schooled at the Jesuit University of Saint Joseph, where he taught Arabic and history of the Arabs at the Oriental Faculty until he became the first president of the Lebanese University in 1951. Rustum was born into a Greek Orthodox family that had converted to Protestantism. Educated in American missions and at the Syrian Protestant College (the American University of Beirut after 1920), he trained further in the North American Mahjar, returning in 1922 with a doctoral degree from the University of Chicago to teach history of the modern Middle East at the American University of Beirut.15 A faithful student of their national narrative, Nimeh insisted on treating Phoenicia as no more than necessary prologue to Lebanon’s history.16

My Compatriots, the Lebanese of the New World Alfonso Aued was born in Lebanon in 1890. He studied journalism in Paris before arriving in 1912 to San Luis Potosí, where he acquired a degree as a lawyer. Aued founded and edited the long-­lived Mahjari periodical El Emir (1937–1967), which we encountered in chapter 5. He published Historia de Líbano in 1945 and La cocina libanesa in 1957 and translated the historical novel Ai-­Abbasa, la hermana del califa (Ai-­Abbasa, the caliph’s sister). Aued’s sources for his history included the Jesuit and Maronite canon: M. Jouplain, Henri Lammens, Charles Corm, the Jesuit journal Al-­Mashriq, and the foundational Arab nationalist The Arab Awakening by George Antonius. Aued dedicated his volume to Lebanon, to Mexico, and to his compatriots, the Lebanese of the New World. Perhaps given his immersion in Mexican immigration debates showcased by El Emir, Phoenicianism was fundamental to Aued, who differentiated among Others encountered during Phoenician commercial expansion in the Mediterranean: in civilized countries, Phoenicians negotiated exchange, installing warehouses and bazaars that secured economic power within host states.

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In semibarbarous countries and those lacking established government, they set up factories in strategically defensible locations where they also built temples. These sites lured locals, introducing them to Phoenician products and to the “new civilization and the inventions and the culture of the moment.”17 When these enclaves were profitable, they became veritable colonies. From Roman Phoenicia, he moves into Christian history as integral to national history. Lebanon, where a flesh-­and-­blood Christ walked and preached, became a land of hermits fasting, meditating, and doing penance in their mountain caves, exemplified by Saint Maron, patron saint of Lebanon and the Maronite Church.18 Arabs are described as invaders, relatively benevolent ones under whose rule civilization thrived until the Crusades, when Christians were allowed into the administration and the Church flourished. Lebanese history as such begins during the Ottoman administration of Mount Lebanon, when locals banded together to fight tyranny as one nation, one destiny.19 Various appendixes complete the book. One reproduces speeches by the political figures of recently independent Lebanon: President Bechara al-­Khoury, Prime Minister Riad al-­ Solh, President of Parliament Sabri Bey Hamade. The second discussed the question of a Lebanese race and Lebanon’s relation to pan-­A rabism; the third offers a quick tour of Lebanon’s tourist attractions; the fourth pre­sents Lebanon’s economy; and the last its administrative organization. The book closes with a timeline of Lebanese history, from 225 AD when the Roman emperor Alejandro Severo was born in Arka, Lebanon, to the first Pan-­A rab Congress establishing the Arab League in 1944. A brief separate timeline for Islam follows, from the birth of the prophet Muhammad in 580 to the death of reformer al-­Afghani in 1897.

Intermediaries between East and West in a World of Conquests Najib Dahdah, Maronite politician and journalist, was the son of a Lebanese historian. Phoenicianist contributor to the Jesuit journal Al-­Mashriq, he participated in the Congress of the Coast and the Four Districts convened by Muslim and Christian leaders in Beirut, 1936–1937. The Congress met Franco-­Syrian negotiations with the demands that coastal districts annexed to Greater Lebanon by the French be returned to Syria and Lebanese urban notables be allowed a greater share in politics and social life.20 In the 1960s, Dahdah was Lebanese ambassador in Mexico, where he produced and published Evolución histórica del Líbano (Historical



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evolution of Lebanon), a brief national history also published in French. With a foreword by Fuad Ammoun, Lebanese minister of foreign relations, and prologued by Rodolfo Usigli, former ambassador of Mexico in Lebanon, the book became a reference in the Mahjar, cited by intellectuals producing objects of memory. In his collection of historical essays illustrating Lebanon’s “essential right to independence and to its borders,” Dahdah mobilized territory, language, origin, and history following Ernest Renan to develop a narrative of the nation as heroic, unchanging protagonist of historical accident.21 Lebanon and the Lebanese appear immutable through twenty-­five centuries of “independent life.” He cites the same French, Jesuit, and Lebanese Phoenicianists as Aued: Jouplain, Henri Lammens, Charles Corm, and Al-­Mashriq, enriched with regional Arab chronicles. Dahdah rejects Lammens as naïve for suggesting Greater Syria as geographic unit, defending Lebanon’s natural borders: the Beqaa, source of cereals; the coast, producer of olives, bananas, dates, sesame, and citrics; and the mountain, providing mulberry trees, tobacco, and an assortment of fruit. Ancient Phoenicia foreshadows Lebanese foreign policy of the 1960s. Then as now, peaceful conquerors preferring “strict neutrality,”22 the Lebanese operate as “intermediaries between the East and the West in a world of conquests.”23 Though territorially small, “the country’s independence was possible and also necessary to the prosperity and development of its population.”24 With the demographic substitution of Phoenicians by Arabs, the nation owes much to both peoples and nothing to the Ottomans, a natural enemy. Dahdah’s history was the main source for journalist Castro Farías’s 1965 celebration of the migration in his Aporte libanés al progreso de América (Lebanese contribution to progress in the Americas). Father Emile Eddé cites it, in his two-­volume El Líbano en la historia (Lebanon in History) published in 1993 in Buenos Aires and in Jounieh in 2001. Dahdah is also cited by Patricia Jacobs in her Diccionario enciclopédico de mexicanos de origen libanés y de otros pueblos del Levante in 2000.

The World Lebanese Cultural Union In the 1990s, when some would argue the Mahjar was no more, Père Emile Eddé’s El Líbano en la historia began to be published in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Jounieh in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Arabic. Volume I was produced in 1993 for the hundred-­year celebration of the Maronite Mission in Argentina, attended by Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros

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Sfeir, who profited from the occasion to consecrate a church to San Maron in Buenos Aires. The history was to be distributed in all Spanish-­speaking countries by the World Lebanese Cultural Union.25 A second volume narrating the history of Lebanon from the Maan emirs through the present was published in 2001 in Jounieh, circulating in Mexico as migrants visiting the homeland brought it back as an autographed souvenir. Mahjari in their production and projected circulation, Eddé’s histories are the first to claim research in French and Maronite archives. He refers to French Orientalist classics: Jean de la Roque, the Comte de Vol­ney, Jouplain, Lammens; and references texts by religious and political mandate figures, like Maronite Patriarch Arida and Generals Catroux and Puaux. He cites French and Maronite histories of Christianity in the region and Lebanese historians and commentators of the 1980s, like Meir Zamir and Georges Corm. He also includes Mahjar authors based in Cairo (Is­kan­dar Amoun 1913; Camille Eddé 1921; Antoine Yammine 1922), Brazil (Salo­ mon Jorge, São Paulo 1948; Barbara Yung, Rio, 1973; Mansour Challita, Rio, 1976), the United States (Philip Hitti 1957), and Mexico, citing Dahdah’s (1964) work. Eddé tells a story of coexistence and collaboration between Maronites, core of the Lebanese nation, dutiful followers of the pope and friends of France, and their Druze neighbors in Mount Lebanon. Orientalist authorities are absorbed into the body of the text and embellished. The Druze are rendered suspect through French dismissals; Puget de Saint Pierre is cited to describe Emir Milhem as perverse;26 Rene Ristelhueber to cast Bechir II as “the perfect Oriental ruler, imposing respect through his skill, his cruelty sometimes, and his magnificence.”27 Eddé confers a central role to Patriarch Hoyek in the negotiation of Lebanese independence. Photographs of archaeological sites, maps, portraits and memorials of national heroes, and reproductions of documents sealing political protection or alliance illustrate Eddé’s histories.

Nostalgic Histories Carlos Martínez Assad was born in Amatitlán, Jalisco, in 1946; his maternal grandfather Nassario Assad was Maronite, from Baiqoun in the Shouf, Lebanon. Martínez Assad studied sociology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and received a PhD in political sociology from the University of Paris. He directed the Institute of Social Research at UNAM from 1983–1989 and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1992.28 He has taught widely and is the author of four regional histories of the



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Mexican Revolution and various works of fiction: novels En el verano, la tierra (In summer, the land, 1994), A Dios lo que es de Dios (To God what is God’s, 1995), the travel account Memoria de Líbano (Memory of Lebanon, 2003). His most recent novel, La casa de las once puertas (The house with eleven doors), was published by the prestigious Seix Barral press in 2015. Married to Jewish Mexican novelist Sara Sefhovich, Martínez Assad builds his narratives on nostalgias of Mashriq and Mahjar. Citing Père Emile Eddé as his main source on the modern history of Lebanon, along with the French Orientalist canon and anything ever written by Amin Maalouf, he acknowledges Al-­Fannan, the Centro Libanés Association of Artists and Intellectuals of Lebanese Origin, whose members produced other texts in this chapter: Patricia Jacobs, Norma Barquet, Martha Díaz de Kuri, Ulises Cassab, Joseph Naffah, and Nouhad Mahmoud. I include Memoria as a variation of the history genre because Martínez Assad’s narrative of his first two visits to the land of his grandfather, in 1975 and 1998, claims historical erudition, eyewitness status, and truth value. It is offered as a learned voyage in time, a tour of history. Martínez Assad, who had previously experienced the Mashriq only in family memory, writes to his recently deceased mother from Lubnan, “country of whiteness by its Phoenician name,” perceived through a passionate Maronite Mahjari Orientalism. He evokes sweltering tropical Jalisco afternoons when the family listened to Nassario’s tales peppered with Arabic that she had to translate. In the affective company of Kahlil Gibran, the author reads Lebanese urban and rural landscapes through literary and historical erudition, sprinkling his text with Arabic terms glossed for the reader, inserting scraps of ancient history, invoking travelers who saw in the city of Beirut “an enchanted sultaness” known since the sixteenth century as “the Paris of the Maronites.”29 His narrative is full of Mahjari memories of place and landscape; family and friends share the page with Gérard de Nerval writing his Voyage en Orient in 1851. Grandfather’s injunction to “go to the Bled, the land I dream of always” jostles with the contrast between the Beirut seen in 1975 and Alphonse de Lamartine’s 1832 description of the city. Martínez Assad travels south with biblical narratives and Homer’s Odyssey, evoking Menelaus’s visit to the city of Saida in antiquity. Though we read that he is also familiar with T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the film Lawrence of Arabia, the modern inhabitants of Lebanon are illegible to him: “Along the road I see impoverished, almost miserable, dirty places; what is remarkable is the Muslim population that settled here since the moment of Islamic expansionism, but a good pro-

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portion are Palestinian refugees, the women wearing chador and the men keffie. The trip becomes hellish with constant bus stops.”30 Mistaking Palestinian hijab for Iranian chador, harrowed by the visible presence of Muslims, the author prefers the comfort of slipping back into biblical time once in Sur, to sing the glories of Phoenicia and Greek mythology, moving on to Baalbek with Gibran and Lamartine. The author’s 1998 travels begin by invoking Voltaire’s character Zadig and move into the history of Mount Lebanon, citing European aristocratic travelers, consular memoirs, and Amin Maalouf ’s The Rock of Tannios. Martínez Assad reminds the reader of murderous Ottoman history, which provoked the Lebanese exile to the American Mahjars. The author leaves behind Beirut “[which] is like some place in Spain or France,” where he enjoys “legendary hospitality” and the company of wise Maronite men, to penetrate into the sacred space of the mountain where he finds cedars, monasteries, and his grandfather’s family house in the village of Baiqoun.31 Encouraged by his driver, he knocks on a village door and is magically swarmed by chattering relatives kissing him on both cheeks, pressing his hands between theirs, offering him grapes and even putting them to his mouth as they remember, reciting: “Salem, your grandfather, was the eldest, then Yusef, then Suleiman, Abdallah, and finally Yamal, the only girl. . . .”32 Modernity is central to his imaginary of Beirut: “In this autumn of 1998, I see at first sight a Western city, at least from the perspective of the Christian part,” decorated with national flags to celebrate the recent election of President Emile Lahoud. Lebanon is modern and democratic, insofar as it is Christian. Damascus in contrast, site of ancient splendor, is a medieval labyrinth dominated by giant portraits of the Oriental despot, Hafez al-­Assad. Damascene architecture and enchantment are explained through the Quran and the Thousand and One Nights, geography and food linked using Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean. Palmyra is intelligible via Marlene Dietrich in Allah’s Garden and the Zenobia of Amin Maalouf ’s Gardens of Light. Aleppo allows him to tell the story of the Maronites through the eyes of Bishop Wadih Boutros Tayah, which concludes in AD 686, “when the Maronite patriarchate was finally established in the Lebanese Mountain.”33 Ulises Cassab, another Mahjari writer of nostalgic history, was born in 1936 in Niltepec, Oaxaca, to a Chaldean family from Telfek, Iraq. He made a career at the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, teaching and lecturing on sports and medicine. An enthusiastic traveler, he contrib-



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utes to press and TV as an amateur historian on world history themes. His Cadmus, Universal Teacher of 1981 was followed by Líbano desde Fenicia (Lebanon since Phoenicia), which appeared in 2006.34 It is a breathless tour loosely inspired on the work of Phoenicianists Corm, Ammoun, Chami, and May Murr and modern historians and archaeologists of Lebanon like Kamal Salibi and Emir Maurice Chehab, curator of the Lebanese National Museum. Excerpts are borrowed from Al-­Ghurbal and Al-­Khawater, and Mahjar authorities invoked: Philip Hitti, Mussa Kuraiem, Nagib Dahdah, Ambassador Joseph Naffah, Antonio Mouhanna (Melkite bishop in Mexico), Gabriel Ghanoum (Melkite archimandrite for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean), Boutros Tayah (Maronite bishop in Mexico), Père Emile Eddé, León Rodríguez Zahar, and Patricia Jacobs. French and Lebanese tourism guides provide the rest. With forewords by the president of the Mexico-­Lebanon Friendship Association, Ambassador Nouhad Mahmoud; Archbishop Antonio Chedraui of the Orthodox Church in Mexico; Maronite archbishop in Mexico George Abi Younes; Melkite bishop in Mexico Monseñor Antonio Mouhanna; Maronite Father Jacques Najm; Carlos Matuk Canán, director of the Centro Libanés; and Antonio Trabulse Kaim, director of the Instituto Cultural Mexicano Libanés, Cassab’s book creates the illusion of boundless erudition as the author leaps from one historical moment to the next. Cassab begins in prehistory, runs through biblical time, with “the manifestation of Jesus without a doubt, the most notable occurrence of the Roman period, the most significant of the Western era and the most transcendent in the history of the world.”35 Phoenicians were the first Lebanese migrants, Lebanon the refuge of political exiles.36 It is illustrated with maps and nineteenth-­century British Orientalist lithographs of Lebanese rural and urban landscapes and ruins taken from Richard Chahine’s three-­volume Lebanon, Pictures of our Heritage, published in Beirut in 1996. The lithographs freeze Lebanon in nineteenth-­century romance inconsistent with characterizations of Ottoman administration as “bestial domination.”37

Writing Against Three histories denounce multiple violences, explaining Lebanese conflicts to a Spanish-­speaking audience. Joseph Naffah’s autobiography La lucha de mi vida por la educación y la paz (My life’s struggle for education and peace), published in 2000, offers a history of Lebanese diplomacy since

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1943 with a foreword by former Mexican president José López Portillo.38 On the cover, a Greek urn portraying Phoenician Cadmus is subtitled “a commentary on the War in Lebanon to avoid the clash of civilizations foreseen by Samuel Huntington in his book.”39 Born into a modest Maronite family in Beit Chabab, Lebanon, in 1919, Naffah studied international law and administration at Beirut’s Jesuit Saint Joseph University, joined the Lebanese foreign service in 1944, and spent much of his career in the American Mahjars. He was consul general in São Paulo (1964–1970) and ambassador in Mexico (1972–1978), Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea. He founded the Brazil-­Lebanon Cultural Association, the Casa Libanesa in São Paulo, and the Brazil-­Lebanon Chamber of Commerce. Ambassador Naffah contributed to the visibility of the migration in Mexico, entertaining politicians with his wife’s home cooking. A memorializer, he erected a monument to teachers, personified by Cadmus, and created the public park Jardín de la República del Líbano, in the affluent neighborhood of Polanco, Mexico City. He also organized the committee for the construction of the Fakhr-­al Din monument in Beirut.40 Defending an Oriental origin of civilization, Ambassador Naffah urgently pleaded with the international community, the American Mahjars, explaining the civil war as the result of foreign intervention and noting Lebanon’s exceptional reconstruction. In his narrative, the Lebanese state in diaspora becomes the space of an alternate national history, where the 1975 war doesn’t happen, the trope of Lebanon as fount of Mediterranean-­Universal-­Phoenician civilization elbowing violence out of the horizon. A single Mahjari woman produced a history of Lebanon: Sofía A. Saadeh, Arabist Antun Saadeh’s eldest daughter. Antun had lived in the United States 1919–1920 and in Brazil 1921–1924. A Greater Syria nationalist constantly persecuted by French mandate authorities, he founded the secular Syrian Socialist National Party in 1932. In 1938 he took refuge in Brazil, moving to Argentina in 1939, where he met his Mahjari wife, Juliette el-­Meer. Born to the Greek Orthodox couple in Buenos Aires in 1942, Sofía traveled to Beirut with her mother and younger sister as a small child in late 1947, following her father’s return from his Mahjar exile. The family soon fled to Syria, where the women sought shelter in a monastery. After Antun’s execution by the Lebanese state in 1949, Juliette was imprisoned in Syria for ten years, while the SSNP struggled with the Ba’ath Party. Sofía Saadeh received a BA and MA in history from the American Uni-



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versity of Beirut before going on to obtain a PhD in history of the Middle East at Harvard. Returning to teach and work at American University of Beirut and the Lebanese University, Saadeh published five books on Lebanese society and politics. Her El Líbano: religión y ciudadanía, published by the Asociación Cultural Siria in Buenos Aires in 2010 as a translation of Lebanese Confessionalism in Citizenship and Conflict, circulates among Mahjaris in Mexico. Saadeh writes against the confessional system, identifying spheres in which the National Pact has proved ruinous to the consolidation of Lebanese citizenship since 1943. In her analysis, confessionalism undermines reform efforts, negatively impacting the lives of women through the permanence of religious legislation disadvantageous to them. It also mines the educational system, labor organization, and the formation of an active civil society.41 Hisham Hamdan was born in 1953 into a Druze family in al-­Benay, Lebanon. The son of a judge, he trained as a lawyer in the Lebanese National University, going on to obtain a PhD in international public law in the former Czechoslovakia. He joined the Lebanese foreign service in 1978, becoming ambassador to Argentina (2000–2013) and Mexico (2013– 2016), the author of numerous books on international governance, and an active lecturer. His Líbano: en medio del juego y del doble discurso de las grandes potencias (Lebanon: between the game and the double discourse of the great powers), with a foreword by Argentinian Mahjari journalist and analyst Carlos Duguech, was published in Buenos Aires by Editorial Canán in 2012 and in Mexico in 2013 by the Druze association El Mundo Árabe en México (The Arab World in Mexico), presided by Suleiman Akabani. A collection of essays and opinion pieces produced over ten years, it discusses Lebanese history from 1975 through the Arab Spring.42 After a brief geographical and historical sketch, Hamdan offers an invitation to visit this land of “many seductions”—including archaeological sites, ski resorts, restaurants, and museums—a prime destination for religious tourism of the Holy Land, including the geography of Christ’s miracles, the cradle of Catholic saints, and the coexistence of religious practice visible in the architecture of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Lebanon, which gave the world Kahlil Gibran, also offers the tourist Beirut’s nightlife, with plenty of Spanish speakers and mate drinking to help Latin Americans feel at home. Throughout the essays, Ambassador Hamdan writes in defense of a Lebanese history of democracy and prosperity, against the civil war and Israeli intervention, and against state reconciliation with political Islam in the wake of the Arab Spring.

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Eight Community Chronicles Teams of women interviewing community members, collecting photographs and documents under the direction of well-­known community intellectuals, have produced seven Mahjari chronicles between 1989 and 2010. Unlike the national histories, which ground their authority on authors’ erudition and citation of an evolving academic canon, chronicles rely on oral history and community archives to document institution building in the Mexican Mahjar. The nation is peculiarly absent in community chronicles, substituted by local understandings of religious tradition and universal culture as frames enabling shared origins and political action. Valorizing family history and community memory, chronicles stimulated the creation of the Archivo Libanés of the Instituto Cultural Mexicano Libanés, directed by Antonio Trabulse, and the Centro de Documentación e Investigación Judío, directed by Alicia Gojman.43 Chronicles frame Mahjari institution building through the histories of mobility and world histories imagined by particular Jewish and Maronite communities. Jewish histories originate in Babylonia and the Mediterranean, assigning a special role to Iberian Judaism as both loss and link, wound and bridge toward Ottoman and American geographies. Maronite Mahjar histories begin, not on the transatlantic steamboats of Ottoman modernity, but on Noah’s Ark, with Phoenicianism providing another link to universalism. There are no Syrian, Muslim, or Druze community chronicles. Chronicle print runs are relatively small, between five hundred and two thousand, since volumes are intended to circulate within communities, each in a larger, more luxurious format than the last. Chronicles’ roots are in another genre, the census or community directory, present across the Mahjar from early twentieth-­century business directories in the United States (1908) through mid and late twentieth-­ century family-­centered efforts in Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela. Don Domingo Kuri, owner of the shop El Arca de Noé (Noah’s Ark) in the port of Veracruz, whom we have met in every chapter, was said to keep migrant directories he used to help new arrivals join family and friends. The Guadalajara chronicle and the Miguel Afif family memoir describe him as “a guardian angel” helping migrants find their bearings.44 French consular authorities produced the 1921 census and the 1926 registration. Salim Abud and Julián Nasr compiled the first printed directory of Mashriqi migrants and descendants in Mexico and Central America in 1948, last updated by Maronite Father Jacques Najm in 1981. Directories, which listed the names of heads of families, addresses, and



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phone numbers, are no longer updated. As Mahjaris become wealthier, security concerns make families reluctant to share contact information. The most recent efforts were Druze directories in 1983 and 2001, encouraged by the arrival of a Druze Lebanese ambassador to Mexico in 2001. Two chronicles include directory-­like annexes; in his foreword, Ambassador Nouhad Mahmoud described the entire Guadalajara chronicle as a creative illustrated directory. Community censuses of the Jewish population in Mexico are periodically circulated within the community by umbrella institutions. Unlike directories, all community chronicles reflect the institutional fragmentation of the migration. Enrique Castro Farías—a Chilean journalist who covered the 1948 Arab-­Israeli conflict as a war correspondent, developing into a passionate supporter of the Palestinian struggle as a result—was the only non-­ Mashriqi to produce a chronicle, in 1965. He wrote extensively on the Cuban and the Chinese revolutions and is perhaps best remembered as a poet. Castro Farías traveled to Mexico on an official cultural mission during his tenure as adviser to President Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in the late 1950s. With President Ibáñez’s death in 1960 and rising criticism of his administration, Castro Farías stayed on in Mexico as columnist for a major newspaper, El Universal. He decided to revisit Lebanon, where he had attended a 1948 Arab League meeting, and published a celebration of the Lebanese across Mashriq and Mahjar: Aporte libanés al progreso de América, sponsored by the World Lebanese League. Based on interviews with Mahjaris and Lebanese politicians and Dahdah’s book, a history of the World Lebanese League is followed by labor biographies and migration histories for selected Mexican Mahjar notables.45 Liz Hamui de Halabe coordinated the team of nine third- and fourth-­ generation Mahjaris that produced Los judíos de Alepo en México (The Jews of Aleppo in Mexico) in 1989. Born in Mexico City to a Jewish family of Aleppian origin, Hamui holds a PhD in social sciences from the Jesuit Universidad Iberoamericana. A prolific author on religious sociology and Jewish history in Mexico, Hamui attends academic conferences, teaches, supervises student research, and is currently director of the Departamento de Investigación Educativa of the Facultad de Medicina graduate school of UNAM. The collective volume was published by the Maguen David community center to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the institution as Sedaka y Marpé, a charitable association. The chronicle frames Maguen David through a history of Judaism that zooms in to Judaism in Aleppo, followed by a history of Jewish migration to the Ameri-

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cas, narrowing into migration to Mexico. It reproduces photographs and documents illustrating arguments, but text dominates.46 Some contributions provide bibliography in footnotes, citing general reference works like the Encyclopedia Britannica, Corinne Krauze’s history of the Jews in Mexico, and Isaac Dabbah’s memoir. Two large-­scale chronicles produced in the early 1990s claim to be broadly inclusive. Imágenes de un encuentro (Images of an encounter), published in 1992, was edited by Judit Bokser de Liwerant. Bokser, born in Argentina in 1946, has lived in Mexico since 1967. A political scientist initially trained at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to which she and her husband are generous donors, she obtained her PhD at UNAM, later directing the graduate school and other programs at the political science facultad. An author of books on Jewish culture in Mexico and political theory of globalization and difference, she has been the recipient of numerous academic awards. Bokser coordinated a team of five professional journalists and graduate students to produce a book in which images are central. Jointly published by Tribuna Israelita, Comité Central, Mexico’s National University, and the Atzmauth Fund, Imágenes received an award for its flawless design. It has a foreword by the rector of the university, José Sarukán, who is of Armenian ancestry. Though it begins by acknowledging the arrival of Jews in Mexico with the Spanish conquest, observing their persecution by the New Spain’s Inquisition, the chronicle focuses on twentieth-­century migrations, noting tensions organizing Jewish community life in Mexico. Jewish migrants grouped together, but contrasts between their Ottoman and Ashkenazi histories tended to fragment emerging institutions. The narrative centers on umbrella organizations dominated by Ashkenazim, Mexican Jews’ thickening ties to the state of Israel after its founding, and the difficulty of integrating into the Mexican Catholic mainstream.47 This chronicle provides a rich academic bibliography. Displayed on Mahjari coffee tables, the two-­volume De Líbano a México chronicle is similar to Bokser’s in the centrality of images and the displacement of subalterns in hegemonic community memory. Lourdes Macluf, a journalist and writer born in 1949 in Mexico City to a family from Bekaa Kafra, and Martha Díaz de Kuri, a Mexican orthodontist married into a Mahjari family, coauthored De Líbano a México: crónica de un pueblo migrante (From Lebanon to Mexico: chronicle of an emigrant people, 1994) and De Líbano a México: la vida alrededor de la mesa (From Lebanon to Mexico: life around the table, 2002). Macluf published two novels, Aquel



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amor in 2001 and Si hubiera mar . . . in 2007, with the prestigious Alfaguara press before her untimely death. Díaz de Kuri has continued producing Mahjari family histories. Printed and distributed by the Sanborns restaurant and bookshop chain owned by Carlos Slim, these volumes titled De Líbano constitute official Maronite memory. The authors interviewed 116 Mahjaris for the first and 110 for the second volume, citing Aued and Nimeh’s Historia de Líbano, the Abud and Nasr and Najm censuses, Hitti’s Lebanon in History, community newspapers Al-­Ghurbal and El Emir, and the Archivo General de la Nación. Beginning with “the Phoenician inside each of us,” Lebanon as minority refuge, and Volney’s account of Lebanese society in the eighteenth century, they re­cord community mythology: a story of Turkish invasion and injustice, the Christian exodus from the mountain beginning with the 1860 wars. Horrors perpetrated by the Turks include exiling men who agitated against Ottoman administration and conscription. The French mandate and the Phoenician alphabet close the first chapter hand in hand. The authors briefly describe the Porfirian Mexico that initially received Mahjaris, migration, and economic policy transformed by the revolution. They invoke memories of transit—migrant businesses in Mexico and the transition to professions in the second generation. The final chapters re­cord the formation of community associations. Commemorating one hundred years of institutional life, Historia de una alianza (History of an alliance), published in 1999, tells the story of Alianza Monte Sinaí, the first Jewish institution in Mexico, as the story of the late twentieth-­century Comunidad Alianza Monte Sinaí, which clusters Jewish migration from Damascus. An ambitious project with eighteen interviewers coordinated by Sofía Mercado Atri over five years, it traces the story of Damascene Jewry, once greatly enriched by the arrival of Spanish exiles, traveling to Mexico. The chronicle opens with a brief sketch of life in Damascus and Beirut, where many Damascene families settled and which became a door onto the world as the situation of Syrian Jews deteriorated after 1948. The narrative focuses on the diaspora toward the Americas and, since Alianza was founded in 1912, on the Mexican Revolution as context of arrival. It documents the diversification and consolidation of community institutions in the thirties and growing participation in Mexican society accompanied by the consolidation of diasporic Zionism in the forties. The story then disaggregates into chapters on Alianza associations: synagogues, aid societies, women’s groups, youth groups, press, and the community center.48 In 2006, the Centro Libanés of Guadalajara published Ramas del mismo

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cedro: voz viva de la comunidad libanesa de Guadalajara (Branches of the same cedar: the living voice of Guadalajara’s Lebanese community) under the editorial care of Marcos Arana Cervantes. The first third of the book is a description of Lebanon; photography illustrates archaeological treasures, recognizing the origin of the Lebanese in biblical time and characters: “Noah’s Ark had barely settled in the mud left behind by the biblical flood, and the patriarch was already thinking of the mission he would entrust to each of his children. Shem, Ham, and Japheth . . . received from their father the command to populate the earth. They begot the races that occupy the universal geography. The Lebanese recognize Ham as their paternal forefather. . . .”49 A special section is dedicated to the Maronites, “bastions of Christianity and universal culture.” The second third of the chronicle narrates migration from Syria and Lebanon to the state of Jalisco, conquered by Mashriqis in search of new horizons, who set in motion the commercial transformation of the region. The final section, a directory of families in Guadalajara, is illustrated with photographs of historical and contemporary landscapes in Lebanon and Guadalajara, migrant couples settled in Jalisco, and community events. The most recent chronicle, Sefarad de ayer, hoy y mañana: presencia sefaradí en México (Sefarad of yesterday, today, and tomorrow: Sefardi presence in Mexico), was published in 2010. Edited by Rosalynda Pérez de Cohen, Simonette Levy de Behar, and Sophie Bejarano de Goldberg, the volume has a dual timeline—historical and ethnographic—and is the first to pre­sent segments of text in a heritage language: ladino or judeo-­español. Opening with a bilingual Ladino and Spanish testimony of Sefardi life in the early twentieth-­century Ottoman Mediterranean, it is organized through the Jewish holiday cycle, beginning with the new year in Rosh Hashanah and offering recipes for each holiday’s feasts. A loose chronology develops, tracing migrant origins in three locations—­Babylonia, Sefarad, and Turkey—weaving together the common experiences of Sefardis in Turkey, Italy, Bulgaria, and Morocco. A chapter on rabbis focuses on Palti, “el rabino turco,” the Istambuli rabbi who led the community for nearly forty years. The book closes with a chapter mourning Jewish expulsion from Spain, the episode that opens Bokser’s Imágenes.

Fifteen Mahjari Cookbooks Twice as numerous and much more diverse than national or community histories, Mexican Mahjar cookbooks are less-­disciplined memory sites. The first, compiled by two women in 1952, is a simple manual that circu-



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lated among kin networks as a gift to women new to running a household. The second, published in 1957, was the home cook’s companion to the national histories: invested in nation building, defining Lebanese food in the wake of independence. During the 1980s, practical cookbooks preserved family tradition, simplifying and quantifying recipes for busy working women. Small and inexpensive, sold in Mahjari specialty groceries popular with Mexicans of other origins, these first circulated beyond migrant communities. The inclusion of Lebanese, Moroccan, Egyptian, and Turkish culinary traditions in an international ethnic food canon popularized Mashriqi dishes and ingredients as exotica for the Mexican mainstream during the mid-­1990s.50 Sold at newsstands and other massive distributers, a dozen inexpensive editions claiming to represent these national foods have also circulated in Mexico since the mid-­2000s. Printed in Spain, France, and Argentina, they constitute a parallel circuit that feeds into Mexican Orientalisms. In the late 1990s, culinary art and tradition became the object of Mahjari memory, the target of community histories and chronicles. Increasingly expensive heirloom cookbooks sold by appointment at Mahjari associations, circulating only within communities, have become a vehicle to display migrant opulence as ancestral since 2006. María Manzur de Borge’s Manual práctico de cocina libanesa (Practical manual of Lebanese cooking), published in Mérida, Yucatán, in 1952, was the first Mexican Mahjar cookbook.51 The slim, inexpensive booklet reached Tere Musi via a chain of female relatives on the occasion of her marriage.52 It bears the traces of sixty years of life in the kitchen: stains, drips, pen-­test scribbles, phone messages and numbers, dates, ingredient prices, and recipe annotation. It provides no introduction to Lebanon, only brief acknowledgment to Nazja Borge vda. de Borge, María’s in-­law, whose help made the manual possible, and a note explaining that given translation difficulties, appropriate Spanish names had been created for recipes. Arabic transliteration is reinvented with variations throughout the ninety-­eight pages, and the fare on display is basic mountain food. Most recipes have no more than four or five ingredients: a vegetable, olive oil, garlic, and onions. Six large pigeons, two bitter oranges, lard. The kings of the table are ten kibbe variants. The logic of chapters is Mashriqi: soups, kibbes, meat-­based dishes, laban (yogurt) and laban-­based dishes, oil-­based dishes, salads, and sweets. In 1957, Don Alfonso Aued authored Cocina libanesa, the first cookbook mentioned by community chronicles, popular enough to go through additional editions in 1971 and 1979. In premodern Middle Eastern literary

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canons, cookbooks authored by men were inscribed into adab, the literature and manners tradition, as an erudite, high-­culture genre displaying authors’ familiarity with culinary history, written for an audience of other men schooled to appreciate such texts.53 Given elaborate processing techniques, some of Aued’s recipes might have been taken from such older cookbooks. Priding herself on her silent contribution, Georgette Merhy de Kuri wrote out many of the 340 recipes compiled from various unacknowledged sources. Mirroring early twentieth-­century literatures grooming women to be proper domestic administrators of nutrition and hygiene for modern citizens, Aued instructed female New World audiences on true Lebanese practice and their womanly role:54 This book is greatly useful to the woman of our Colonies in America and the Latin woman in general, since the migrant as well as the woman born here will find in it something new, and all the more the latter, who with the help of this very complete cookbook, will easily launch and develop her innate qualities as an excellent Housewife. The Latin woman will also be able to make use of the teaching in this book with wonderful results, to widen her knowledge on such a feminine and prestigious topic in the home as culinary art. Her knowledge in this sense will allow her to radically change her menus now and then, offering something as different, nourishing and delicious as our national dishes. She will doubtless receive in this way, warm compliments as the Woman of the House.55

Aued distinguished recipes “known in Lebanon and some parts of Syria,” from those of Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and North Africa, “which have nothing in common with our cooking,” though he included preparations in Egyptian, Jordanian, Persian, Indian, Lebanese, Smyrna, Damascus, Aleppo, Zgharta, Baghdad, Beirut, Bordeaux, Provence, Moorish, Arab, and Levantine national or regional styles.56 After a huge array of complex dishes, a section on typical recipes goes from hummus to the home processing of staples: pickles, olives, kishik, homemade arak, wine, vinegar, and preserves. Aued favored ingredients now abandoned by Mahjari middle classes: liver, brain, whole animal heads. Though Islamicate recipes like Zainab’s fingers, mansaf, and Umm el flafel are included, a section on pork dishes makes this a Christian cookbook. Invoking adab and foreshadowing 1980s Mashriqi ethnographic cookbooks inscribing disappearing practices as national traditions, Cocina libanesa was the lady’s companion to Aued’s History.



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After decades of relying on women’s transmission of culinary technique along with Manzur and Aued’s small, inexpensive cookbooks, a boom in production characterized the 1980s. Women compiled the recipes of older women who had experienced the Mashriq, who were aging and disappearing. Losing authentic sources was not the only concern, however. As women acquired more formal education and joined the paid labor force en masse, a larger transformation interrupted their apprenticeship in the kitchen. As cookbook writers and users explained in interviews, women no longer had time to engage in collective cross-­generational cooking and elaborate food processing. This led to the careful translation of practice into text and the marketing of textbooks offering simplified, quick, and easy variations on authentic national, community, and family tradition. Ventura Barquet Socille was born in Mexico City in 1921 to a Maronite family from Zgharta.57 In 1982, she published La cocina de Ventura: lecciones de cocina árabe (Ventura’s kitchen: lessons in Arabic cooking). As Ventura explained to Macluf and Kuri: “I wrote it so our recipes wouldn’t be lost; an important part of our culture is in our food.” Small-­format, addressed to the home cook, La cocina boasts the delights of the middle-­class Mahjari table. Black-­and-­white photographs feature the author, aproned, demonstrating her art on well-­worn kitchenware. Lessons include storage techniques, ingredient selection, and the preparation of Lebanese staples. The book was instantly popular beyond the migrant population, reaching its eighth edition by 2002. Ventura’s expertise was advertised nationally in 1987 when she was invited to contribute to a mainstream periodical, Comida Fácil, and then to star in a televised cooking program, Vida diaria, aired by prime commercial broadcast Televisa.58 After teaching keppes, the laborious Lebanese national delicacy, Ventura suggested preparing an obscure dish reminiscent of everyday mountain fare, masbahat al-­darwish. Suddenly worried that she would not be able to explain the dish’s name to her audience—having no clue how lamb with large chunks of eggplant, potato, tomato, and zucchini related to dervish prayer beads—she consulted with Madame Marie Choueiry, the Arabic instructor. Choueiry explained that since dervishes lived off neighbors’ donations, stones threaded in their masbaha prayer beads were multicolored like vegetables in the dish.59 Ventura’s work, between ethnic and author cooking, pioneered both camps and initiated the new wave of simple heritage cookbooks. Two compilations by communities imagining their food as close to yet distinct from Ventura’s Lebanese Maronite cooking appeared in 1984. Recetario internacional y árabe includes 628 recipes collected by twenty

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women of the Chain, Tamer, and Zairick Greek Orthodox families, some living in Mexico City and others in Orizaba, Veracruz, where these families initially settled. Conceived for a fundraising effort, “Las Primas” (the [female] cousins) organized family recipes and sold the volume to sponsor charity events.60 Their culinary repertoire reflects Orthodox regional origins and marriage patterns, including Syrian Halabi and Homsi specialties—carabesh halab, crossmbasibsi, and crossm basipsi amalin—and Palestinian staples marmahon and mloujia.61 It was reedited in 1994 with 800 recipes, of which only 186 comprise the final sections of Arabic dishes and sweets. Bendichas manos: comida sefardí was compiled by the 1984–1985 Mothers’ Committee at the Colegio Hebreo Sefaradí to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the school.62 Basic Turkish recipes addressed to the home cook who is also a working woman and extensive instructions on freezing techniques suggest that complex dishes are prepared periodically rather than on an everyday basis. Many recipes are simple and make rational use of domestic resources, integrating common ingredients and scraps. A member of the community explained: “In Yugoslavia, where my parents were born, people cooked with what they had; my mother did this in our home as well. Some nights we would have ‘onion dinner’; if tomatoes were in season and inexpensive, it would be ‘tomato dinner.’ The vegetable would be cooked and seasoned with olive oil, garlic, onions, salt, and eaten with fresh bread, and that was it, that was dinner.”63 Yamil Yitani, born in the 1950s in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, to a family from Zgharta, worked with numerous Lebanese ladies and their descendants in Puebla to put together the multivolume Cocina libanesa: fácil y rápido (Lebanese food: quick and easy). The first volume, A-­F, which appeared in 1988, included 175 recipes.64 A journalist, Yitani studied law in Puebla but was active as a businessman and martial arts practitioner, editing and authoring more than twenty-­four books.65 Like Ventura’s, his Cocina libanesa simplifies and quantifies everyday recipes, providing a guide to home cooking. Assigning food a central role in Mahjari memory and sociability, Diccionario enciclopédico de mexicanos de origen libanés y de otros pueblos del Levante (Encyclopedic dictionary of Mexicans of Lebanese and other Levantine origins)—edited by Patricia Jacobs Barquet in 2000—and Macluf and Díaz de Kuri’s De Líbano a México: la vida alrededor de la mesa, published in 2002, first made food into the object of memory. These are not primarily cookbooks. Presented as serious intellectual efforts intended for Mahjari and Mexican audiences, they are companions to Martínez Assad and



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Cassab’s nostalgic histories, produced by the same discursive community. Patricia Jacobs mobilized family, friends, colleagues, and the FONCA (Fomento Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes) to produce the Diccionario. Patricia was born in Mexico City in 1945, to notable Mahjari parents of Mexico and New York with family histories anchored in Hasroun and Tripoli. After attending French Catholic schools in Mexico and Canada, she studied anthropology and fine arts at the Jesuit Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, later learning classical fusha Arabic at Colegio de México. A career researcher, she worked in publications for the national funding agency CONACYT and during the last two decades of her life was affiliated with Carlos Slim’s CARSO archive. The Kahlil Gibran archive housed at Slim’s Soumaya Museum was brought from Boston to Mexico City through her efforts.66 Doña Norma Barquet, Patricia’s mother, authored most entries on food in the Diccionario: Lebanese appetizers, gastronomy, laban, and Lebanese sweets are the longer ones. She invites us to multiple aesthetic pleasures in the company of Lebanese ancestors: Any witness before a table gaily laid with a wide spread of appetizers— which may constitute a meal in themselves—will be completely amazed and satisfied. They will take pleasure admiring a range of colors, from the softest to the most intense, and will enjoy the tastes that go from the simplicity of a sliced tomato, some pickled turnips or olives of all sizes and colors—green, purplish blue, brilliant black—to the exotic and sophisticated kebbe in its many presentations; chard, cabbage and vine leaf rolls; the delicious hummus and eggplant spreads, little pastries stuffed with spinach or meat; chicken and lamb kebabs, falafel, and the aroma of lemon and garlic will be there and the dishes will shine with the green-­golden amber of olive oil and the intense color of pomegranate seeds, the emerald green of fresh mint and the purest white of laban and labne. And to keep company to all of this, bread and the constant memory of those who left the white mountains of Lebanon and sowed their traditions and their habits in Mexico will be present.67

The five-­page gastronomy entry is among the longest in the Diccionario, another celebration of the exquisite, harmonious, multiple light delicacies, the vast repertoire and healthy pleasures of this culinary art: “Gastronomy has a fundamental place in the culture of the Lebanese people. Lebanese culinary traditions were brought by the first migrants, who found in Mexico an abundance of the ingredients necessary to continue their customs, which they knew how to transmit to their descendants, who

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continue to express through them the generosity, splendidness, and hospitality that characterizes them.”68 In 2002, Macluf and Díaz de Kuri published the second volume to their community chronicle. With forewords by Maronite bishop in Mexico Wadih Boutros Tayah and community intellectual Carlos Martínez Assad and an introduction by the authors, the book begins with the origins of Lebanese food. These are situated in a Mediterranean tradition and described, via Pierre Loti, as unchanging “since the time of Christ,” with a special entry dedicated to Jesus’s table and an extensive glossary.69 Based on interviews, the volume alternates migrant memories of food preparation and consumption with recipes for dishes marking Christian, life cycle, and Mexican national festivities taken from family notebooks and published cookbooks. Migrant adaptations to Mahjar conditions are detailed. With food preparation a woman’s task and measure of her diligence and ingenuity, ingredients and utensils were cleverly adapted to local availability. Though reproducing early twentieth-­century Mashriqi food habits— clarifying butter, pickling and preserving seasonal fruits and vegetables, planting grapevines and figs in gardens, growing fresh produce, preparing labne with starters brought from the Mashriq, and keeping chickens on the roof—women began to experiment with local ingredients. Women’s culinary apprenticeships and sharing of recipes are emphasized as leading to the publication of the first Mahjar cookbooks. Some families made the provision of Mashriqi staples into a livelihood, setting up bakeries, small restaurants, groceries, and coffee shops. Cooking for sale was a good way for a woman to support a family in the Mahjar. Yustra Aboul Hosn, a Druze migrant, educated her children with her cooking, sold at her grocery and restaurant La Fenicia in Mexico City. She published Las mil y una recetas: lo más antojadizo de la cocina árabe libanesa, Ishha wa atyab al-­makulat wa al-­hilwayat al-­arabiya (The thousand and one recipes: the tastiest of Arab Lebanese food) in 1998. She welcomes her readers “to Arab (Lebanese) cooking” in a brief introduction. Lebanon is described as a small country with a Mediterranean climate allowing for the production of fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats year-round, and the Lebanese as excellent and generous hosts who will offer from thirty to forty dishes as appetizers. Among highlights she mentions arak, sweets, and Arabic coffee, which she identifies as a Turkish legacy. Her book, addressed to the Mexican home cook, includes a section on producing the basic building blocks of Lebanese Mountain cooking: awarma, laban and labne, keshek, clarified butter, syrup, zaatar, shanklish.70 Small-­format



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and inexpensive, Las mil y una recetas has been immensely popular, going through several reprintings. Since 2000, the number and quality of Mahjari cookbooks exploded, with luxury editions acquiring heirloom status, recipes shared online and distributed with community periodicals or included in family memoirs produced for Jewish schools’ Shorashim (Roots), a global family memoir contest sponsored by the Diaspora Museum in Jerusalem since 1998.71 Former Lebanese ambassador to Mexico Nouhad Mahmoud and his wife, Najah Bouchakra Mahmoud, both Druze, worked with Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú and Fundación Cultural Banamex to produce Sahtein ¡Provecho! Sabores de Líbano (Sahtein: bon appetit! Flavors of Lebanon), in 2006. Large format, professional color photography, and minimalist design make this the first luxury Mahjari cookbook. Funding agencies’ directors pre­sent the book as an occasion to delight in the Lebanese tradition of sharing “bread and salt,” through Madame Najah’s peerless recipes. Luxury is manifest in image quality, weight of paper, and restraint of presentation at this diplomatic table: discreet portions served on white crockery, linen napkins; carefully manicured, professional young female hands demonstrate technique against a marble countertop.72 Recipes are framed by brief articles authored by Ambassador Nouhad, narrating the seasonality of food production in the Lebanese Mountain, the simplicity of food consumption until very recently, with a typical supper consisting of a bowl of olives, some labneh and bread, and sliced tomatoes and cucumbers. Between 2004 and 2012, the Monte Sinaí periodical was delivered to community members with a bimonthly supplement, El secreto de nuestra cocina (The secret of our cooking). Small-­format inserts offered two simple recipes in the Jewish Damascene tradition compiled from a handful of notable lady cooks. The supplement design and name changed to Identidad Monte Sinaí (Mount Sinai identity), then Nuestro sazón (Our flavor). The project developed a fabulously beautiful cookbook, Sefra dayme: cien años de cocina judeo-­damasquina en México (Sefra dayme: One hundred years of Judeo-­Damascene cooking in Mexico), published in 2012 to commemorate the hundred-­year anniversary of Alianza Monte Sinaí. Sefra dayme is glossed as “may you always have abundant food on your table, a tableful of delicacies, a table of blessed food, a table of joy.”73 Entering its second printing by 2013, despite its cost, the book is often a gift to brides; even those who know the recipes well “just want to have it.”74 Not the everyday fare of the supplement, Sefra dayme is a celebration, exquisite photography documenting feasts honoring holidays, weddings, and births. Opening recipes for ritual sweet wine, nbid, and challah bread

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for Shabbat are illustrated with a family of women, professionally coiffed and dressed in sophisticated black with matching aprons, making challot. Opulent tables laid out with the themes and dishes of annual festivities alternate with purple damask pages dedicating tables to women in the community. Recipe pages have watermark traces of their food category in Arabic handscript: mezze, shurba, hilwayat wa masharib. The book celebrates women, within Mahjari Syrian Judaism, as the makers of holiday feasts and everyday seffe (order): The Judeo-­Damascene woman is a wonderful hostess. She receives her family, her neighbors and her friends with the doors of her house open, in a warm, orderly and cheerful ambiance, making them feel how special their visit is . . . to say that a woman has seffe is the highest compliment, the best evaluation; it implies having something like a sixth sense, feminine intuition, she has the capacity to attract the divine presence (shejiná) to her home through her flawless behavior as mother, wife, sister, daughter and friend, creating a home full of peace and tranquility. That is why, when it comes to cooking, she also does it with immense pleasure and joy, especially for shabbat and the holidays, preparing traditional dishes which, with great devotion, she learned from her predecessors, and through which she relives, in a way, the atmosphere she experienced in her grandmother’s house. Seffe implies union. When a holiday approaches, women family and friends get together to help in the preparations; everyone gladly offers to participate in the event because the holiday begins in its preparation. Seffe is a heritage left us, which we will continue to practice in our homes.75

With such high expectations of the Judeo-­Mahjari woman as homemaker, it is not surprising that women evaluate those working outside the home as lazy cooks. In 2012 the Sefardi community reprinted Bendichas manos with the support of Bank Hapoalim, and the Mothers’ Committee of the Colegio Hebreo Sefaradí produced Lo meshor de lo nuestro: un recorrido por la comida tradicional sefardí (The best of our cooking: routes through traditional Sefardi food), as a gift for brides. In midsize format, it’s illustrated with recipe photographs and Mediterranean streets, sights, and sayings in ladino; though it offers only ninety recipes, “All the basic stuff is in there.” Recipes are also included in the 2010 Sefardi community chronicle Sefarad de ayer, hoy y mañana, in community webpages, and in online periodicals. On the Enlace judío blog, independently edited by Beiruti May Samra, longtime press coordinator of the Maguen David community of Aleppo



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Jews in Mexico, Sefra dayme recipes share online space with contributions by Flora Cohen, author of a three-­volume cookbook of elegant Oriental Jewish food in the 1980s.76

Eight Memoirs Food is a favorite marker of Mahjari difference mediating memory.77 Family histories describe commensality as central to family structure and continuity, equivalent to birth and death: “A birth, the departure of a loved one or simply the shared meal on a habitual day of the week, can furnish the necessary excuse to make a moment to evoke memories loaded with nostalgia and reminiscence . . . to get warm . . . serve another cup of hot, sugary coffee . . . continue retelling memories.”78 Among generations that speak no Arabic, have no experience of the Mashriq, know little of its history, and have no investment in its present or its future, a good djaj mahshi still arouses sighs and might ease away the tension of some personal crisis: “This is my soul, this is my taste and my pleasure. I feel that I am impregnated with this, this was from my house, the tishpishtli, this one, look, that was the food at home, what my mother prepared no matter what country we were in: Chile, Venezuela, Mexico, Israel. Food is the house, you do everything with food, without food there is no home. If you ask me if I want some coffee, I want Turkish coffee with a little piece of baklava, that is where I find taste.”79 Commensality was an important dimension of my ethnographic process, marking moments of inclusion, constructing the ethnographer’s moral responsibility as a mediator of community memory: “Al jubz wal milh, as they say over there,” I was reminded by Nacib Fayad, you have shared “bread and salt” with us. Mahjaris began producing and publishing memoirs in the 1980s. Memoirs documenting families in transit zoom in to individuals’ experience of community life in the ethnographic mode to make sense of mobility. Like national and community histories, memoirs are a Maronite and Jewish genre. Some, like Isaac Dabbah’s, were produced as aids to community memory. Others reflect Mahjaris’ professionalization as writers: Rosa Nissán and Bertha Betech de Duek produced their texts through long-­ term participation in writing workshops led by Mexican writers; Bárbara Jacobs and Carlos Martínez Assad trained in narrative disciplines and married professional writers. Jewish memoirs have been appropriated transnationally. Maronite memoirs have appeared in larger and more prestigious commercial presses, circulating across the Hispanophone world and beyond as Mexican literature. Since the mid-­2000s, chronicling the tra-

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jectory of extended families is increasingly popular. These books are produced to honor founding couples, sometimes on the occasion of death; or to honor exceptional businessmen’s trajectories. They rely on family archives, interviews with family members, community chronicles, and chroniclers as writers. Print runs vary according to the family’s prominence: five thousand for stellar businessman Alfredo Harp Helú, three thousand for notable businessman Elías Murra Marcos, or five hundred for memoirs meant only for family members.

Aleppo’s Everyday Isaac Dabbah Askenazi’s 1982 Esperanza y realidad: raíces de la comunidad judía de Alepo en México (Hope and reality: roots of the Jewish community of Aleppo in Mexico) was the first Mahjari memoir published.80 It begins with a history of Aleppo in Jewish sources: making biblical into historical time, charting mentions of the city in a long chain of verifiable rabbinical writing, emphasizing learned men as spiritual leaders constituting communities and centers of learning all the way through the founding of the Alliance Israelite Universelle schools in 1869.81 In Dabbah’s account, Aleppo’s Jews flourished under Arab and Ottoman protection, in dialogue with Jewish populations moving into the Ottoman Empire as refugees from Sefarad and as consuls representing Frankish powers under the Capitulations. He narrates Jewish life in popular quarters during the first decade of the twentieth century: rented housing around a common courtyard akin to the Sefardi casa grande or cortijo, a house shared by a group of brothers with their extended families. Food is a window on daily spaces, rhythms, and tasks of family life. The single room shared for sleeping during the night was used for eating family meals. Dishes and silverware were placed on a large metal tray if the family was wealthy or on a woven straw mansaf if they were not. Meals were cooked in the courtyard, where coal stoves were assigned to housewives; seasonal fruit and sweets were stored in a cupboard built into the wall of the family room. For breakfast, a handful of preserved olives and some bread with oil and zaatar, maybe a little cheese and halawe. The midday meal was composed of leftovers from the previous day’s dinner or eggs scrambled with parsley, potatoes, or cheese. Dinner was the main meal: seasonal vegetables cooked with oil. Once a week, for Shabbat, some lamb meat in kibbe. Housewives processed seasonal foods to store and use year-round: olives in oil and lemon; fruit and vegetable preserves; orange, pomegran-



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ate, and tamarind syrups.82 In winter, fish came in from Beirut and other ports; chickens were eaten for Yom Kippur. Many families could not afford to eat butter and eggs every day; goat herders walked the streets early in the morning with their flocks, ready to milk them for clients to feed to the sick. Coffee was served to guests and drunk at cafés chantants, where families listened to singers accompanied by orchestras of oud, dirbake, and arra. Persons violating Shabbat and women invading male spaces like the coffeehouse were fined in flour, which was distributed to the Jewish needy.83 Women ensured that blessings were said over food. Dabbah locates Jewish migration to Mexico as part of great economic migrations that brought millions of people from the Old World to the New; boat transit was complicated by the dearth of kosher food available to travelers.84 His invocations of food in the Mahjar are equally eth‑ nographic: the cost of food in Porfirian Mexico, home delivery of Arabic bread, women adjusting to local earthenware cooking utensils; food served at Halabi Jewish weddings: candied almonds, shrab-­u-­loz, British bread.85 Food disappears in his recollection of political history: the founding of Halabi institutions in Mexico, community responses to World War II, and the burning of Jewish spaces in Aleppo in 1948. It is reduced to tea—the occasion to meet with ladies’ committees organizing community fundraising to support destitute Halabi families moving to Israel—as the roots of the community shook.86

Class, Family, Women’s Tasks Bárbara Jacobs Barquet was born in Mexico City in 1947, daughter of Norma and younger sister of Patricia. Schooled with other Mexican elites at the all-­girls Colegio de la Asunción (run by French Catholic nuns) and a Canadian Catholic boarding school, she trained as a psychologist at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; taught translation at Colegio de Mexico and English literature at the Jesuit Universidad Iberoamericana; and began writing short stories and essays in 1970. Her work has been published by leading Spanish-­language fiction presses Editorial Era and Alfaguara and translated to English, Portuguese, Italian, French, and German.87 Bárbara married Honduran-­Guatemalan Augusto Monterroso, a legendary figure of Latin American short fiction, with whom she coedited Antología del cuento triste (Anthology of the sad short story). She received an AT&T creative writing grant in 1993 and joined Mexico’s National System of Artistic Creators in 1994; she lectures widely. Her early work, like Doce cuentos en contra (Twelve stories against),

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which appeared in 1982, focuses on women’s coming of age in affluent milieus of 1960s Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Though largely absent from these cerebral, experimental stories, food flags gendered expectations and commensality is necessary to family celebration.88 The Mahjar haunts two of the stories, “Tía Luisita” (Aunt Luisita) and “La vez que me emborraché” (That time I got drunk). In “Tía Luisita” Jacobs invokes la tiada—a horde of aunts, a boisterous bunch of female relatives, some wealthy and others in dire straits—who descended periodically on her home to visit and feed and feast their eyes on her mother’s lavish hospitality. Drinking and smoking stain morally dubious female characters, a sign of their modernity and affluent ennui. Beautifully laid-­out tables of delicate teacakes, tiny sandwiches, and frail petit fours index mother as a proper lady while subalterns, anonymous cashiers, and taxi drivers stink of common food, beans, and pulque. In “La vez que me emborraché” a young woman and her cousin, children of Lebanese migrants, cultivate their eyelashes with nighttime potions guaranteed to make them thick “like an Arab’s.” Food prepared for men becomes the means of male violence, unwanted soup hurled by the father at the mother’s head; an ill-­equipped kitchen, shared work space, affords solidarity between the cowering mother and grandmother. Food preparation for different members of the household, baby food and adult food, marks the daily rhythm of a housewife’s empty life in “Retrato conjetural” (Conjectural portrait). In her novels Las hojas muertas (The Dead Leaves) of 1987 and Las siete fugas de Saab alias El Rizos (The seven disappearances of Saab, alias Curly) of 1992, Jacobs turns to family memoir. She illustrates Mahjari transnationalism, weaving affective geographies across Mexico and the United States. Las hojas muertas, translated to English (1993), Portuguese (1998), and Italian (1999), won the prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Prize. The Mexican Ministry of Public Education selected it as an exemplary Mexican novel, and its Correo del Libro Mexicano program distributed thirty thousand copies to public libraries across Mexico.89 In Las hojas food provides concrete detail, allowing Jacobs to trace and convey loving relationships and family intimacy. It first appears as zwedi, travel food, prepared by mother for yearly road trips to visit father’s family living in the United States, where children learn to eat American food and love their paternal grandmother, Mama Salima, who cooks and smokes in front of a lighted fireplace, without missing anyone. Commensality provides regular rhythms: daily family meal schedules and father’s nighttime coffee-­shop gatherings of male friends. Father’s world travels before marriage taught him appreciation of foreign foods:



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his years as a journalist in Moscow and fighting in Europe during the war, when he longed for familiar bacon and eggs. Food provides opportunities for complicity between parents, early in their marriage when father teaches mother how to cook, through decades of mother’s baking almond cookies for him to gobble up and hide in his closet, having experienced famine in Lebanon. In Las siete fugas meal times index the predictable regularity of domesticity that the main character flees from. Food provides strategies for creating or repairing social bonds: a brother reconciles with his sister by sharing his Popsicle, a father and uncle bribe jail guards with grapes, a young man invites a girl he fancies to have coffee with him.

Food as Thread In 1992, Rosa Nissán published the first of two novels, Novia que te vea (A bride I hope to see you), with the sequel Hijo que te nazca (Son be born to you) following in 1996. Nissán was born in 1939 in Mexico City to Ottoman Jewish families; her father’s from Jerusalem and her mother’s from Istanbul. Novia que te vea became hugely successful in 1993, when it was adapted into a film narrating the contrasting experiences of two young women coming of age in Mexico City in the 1950s, one Sefardi and the other Ashkenazi. Though Nissán studied journalism at the Feminine University, the novels owe much to her two decades in Elena Poniatowska’s literature workshop. Nissán also published a travel memoir, Las tierras prometidas (The promised lands), a short story collection, No sólo para dormir es la noche (Night is not only for sleeping), and a third novel, Los viajes de mi cuerpo (My body’s travels), in 1999. She has lectured and taught widely, focusing on autobiographical fiction.90 Nissán’s narrative is strewn with food structuring family interaction and social reproduction, providing bridges and links, entangling people of all ages and traditions. In Novia que te vea, narrated by Oshinica, daughter of Ottoman Jews, food is the pilgrims’ burden, along with their children, their sick, their blankets; it happens on the street, in homes, defining space. Food preparation can provide women with income; sweet bribes entice Jewish children to attend catechism. Delivered to homes by the milkman, the meat man, food is fetched by children on their way to and from school, for their own household, and for lone women neighbors. Fed healthy breakfasts wolfed down before racing to the school bus, children take home-­ cooked meals to menfolk working in shops downtown from dawn to dusk, seven days a week. Everyday meals are eaten quickly and well, surveyed by mother—watchful eye, belt in hand. Food smells waft in streets, out

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of bundles prepared for family movie outings. Delicacies cooked with secret recipes are offered by lonely ladies to women relatives who visit and help out; fetching them from the kitchen provides excuses for children to snoop around. Coffee is offered to guests in Ladino; women bringing in trays overhear wedding negotiations, bits of conversation not meant for their ears. Cooking and sewing lessons are the education of choice for girls pulled out of school after sixth grade to prepare them for marriage. Special foods are part of Jewish holidays, at the core of Shabbat: when grandfather gets home from work, he first inspects the pots boiling in the kitchen, the table laid out. Tension mounts as he lectures his children on their faulty religious practice, but unwinds as food is served: “Things become calmer with the chicken soup; by the zucchini, grandfather offers uncle some more avocado, another piece of chicken, assuring him that it is kosher, as well as the wine.”91 Snacks are prepared to be sold at school functions; sweets are part of children’s choirs’ rewards when they perform at community weddings. According to the migrant generation, food is only what mothers learned to cook from their mothers in Turkey. Children rebel, refusing to eat, celebrating Mexican snacks cooked at home, sneaking off for Mexican street food. Community schools encourage children to value all Jewish culinary traditions: Arab, Turkish, and Yiddish. When grandparents tell of leaving Jerusalem to seek better fortunes, grandmothers remember food prepared for the voyage: eggs, boiled potatoes, sardines, and fruit for many days, all kosher.92 As Oshinica approaches marriageable age, courtships involve men’s generosity, or not, when eating out in restaurants, something new to her. She discovers new foods during her short spell as a working girl and with her Halabi in-­laws, whose women work for eight days preparing holiday foods. When an aunt is called in from Monterrey to prepare proper Turkish wedding food, chopped spinach fills verandas, and dough for burrecas has invaded every table. Her father recommends: “Just learn to cook, love comes through the mouth.”93 In Hijo que te nazca, Oshinica begins married life learning Sefardi recipes from her mother and feasting on street food with her new husband. Initial celebration of her independence as head of household deteriorates into loneliness, boredom, and resentment of her womanly tasks. Food is part of changes during pregnancy, her relationship to her children through breastfeeding, and the grueling preparation of everyday family meals. Recipes are swapped with young neighbors, also new mothers, as a community gradually emerges in her building: “neighbors cook, mixing smells, laughter, angers.”94 Food feeds her growing discomfort with a de-



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manding husband, who is late to meals laboriously prepared. She dislikes his family’s holiday meals. His violent recriminations over breakfast eventually spark their divorce. Bertha Betech de Duek produced her autobiography Rachelle: las voces del destino (Rachelle: the voices of destiny), published in Mexico City in 2005, through long-­term participation in Germán Dehesa’s writing workshop. Betech’s was a prosperous family, owners of a khan, who fled to Panama via Beirut after the 1947 burning of Aleppo’s central synagogue, sacred texts, and community spaces. Duek remembers her Aleppo childhood in the wealthy suburb of Djamilie, the only confessionally mixed neighborhood in the city.95 Life in Djamilie contrasted with the popular neighborhoods described by Dabbah and Silvia Hamui Sutton’s children’s book, Sucedió en Alepo (It happened in Aleppo).96 Food anchors the author in Aleppo’s culinary culture, marks her as child—the youngest daughter of a bourgeois family, fed delicacies by her elder siblings and Armenian nanny.97 Aleppo was a land of plenty and women the keepers of household rhythms and order: “. . . you could find anything: an exuberance of fruit and vegetables. . . . In every season food was stored for the whole year. Mom made jams with black cherries, apricots, quince and the special one made of rose petals, with its delicate flavor. She set out the fruit with sugar and lemon juice in a basin on the roof, covering it with a piece of glass for several days. The preserves were ready on their own. It was necessary to watch out so that children, and even neighbors, didn’t eat them.”98 Greek olives dressed with olive oil and zaatar were always on the table, and a stringy cheese also homemade and stored. Breakfasts of bread with cheese or qamareddin, sometimes baguette with dark chocolate, were common across neighbors; but kibbe jamda was a Jewish specialty, betraying homes in Damascus, Aleppo, and their diasporas on Shabbat. Overflowing pots are described as “one of the keys to maintaining the family together, because the enjoyment of food creates bonds between loved ones.”99 Abundance halted in 1948, when women dragged their feet, her father avoided going to the market in preparation for Pesaj, and people—surrounded by mounting hostility—no longer drank coffee on their balconies.100

The Threshold of Memory Alfredo Harp Helú, a fantastically successful businessman, was born in Mexico City in 1944 to the Harp family from Kferzainha, settled in Oaxaca since 1923, and the Helús from Baabda. His maternal grand-

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father, José Helú, only son of a judge, founded the Mahjar periodical Al-­ Khawater.101 In Harp Helú’s autobiography, Vivir y morir jugando béisbol, published in 2003, food opens the story of the Harp couple: “My grandparents were great cooks; they bought lamb meat at the 20 de Noviembre market and prepared Lebanese food. They always had fresh fruits and vegetables that they planted in a small orchard in their home’s garden. I imagine they expected to return to Lebanon, because they never bought the wonderful houses in the historical downtown where they lived and had their shop. . . .”102 Elías Murra Marcos, historia de un esfuerzo: CIMACO (History of an effort: CIMACO), published by Miguel Ángel Porrúa and CIMACO in Torreón in 2005 under the editorial care of María Isabel Saldaña Villareal, is the biography of a successful Palestinian businessman. Exceptional in its use of regional archives, which make for a rich local history of Torreón a bit distant from migrant experience, it was commissioned from a team of researchers. The Murra Marcos chronicle begins in Bethlehem, “the cradle of Jesus Christ,” narrating transit from “the Holy Land” to Torreón in northern Mexico. Martínez Assad’s prologue emphasizes how Palestinian Christians, oppressed by the Turks, trace their ancestry to Ham, the son of Noah, like the Lebanese. Mentioned in the Bible, Bethlehem’s simple food has not changed since biblical times. Interviews evoke harvests of olives, grapes, figs, and melons offered to guests on generous trays and wedding feasts of arak, lamb, stuffed grape leaves, and qube, “which the Lebanese call kibbe.”103 Interviews describe Mahjari notables in Torreón, “the patriarchs of the colony,” enjoying each other’s company in a climate similar to Bait Laham’s, where grapes, dates, figs, pomegranates, and nuts can be harvested to make marmaon and baklawas. The Miguel Afif family memoir, Pepe y Nena, edited by María Elena Miguel de Simon, the couple’s daughter, was produced by chronicler Martha Díaz de Kuri and Martha Vazquez Lacroix through family interviews. It reconstructs the trajectories of José Miguel Nader and María Elena Afif Nader, whose families traveled from Bkassine to Buenos Aires and then to Teziutlán, Puebla. Fictionalized dialogue and drama frame interview excerpts; food is woman’s task, central to romanticized celebrations. In Carlos Martínez Assad’s 2015 fictionalized memoir La casa de las once puertas, food operates as threshold to memory, staging geographies, facilitating transits, and authenticating genealogies. The novel begins with the author as child, listening to his Lebanese grandfather: “In the afternoons, grandfather, sitting on the Huastecan palm rocking chair, spun his stories . . . shooing off mosquitoes and the heat, fanning himself slowly, as he



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savored his memories mixed with the taste of coffee, with the smell of freshly baked bread.”104 Family women’s dedication to food preparation and administration index their decency. Family recipes are replicated for weddings, celebrating through culinary memory. Ingestion of nonfoods flavors the narrative with Latin American magical realism: a young aunt nibbling on rose petals consumes so many in anguish that she dies on the eve of her wedding, haunting family and fiancée who wait for her every evening with open doors. Food inflects her Mexican fiancée’s imaginary travels to the Middle East, where he finds an Oriental aesthetics of edible pleasures: extraordinary abundance, exceptional flavors, and hospitality that remind him of the dead woman’s household, allowing him communion with his departed beloved. The product of land and labor, food becomes a vehicle to narrate family origins in agricultural Mount Lebanon, where in spite of Turkish domination, grapes, olives, and wheat grew to make kippe, taboule, olive oil. Ancestors cultivated figs, made arak, and harvested pine nuts in this “bastion of the Christian minorities as the region Islamized.”105 The heterotopia of the mountain anchors Maronite moral righteousness and tropicalizes Mexico, where Indians traded in “white, black, purple, orange, yellow, pink, brown, beige corn; chilies of many colors and sizes, beans in unimaginable varieties . . . tobacco, coffee, sesame, amaranth, brown sugar, anise, tomatoes, chayotes, fava beans, pumpkins, green beans, radishes, pemuches, quelites, verdolagas, rue, rosemary, parsley, mint, cilantro, pepper, clove, saffron. Among fruits, small sugary pineapples and papayas were noteworthy, little mounds of coyoles on plantain leaves, guavas, jobos and chicozapotes; citrics: oranges, limes, clementines, sidras and lemons.”106 Tropicalization expunges the Ottoman Empire’s sixteenth-­century adoption of tomatoes, potatoes, and turkeys from New Spain. At Mahjari shops, locals found sweets for the children and aguardiente for the men and were introduced to modernity through refrigerators and ice cream. Women of the family soon mastered local culinary specialties, combining Lebanese and Mexican traditions in award-­winning creative mixing. Aunt Cara, the eldest daughter, became responsible for running the household after the untimely deaths of her mother and stepmother: [She] represented authority, conferred by the great bundle of keys tied at her waist, with the keys to the shop, the house, the hotel, the pantries, the warehouse and the back garden . . . she walked, issuing orders nonstop: had the tablecloth been starched, was food ready on time, as she looked into the steaming pots on the stove, had her sisters had their

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bath, and Nanny Lupe, with her horde of assistants, placed large colorful bows on hair shiny from last night’s combing. She walked through the garden checking to see that the rosebushes had been pruned correctly, and if the day’s flowers had been placed in vases; she scolded the gardener for not having fixed the garden as requested, returned to the kitchen to make sure that bread had been baked and nixtamal for tortillas was cooking, sent for any eggs the hens might have laid in the back garden, saw to it that the coffee was hot and strong enough, to my father’s liking, and that the hot chocolate had enough foam, as we liked. . . . The whole family sat orderly around the table at seven in the morning and like a prince, as we saw him, grandfather appeared, rigorously dressed in white and smelling of soap and cologne, to sit at the head of the table. —Ya marhaba (hello everyone), he would say to us. As soon as Aunt Cara had settled into her place to his right, as if by magic, the servants came in from the kitchen, smelling of smoke from the wood fire and loaded with dishes. . . . They set a large serving dish in front of him and then served the rest of the family their portions, the smallest for the children, while Aunt Cara, severe, showed us how to use the silverware.107

Women’s food-­centered supervision gave everyone a place, performed patriarchy, and disciplined children. Food was an opportunity for enacting servitude, teaching lessons, and creating order while making everyone feel loved and secure. In conclusion, from the 1940s on, the Mahjar lost many of its early spaces of everyday interaction across confessional and class difference as Mahjaris scattered in urban space according to their economic trajectories, were recruited by national-­confessional projects in the Mashriq, and inhabited Mahjari institutions policing boundaries to sociability. Mahjari production of textual memory is structured by the inscription of difference that earlier chapters charted.108 In 1945, national histories defined independent Lebanon’s specificity. By the 1980s when genres multiplied, new generations—socialized in a fractured Mahjar—naturalized difference in the burgeoning memory literature of recent decades. Community intellectuals produce ever more normative memories of Mahjar and Mashriq; narratives are normalized through citation practices, the few texts produced outside closed circles not cited or preserved in libraries.109 The process is visible in the cultural production of members of Al-­ Fannan, the Centro Libanés Association of Artists and Intellectuals of



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Lebanese Origin.110 Tribuna Israelita and the Comité Central Israelita de México coordinate Jewish institutions in Mexico, differentiated by migrants’ city of origin.111 Community schools, concentrating the bulk of Jewish youth in Mexico since the 1980s, provide additional anchorage for the circulation of narrative templates.112 Increasingly financed and distributed by community associations, textual memory has emerged as a Maronite and a Jewish privilege. Symptomatic of the efficacy of institutionalization and displacement, there are no Syrian, Muslim, or Druze national histories, community chronicles, or memoirs. There are, however, one Syrian and two Druze cookbooks. Though all of this literature uses food and commensality as affectively laden metaphors for Mahjari continuities, and all four genres have reified class and sectarian boundaries, the devalued, feminized cookbook genre has afforded microsites of freedom that smuggle a silenced diversity into the future.

T he Ar ab and Its Double

Chapter 8

They used to have in this city many and very great mosques or temples in which they honored and sacrificed people to their idols, but the great mosque was wonderful to see; it was as big as a city.1 In all this time the betrothed had never seen nor spoken to each other, until they bring the lady all covered up and give her to her husband and they celebrate the wedding in the manner of Moors.2 The Mexican Mahjar was built on visions of Arabs crafted, appropriated, and resisted since the Spanish-­Amerindian colonial encounter in 1525.3 This final chapter explores the circulation of representations of the Arab Orient in Mexico. Spanish conquerors’ descriptions of Tenochtitlan, Mexico’s Aztec capital, as bristling with mosques, provide a point of entry into Middle America’s kaleidoscopic imaginaries of the Arab. Convinced that they would be useful mediators in the Indies, Christopher Columbus brought Arabic speakers on his first voyage to the New World.4 Though such translators’ skills proved inapplicable, Spaniards described Aztec temples as mosques and Yucatán marriage habits as Moorish.5 Among Indians, the Orient was grasped and envisioned through biblical lore disseminated in early colonial conversion efforts and pageantry.6 Orientalisms produced in the periphery pose new questions to Edward Said’s classic formulation of Orientalism as representing and constituting a power differential, and I will argue that representations of the Arab in Mexico are in dialogue with but not merely derivative of Euro-­American production on the Orient. In order to rethink Mexican and Central American Orientalism we need to ask what Middle America’s epistemological and ontological relationships to the Orient are. European knowledge of the Orient developed with economic and political penetration in the region, individuals traveling on consular or military duty collecting texts and engineering translations. Does Latin America produce expert and popular texts about the Orient, or are populations largely consumers of global academic ex-



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pertise and mediatic forms produced under the hegemony of the United States? What kind of political and economic links exist between Middle America, the Middle East, and regions producing representations of the Oriental that Middle Americans consume? What is the role of the postcolonial state and public policy in the production of the Oriental? Are Mexico and Central America part of the West, and if they aren’t fully, how are they situated within global dynamics defined by the opposition of East and West? What forms of resistance do these subalternizations afford? Are there local sources representing the Oriental? How do differently positioned subjects, occupying contrasting class positions, marked or unmarked by racializing discourses, differently constructed and surveilled by gender regimes, inhabit and make use of Orientalisms?7 With the arrival of modern Mashriqi migrations and the construction of the French colonial state across Mashriq and Mahjar, Mexican, French, and Mahjari Orientalisms interacted to cultivate figures of Euro-­ American Orientalism that are alive and well in Mexican criollo and mestizo imaginations. An eternal, unchanging Orient of teeming marketplaces, corrupt despotism, mystical religiosities, sexually insatiable Arabs, and the secluded feminine erotic has been joined by current permutations emphasizing terror, fanaticism, and women’s oppression.8 This chapter explores Orientalisms in Mexican public culture through ethnography, focusing on the Oriental as object of consumption mediated by local fantasies structured by late capitalism.9 Envisaging both cultural difference and identity through the Orient, three processes duplicate the Arab in early twenty-­first century Mexico: criollo histories of Iberian connection bridging Middle America and the Middle East, local entanglements with Mahjari projects, and mediatic consumer Orientalisms fashioned into subversive tools by mestizo youth.10 Spanish colonialism and twentieth-­ century subordination to the United States mediate Middle American Orientalisms. Nationalisms, modernisms, and public policy have been transnationalized by a history of dependence; so have common sense, everyday evaluations, and humor. Inhabiting fractured, colonized Orientalisms, officials, experts, and the public oscillate between Islamophobia and Islamophilia. Criollos claim kinship with Spain’s Arab history to legitimize themselves as heirs to colonial privilege. Spanish and Mexican strategies for appropriating al-­ Andalus parallel anticolonial nationalisms.11 Mexican ideologies of mestizaje claim an Indian past as foundational of national particularity yet marginalize the living Indian, irreconcilable with the nation as liberal, Western project. Just as the good Indian who allows the mestizo nation



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to appropriate archaeological treasures and mathematical precocity as sources of national glory is the dead Indian, the good Arab, our ancestor the Arab, is the Arab of the past. Our Arab contemporaries are a vaguely ominous presence, sexually threatening to white, Catholic women. Though definitions of the Mexican Mahjar as Lebanese discarded the Arab, the Orient provides tropes for articulating fascination and discontent with migrants. Mahjaris operate as providers of the desired Arab for Middle American consumption of Oriental food and dance and associated paraphernalia. Latin-­A rab women, tropicalized and Orientalized as sex symbols by the cultural industries of late capitalism, embody the desirable exotic.12 Recent, transient, or Muslim migrants play important roles as authenticators of commodities and services; some remain anonymous while others become pop-­culture stars, with Colombia’s Shakira and Mexico’s Salma Hayek stealing the show. Belly dancing is performed in a growing number of venues, social clubs, and restaurants advertising the spectacle of the dance of the seven veils as after-­dinner indulgence distinguishing their establishment. Mahjari wealth is celebrated but resented; vicious online chats and friendlier joke-­telling resurrect xenophobic midcentury characterizations of migrants as greedy, treacherous foreigners. In contrast to Mahjari efforts to inscribe difference, Orientalisms fail to recognize confessional distinction, making Arab and Jew indistinguishable. Three appropriations of the Orient beyond Mahjari communities recur in public space and everyday conversation.13 Popular culture feeds fantasies about the legitimacy of sensual expression in the Orient, inspiring feminist liberation from Mexican patriarchal concealment of women as subjects of desire.14 With the feminization of remunerated labor in Latin America affording a recent feminization of leisure, belly dance is increasingly popular among mestizo women, who can thereby publicly perform a sexuality that would be reprehensible if it were not Oriental.15 The media, strongly mediated by US production, inflect Mexican Orientalism with some of its darker shades, unleashing phantoms of women’s servitude and male violence. Yet media portrayals of an occupied Orient have inspired third-­worldist solidarities among urban lower-­middle-­class students since the 1970s. Militant urban youth recognize Islamist movements as antiglobalization struggles. Conversion to Islam in Mexico becomes for some a strategy of resistance to neo-­imperialism and patriarchy. It allows mestizo youth to scale a Mexican class formation still organized by colonial race politics through access to cosmopolitan markers of belonging elsewhere.16



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Our Ancestors the Arabs A foundational set of discourses stem from Spanish colonialism, through which Mexico inherited Spain’s ambivalence as colonized and colonizer of the Arab.17 Early modern and modern Spain’s Christian attempts to establish the Arab as subordinate Other were fractured by the heritage of eight centuries of Andalusian hegemony.18 The peninsular Reconquista extended into the conquest of the New Spain. When the passage of New Christians—Muslim and Jewish converts to Christianity—to the New Spain was banned in the mid-­sixteenth century, moriscos and mudéjar architecture had already crossed the Atlantic.19 The Inquisition soon followed them; the Spanish crown instituted policy to eradicate the Arab from its Iberian and New World territories as it erased the indigenous from the Americas, banning language use, religious difference, and attempts at autonomy. As Spain’s age of empire drew to a close in the late eighteenth century, Northern European Orientalisms increasingly excluded Spain from European rationality and civilization, highlighting its Arab heritage, locating the boundary between Western Europe and the Orient somewhere north of Andalusia rather than in Gibraltar. Spanish scholars trained in French Orientalist traditions were divided; while Pascual de Gayangos and his school celebrated the Arab past, Catholic conservatives plotted to conquer Morocco.20 After 1939, Franco’s tourism ministry engaged in self-­ Orientalism, selling southern Spain as exotic in an attempt to lure European visitors. His ultra-­Catholic dictatorship wove new ties to Maronite projects in the Mashriq and invoked al-­A ndalus to celebrate Iberian-­A rab brotherhood as the foundation of a benevolent Spanish colonialism in North Africa.21 In former Spanish colonial territories, the glories of Arab Spain are mobilized with a positive valence. Postcolonial criollo nation building has been ambivalent, seeking distance from the Spanish, yet reproducing Iberocentric criteria for access, mobility, modernity. Late twentieth-­ century foreign policy evokes the Andalusi to construct Spain, Mexico, and Brazil as natural mediators between the Arab and the rest of the world.22 In popular culture and everyday practice in Mexico, claims to Spanish descent and/or cultural proximity to Spain still function as markers of racialized class distinction. Criollos and mestizos claiming elite status often index European belonging by appropriating the glorious heritage of an Iberian-­A rab past manifest in al-­A ndalus’s celebrated cultural artifacts: architecture, literature, lexicon, and tolerant convivencia.23



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Displaying a general taste for the Arab—for Arabized literature, performance, and food—is imagined as the natural consequence of having Spanish blood. We love and enjoy the Arab, we are Arab, because we are Spanish. This logic fuels the circulation of immensely popular Orientalist Islamophilic literature, such as Alberto Ruy Sánchez’s Quinteto de Mogador (Mogador quintet), which the author defines as “horizontal Orientalism.” Upwardly mobile Mahjaris share the criollo and mestizo quest for the narration of the self, or at least of local spouses and their genealogies, as Spanish. The living Arab in contrast is a radical Other defined through the Islamophobic equation of Islam and terror.

White Slave Traffic: The Sinister Business of Sexual Slavery 24 The narrative on our ancestor the Arab is complicated in elite discourse by a Catholic perception of the Arab as fount of the erotic and other moral threats. The eroticized Orient has been present in Latin America through print and popular entertainment since the nineteenth century.25 Multiple European translations of the Thousand and One Nights and Omar Khayyam have circulated constantly.26 The culture of cabarets and variety shows in Mexican urban space gestured to Hollywood dreamlands, linking café chantant, the Middle East, and depravity, echoing classics such as the 1930 Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper film Morocco. From the 1930s through the present, the Orient has been a favorite theatrical prop, inspiring the names of cabarets and nightclubs in Mexico City and other large cities like Guadalajara: the Casbah, El Baghdad, El Morocco, El Marrakesh.27 Erotic literature written in or translated into Spanish in the late twentieth century is plagued with fantasies of abduction, harems, and sexual slavery, as even a cursory review of collections like Spanish publisher Tusquets’s La sonrisa vertical (The vertical smile) reveals.28 Mexican Catholic Orientalism genders the sexually threatening Arab as male. A characteristic example is narratives about la trata de blancas, the white slave trade. While the term has largely disappeared from public discourse, white slavery was of such concern in the early twentieth century that it brought heads of state together in international conventions held in Paris in 1902 and 1910.29 A treaty criminalizing the practice was adopted by the government of Uruguay as late as 1960.30 The label is used to arouse outrage toward contemporary forms of human trafficking, a euphemism for women forced or enticed into conditions of prostitution resembling bonded labor. The term has survived in Latin American



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popular imaginaries, appearing in newspaper headlines in Argentina, the anonymous popular texts of Wikipedia, YouTube journalistic video clips denouncing the prostitution of Chilean girls in Japan, and in motherly warnings to adolescent daughters in Mexico.31 Narratives of sexual danger among elite criollo women in Mexico sent to boarding schools and finishing schools in Europe as adolescents in the 1960s warned of the predatory sexual habits of Arabs and the risk of abduction: Arabs are terrible. It was very, very dangerous, the Arabs that abducted young women to sell them. Everyone warned you before you left for Europe; it was a well-­known phenomenon. Look, a cousin of the Rodríguez girls was a gorgeous girl, tall, very white, with beautiful hair. She was in Paris; one day she went out for a walk and she disappeared. They never heard from her again; everyone said she had been abducted for the trata de blancas. They must have sold her into some Arab sultan’s harem. . . . In any case she disappeared, and that happened with a lot of girls, the prettiest ones, don’t you know that they like white girls?32

Adolescent Mexican girls studying abroad are still warned of sexual danger. The Arab threat, updated to suit the times, takes the form of a working-­class migrant: the Parisian figure of the dragueur, a sexually insatiable (Arab) bum who trails young women, insistently making passes at them. The racial marking in these narratives lies not in the legality or illegality of trade in different human races, but in criollo girls’ potential to fulfill Arab men’s appetite for white sexual slaves.

Mashriqi Migrations Another set of representations of the Arab emerged around the century and a half of migration from the modern Middle East. Most migrants came from the Mashriq, with small numbers of people arriving from all corners of the Arabo-­Islamic world: Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, more recently also from South Asia. The already doubly ambivalent Arab, conquering and conquered ancestor and sexual threat, was complicated by the migrant presence. Mahjari habits, bodies, and colonial and postcolonial benefactors contributed new dimensions to the Arab in the popular imagination, fascinated with their economic trajectories. Though scholarship has defined Mahjaris as an ethnic group, their ethnic status, produced by administrative taxonomies foregrounded within national paradigms, does not foreclose other classifications. A



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friend’s father instructed me about popular perceptions and Mahjari claims: “the Arabs, when they’ve just arrived, they are Turks; once they own their own little shop they are Arabs, and when they become elites they are Lebanese.”33 In the realm of humor, the Arab migrant is portrayed as dominated by the twin “Semitic” obsessions of thrift and profit: Joke #1. A father says to his son: “Basarut, go ahead; go ask our neighbors if we can borrow their hammer to hammer a nail.” Little Basarut goes to the neighbor’s and is back in no time. “Baba,” he says, “the neighbors say they can’t lend us their hammer because it gets worn down.” “Those stingy bastards! Amazing how tight-­fisted people can be. Fine then, go get our hammer out.” Joke #2. An Arab is talking to his son: “Listen son, this beautiful clock belonged to my great-­grandfather; then it was my grandfather’s, then my father’s, and finally it was mine. Now I want it to be yours; I’ll give you a good price.” Joke #3. An Arab goes to the newspaper to post his wife’s obituary. When he gets there he tells the secretary: “I would like a cheap obituary.” “Ok, what should I write?” “Afife died.” Surprised, the secretary says to him: “Sir! You can’t just say ‘Afife died’! Look, it’s the same fee for two or for ten words.” The Arab says: “Oh! That’s great! Then write ‘Afife died, I’m selling red suburban cheap.’” Joke #4. Question: Who loses out when an Arab and a Jew do business together? Answer: The Internal Revenue Service.34

Joke characters are defined through kinship roles readily recognizable to Mexican audiences. Comic effect is achieved by Mahjari violation of



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the expected affect of father and son and husband and wife relationships. Jokes 1–3 emphasize the older generations’ struggle with the phonetics and grammar of Spanish. Basarut is a nonsense sequence constructed to mimic Arabic for local ears. In the fourth joke, the equation of Arab and Jew defines both as foreigners with a common interest in profit, willing to pursue it at the expense of public well-­being, represented by the state taxation apparatus. In the neoliberal moment, Middle American Arabs have unprecedented media visibility. The production of the Arab as elite in mediatic sites is at least partially due to Mashriqi ownership of media.35 A climate of ethnic celebration and the creation of new ethnically marked institutions parallel the glamorization of Mashriqi identities in the media. Media portrayals of Mahjari wealth and glamorous lives are gendered in predictable Western bourgeois ways, affording further avenues for participation in the elite spaces of country clubs and national politics. Latin-­Lebanese men are glamorized as global businessmen; their mediated sex appeal portrays business success and the joys that money can buy: expensive fashion in clothing and technology, smart suits, latest cell phone in hand. Women are displayed as exemplars of “exotic beauty.” Latin-­A rab females are embodied by the figures of Mexican Salma Hayek and Colombian Shakira. While other Mahjari beauties occasionally make it onto newspapers, blogs, and websites, these two global glamour legends take up a lot of space. Hayek has extended her voluptuous figure beyond the silver screen. The advertising campaign and calendar that she did for the Italian liquor brand Campari in 2007 for example showcased her curves: well groomed, well jeweled, and well dressed. Shakira, the rebel pop star par excellence, has specialized in performing the erotic East by Arabizing Latin American pop music. She popularized Arab-­inspired tunes and belly dancing, displaying her young body in belly-­dance outfits of Bollywood inspiration or matching a coin belt to skin-­tight black leather pants.

Arabs in Mexican Cinema and the Rise of Telenovelas In Mexico, an important transition occurred from benevolent representations of the Arab in the golden age of national cinema, when Mexico exported cinematic products to all of Latin America, to hybrid imaginaries circulating during the NAFTA era. Mahjaris have not been a central theme of Mexican cinema, despite the fact that the migration contributed celebrated actors and directors to the national industry during its golden



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age in the 1940s and 1950s.36 Only two films, made by Joaquín Pardavé in close succession, directly portray Mahjari families: El baisano Jalil (The countryman Jalil) in 1942 and El barchante Neguib (The berchant Neguib) in 1945. In the postrevolutionary climate, the Mahjari, cast as hardworking migrant, became a tool to criticize old-­regime elites and their exploitative habits. The lifestyles of the idle and greedy Mexican rich could be attacked as moral turpitude and laziness when contrasted with migrant industriousness. Over the next decade, the Orient was linked to comedy, anchored in realms of fantasy in films like El mago (The magician), starring the peerless Mexican comic Mario Moreno (Cantinflas), in 1949. In 1957, Mexican comic Tin Tan starred in Las mil y una noches (One Thousand and One Nights), a silly adaptation set in Mexico City-­disguised-­as-­Damascus. The Orient made a new star appearance with the radio program Kalimán, created by Rafael Cutberto Navarro and Modesto Vásquez González in 1963. Benevolent Prince Abul Pasha finds Kalimán, an infant floating downstream in a basket, and adopts him as heir to his kingdom of Kalimantán. Brought up by hunters and Mongols after his father’s assassination, the young man travels to Tibet, becoming a master of judo, karate, and jiu jitsu who will eventually come home to claim and then renounce his throne, and wander the world defending justice. An instant hit, the program’s success led to the publication of a Kalimán comic book in 1965, which appeared weekly until 1991. For twenty-­six years, Kalimán, a male descendant of Indian goddess Kali, battled evil with the help of his young Egyptian companion, Solin, a descendant of the pharaohs. Acclaimed beyond Mexico in Cuba, Central America, Colombia, and Ecuador, Kalimán’s popularity peaked with the films Kalimán, hombre increíble (Kalimán, incredible man) of 1972 and Kalimán en el siniestro mundo de Humanon (Kalimán in Humanon’s sinister world) of 1976. In the early nineties, Salma Hayek starred in El callejón de los milagros, an adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Midaq Alley, which transposes a narrative set in the core of old Cairo into late twentieth-­century Mexico City. The decline of the Mexican film industry began as early as 1950 to 1957 and is partially attributed to competition presented by television. Television brought new consumption habits and genres to the screen, among them the globally successful Latin American genre of the telenovela. A televised incarnation of the radionovela, a long-­standing and immensely popular radio genre, the astounding popularity of telenovelas has multiple dimensions. The cost of cinema attendance has risen since the 1990s as multinational companies purchase and remodel movie halls globally, providing cleaner spaces, better sound quality, and plusher seating for



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bourgeois consumers. Movie halls are increasingly unaffordable for the popular sectors, contributing to ever-­lower attendance and perhaps more hours of television spectatorship.37 The production and consumption of television itself has changed profoundly. Information flows once integral to the creation of national publics are superseded by global media.38 New pan-­Latin markets, which include Latino migrants in the United States, elicit a synergy of Mexican consumption of US media, national production, and collaborative ventures funded by US capital. A quick look at the reception of two telenovelas portraying the Middle East, El árabe (The Arab), produced in Mexico in 1980, and O clone (The clone), made in Brazil in 2001, reveals a gulf in practices surrounding production and reception. El árabe was broadcast in Mexico; O clone originally ran on the Brazilian Rede Globo network from October 1, 2001, to June 14, 2002. Within a year it had been aired once or twice in twelve other Latin American countries and the United States, and within a few more years it was also broadcast in Spain, Poland, Russia, Israel, Portugal, Armenia, Slovenia, Mozambique, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. Addressing a mixed bag of hot topics—drug trafficking, cloning, Islam— the telenovela was so popular that a Spanish-­language remake, El clon, aired in 2009. Produced by the US-­based network Telemundo and TV Globo, it was a Brazil-­Colombia-­US coproduction targeting the Latino market in the United States.39 El clon had enormous speed and breadth of circulation, spawning derivative industries and public spaces of commentary dominated by youth: enter the internet with its proliferation of blogs and fan sites, amounting to a self-­proclaimed clonmania.

Third-­World Consumers of Global Media Television emerged as a crucial medium for the exponential increase in media consumption during the last third of the twentieth century. While television viewing in Mexico and Central America is estimated to be slightly lower than elsewhere in Latin America, it is nonetheless overwhelming, with 84.2 percent of households in Mexico owning at least one television set by 1997.40 Television and other media such as the printed press, radio, and, for more affluent or more urban segments, also the internet play a central role in the production of popular imaginaries and the emergence of what globalization scholarship has called the global ecumene: the space of everyday global encounters, of persistent cultural interaction and exchange.41 Media flows are constantly restructured by market and state forces, and gaps between sites of production and con-



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sumption reflect global distributions of power. Controversies surrounding the mediatic consequences of regional trade treaties such as NAFTA have been overruled by the more powerful participants.42 Media coverage of public policy, cultural wars, and violence in Europe and the United States has fabricated a new, globally consumed Oriental since the 1990s. Euro-­American Orientalism continues to produce Europe and the United States as the only loci of rationality. States have been marginal to some of these developments and have actively fostered others, especially since 2001. The increasing availability of representations through satellite broadcasting, the internet, and the deregulation of national mediascapes through free-­trade treaties has contributed to a radicalization of everyday narratives of the Orient in print media and internet discussion groups in Mexico. The Oriental tropes that media produced in the United States exports to Middle America don’t accomplish the same ideological work in this Other context of reception. They feed ambivalent forms of resistance instead. As denigrating portrayals of the Orient are borne into Latin American landscapes of marked inequality, they become authoritative tools with which to express hostility toward migrants and their descendants, especially where they have displaced other populations monopolizing wealth and prestige. Imported representations provide a language of aggression against the Arab quickly adopted by criollo elites and middle classes. Mahjaris are accused of being “disloyal citizens” and “irresponsible elites” who refuse to commit to a shared (criollo and mestizo) national project. As Orientalism continues to inscribe exclusion, the Oriental also becomes a tool for non-­A rabs to express solidarity and resistance to subalternization.

The Arab Menace Like its predecessors, the new Orientalism has multiple dimensions; it is a constellation of representations weaving together contradictory visions and temporalities. American media globally broadcast pre­sents contemporary forms continuous with earlier portrayals, defining the Oriental as Other to the West. The wealth accruing to the Arab Gulf since the early 1970s with rising oil prices and Saudi partnership with the United States provided the visuals for a mediatic portrait of Oriental opulence: the unchanging Islamic East as gracious host and ally. New figures portrayed the Muslim Arab as menace. The 1979 Iranian Revolution contributed footage of bearded, turbaned Islamic clerics, women in chadors, and vic-



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torious hostility to US hegemony. The early 1980s gave us the press narrative of the suicide bomber, inaugurated in Lebanese resistance to Israeli incursions during the civil war and the Sri Lankan Tamil Tiger guerrillas. The Arab as terrorist was narrated in American films of the late 1970s and 1980s through the figure of the airplane hijacker. The Middle Eastern subject was cast as evildoer in the modern struggle between good and evil, rational Western states battling the irrational violence of foreign men. Movies made in the United States were cited by middle-­class viewers as informing the Mexican perception of the modern Arab as menace: The idea of the Arab as a terrorist, when did it start? It started fifteen or twenty years ago, but in the movies, in US movies that ran on TV. And I always thought, funny, they look like my (Lebanese) friend A.’s brothers! I don’t remember any movie in particular, but it was the airplane hijacking ones. Any of the plane hijacking movies, good, bad, or super low budget. They’re all the same to me, Arab, Jewish, Persian, it’s all the same, it’s like I have this total vision.43

The opacity of the Arab terrorist is compounded by racialization and a particular gendering. Always male in the movies, like peddlers under French administration in the Mexican Mahjar, hijackers are not humanized by family ties. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the beginning of the multicultural debates in Europe, culminating in the twin scandals of Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie’s heretical playfulness in his Satanic Verses and tensions surrounding l’affaire des foulards, the headscarf controversy in France. In both cases, debate centered on contending definitions of public space, inhabited by textual narratives and female bodies.44 The boundaries constructed through these struggles demarcated an Islamic East and a secular West tensely coexisting in European public space at the end of the millennium. In line with the global trend after the Beijing conference of 1985, women were markers of modernity, their public display of devotion through the wearing of a headscarf automatically interpreted as reflecting not only unreasonable attachment to religion, but oppression, forced submission to despotic patriarchal authority. These debates paralleled the first US war on Iraq, Operation Desert Storm (1990–1991), which televised the “corrupt despot” Saddam Hussein and spawned the twenty-­four-­hour news broadcast in US television. The single media product that surfaced most frequently in interviews and informal conversation as informing Mexican common sense about



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the Middle East was the movie Not Without My Daughter. Directed by Brian Gilbert and originally released in 1990, it came into the Spanish-­ language market in 1991: Two-­time Oscar winner Sally Field adds another powerful acting triumph to her gallery of great roles in the suspense thriller Not Without My Daughter, a riveting true story of terror and escape. Betty has come to the Middle East with her daughter and native-­born husband (Alfred Molina, Spider-­Man 2, Species) for a visit with his family. But soon the horrible truth about their vacation surfaces. Betty’s husband doesn’t intend to bring his family back to America . . . ever. She may return, he says, but their daughter must stay. And he has centuries of local custom and the oppressive might of a police state behind him. As a stranger in a foreign land, Betty has no money, no friends and no rights. But she does have an unconquerable will. In a hostile, war-­torn country, where even the slightest misstep can mean death, she makes a desperate bid to escape with her child. Her story, her courage and her ultimate triumph are unforgettable.45

The film was widely broadcast in Latin America. Women of every generation and socioeconomic background, claiming to have a neutral perception of the Arab, willing to discuss the region and expressing a benevolent curiosity toward its people, persistently cited this film as the reason behind their horrified and vehement negative when I asked if they would marry an Arab. It is irrelevant that the film is set in Iran and the lead male character played by a British-­born actor of Spanish-­Italian ancestry. He is terrifying; the Middle East as a whole is a war-­torn place of ancestral oppression hostile to foreigners, women, and human rights; and while Muslim men may appear rational when they operate in Western contexts, they revert to immanent violence and opaque irrationality once they find themselves at home. The living Arab emerges as an oppressor of women and violator of the modern social contract. The collapse of the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001 was a critical node in the American relationship to the Orient, bringing the Oriental Other onto center stage in American public space. A mediatic multiplication of representations of the Islamic and the Arab erupted in coverage of the attack, the arrests of al-­Qaeda members associated with it, and the subsequent Afghani and Iraqi wars and occupations.46 The printed press, but more significantly perhaps, the twenty-­four-­hour television newscasts, and the internet became forums for the ad nauseam repetition in images and text of an Islamic threat.



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The new Oriental is the Islamist, a bearded, wild-­eyed young man dressed in traditional Arab garb. He blindly follows absolute orders issued by his leader, a man of religion who is sophisticated, multilingual, and cruel. This despot puts high-­tech communications and transportation developed by what he considers the technologically advanced but morally decadent West to use against it, deploying his fanatical young followers’ expendable lives in this uneven battle while he stays hidden and safe himself. A recent Hollywood avatar of this narrative is the 2008 film Body of Lies, which reproduces the Orientalist narrative even as it pairs it with a critical perspective on US military operations. The same suspicions inform expert and lay analysis of Daesh (the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, and the Levant).

Fantasies of Liberation Belly dance as feminist project is a productive example of how Orientalist consumption is mediated by fantasy. A classic product of Euro-­American Orientalism, the term belly dance is said to have been coined by Sol Bloom, entertainment director of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, to advertise Egyptian folk dancers performing at the fair.47 The term has been widely disseminated since through film and other genres, and various dance styles have been professionalized. The contemporary aesthetics of belly dance in the Middle East itself are partly a Hollywood product, though Egyptian cinema played its part, with the making and marketing of belly stars such as Badia Masabni, Samia Gamal, and Tahia Carioca from the 1930s through the 1960s.48 A belly-­dance movement emerged in the United States in the late 1970s as a strand in the New Age rediscovery of the East.49 Rooted in California, the Middle Eastern Culture and Dance Association established in 1977 continues to hold festivals, competitions, and fairs. Among the most widely attended is the massive Cairo Carnival held in southern California every June, where dancers from all over the United States compete for the title of Belly Dancer of the Universe.50 The development of belly dance in the West has involved participants who delve into the sociohistorical roots of their adopted art form, traveling to the Middle East to train in the popular quarters of Cairo, and others who develop fusions and other styles of primarily US inspiration. As part of the global circulation of women training as belly dancers, Latin American women increasingly take up residence in the Middle East, frequently in Egypt, eventually returning to tour the Americas as



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professionals of exotica. Belly dancing has become widely popular since the mid-­1990s, joining the staple ballet, tap, and modern dance classes in gyms, dance studios, and fitness clubs.51 Teachers and performers concentrate in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, the three Latin American countries with the largest Mahjari populations and the largest middle-­class markets.52 Popularized by pop-­music stars, performed onstage or in fitness clubs in order to discipline young female bodies to late twentieth-­ century aesthetics of sex appeal, belly dance becomes an opportunity to participate in modernity and mark middle-­class status. Arab dance, or beli, has flooded cultural centers and fitness clubs in Mexico in the past fifteen years, becoming wildly popular with young middle- and lower-­middle-­class women. Its professionalization is indexed by the Asociación Mexicana de Danza Árabe y Belly Dance A.C., a professional association that hosted the first Mexican Conference on Arab Dance and Belly Dance in Mexico City in October of 2008.53 Initially concentrated in the capital, beli is now advertised in Morelia, Torreón, Saltillo, and Puebla, among other cities. Mahjaris are crucial to the performance of the Orient as exotic aesthetic. Recent Muslim migrants play key roles as musicians, singers, dancers, and cooks providing Oriental art forms to a Mexican public. Doubly Oriental as Arabs and Muslims, they are important authenticators of the products they sell. A descendant of Mashriqi migrants, Shakira is credited with making belly dancers visible in Latin America. Her 1999 album, ¿Dónde están los ladrones? (Where are the thieves?), in particular the song “Ojos así” (Eyes like these), Arabized Spanish-­language pop rock and its performance with stunning success: Shakira Breaks Record in Mexico! Tuesday May 29, 2007 Mexico (City). Shakira made her fans wait before she came onstage, but she managed to captivate the thousands of people that gathered the day before yesterday at her free performance in Mexico City’s Zócalo with her wholehearted surrender. For the final act of the night the Latin diva executed an Arab-­style dance onstage, before switching to the rhythm of hiphop and ripping the place up with “Hips don’t lie.”54

Shakira exploded onto the US market with her English-­language debut in 2001, reaching across the Atlantic as posters from her Pepsi campaign blanketed street walls in Damascus in the fall of 2005. Her popularity has raged on for over a decade. Shakira has contributed to the marketability of Oriental dance in Latin



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America, making being sexy a core selling point for belly-­dance skills: “What really had a big impact was that Shakira. Shakira made us few people who danced visible. And now all these girls want to dance like Shakira. It’s super sexy.”55 Middle-­class consumers reproduce mediatic aesthetic judgments, defining beauty and sexual attractiveness through young bodies molded by the modern disciplines of diet and exercise. Consider the following ad in a weekly classifieds publication out of Mexico City: Secondhand.com.mx Arab Dance Learn to Dance Like Shakira Price—on consultation LEARN TO DANCE ARAB DANCE AT THE FRIENDS OF DANCE INSTITUTE (FOUNDED IN 1999) SO THAT YOU ARE SEXIER AND YOUR FIGURE IS EVEN MORE MOLDED, WE HAVE MANY SCHEDULES IN BOTH LOCALES. Take advantage of the opportunity of participating in all our activities with a single monthly fee: we have (kungfu-­WUSHU, ZUMBA, BALLROOM DANCING, MEXICAN FOLKLOR, FLAMENCO etc.) “COMING UP INAUGURATION OF OUR NARVARTE LOCALE”56

Belly fever also capitalizes on the dictates of late twentieth-­century fitness ideals: “It is considered a complete exercise because it works all muscle groups in the body. Like all aerobic exercise, if you practice for an hour at least three times a week you will soon see results. You will be burning approximately three hundred calories, since you use the cardio vascular system.”57 In spite of its contribution to a hegemonic consumer culture and a patriarchal bodily imperative, beli constitutes the public performance of a female sexuality that would be censored if it were not Oriental.

Communities of Consumption Mexican consumption of beli indexes women’s professionalization and their access to independent incomes. The movement is characterized by a pseudo-­social science discourse catering to the middle-­class, educated background of consumers:



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The belly dance is one of the most ancient dances in the world; it is surrounded by myths and legends. Some researchers situate the emergence of the belly dance in India, others in Pharaonic Egypt. It was probably present in the rituals of the Great Mother Goddess responsible for the reproduction of the whole planet.58

The discourse very quickly slides into mystical, cosmic tones that resonate with New Age trends and the last generation of Kalimán fans. Through references to “the Goddess” and emphasis on the suitability of women of all sizes, shapes, and ages as dancers, belly dance is cast as a feminist project of valuation of the feminine and its diversity beyond mediatized aesthetics that favor the young and slender. In a consumer world, the new belly dance has quickly generated sisterhoods cemented through shopping and marketed through erotization.59 Dance troupes and individual performers adopt stage names that index the fantastic and erotic: Desde el harem (From the harem) and such. Eroticizing in order to sell is not welcome by all dancers. A young woman who joins in occasional group performances narrated the following: My teacher . . . gets really upset that everyone who’s danced three times is suddenly Ramsa and the Daughters of Sheba and all that crap. She called her group “G. Hernández’s Group” and everyone said “Oh no!” She’s on a different wavelength. I started [dancing] because you feel like an odalisque. We weren’t really into the culture or anything, I mean, we wanted to dance around, and, hey, Indians are bringing a lot of stuff, and the Chinese too, the coin belts. When I started dancing they were really expensive and these days you can find a really cute one for 150 pesos. Ok, so it’s not great quality, but hey. And you know what’s starting to be trendy here? The Palestinas. Indians are bringing them. I love them and I was dying to have one. Prisci brought me one from Egypt like five years ago and I used to wear it as a scarf. And everyone went oh-­ yeah, yeah, like a terrorist. Right now you can find them in every color: baby blue, pink, green, light pink. In stores like Zara.60

The growing availability and plunging costs of belly-­dance paraphernalia and its commercialization by Indian and Chinese merchants reflect its emergence as a mass consumer phenomenon. The fact that Palestinas, that is, keffiyehs, are marketed in trendy feminine shades by shops like Zara—a globally available Spanish label catering to middle-­class professionals—marks Westernized Oriental fashions as respectable. Latin American women increasingly participate as consumers in the



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tourism industry choreographed around belly dance. An example covered in the press bends genres to weave romantic narratives of destiny and magic: Belly Dance in Vogue Sensual dance and a great figure Univision report, November 9, 2008 Sohair’s arrival at oriental dance has a fairy-­tale air: as she sat in an Arab restaurant in Buenos Aires watching a dance show, a stranger came up to her and said “Leave everything, you have to devote yourself to dance.” She paid no attention, but then she started running into this man everywhere, as if by magic, and she decided to follow his advice and take her first classes. That was the beginning of a love story with the art of seduction, as the Argentinian describes it, which made her abandon her job, country, and family to travel to other countries and keep learning. That is how she discovered Egypt, the cradle of the belly dance, where, paradoxically, religion and social mores result in its being ill understood at times.61

While this reporter acknowledges dancers’ ambivalent role in Middle Eastern contexts, beli performers in Mexico routinely deny it.62 One of the feminist dimensions of the project involves the narration immediately prior to performance, of the imagined respectability of Middle Eastern performers. Drawing on pseudo-­social science aspects of the New Age belly discourse, spectators are patiently told by one of the dancers that while Latin American audiences perversely perceive the genre as explicitly seductive and shameless, this is a Western distortion of the original meaning of the dance.63 Specialized tour packages have become available, along with the more universally affordable dance paraphernalia and workshops taught by national and international belly stars.64 The best example is probably the web portal Danar, an initiative out of Mexico City that seeks to coordinate the beli community: Danar is a web portal intended exclusively for those who like to find out the latest in belly dance, Arab culture, physical care, contacts and networks, as well as everything that matters to the belly-­dance community in Mexico and the world. When advertising in the Mexican portal of oriental dance you address a specific market with an important



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intellectual level, [people] of different ages and great purchasing power. Teacher and academy directories. Travel to Egypt!65

With female employment increasing significantly between 1990 and 2006 in Latin America and a narrowing wage gap between men and women, more Mexican women have substantial independent incomes.66 Younger working women tend to have fewer dependents and therefore more disposable income. Women’s resistance is and can be organized through consumption, while young men’s reflects their exclusion from the labor market; despite the fact that women are still more likely to be unemployed, are employed in more precarious sectors, are under contract, earn lower wages, etc. In this emerging culture of feminized consumption, youth becomes an attribute of the feminine, reflected in the aesthetics of websites and advertising and the emphasis on belly dance as a form or tool of seduction.67

Third-­Worldism and Antiglobalization Antiglobalization activism of the past two decades is another case of Orientalist appropriation mediated by fantasy.68 The Arab in these contexts is the Arab threatened by US hegemony and imperial warfare, and the local response is solidarity and mobilization. The figures associated with anti-­imperialist struggle are the Palestinian and more recently the Iraqi, the Lebanese, and the Islamist. These struggles are broadcast through various mediums. While much of the mainstream and televised portrayals mimic the discourse of US media, critical journalism is often sympathetic to those under attack. Sustained Arab resistance to what is perceived as a will to global domination by the United States creates a space of mutual intelligibility for those who operate at the global fringes of a fraying hegemony. The West produces alliances through multiple practices of exclusion. Various organizations in Mexico organized in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle since its beginning. Mexico City in particular has a long history of popular mobilization around local, national, and increasingly global causes. Mexico’s strong tradition of unionization and free university education, both of which clashed with the privatizing projects of the 1990s, produced an extraordinary urban working class—literate, politically aware, yet often living in extended family households supported by family members with stable incomes and access to the limited forms of welfare that state employees enjoy. The relatively strong and stable insti-



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tutional landscape developed by the postrevolutionary state buttressed subaltern militance, containing and consolidating a civil society.69 Leftist activists, especially university students, have been crucial to the mobilization of this civil society. The same demographic that participated in urban solidarity events organized by and around the Zapatista movement between 1994 and 2006, the student-­led strike at the National University in 1998, and the Partido de la Revolución Democrática’s 2006 presidential campaign and post-­campaign mobilization also organizes activities to protest US and Israeli aggression. During the summer of 2006, for example, students at rallies protesting the war on Lebanon spray-­painted Hizballah stencils on the sidewalk in front of the US embassy. While non-­Mashriqi Mexican students enthusiastically adopted Hizballah as a sign of radical resistance, Hizballah’s military action was widely perceived as problematic by Mahjaris, though as the conflict progressed the group gained increasing legitimacy as defenders of what came to be perceived as an Israeli attack on the nation.70 Though Mahjaris of Palestinian, Muslim, or Druze ancestry, economically fragile families, and recent migrants who experienced the violence voiced indignation at the war, they only participated in demonstrations organized by the Lebanese community; candles were lit and red roses waved, but no mention was made of Lebanese resistance.71 Among Mahjaris, solidarity with Hizballah was often read as an expression of sectarian belonging. Toward the end of the conflict, I recorded a conversation at the Centro Libanés in which an educated Greek Orthodox woman who came to Mexico in the 1980s, overwhelmed by emotion, stated that at least Hizballah was defending Lebanon. Her interlocutor, an educated middle-­ aged Maronite man, the grandchild of migrants, arched his eyebrows in disapproval and responded, “Are you Muslim? Oh, I didn’t realize . . .” before turning his back to her.

Being a New Muslim in Mexico In the late twentieth century, Islam, and even Islamism, emerge as a new third-­worldism. Conversion to Islam in contemporary Mexico can be understood as a form of resistance. Often conceived as a theological riddle, an act of faith, a spiritual experience, conversion always also entails situated social consequences as a political and moral choice.72 Various Muslim places of worship have sprung up in and around Mexico City since the early 1990s. The most significant are the Centro Educativo de la Comunidad Musulmana and the Centro Cultural Islámico de Mexico,



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with its center in Tequesquitengo.73 The CCIM has also hosted meeting places in Colonia Narvarte and Coyoacán.74 Though some participants are migrants from historically Muslim regions such as the Middle East and South Asia, sites and moments of Muslim worship are largely attended by Mexican converts. Public performances of devotion, narratives surrounding the choice to convert, and internet forums established by converts suggest that conversion can be pursued as a gendered strategy of resistance to Mexican class formations. The majority of converts come from lower-­middle-­class urban backgrounds. While many converts’ narratives express a particular interest in the egalitarian message of Islam, they also narrate conversion as a rational choice. Professional lower-­ middle-­class women narrate conversion as a result of or a precursor to marriage. Friends and family who have not converted interpret some of these conversions as the pursuit of class distinction. Being Muslim is different, providing a marker of cosmopolitan distinction that becomes a strategy for exiting consumer society’s mass-­produced identities and circumnavigating local taxonomies of class.75

Conclusion

This book has explored the relevance of mobility, as project and practice, to lives initially anchored in the Eastern Mediterranean as the region transitioned from Ottoman to mandate administration and then to national independences. I track mobility experienced as conquest, diaspora, exile, or pilgrimage, to write a transnational colonial history of the present that explores global history on an intimate scale. I have asked questions about who undertook the leap of faith of transatlantic travel and, crucially, how France as colonial power mediated these transits. The book focuses on migrants, as they developed a gendered politics of notables that set modernist debates across Mahjar and Mashriq in conversation and sought out protection from different authorities, grappling with changing French and Mexican state projects. I argue that the Mahjar became increasingly stratified into a migrant notability, their clients, and the marginalized, and that French patronage was crucial in the Mexican Mahjar, since the Mashriq and Mexico were both politically subordinate to French imperial hegemony. Migrants active across the Mexican Mahjar circuit from late Ottoman times through the present invite rethinkings of mobility, transnationalism, and the social and cultural histories of geographies integrated through their circulation. The Mahjar has long been studied through national histories of reception of Arabic-­speaking immigrants. This foundational literature made a number of assumptions about mobility that stemmed from what scholars have labeled methodological nationalism. Methodological nationalism imagines the nation-­state, its institutions, and its ideologies as the primary units containing social processes, informing the analysis and narration of history, including social and cultural history. National histories conceive mobility as essentially passage from one national container to another, privileging the changing national contexts that migrants contend with, the public policy through which “receiving” bureaucracies produce arrivals as “foreigners,” “ethnics,” or other administrative categories, and the public cultures representing or

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eliding difference within the nation. These narratives assume migrants to be subaltern and undifferentiated. They reproduce immigrant memory crafted to carve out a space in the national history of the receiving nation-­ state, silencing dissent and difference within migrant experience itself and effacing other patterns of mobility. Transnational and mobility studies, to which this book is a contribution, propose centering migrants themselves as units of analysis. The conceptual framework of transnationalism requires another analytic imagination and poses methodological challenges, bringing into focus rich and complicated dimensions of mobility obscured by national narratives and archival formations. Crucially, it allows us to recognize not only unidirectional movement but also circulation, transit, return, touring, and displacement. Transnationalism also invites questions about political formations framing mobility other than the national. Mahjaris cultivated important affective and material investment elsewhere, in their spaces of origin, but also in other Mahjars. Their history of mobility is best conceived as global and decentered, rather than tethered to stable points of origin and destination. Methodologically, it can be studied through national, imperial, or religious frames, but scholars must also recognize the centrality of global migrant networks and circulating migrant discourse. I have coined the term Mexican Mahjar to try to capture a transnational formation that foregrounds the floating elsewhere of mobile subjects yet anchors migrant projects in a specific political geography. Recognizing the importance of national jurisdictions channeling mobility, I emphasize imperial circuits and migrant notables framing migrant trajectories to offer a colonial history of Middle Eastern mobility. Making Mashriqis in movement the focus of analysis, I attend to transnational practice on several scales. I argue that the transnational imagination is not confined to subaltern migrant formations spanning points of origin and sojourn, where many ethnographers of migration first noted and theorized transnational practice. Moving Mashriqis differed in their social anchorage of origin, in the time and political conditions of departure, and in the patterns of mobility sustained or not after their initial displacement. They circulated with different kinds of resources across changing political and economic terrain, but their constraints and opportunities cannot be reduced to topographies of origin and reception. Frames larger and other than the nation also attempted to manage mobility transnationally: two imperial projects, the Ottoman and later the French, exercised sovereignty and attempted to consolidate imperial administration by reaching into the Mahjar, the space of migration,



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selectively cultivating allegiances, neglecting needs, mediating between “deserving” diasporic subjects and their states of reception. Religious institutions, particularly the Maronite Church, have also cultivated transnational jurisdictions and allegiances. The Mexican Mahjar constituted a colonial crossroads, where Ottoman, French, and Mexican civilizing missions intersected, attempting the administration of mobile populations of the Ottoman Arab provinces, later the French mandate territories of Syria and Lebanon. A project in historical anthropology, this book focuses on two processes that were particularly salient in Mexican Mahjar sources: coloniality and migrant differentiation. Mahjaris navigated geographies framed by distinct and unequal projects, crafting transnational networks and mobilizing dissonant authorities at the intersection of Arab, French, and Mexican colonial modernisms. The Mashriq and Mexico were politically subjected to the interventions of giants in geopolitics, which conditioned the administration of mobility—as we see with French, American, and British vigilance of migrant business and associational life in the Mexican Mahjar from the late nineteenth century onward. Mahjaris navigated what I have called a postcolonial global. Coloniality, power differentials, and universalizing claims were enacted not only in French and Mexican official archives, however, but also in the discursive work of migrants operating as producers and enforcers of categories and boundaries. Migrant ideologies of movement, of national and ethnic identification, are marked by the adoption of imperial discourse and identification with dominant social actors defined in terms of race, class, and religion. Differentiation and the inscription of difference within the migrant population were as relevant to collective trajectories as the “ethnic” boundaries that the modern nation-­state implements to hem in migrations. Writing postcolonial transregional histories poses important methodological challenges to historical ethnographers. Histories of the Mexican Mahjar are perhaps best written by setting archives in Mahjar, Mashriq, and imperial France in conversation, but also by reading those archives through an ethnographic lens informed by theory. The ethnographer needs to create a transregional archive, setting disparate archival formations in conversation, recognizing their multiple claims to normalize or moralize particular actors and their discourses. A number of languages and registers must be intelligible to the researcher; access must be negotiated to personal, community, and official archives scattered globally. Relevant archives include the gray literature of state administration, the

Conclusion 237

press, and oral histories produced through the ethnographic encounter, but also cultural production and its circulations. Mexico hosts one of the five largest concentrations of Middle Eastern migrants in the Americas. Between 1870 and 1901, an estimated three hundred thousand migrants circulated between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Mahjar, the floating world of migration that spanned British Egypt and colonial Africa, Europe, the American continent, and Australia. By the time the Ottoman political system collapsed in 1918, up to half of the population of the Lebanese Mountain had made the transatlantic journey to the American Mahjars. The migration’s pulse reflected political processes framing divergent trajectories. Intense mobility was interrupted by the Great War but resumed in the 1920s and continued through the late 1940s under the French mandate. About a third of migrants returned definitively to the Mashriq; the rest concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Haiti, and Mexico, spinning transnational lives. Between 1878 and 1930, some thirty-­five thousand Mashriqi migrants clustered in Mexico, with others transiting through, in from or on to Mahjars in the Caribbean, South America, and the United States. Less than a third of migrants complied with official registration in Mexico’s National Registry of Foreigners, established in 1932; those who did built differentiated trajectories, overwhelmingly through commerce, which was the declared livelihood of 90 percent of households. New scales of mobility extended Ottoman regional histories of movement; migrants could afford to extend mobility into transatlantic circuits. Elites displaced and middle classes created through Ottoman reforms circulated along with newly rich peasants, creating a stratified Mahjar and transplanting a politics of notables to the American geographies. When Mahjaris were still Ottoman subjects, French officials in Mexico responded selectively to Christian and Jewish migrants who argued that French practices of protection in Ottoman lands were portable. Once the mandates were conferred by the League of Nations, French interventions operated across independent Mexico and the colonial mandate states. French protection of Francophile Mahjaris, and French, British, and American vigilance and targeting of Muslim migrants, had important consequences for how the Mexican state and elite and popular Mexicans understood Mahjaris. Mandate administration introduced new poles of authority engaging migrants, as authorities in metropolitan France attempted to coordinate mandate officials in the Mashriq and consuls in Mexico to manage migration, reaching into the American diaspora of subjects under French pro-



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tection with census and registration policies to legitimize and institutionalize the mandate in the Mashriq. Migrants found themselves subjected to overlapping transnational jurisdictions and cultivated French and Mexican agents as their legitimate authorities. The imperfect overlap between French late imperial ambitions and migrant practice afforded the development of a transnational public sphere, where migrants interpellated the French and Mexican states for different purposes. During the turbulent decades of the Mexican Revolution, Mahjari fortunes diversified. Many were hard hit by cash strangulation, and even prosperous families were subalternized as French and American political surveillance initiated during the Great War interacted with the economic downturn. Those who weathered the storm reaped profits but bankruptcy threatened again during the 1921 and 1929 economic depressions. Allegiance to the mandate, cultivating intimate ties to corrupt French and Mexican officials, and affiliation with Francophile community institutions were crucial to securing accumulation in the Mexican Mahjar, as the differential salvaging of losses incurred during the revolution through the Mixed Reclamation Committees illustrates. Mahjaris commanding fewer languages and material resources and Muslim migrants in northern Mexico were disproportionately targeted in the conjunction of Maronite, French, and Mexican Islamophobias. Mahjari notables actively denounced and displaced marginizable Mashriqis in collaboration with the French, consolidating themselves as mediators between authorities and less-­fortunate Mahjaris, building compatriot clienteles and accumulating resources, power, and prestige in the process. After the Mexican Revolution, migrants’ status as French protégés and their Oriental whiteness made them both intelligible as elites and vulnerable to xenophobia. Mahjaris faced growing rejection from Mexican state and popular sectors during the economically difficult 1930s. Legislation curtailing movement targeted impoverished migrants, eventually also threatening expulsion of communities and Mahjari notables. Notables developed two strategies to situate Mahjaris as rightful conquerors of Latin American geographies in this context. The first negated destitute migrants their status as Mashriqis, displacing them morally and physically from community institutions and the public landscape. Only white, wealthy Christian Mahjaris could claim continuity with the Mashriq. In the second, Mahjari notables mobilized Maronite Phoenician nationalism to partner with criollo elites in a common civilizing mission bringing Middle American mestizo and Indian populations into the fold of Eurocentric, Christian civilization. I trace the Ottoman production of Latin

Conclusion 239

American populations as savages in Ottoman Arab poetry and travel accounts recovered in Nahda editorial ventures. When threatened with mounting xenophobia and a hardening migratory regime, the modernist Arab imagination rearticulated those representations to situate Mahjari migrants as legitimate conquerors of Middle American geographies and partners to the criollo civilizing mission. With a handful of notables mediating between their compatriot clients and French and Mexican authorities, geographical mobility gave way to the institutionalization of social mobility, privileging Christian, white, and French identifications and networks in Mexico. This history has informed and fractured Mahjari social memory and representations of the Arab Orient that circulate in late twentieth-­century Mexico. As social mobility became institutionalized in migrant associational life, the migrant majority lost their moorings to a Mashriqi past. Notables sustained transregional practice and their clients a de-­A rabized national (Lebanese) identification anchored in community institutions. Working-­ class populations of all religious traditions, in contrast, became invisible as Mahjaris. Unmooring the collective boat from Palestinian and Syrian national imageries burdened by the politics of the American century was as important toward Mahjari ascendance in Mexico as linking Lebanon to a Phoenician past and a French present in public culture. Greek Orthodox or Jewish, Syrians were shuffled out of sight, and the Lebanese emerged as (Maronite) Christian, (upper) middle class, economically liberal, culturally Western, and distinct on all these counts. Community intellectuals have produced increasingly normative memories of Mahjar and Mashriq, developing and importing national and confessional boundary-­building projects. There has also been a multiplication of genres with distinct patterns of production, circulation, and consumption and different degrees of authority and permanence, however. Gaps across genres provide degrees of opportunity for stowaway remembering of a hidden diversity and crossed histories, affording a multilayered, divergent structuring of migrant memory. As ephemera, a devalued feminine genre, cookbooks offer a microsite of freedom, where memory erased by national and community logics can be smuggled into the future. Finally, I explore the contemporary circulation of criollo and mestizo imaginaries of “the Arab,” which conceive both cultural difference and identity through the Orient. Mexican Orients are refracted through the Orientalisms of two successive hegemonic presences, Spain and the United States. Criollo histories of Iberian connections bridging Middle



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America and the Middle East, local entanglements with Mahjari projects, and mediatic consumer Orientalisms fashioned into subversive tools by mestizo women and youth multiply Mexican Orientalisms beyond received Euro-­American notions. In contrast to Mahjari community efforts to inscribe difference, Mexican Orientalisms fail to note confessional distinctions among Mashriqis, making Arab and Jew indistinguishable. Work on the Mexican Mahjar is relevant to shifting the narrative of Middle East historiography, which must respond to the rich and complicated consequences of attending to the region with an analytic imagination freed from national and area studies paradigms. It contributes to a social history of Mexico that does not center the Mexican but disaggregates actors and ideologies that have been part of local landscapes without being confined to them or being necessarily determined by local dynamics. It also complicates migration and transnationalism analyses, which focus on mobile populations that are assumed to be internally homogeneous in terms of race, class, and religious tradition. Work remains to be done on the role of religious authority, its jurisdictions and reconfigurations across Mahjar and Mashriq. Spaces that functioned as dense nodes of transit for migrants dispersing across the global Mahjar might also be explored in light of the analytic and historical insight afforded by this book. The history of Marseille, Havana, or New York as common referents across Mahjars is yet to be written. Stories of illegality and the smuggling of human and merchant traffics across Mahjars are also pending.

Notes

Introduction 1. Amin Maalouf, Origines (Paris: B. Grasset, 2004), 422; translation by the author. 2. Botros, a teacher before and after his brief American adventure, was frustrated enough with the vicissitudes of his career at the College Oriental in Zahleh to write to a local notable in 1900 that he quit his responsibilities there, “having decided to leave the universe of pedagogy to venture into a different activity, be it in Egypt, or in the American countries.” Maalouf, Origines, 93. On transition to the mandate period see James Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Michael Provence, The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Nadya Sbaiti, “Lessons in History: Education and the Formation of National Society in Beirut” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2008); Max Weiss, “The Cultural Politics of Shi’i Modernism: Morality and Gender in Early 20th-­Century Lebanon,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, no. 2 (2007): 249–270. 3. Maalouf, Origines, 420. 4. Period sources use the geographical term Lebanese Mountain to anchor migrants. The term refers to an Ottoman administrative unit, Mount Lebanon, which was established as a semiautonomous governorate after the 1860 civil war. Under French administration, the Republic of Greater Lebanon was established in 1920, but earlier usage persisted. 5. Al-­Nahda, the modernist Arab renaissance that spanned the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, will be analyzed further in subsequent chapters. 6. I use the Arabic term Mashriq rather than two labels associated with colonial projects: the French Levant and the American Middle East. On the history of these terms, see Zachary Lockman, Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); and Lara Deeb and



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Notes to Pages 2–3

Jessica Winegar, Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 7. An important step in the institutionalization of Middle East mobility studies was the launching of Mashriq and Mahjar: Journal of Middle East Migration Studies. See the editorial foreword to the first number by Andrew Arsan, Akram Khater, and John Karam, “On Forgotten Shores: Migration in Middle East Studies and the Middle East in Migration Studies,” Mashriq and Mahjar 1, no. 1 (Spring 2013), 1–7. 8. James Gelvin and Nile Green, Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 9. On migrations to the Americas, see Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi’s classic volume The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration (London: I. B. Tauris, 1992). Also Ignacio Klich and Jeffrey Lesser, Arab and Jewish Immigrants in Latin America: Images and Realities (London: F. Cass, 1998); Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, Rethinking Jewish-­L atin Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008); and Raanan Rein, María José Cano, and Beatriz Molina Rueda, Más allá del Medio Oriente: las diásporas judía y árabe en América Latina (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2012). On Brazil, see Clark S. Knowlton, “Spatial and Social Mobility of the Syrians and Lebanese in the City of São Paulo, Brazil” (PhD diss.: Vanderbilt University, 1955); John Tofik Karam, Another Arabesque: Syrian-­Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007); Jeffrey Lesser, Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and Lesser, Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese-­Brazilians and Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). On Argentina, see Christina Civantos, Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); Sofia D. Martos, “The Balancing Act: Ethnicity, Commerce, and Politics among Syrian and Lebanese Immigrants in Argentina, 1890–1955” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2007); María del Mar Logroño, “The Development of Nationalist Identities in French Syria and Lebanon: A Transnational Dialogue with Arab Immigrants to Argentina and Brazil, 1915–1929” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2007); Lilly Ballofett, “Mahjar Maps: Argentina in the Global Arab Diaspora” (PhD diss., University of California Davis, 2014). On the United States, see Sarah Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Akram Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Hani Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to US Citizenship (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014); Stacy Fahrentold, “The Global Levant: Making a Nation in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora” (PhD diss., Northeastern University, 2013); Reem Bailony, “Uncle Sam and Amir

Notes to Pages 3–6

243

Arslan: Citizenship, Race, and Religion among Syrians of the United States in 1927,” presented at the 2014 Bodies in Motion Conference, North Carolina State University, Raleigh. 10. This business was estimated to be worth millions of dollars, according to Doctor Bollamir, Memoir sur l’emmigration syrienne, 1901, Archive de la Chambre de Commerce de Marseille. ML4.2.7.3.1/01. Droit et Législation. Règlementation du Commerce et de l’Industrie. Étrangers (commerçants et travailleurs immigres) Travailleurs étrangers à Marseille et dans les Bouches du Rhône. 11. Khater, Inventing Home. 12. Badawi al-­Mulaththam, al-­Natiqun bi-­al-­dad fi Amirika al-­Janubiyah (Beirut: Dar Rihani lil-­Tiba`ah wa-­al-­Nashr, 1956). 13. Like European migrants of the time, Mahjaris describe economic prosperity as “hacer la América,” making America. 14. Reverend Jessup contrasts the new houses to those he lived in when he first arrived in Lebanon: “My second summer in Duma, in 1858, my wife and I spent in the house of a Greek priest, Soleyman. It was an antique mountain house, consisting of two long parallel rooms, separated by a wall of kowar (woven reeds plastered with clay, and divided into sections or bins, holding wheat, barley, cut straw, and various household stores). This wall extended only three-­fourths of the height of the ceiling. . . . The floors, as usual in those days, were of clay, which was washed over weekly by the women and rubbed down with a smooth pebble, thus killing the flees [sic] and renewing the surface. Over this were spread mats which were a protection. As the peasants leave their shoes at the door and use no chairs or tables, the floors did good service. But our chairs and tables soon broke through the crust of clay, to the dismay of the priests’ wife.” Henry Harris Jessup, Fifty-­ Three Years in Syria (London and Edinburg: Fleming Revell Company, 1910), 117. 15. Bollamir, Memoir. On oral history, see Alixa Naff, Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985); Martha Díaz de Kuri and Lourdes Macluf, De Líbano a México: crónica de un pueblo emigrante (Mexico City: Gráfica, 1995); Liz Hamui de Halabe and Fredy Charabati, Los judíos de Alepo en México (Mexico City: Maguen David, 1989). 16. As reported by French official Marechal Pechkoff in 1927. MAE (French Ministry of Foreign Relations, Ministère Français des Affaires Étrangères), vol. 401, 58–76. 17. See Devi Mays’s excellent dissertation on Sephardi Jews moving through Mexico, “Transplanting Cosmopolitans: The Migrations of Sephardic Jews to Mexico, 1900–1934” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2013). 18. Most scholarship focuses on national projects. For Mexico, see Theresa Alfaro-­Velcamp’s work; on homeland politics, see work by Logroño, Fahrentold, and Bailony. 19. Thompson, Colonial Citizens; Carol Hakim, Origins of the Lebanese National Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Kais Firro, Inventing Lebanon: Nationalism and the State under the Mandate (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003).



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Notes to Pages 8–10

20. Notable among emerging Middle East mobility studies are the journal Mashriq & Mahjar and the work of scholars focusing on Mediterranean mobilities: Ilham Khuri-­Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Julia Clancy-­ Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800– 1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Andrew Arsan, Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and a crop of excellent dissertations, including Mays, “Transplanting Cosmopolitans.” Excellent volumes focusing on cultural production include Ella Shohat and Evelyn Alsultany, eds., Between the Middle East and the Americas (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2012); on subsets of migrants, see Leonardo Schiocchet, Entre o Velho e o Novo Mundo: a diaspora palestina desde o Oriente Medio a America Latina (Lisbon: Chiado Editora, 2015); on the diaspora as global phenomenon see Trevor Batrouney et al., Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian Communities in the World: Theoretical Frameworks and Empirical Studies (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2014). 21. Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick-­Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology,” International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (2003): 576–610. 22. George Gmelch, “Return Migration,” Annual Review of Anthropology 9 (1980): 135–234. For Mashriqi diasporas, Khater was the first to center return migration in Inventing Home. 23. For a rethinking of political theories of the migrant see Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 24. The ethnic in this sense is a label developed for the administration of migrant diversity in post-­1965 migrations into the United States. See Brackette Williams, “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 401–444. On the administration of difference in Mexico, see Adriana López Monjardín and Marcela Coronado Malagón, Comunidades en movimiento (Mexico City: Ediciones Navarra: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2014). 25. I owe Stacy Fahrentold the trope of a politics of sentimentality. 26. Roger Rouse, “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism,” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 8–23; Michael Kearney, “The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 547–565; Nina Glick-­Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992); Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

Notes to Pages 10–12

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27. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Late twentieth-­century literatures—especially postcolonial (magical) realist literatures, have narrated contemporary modernities as cultural landscapes generated through centuries of encounters since the mid-­twentieth century: Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, Rushdie, Ghosh. While such texts were initially characterizations of the postcolonial periphery, more recent portrayals, both within and beyond academia, note the visibility of histories of entanglement in imperial metropolitan centers. Hall, Appadurai, and Gilroy call our attention to the Indian and Caribbean presence in London, for example. 28. Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 29. Nadje Sadig al-­Ali, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (London: Zed Books, 2007), 1–2; Mariko Tamanoi, Under the Shadow of Nationalism: Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998); Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). 30. Mariko Tamanoi, Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005); Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009). 31. Bernard S. Cohn, “History and Anthropology: The State of Play,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 2 (Apr. 1980): 198–221. 32. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xiii. 33. Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 47. 34. Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies, xx. 35. Cohn, Anthropologist among Historians, 44. 36. Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973). 37. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, Columbia University Press, 1983). 38. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); Lila Abu-­Lughod, “Writing against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard Fox, 137–153 (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 1991); Michael Gilsenan, “Very Like a Camel: The Appearance of an Anthropologist’s Middle East,” in Localizing Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing, ed. Richard Fardon (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990). 39. Shepard Krech, “The State of Ethnohistory,” Annual Review of Anthropology 20 (1991): 345–375. 40. Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies, xxiv.



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Notes to Pages 13–14

41. Cohn, Anthropologist among Historians, 17. 42. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 43. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, 32. 44. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 45. Saurab Dube, Historical Anthropology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Brian Keith Axel, From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 46. Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies. Also see Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution. Following Walter Mignolo, debates in the context of the Subaltern-­Popular Multicampus Research Group at the University of California Santa Barbara have emphasized the subaltern as processual, encouraging the recognition of “subalternization” rather than a subaltern subject. See also Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination: Studies in the Ethnographic Imagination (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counterinsurgency,” in Culture/Power/History, edited by Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, 336–371 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 47. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); “Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race and Morality in Colonial Asia,” in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, ed. Micaela di Leonardo, 51–101 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue, Imperial Formations (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007); Prasenjit Duara, Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (London: Routledge, 2003); Partha Chatterjee, Omnibus (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). See Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-­Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), and Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), for the centrality of transnational missionary networks to the colonial state in the Mashriq. On transnational anticolonial nationalism and the construction of “Arab” nationalist projects in the diaspora, see Gualtieri, Between Arab and White; and Logroño, “Development of Nationalist Identities.” 48. Adrienne Rich, “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (London: Little, Brown and Co., 1984); Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

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49. See Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. 50. Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, 32. 51. Guha, “Prose of Counterinsurgency.” 52. Cohn, Anthropologist among Historians, 24. 53. Cohn, Anthropologist among Historians, 32. 54. Julia Clancy-­Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998); Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue, Imperial Formations. 55. The chronology of institutions used or created by Mahjaris was compiled using three sources: the MAE (Archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Relations; Ministère Français des Affaires Étrangères), my own interviews with migrants in Mexico and Lebanon, and published accounts: Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México; Hamui de Halabe and Charabati, Los judíos de Alepo; Carmen Mercedes Páez Oropeza, Los libaneses en México: asimilación de un grupo étnico (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1984).

Chapter 1 1. Veracruz had been the gateway into New Spain since 1519, monopolizing Atlantic trade for three centuries, and remained the most important port facility in nineteenth-­century Mexico. On the migration to Mexico, see Páez Oropeza, Los libaneses en México; Zidane Zeraoui, “Los árabes en México: el perfil de la migración,” in Destino México: un estudio de migraciones asiáticas a México, siglos XIX y XX, ed. María Elena Otta Mishima (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1997); Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México; Theresa Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007). 2. On Lebanon’s urbanization process, see Fuad Khuri, From Village to Suburb: Order and Change in Greater Beirut (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Leila Tarazi Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-­Century Beirut (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). On Ottoman stratification, see Albert Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Michael Provence, Great Syrian Revolt. 3. The immigrant narrative provides a socially accepted template to which individual and family experience gradually adjust in the narration of the migrant experience: Mahjaris have gone from rags to riches, from peddlers to industrialists, by successfully integrating and contributing to the glory of the (Mexican) nation, excelling in industry, politics, arts, and culture. On narrative synchronization to accepted social understandings through the telling and retelling of individual experience, see Cheryl Mattingly and Linda C. Garro, Narrative and



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the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 4. On the development of the Lebanese Phoenician narrative, see Asher Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia: The Search for Identity in Lebanon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004). 5. On these transformations, see Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism; Engin Deniz Akarli, The Long Peace: Ottoman Lebanon, 1861–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). On their consequences for mobility, see Khater, Inventing Home; Gualtieri, Between Arab and White. 6. James Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Michael Provence, “Ottoman Modernity, Colonialism, and Insurgency in the Interwar Arab East,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 205–225; and Zeynep Çelik, Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-­ Ottoman Encounters, 1830–1914 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). 7. Khater, Inventing Home; Sarah Gualtieri, “Making the Mahjar Home: The Construction of Syrian Ethnicity in the United States, 1870–1930” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2000). 8. On the history of Muslim migrations in the North American Mahjar, see Sally Howell’s excellent Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); on the Latin American Mahjar, see María del Mar Logroño, Paulo Pinto, and John Tofik Karam, eds., Crescent over Another Horizon: Islam in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latino USA (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015). 9. Zeevi points out that the form of Tanzimat codifications derived from French, Swiss, and Belgian legal systems. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a new elite intended to create a modern state, forging a monolithic populace united in its allegiance to the sultan, which would provide a modern workforce and conscription army. Dror Zeevi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 74. 10. James Gelvin, The Israel-­Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 11. Ottoman modernization attempted to dissolve old social boundaries between non-­Muslims and Muslims and between free and slave. Zeevi, Producing Desire. 12. Gualtieri, “Making the Mahjar Home,” 76. 13. Gualtieri, “Making the Mahjar Home,” 47. 14. Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 15. See Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism. 16. On the sectarianization of Lebanese Shia, see Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-

Notes to Pages 26–27

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versity Press, 2006); and Max Weiss, “Cultural Politics of Shi’i Modernism,” and In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi’ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 17. See Akarli, Long Peace. 18. The règlement for the reorganization of Mount Lebanon was drawn up by representatives of Great Britain, France, Russia, Austria, and Prussia in collaboration with local agents and Ottoman authorities. Ratified through an international protocol in 1861, it decreed Mount Lebanon a governorate, a mutassarrifiyya, headed by a Christian governor appointed directly by the Sublime Porte. The règlement was amended and extended in 1864 (Akarli, Long Peace, 31–33). 19. Gualtieri, “Making the Mahjar Home,” 61. 20. Khater, Inventing Home, 50. 21. Ottoman restrictions on Muslim mobility were more stringent. On Ottoman restrictions to migration, see Ignacio Klich, “Criollos and Arabic Speakers in Argentina: An Uneasy Pas de Deux, 1888–1914,” in Hourani and Shehadi, Lebanese in the World. Muslim minorities considered heretical by Ottoman Sunni orthodoxy, such as the Shia, the Alawi, and the Druze, had a more ambivalent and problematic relationship to the empire than millets. See Zeynep Turkyilmaz, “Anxieties of Conversion: Missionaries, State and Heterodox Communities in the Late Ottoman Empire” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2009). 22. Khater, Inventing Home. 23. As Gualtieri has also argued in “Making the Mahjar Home.” 24. On conceptualizing class, I follow Karen Sacks, “Toward a Unified Theory of Class, Race, and Gender,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 3 (1989): 534–550. See her also as Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), and Sherry Ortner’s work. My analysis is also informed by ethnographies of class practice. See Julie Bettie, Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink-­Collar Identities in the Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 25. Yasif Yaziji, Risala tarikkhiyya (Beirut: n.p., 1869), 63; Khater, Inventing Home, 20. 26. Khater, Inventing Home, 13. 27. See Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia, for a history of the Phoenician national myth in Lebanon. 28. See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 29. Lebanon, and Beirut especially, are repeatedly described in Mexico as less Eastern, or less Arab, than their hinterland or their neighbors—and therefore



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more Western, better suited to broker, well placed to capitalize on the reification of a civilizational divide. The uses of this narrative in the Mexican Mahjar will be addressed in chapter 4. 30. Naff, cited in Gualtieri, “Making the Mahjar Home,” 76. 31. Conversation with Nuha Khoury in Cairo, April 2008. Also see Jirji Zaidan, Mudhakkirat (Beirut, Dar al-­K itab al-­Jadid: 1968). 32. See Michael Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, on notable rural networks established through schooling that were active during the Great Syrian Revolt. 33. Jim Gelvin has noted that “There were other reasons why absentee urban landlords acquired land: sometimes peasants couldn’t afford the tapu (registration) fees; sometimes they defaulted on loans from usurers; sometimes they couldn’t prove they had cultivation rights; sometimes notables used their position on various councils to acquire land rights.” Personal communication. 34. See Tsolin Nalbantian, “Fashioning Armenians in Lebanon: 1946–1958” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011). 35. Gualtieri, “Making the Mahjar Home,” 39. 36. Among numerous examples, on Lebanese commercial ingenuity see Ángeles Mastretta’s short stories, Mujeres de ojos grandes (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1990). 37. Gualtieri, “Making the Mahjar Home,” 39. 38. On the New York colony, see Linda Jacob’s Strangers in the West: The Syrian Colony of New York City 1880–1900 (New York: Kalimah Press, 2015). 39. Gualtieri, “Making the Mahjar Home,” 90–91. On the Lebanese in Marseille, see Liliane Rada Nasser, Ces marseillais venus d’Orient: l’immigration libanaise à Marseille aux XIX et XXeme siècles (Paris: Karthala, 2010). 40. The Asociación Camarina de México, active during the 1930s, addressed telegrams to the French high commissioner in Beirut stating their collective position on various political issues hotly debated in the Mahjar, claiming to represent at least four hundred households in 1937. 41. Rum Katulik, or Melkite Christians. 42. Interview by the author, Douma, fall 2005. 43. François-­Xavier Guerra, in La sucesión presidencial de 1910: la querella de las élites (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998), makes a similar argument regarding the political modernization of Mexico through old political practices of caudillismo and patron-­client relationships. For more details on regional markets in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century Mexico, see Angelina Alonso Palacios on Puebla’s textile industry (Los libaneses y la industria textil en Puebla: cuadernos de la Casa Chata [Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, Cultura, 1983], 89), and Luis A. Ramírez Carrillo on the henequen industry in Yucatán (Secretos de familia: libaneses y élites empresariales en Yucatán [Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994]). 44. Royce notes that the first Lebanese families in the isthmus of Tehuantepec came at the end of the nineteenth century and were drawn by a railroad being built across the isthmus between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean (cited

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in Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 56). On the growth of the road system in Mexico and its relation to the railways, see Michael K. Bess, “Routes of Compromise: Road Building and Motor Transportation in Modern Mexico, 1920–1952” (PhD diss., University of Texas at El Paso, 2013). 45. Diana Urow Schifter, La inmigración a México durante el Porfiriato: un estudio de caso; Torreón, Coahuila (Mexico City, Universidad Iberoamericana, 1994). 46. Rosalynda Pérez de Cohen, Simonette Levy de Behar, and Sophie Bejarano de Goldberg, Sefarad de ayer, hoy y mañana: presencia sefardí en México (Mexico City: Comunidad Sefardí, 2010), 93. 47. Loewenbach reported on girls working in wood and copper workshops in Damascus by the time they were eight years old. Lothaire Loewenbach, Voyage en Syrie, Palestine, Égypte (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1908). 48. Pérez de Cohen, Levy de Behar, and Bejarano de Goldberg, Sefarad de ayer, 94–96. 49. Isaac Dabbah Askenazi, Esperanza y realidad: raíces de la comunidad judía de Alepo en México (Mexico City: Libros de México, 1982), 94. 50. Enrique Castro Farías, Aporte libanés al progreso de América (Mexico City: Unión Libanesa Mundial, 1965), 129. 51. Castro Farías, Aporte libanés, 127. 52. Castro Farías, Aporte libanés, 107. 53. MAE vol. 407, 54. Another example in vol. 407, 53: “I would be thankful if Your Excellency could request of the Resident General of France in Syria the authorization for Mr. Botros Elias Hanna Nacif to come to Mexico. This Lebanese man, originally from Mgaire, lives in Beirut (at Abraham Ecare’s home), and his sister who is a widow lives in Piedras Negras (state of Vera-­Cruz). She needs him to assist her in her business.” 54. Castro Farías, Aporte libanés, 108. 55. See Gualtieri, “Making the Mahjar Home,” for example, for the US case. 56. Klich, “Criollos and Arabic Speakers in Argentina,” in Hourani and Shehadi, Lebanese in the World. 57. Numerous interviews by the author. 58. As Sarah Gualtieri’s work on step migration has underscored. 59. She cites Julián Nasr and Salim Abud, Directorio libanés: censo general de las colonias libanesa palestina siria residentes en la República Mexicana (Mexico City: 1948) as her source. See Páez Oropeza, Los libaneses en México, 131. For numbers of descendants in 1976, she cites various community publications as her sources: Castro Farías, Aporte libanés; al-­Jawater; El Emir. See Páez Oropeza, Los libaneses en México, 150. 60. Created in 1932, the registry is still in effect. However, registration cards have been unavailable to the public or to researchers since 1951 under the law protecting personal data. 61. “Foreigners required to register with the RNE (Registro Nacional de Extranjeros) in accordance with Article 63 of the General Population Law, obtained



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from the digitized FM1 database which contains a total of 521,949 registrations of foreigners of all nationalities”; provided by INM staff supervised by Lic. Jorge Torres Moreno, INM Historical Archive Director, July 2006. I requested demographic information on migrant entries for citizens of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan, who total 6,614. I have also included 740 migrants from Turkey and 402 from Iran, given interview statements that suggest the Iranian population is mostly Syrian and Lebanese Jews who purchased Iranian passports from the Shah’s regime. Since I could not access the files directly due to confidentiality restrictions, I thank Lic. Torres Moreno and his staff for their support. 62. Mulaththam, al-­Natiqun. 63. Compiled from various tables in Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah. Sofia Martos, working on the migration to Córdoba, Argentina, found that about 10 percent of migrants stated that they were ‘merchants by trade’; more than enough to provide guidance to those less familiar with commerce. 64. According to municipal archives analyzed by Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah. 65. Botros Maalouf in Maalouf, Orígenes, 125. 66. Amin Maalouf, Orígenes (Madrid: Alianza, 2004), 93. 67. James Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). On constitutionalist projects, see Elizabeth Thompson, Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 68. Maalouf, Orígenes, 126. 69. Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 70. Alicia Gojman de Backal, Don Jacobo Granat (Mexico City: n.p., 2014), 66–67. 71. Kathy Saade, Katrina in Five Worlds (Long Beach: Five World Press, 2010). In the context of a fictional account, see also Carlos Martínez Assad, La casa de las once puertas (Mexico City: Seix Barral, 2015). 72. Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens; Gregory Orfalea, The Arab Americans: A History (Northampton: Olive Branch Press, 2006). 73. On humanitarian efforts see Simon M. W. Jackson, “Mandatory Development: The Political Economy of the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon, 1915–1939” (PhD diss., New York University, 2009). On Palestine and the wartime bonanza see Gelvin, Israel-­Palestine Conflict. According to Gelvin, Palestinian regions that hosted military bases benefited economically from their presence; the period is remembered as “the Prosperity.” See also Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 74. Stacy Fahrentold, “Between Treason and Cowardice: Syrian American

Notes to Pages 40–44

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Military Recruiting in WW1,” presented at the 2014 Bodies in Motion Conference, North Carolina State University, Raleigh. 75. Fahrentold, personal communication. 76. Gojman de Backal, Don Jacobo Granat, 67. 77. Castro Farías, Aporte libanés, 72. 78. Castro Farías, Aporte libanés, 68. 79. Castro Farías, Aporte libanés, 110. 80. Serie E Levant at the Archive du Ministère Extérieur, La Courneuve, Paris, France. 81. Castro Farías, Aporte libanés, 71, 74. 82. Philippe Fargues, Réserves de main-­d’œuvre et rente pétrolière: étude démographique des migrations de travail vers les pays arabes du golfe (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1980). 83. Boutros Labaki, “Lebanese Emigration during the War (1975–1989),” in Conference on Lebanese Emigration (Oxford, UK: 1989). 84. Charles Issawi, An Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Mohamed Kamel Doraï, Les réfugiés palestiniens du Liban: une géographie de l’exil (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2006); Are Knudsen and Sari Hanafi, eds., Palestinian Refugees: Identity, Space and Place in the Levant (London: Routledge, 2011); Philippe Fargues, “Arab Migration to Europe: Trends and Policies,” International Migration Review 38, no. 4 (2004): 1348–1371; Fargues, Réserves de main-­d’œuvre. On Australia, see Ghassan Hage, Arab-­Australians Today: Citizenship and Belonging (Carlton South, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2002); and White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (New York: Routledge, 2000). 85. Women’s rights groups and other activists have contested this practice and campaigned to give women the right to pass on citizenship to their offspring since the early 2000s. 86. This has been a politically salient strategy. See Boutros Labaki, The Role of Transnational Communities in Fostering Development in Countries of Origin: The Case of Lebanon (Beirut: United Nations, 2006). 87. There is an honorary Mexican consulate in Damascus, and various individuals have historically taken on the role of helping Syrian migrants sort out official procedures, emergencies, etc. in Mexico. 88. For more on Jewish migration and institutions, see Camila Pastor, “Inscribing Difference: Maronites, Jews and Arabs in Mexican Public Culture and French Imperial Practice,” Latin American & Caribbean Ethnic Studies 6, no. 2 (2011): 169–187. 89. Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México. 90. “El bled” is the hispanization of the Arabic al-­balad, “the country,” used to denote the Mashreq. Paisano is the term migrants and their children use to talk about themselves and their fellow migrants; it is a Spanish word that means “of



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the country” and is also used by other migrant populations—for example, rural Mexican migrants to the United States in the twentieth century. Interviews by the author with Carlos Martínez Assad, José Luis López Habib, Said Nacif, and Mrs. Khalife. Also, various interviews in Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México. 91. Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 54–55. 92. Among other testimonies about Domingo Kuri, see Familia Miguel Afif, Pepe y Nena (Mexico City: Ediciones Gernika, 2013). 93. See Stacy Fahrentold, “Sound Minds in Sound Bodies: Transnational Philanthropy and Patriotic Masculinity in Al Nadi al-­Homsi and Syrian Brazil, 1920– 32,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46 (2014): 259–283. 94. Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México. Sahriyes are late afternoon or evening social gatherings; like tardeadas in Spanish. In 2006 they published a new directory of families from the town of Beit Mellet, and they continue to coordinate new migration. 95. On the Asociación Camarina, see MAE, vol. 618, 357. 96. MAE, vol. 411, 146–147. 97. MAE, vol. 409, 240. 98. Periodicals published in Mexico are part of a broader Mahjar press tied to political projects. See Camila Pastor, “Palestina como espectáculo en la prensa del Mahjar mexicano,” in Rein, Cano, and Molina Rueda, Más allá del Medio Oriente, 55–76. Unless otherwise specified, periodical names, dates of publication, and founders are taken from Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México. 99. Mahjar periodicals were more numerous in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, where large numbers of migrants concentrated. Argentina had a very active cluster of periodicals and presses that translated classic texts like the Quran and Kalila wa Dimna. A circle of Mahjaris writing in Arabic emerged in South America and called itself al-­A ndalus; see Rosa Martínez Lillo, “Al-­Andalus en Brasil,” in Contribuciones árabes a las identidades latinoamericanas, ed. Karim Hauser and Daniel Gil (Madrid: Casa Árabe, 2008). In fact, in later decades, the Latin American Mahjar at large was referred to as al-­Andalus. See Mulaththam, al-­Natiqun. 100. On British Protestant missionary schooling, see Ellen Fleischmann, “The Impact of American Protestant Missions in Lebanon on the Construction of Female Identity, c. 1860–1950,” Islam and Christian-­Muslim Relations 13, No. 4 (2002): 411–426. See Sbaiti, “Lessons in History,” for an overview of education in Beirut; also Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism and Artillery of Heaven on missions at large. Recent scholarship has also noted the establishment and expansion of Ottoman educational institutions. 101. Alonso Palacios, Los libaneses, 101; extraordinarily high rates for the early twentieth century. 102. French literates had already been alphabetized in Latin script, and the linguistic distance between Spanish and French as Romance languages is much less than that between Spanish and Arabic.

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103. “Le Docteur Youssef Chmouti, établi a Mexique depuis 16 ans,” MAE, vol. 411, 50. 104. “M. Youssef Chmouti, alias Joseph A. Shemonti a été expulse du Mexique vers mai 1927, à la demande de ces propres compatriotes syro-­libanais qu’il provoquait sans cesse dans son journal, soit qu’il attaquait les familles de ses adversaires politiques ou qu’il se livrât a des manouvres de chantage. Par ailleurs, comme l’attitude hostile de Chmouti, déjà signalée par cette légation le 4 octobre 1920 s’est continue à notre égard jusqu’à son expulsion il ne me semble pas que la rentrée du requérant au Mexique soit une chose désirable,” MAE, vol. 411, 60. 105. MAE, vol. 411, 66. 106. “Jadis infectée de germanophile et qui restait ralliée plus ou moins sincèrement a nous après la guerre,” MAE, vol. 617, 175. 107. French cultural hegemony in Mexico during the Porfirian period (1876– 1911) needs to be stressed when describing cultural aspects of Mahjari access to resources and status. French culture was admired and imitated as the pinnacle of cultural and civilizational refinement. Local elites were French speaking and generally Francophile. Ladies imported fashions from Paris through fashion magazines and acquired clothes during long months spent in Europe for recreational and medical purposes. Statesmen imported administrative models and a civilizing mission. Elites appropriated French racial ideologies and imperial stance. Narratives on Francophile practices from author’s interviews with T. Castelló Yturbide and other descendants of Porfirian elites.

Chapter 2 1. On the mandate, see Nadine Méouchy, ed., France, Syrie et Liban, 1918–1946: les ambiguïtés et les dynamiques de la relation mandataire, Actes des journées d’études organisées par le CERMOC et l’IFEAD, Beirut, 27–29 mai 1999 (Damas, 2002); Nadine Méouchy and Peter Sluglett, The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspectives (Boston: Brill, 2004); Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan, The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates (London: Routledge, 2015). 2. Also the case for the British. See Lauren Banko, “The ‘Invention’ of Palestinian Citizenship: Discourses and Practices, 1918–1937” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, 2014); Nadim Bawalsa, “Citizens from Afar: Palestinian Migrants and the New World Order, 1920–1930.” In Schayegh and Arsan, Routledge Handbook. On women’s labor mobility, see Camila Pastor, “Suspect Service: Prostitution and the Public in the Mandate Mediterranean,” in Schayegh and Arsan, Routledge Handbook; and Francesca Biancani, “‘Let Down the Curtains around Us’: Sex Work in Colonial Cairo, 1882–1952” (PhD diss., London School of Economics, 2012). 3. Two PhD dissertations on the Argentinian Mahjar: Sofia Martos, “The Balancing Act: Ethnicity, Commerce, and Politics among Syrian and Lebanese Im-



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migrants in Argentina, 1890–1955” (University of California, Los Angeles, 2007); and María del Mar Logroño, “Development of Nationalist Identities.” Camila Pastor on Mexico: “The Mashreq in Mexico: Patronage, Property, and Class in the Postcolonial Global” (University of California, Los Angeles, 2009); Stacy Fahrentold on the American Mahjar, “The Global Levant”; Devi Mays on Sephardi Jews moving through Mexico, “Transplanting Cosmopolitans.” Andrew Arsan, in Interlopers of Empire, does the same for the French West African Mahjar. 4. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 132, 5. 5. Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants; Akarli, Long Peace; Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism. 6. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 132, 19–20. 7. Gildas Brégain, Syriens et libanais d’Amerique du Sud (1918–1945) (Paris: Harmattan, 2004), 48–49. 8. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 132, 4. 9. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 408, 186-­b. 10. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 132, 55. 11. On collaborating elites in the Mashriq, see the work of Elizabeth Thompson. 12. MAE Nantes. Mexico. Consulat et Legation. Serie B, Protection des syriens, 81. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Jacques Paire, La comunidad francesa en México (Mexico City: Racines Françaises au Mexique, 2005), and Jean Meyer, “Les français du Mexique au XIXème siècle,” Cahiers des Ameriques Latines no. 9–10 (1974): 44–71. 17. Paire, La comunidad francesa, 14; and Patricia Jacobs Barquet, Diccionario enciclopédico de mexicanos de origen libanés y de otros pueblos del Levante (Mexico City: Ediciones del Ermitaño, FONCA-­Grupo Financiero Inbursa-­Sanborns, 2000), 24. 18. MAE Nantes. Mexico. Consulat et Legation. Serie B, Protection des syriens, 81. 19. MAE Nantes. Mexico B Personnel, Dossiers individuels (1915–1926), 73. 20. MAE Nantes. Mexico. Consulat et Legation. Serie B, Protection des syriens, 81. 21. Ibid. 22. MAE Nantes. Mexico B Personnel, Dossiers individuels (1915–1926), 73. 23. MAE Nantes. Mexico. Consulat et Legation. Serie B, Protection des syriens, 81. 24. Ibid. 25. MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais, Dossier general (1914–1928), 257. 26. “Que nunca he tenido ni tendré,” MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais, Dossier general (1914–1928), 257.

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27. MAE Nantes. Mexico. Consulat et Legation. Serie B, Protection des syriens, 81. 28. Ibid. 29. MAE Nantes. Mexico, Dossiers de travail (1910–1928), 218. 30. MAE Nantes. Mexico. Consulat et Legation. Serie B, Protection des syriens, 81. 31. Ibid. 32. Castro Farías, Aporte libanés, 124, 136, 187. 33. MAE Nantes. Mexico. Consulat et Legation. Serie B, Protection des syriens, 81. 34. MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais, Dossier general (1914–1928), 257. 35. MAE Nantes. Mexico B Personnel. Dossiers individuels (1915–1926), 73. 36. MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais, Dossier general (1914–1928), 257. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. MAE Nantes. Mexico B Personnel, Dossiers individuels (1915–1926), 73. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. On the nation-­building sense of the census, see Fahrentold’s excellent dissertation (“Global Levant”). 46. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 407, 60. 47. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 407, 61. 48. Ibid. 49. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 407, 63. 50. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 407, 67. 51. See Alice O’Connor’s brilliant history of poverty in the United States for discussions on nineteenth- and twentieth-­century Euro-­American discourses of poverty, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-­ Century US History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Susan Thorne, “The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable: Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); David Anderson and Vigdis Broch-­Due, The Poor Are Not Us: Poverty and Pastoralism in Eastern Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 1999). 52. MAE, vol. 132, 6. 53. On Mexico’s anti-­Semitism and ambivalent reception of European Jewish migrants, see Alicia Gojman de Backal, Camisas, escudos y desfiles militares: los dorados y el antisemitismo en México, 1934–1940 (Mexico City: Escuela Nacional de Es-



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tudios Profesionales Acatlán, UNAM; Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000); and Daniela Gleizer, Unwelcome Exiles: Mexico and the Jewish Refugees from Nazism, 1933–1945 (Boston: Brill, 2014). 54. As James Gelvin, in Israel-­Palestine Conflict, has argued regarding the construction of “Jewish” and “Palestinian” identities. 55. Brégain, Syriens et libanais, 50. 56. Brégain, Syriens et libanais, 54. 57. MAE Nantes. Mexico. Consulat et Legation. Serie B, Protection des syriens, 81. 58. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 132, 5. 59. MAE Nantes, 4. 60. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 407, 41. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 407, 54; vol. 407, 53. 61. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 407, 50, 79. 62. Emphasis in the original. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 407, 79. 63. Brégain, Syriens et libanais, 51. 64. Brégain, Syriens et libanais, 55. 65. MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais, Dossier general (1914–1928), 257. 66. MAE Nantes, 4. 67. Brégain, Syriens et libanais, 52–53. 68. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 408, 36. Dragomans is a term used for translators historically employed by European consulates in the Mashriq, where they sometimes additionally functioned as trade representatives or agents, according to James Gelvin (personal communication). The “protégés régulièrement immatriculés”—something like “the migrants registered in good standing with the French authorities”—designated qualified personalities as auxiliary agents in French consulates who were in charge of all affairs regarding their compatriots. These agents’ salaries were paid by a “slight contribution” furnished by all the protégés (MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 132, 6). 69. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 409, 114. 70. MAE Nantes, 4. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais, Dossier general (1914–1928), 257. 80. On Pechkoff’s migration report, see Khater, Inventing Home. On his surveillance mission, see Bailony, “Uncle Sam.” 81. Bailony, “Uncle Sam.”

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82. MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais, Dossier general (1914–1928), 257. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid.

Chapter 3 1. Cited in Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah. 2. Linda Dabbah de Lifschitz, “La inmigración de los judíos de Alepo,” in Hamui de Halabe and Charabati, Los judíos de Alepo, 123. 3. MAE, vol. 410, 269–270. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. On race in Mexico, see Ilona Katzew and S. Deans-­Smith, Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican America (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-­Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Anne Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Brígida von Mentz, Trabajo, sujeción y libertad en el centro de la Nueva España: esclavos, aprendices, campesinos y operarios manufactureros, siglos XVI a XVIII (Mexico City: M. A. Porrúa Grupo Editorial, 1999); R. McCaa, “Calidad, Clase and Marriage in Colonial Mexico: The Case of Parral, 1788–1790,” Hispanic American Historical Review 64, no. 3 (1984): 477–501; Magnus Morner, “Race and Class in Latin America,” presented at the Conference on Race and Class in Latin America (New York, 1970). 7. Claudio Lomnitz, Vicios públicos, virtudes privadas—la corrupción en México (Mexico City: M. A. Porrúa, 2000). 8. French colonization in Algeria began in 1830, and the British government took over the monopoly of the East India Company in 1833 (Colette Guillaumin, “Race and Nature: The System of Marks,” Feminist Issues 2, no. 1 (1982): 45), and “The Idea of Race and Its Elevation to Autonomous, Scientific, and Legal Status,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980); Stuart Hall “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance”; and Gerard Pierre-­ Charles, “Racialism and Sociological Theories,” in the same UNESCO volume. Also see Irene Silverblatt, “New Christians and New World Fears in Seventeenth-­ Century Peru,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 3 (2000): 524– 546; Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 9. As Edward Said has argued in definitions of Orientalism. See Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). Also see critiques highlighting links between colonization and the expansion of anthropological knowledge. Among others, Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter.



260

Notes to Pages 83–86

10. Interview by the author with Teresa Castelló Yturbide—“Fíjate que decían de Don Porfirio que Carmelita lo blanqueó.” Mexico City, 2006. 11. Interview with Teresa Castelló Yturbide: “Mis papás se hicieron novios en Paris. No ves que mi papá estaba estudiando en Liverpool y cuando podía se iba a Paris pues era primo hermano de Carmelita. Como Carmelita y don Porfi estaban exiliados en Paris las buenas familias de mexicanos que viajaban iban a visitarlos. Mi mamá hizo un viaje con sus tíos y cuando llegaron a visitarlos ahí estaba de casualidad mi papá; se conocieron y se hicieron novios. Tengo la foto, están los dos muy guapos, en el Bois de Boulogne.” 12. See Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); and O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, on the rise of racial sciences in the United States. On Mexican elite attitudes to the United States, various interviews by the author. 13. Hale, “Political and Social Ideas,” 381. 14. If immigrant property owners wished to maintain their foreign nationalities instead, they needed to declare so before the relevant authorities (Alfaro-­ Velcamp, So Far from Allah). 15. François-­Xavier Guerra, México: del antiguo régimen a la Revolución (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988); La sucesión presidencial de 1910: la querella de las élites (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998). 16. Though they often married into local elites, they cultivated the transmission of their own languages and traditions, since their privilege derived from being able to perform indexes of their European lineage, or race. 17. Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 40. 18. Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 68. 19. MAE, vol. 408, 11. 20. On the revolution’s changes to the social contract, see Lomnitz, “Modes of Citizenship,” in Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities; and Viviane Brachet de Márquez, The Dynamics of Domination: State, Class, and Social Reform in Mexico, 1910–1990 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). 21. Eric R. Wolf, “Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society: Mexico,” American Anthropologist 58 (1956): 1065–1978; Hugo G. Nutini and Claudio Lomnitz, “The Wages of Conquest: The Mexican Aristocracy in the Context of Western Aristocracies,” Ethnos 62, no. 3–4 (1995): 151; Hugo G. Nutini, “Class and Ethnicity in Mexico: Somatic and Racial Consideration,” Ethnology 36, no. 3 (1997): 227–238. 22. See Brackette Williams’s excellent work on the racial integration of New World nations through the case study of Guyana, A Class Act. 23. Nutini “The Wages of Conquest” and “Class and Ethnicity in Mexico.” See also Jonathan I. Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610–1670 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); the following works by Rodolfo Stavenhagen: Clases, colonialismo y aculturación (Guatemala: José de Pineda Ibarra, Ministerio de Educación, 1968); Social Classes in Agrarian Societies (Garden City: An-

Notes to Pages 86–90

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chor Press, 1975); Las clases sociales en las sociedades agrarias (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1976); Problemas étnicos y campesinos: ensayos (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1980); and The Ethnic Question: Conflicts, Development, and Human Rights (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1990). Also see Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Morner, “Race and Class”; Sol Tax and Wenner-­Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Heritage of Conquest: The Ethnology of Middle America (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952). On Belize, see the excellent work of Laurie Kroshus Medina, “Development Policies and Identity Politics: Class and Collectivity in Belize,” American Ethnologist 24, No. 1 (1997): 48–169. 24. MAE, vol. 408, 11–12. 25. On Mashriqi migration to Yucatán, see Ramírez Carrillo, Secretos de familia. 26. Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 94. 27. Syrian Jews sometimes established more enduring institutional links and patron-­client relationships with Ashkenazim than with other Mashriqis. 28. Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México, 62. 29. El Redondel was a newspaper celebrating bullfighting and documenting the exploits of each bullfighting season in Mexico City. Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México, 225. 30. Interview with Norma Barquet, Mexico City, 2006. 31. On the buoyancy of Porfirian elites, see Larissa Adler de Lomnitz and Marisol Pérez Lizaur, A Mexican Elite Family, 1820–1980: Kinship, Class, and Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Alfonso de Maria y Campos, José Yves Limantour: el caudillo mexicano de las finanzas, 1851–1985 (Mexico City: CONDUMEX, 1998). 32. With Juárez’s Laws of Reform expropriating all Church property in 1842, Church buildings were taken over by the state to house libraries, cultural centers, and government archives. Interview with Teresa Sayegh, 2006. 33. Klich, “Criollos and Arabic Speakers in Argentina,” in Hourani and Shehadi, Lebanese in the World; David Euraque, “The Arab-­Jewish Presence in San Pedro Sula, the Industrial Capital of Honduras: Formative Years, 1880s–­1930s,” in Klich and Lesser, Arab and Jewish Immigrants, 94–124; Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah; Pilar Vargas and Luz Marina Suaza Vargas, Los árabes en Colombia: del rechazo a la integración (Bogotá: Planeta, 2007). 34. On the dynamics of immigration to the United States, see Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks; and O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge. 35. Efforts to restrict migration to the United States paralleled the growth and development of eugenics and racial sciences (Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 29). 36. ‘Árabe’ ukraniano de nacionalidad muerto por muchacha de la clase humilde porque intento ultrajarla. Cited in Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 101. 37. On Guatemala, see MAE, vol. 410, 269–270; El Salvador, see MAE, vol. 411, 220. On Colombia see also Vargas and Suaza Vargas, Los árabes en Colombia.



262

Notes to Pages 90–93

38. On Ottoman bans, see Klich, “Criollos and Arabic Speakers in Argentina,” in Hourani and Shehadi, Lebanese in the World. 39. Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 98. 40. Lesser has argued the same for South American cases in his Welcoming the Undesirables, Negotiating National Identity, and Searching for Home Abroad; Lesser and Rein, Rethinking Jewish-­L atin Americans. 41. Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 100. 42. The MAE holds numerous examples of immigration legislation from countries throughout the Americas, since restrictions were brought to the attention of mandate authorities—often accompanied by requests for the negotiation of protection or exceptions. 43. MAE, vol. 408, 41. 44. Ibid. 45. M. Périer in 1924 (MAE, vol. 408, 11–12). 46. See Stuart Hall et al., Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (London: Verso, 2000); Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990); “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge Kegan and Paul, 1981); “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO Press, 1980), on the role of state-­sponsored moral panics in the reconfiguration of racial “others” vis-­á-­v is purified definitions of “the nation” in circumstances of economic transition or duress. Their case is Thatcher’s Britain. 47. MAE, vol. 409, 38. 48. MAE, vol. 132, 54-­a. 49. Italics mine. The text reads as follows: “Given that the immigration of persons of Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Arabic and Turkish origin has reached a limit that makes itself felt in the national economy in an unfavorable manner on account of their conglomeration in urban centers; Given that, while the number of foreigners of the aforementioned nationalities, shown by the incomplete census that by order of this Ministry is being taken in the republic would not be sufficient to establish restrictive measures against said immigrants, the activities of the same do justify a limitation, even if it be temporary; Given that these activities do not constitute a useful economic factor in the development of public wealth, nor can they be considered as a productive contingent, as the immigrants under consideration make a living through petty trade and moneylending; the former exercised in the form of street peddling with practically no capital or precarious credit; a system that far from promoting industrial progress has occasioned a notable instability in bulk trade and has deprived our own countrymen of [participating in] petty trade; Given that a selection based on the professions of those immigrants would not give satisfactory results as a majority of them have noted in their passports and identification cards that they are farm laborers and none of them on ar-

Notes to Pages 94–102

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riving in the republic engage in agricultural work, the Secretariat of the Interior, making use of the faculty granted to it by Article 65 of the migration Law, orders.” Cited in Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 103. 50. MAE, vol. 410, 180. 51. Ibid. 52. MAE, vol. 410, 183. Unfortunately the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique received the news too late, and the exception had to be renegotiated for this group of migrants to board the next departing steamship, the Espagne (MAE, vol. 410, 186). 53. MAE, vol. 410, 180. 54. Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México, 65–66. 55. MAE vol. 132, 55. 56. Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México, 66. 57. MAE, vol. 616, 24. 58. All other MAE documents concerning Mexico are in French, Spanish, or Arabic. 59. MAE, vol. 616, 182. 60. MAE, vol. 616, 214. 61. Pablo Yankelevich, “Extranjeros indeseables en México (1911–1940): una aproximación cuantitativa a la aplicación del artículo 33 constitucional,” Historia mexicana no. 211 (2004): 693–744. 62. Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 119. 63. Ibid. 64. Cited in Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México. 65. Yankelevich and Jacobs, personal communication. 66. Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 106. 67. Newspaper El Hombre Libre, Jan. 12, 1934, cited in Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 120. 68. Bloque Nacional de Defensa Pro Patria, in Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 118. 69. Comité Pro-­Raza, in Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 118. 70. Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 116. 71. Alfaro-­Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 116. 72. In the United States, “The relationship between white and black women around domestic labor, as so many feminists of color have shown, carries deeply racist expectations for white women. Grandma embraced the racial superiority of her position as an employer and a white woman. In this context, to be white is to direct but not perform the dirty work of cleaning, which marks its doers as racially inferior women.” Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 18. 73. Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 19.



264

Notes to Pages 103–107

Chapter 4 1. Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Tribunal Superior de Justicia del Distrito Federal (TSJDF), “Juicio civil de Guadalupe Bourge de Letayf en contra de Antonio Letayf y el Banco Germánico de América del Sur” (Mexico City, November 2, 1923), Box 1807, File 326325, f. 2. 2. AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio de liquidación judicial” (Mexico City, February 26, 1924), Box 1870, File 338155, f. 11. 3. Jean Meyer, La fábula del crimen ritual: el antisemitismo europeo 1880–1914 (Mexico City: Tusquets, 2012). 4. Interview with Patricia Jacobs, Mexico City, February 2006. 5. MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais, Dossier general (1914–1928), 257. 6. AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio civil de Guadalupe Bourge de Letayf en contra de Antonio Letayf y el Banco Germánico de América del Sur” (Mexico City, November 2, 1923), Box 1807, File 326325, f. 5. 7. AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio de liquidación judicial, 26 de febrero de 1924, f. 338155, caja 1870. Foja 7 and AGN-­TSJDF, Juicio civil de Guadalupe Bourge de Letayf en contra de Antonio Letayf y el Banco Germánico de América del Sur” (Mexico City, November 2, 1923), Box 1807, File 326325, f. 27. 8. MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais, Dossier general (1914–1928), 257. 9. MAE Nantes. Mexico B Personnel, Dossiers individuels (1915–1926), 73, Nantes 4. 10. James Grant, The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014). 11. Jaime R. Aguila, “Mexican/US Immigration Policy Prior to the Great Depression,” Diplomatic History 31, no. 2 (March 2007): 207–225. 12. Dabbah Askenazi, Esperanza y realidad, 136. 13. AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio de liquidación judicial” (D.F. February 26, 1924), Box 1870, File 338155, f. 7. 14. AGN. TSJDF, “Sumario hipotecario de Minme Carlos y Antonio Letayf” (D.F., August 25, 1922), Box 1745, File 313310. 15. AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio hipotecario en contra de Kuri Primos Sucesores y Antonio Letayf” (D.F., November 23, 1922), Box 1756, File 315895, f. 28. 16. AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio hipotecario en contra de Antonio Letayf” (D.F., December 10, 1922), Box 1689, File 302813. 17. AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio mercantil en contra de Kuri Primos y Sucesores y Antonio Letayf” (D.F., December 27, 1922), Box 1709, File 306240. 18. AGN. TSJDF, “Copia testimoniada de la asignatura de mutuo con intereses e hipoteca otorgada por los señores Antonio Letayf y Alberto Ledoyen” (D.F., June 1, 1918), Box 1458, File 258151, f. 135. 19. Ibid., f. 62. 20. Ibid., f. 103.

Notes to Pages 107–111

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21. AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio mercantil en contra de Kuri Primos y Sucesores y Antonio Letayf” (D.F., December 27, 1922), Box 1709, File 306240. 22. AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio hipotecario en contra de Kuri Primos Sucesores y Antonio Letayf” (D.F., 23 de noviembre de 1922), Box 1756, File 315895, f. 29. 23. AGN. TSJDF. Sociedad legal conyugal, “Demanda en contra del Banco Germánico de la América del Sur y Antonio Letayf por parte de Guadalupe Bourge de Letayf” (Mexico City, November 26, 1922), Box 1724, File 309198, f. 65. 24. AGN. TSJDF, “Demanda en contra del Banco Germánico de la América del Sur y Antonio Letayf por parte de Guadalupe Bourge de Letayf” (Mexico City, November 26, 1922), Box 1724, File 309198, f. 65 and: AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio civil de Guadalupe Bourge de Letayf en contra de Antonio Letayf y el Banco Germánico de América del Sur” (Mexico City, 2 de noviembre de 1923), Box 1807, File 326325, ff. 1–4. 25. Ibid., f. 9. 26. AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio civil de Guadalupe Bourge de Letayf en contra de Antonio Letayf y el Banco Germánico de América del Sur” (Mexico City, November 2, 1923), Box 1807, File 326325, f. 119. 27. “Además, que fe merecen las preguntas articuladas por la esposa a su consorte sobre este punto, cuando ambos hacen vida marital y sus intereses e intenciones caminan paralelas al mismo fin? . . . Ninguna, y así lo reconoce el artículo 2020 del Código Civil.” Ibid., f. 115. 28. Ibid., ff. 14–15. 29. Ibid., f. 9. 30. AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio de liquidación judicial” (D.F., February 26, 1924), Box 1870, File 338155, f. 10. 31. AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio civil de Guadalupe Bourge de Letayf en contra de Antonio Letayf y el Banco Germánico de América del Sur” (D.F., November 2, 1923), Box 1807, f. 326325. 32. AGN. TSJDF, “Juicio de fraude en contra de Antonio Letayf” (D.F., December 20, 1923), Box 1819, File 328842, f. 9. 33. Ibid., f. 31. 34. Ibid., f. 84. 35. AGN. Presidentes Obregón-­Calles Antonio Letayf (421-­L-­34). 36. DGIPS, “Asunto: Antonio Letayf, solicita a Manuel Aguirre Berlanga, Secretario de Gobernación, permiso para llevar a cabo una rifa en beneficio de los huérfanos y desheredados sirio-­libaneses de la última guerra” (Mexico City, 1920), FO393, SC196, A.2/ooo.6, Box 3, File 7. 37. Ibid., f. 135. 38. MAE Nantes. Mexico B Personnel, Dossiers individuels (1915–1926), 73. 39. DGIPS. Oficina de Información Política y Social. Personal. Nombramientos y antecedentes, “Se denuncia que el Jefe del Departamento Jurídico de Relaciones tiene un bufete en sociedad con el licenciado Aguilar, empleado del mismo



266

Notes to Pages 111–114

Departamento y un señor Letayf para el arreglo de cartas de naturalización. Informes sobre Inmigración de libaneses” (D.F., July 1938–­July 1938), Box 107, File 43, 2 fs. 40. Yankelevich, “Extranjeros indeseables,” 737–738. 41. MAE Nantes. Mexico B Personnel, Dossiers individuels (1915–1926), 73. 42. Pablo Yankelevich, “Extranjeros indeseables.” 43. Chinese presented 64.4 percent of revocation cases, however. No single archive holds all expulsion cases. 44. AGN. Dirección General de Investigación Política y Social (DGIPS). Oficina de Información Política y Social. Extranjeros. Expulsados, “Anastasia Kazaal, siria-­libanesas radicado en Ciudad Juárez. Informe de actividades para expulsión” (Chihuahua and D.F., June 1940–­June 1941), Box 328, File 22, 31 fs. 45. Murders were reported to French authorities in 1929 and 1933. MAE Nantes. Mexico B Personnel, Dossiers individuels (1915–1926), 73. Gualtieri has documented lynching of Mashriqis in the American South. 46. Ibid., 734. 47. Torreón Municipal Archive. 48. On the history of organized labor and the left in Mexico, see Carlos Illades, Las otras ideas: el primer socialismo en México, 1850–1935 (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2008). 49. MAE Nantes. Mexico B Personnel, Dossiers individuels (1915–1926), 73. 50. Ibid. 51. Michael Provence, Great Syrian Revolt. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. DGIPS, “Oficio acompañado de 100 ejemplares de la lista de los extranjeros expulsados del país en calidad de perniciosos” (1922), C. 203.41, Box 13, File 4. DGIPS, Departamento Confidencial, Extranjeros, Expulsados, “Ganem Adbo, árabe, considerado pernicioso” (Zacatecas and D.F., November 1933–­April 1934), Box 325, File 34, 19 fs. DGIPS, Departamento Confidencial. Extranjeros. Expulsados, “Ali Conrady o Alejandro González y Nicolás Elías Nasrallan, sirio libaneses, radicados en Tampico. Se solicita su expulsión por perniciosos” (Tamaulipas, April 1949–­May 1949) Box 331, File 13, s fs. 56. DGIPS, Departamento Confidencial, Extranjeros. Expulsados, “Emilio y Lucio Hamue, sirio-­libanés. Investigan sus actividades para expulsarlo por fraude al fisco” (D.F., May 1933–­August 1933), Box 325, File 9, 6 fs. DGIPS, Oficina de Información Política y Social. Extranjeros. Expulsados, “Jorge Atic Salman, palestino. Informe de actividades en Saltillo, acusado de estafador” (Coahuila, August 1938–­August 1938), Box 323, File 60, 3 fs. DGIPS, Oficina de Información Política y Social. Extranjeros. Expulsados,

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“Jorge Curioca Heddo, árabe, Denuncia de actividades ilícitas” (Zacatecas and D.F., February 1940–­March 1941), Caja 331, exp. 27, s fs. 57. DGIPS. Oficina de Información Política y Social. Extranjeros Expulsados, “La agrupación Nacional Pro Raza en Texmelucan, solicita la clausura del Círculo de Comercio Libanés y la expulsión de Miguel Nácer” (Puebla and Mexico City, April 1935–­May 1935), Box 326, File 37, s. fs. DGIPS. Oficina de Información Política y Social. Extranjeros. Expulsados, “Raúl Misrachi, árabe. Solicitan expulsión” (D.F., November 1940–­February 1941) Box 328, File 27, s fs. DGIPS. Oficina de Información Política y Social. Extranjeros. Expulsados, “José Cholac, árabe. Ejidatarios en Villa Corzo solicitan expulsión” (Chiapas y D.F., June 1941–­August 1941), Box 331, File 29, s fs. DGIPS. Departamento de Investigación Política y Social. Extranjeros, “Expulsados. Jacobo Cojab, árabe o judío. Solicitan expulsión” (D.F., 1942 abril-­1942 abril), Box 329, File 6, 2 fs. DGIPS. Departamento de Investigación Política y Social. Extranjeros. Expulsados, “Salvador y Marcelino Isaac, árabes. La Unión Municipal Autónoma de Veteranos de la Revolución en Múzquiz solicita expulsión” (Coahuila y D.F., February 1942–­February 1942), Box 327, File 36, 2 fs. DGIPS. Dirección General de Investigación Política y Social. Extranjeros. Expulsados, “Ali Conrady o Alejandro González y Nicolás Elías Nasrallan, sirio libaneses, radicados en Tampico. Se solicita su expulsión por perniciosos” (Tamaulipas, April 1949–­May 1949), Box 331, File 13, s fs. 58. DGIPS. Oficina de Información Política y Social. Extranjeros. Expulsados, “Dieciséis judíos y un árabe. Solicitan investigación de actividades” (D.F., November 1939 noviembre–­1941 agosto), Box 328, File 17, 26 fs. DGIPS. Departamento de Investigación Política y Social. Extranjeros. Expulsados, “Jacobo Cojab, árabe o judío. Solicitan expulsión” (D.F. April 1942–­April 1942), Box 329, File 6, 2 fs. 59. Secretaría de Gobernación. Dirección General de Gobierno, “Bernardino Mena Brito miembro del Centro de Comerciantes Mexicanos de la Merced denuncia ante el presidente de la república Lázaro Cárdenas las injusticias cometidas por el señor Julián Slim a comerciantes de la merced” (Mexico City, 1940), FO393. SC196, 2/012(29)7, Box 1, File 61. 60. TSJDF, “Actor: Serra, Antonio N. apoderado de Julián Slim. Demandado: Rodríguez, Efren. Juicio: Sumario por desocupación. Juzgado: Tercero Menor” (Mexico City, 1932–02–­27), Part I, Folio: 506229, 5 fs. TSJDF, “Actor Cossío, Juan Manuel apoderado de Julián Slim. Demandado: Martínez, Joaquín. Juicio: Verbal por deuda de pesos. Juzgado: Cuatro de Paz” (D.F., 1934–03–­03), Part I, Folio: 577521, 6 fs. 4. TSJDF, “Actor: Zepeda, José María apoderado de José Slim. Demandado: Rojas, María. Juicio: Oral por desocupación y pago de pesos. Juzgado: Segundo de Paz” (D.F, 1935–05–­16), Part I, Folio: 439356, 7 fs.



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TSJDF, “Actor: Michel Mousa Issa, Milade apoderado de Nagibe Mitry. Juicio: Amparo contra actos de la Quinta Sala, en el incidente de suspensión, relativo al juicio sumario de arrendamiento, promovido por Julián Slim. Autoridad: Quinta Sala” (D.F., 1937–05–­18), Part I, Folio: 529711, 9 fs. TSJDF, “Actor: Sánchez Gavito, Antonio. Juicio: Recurso de apelación interpuesto contra la sentencia del Juez Décimo Segundo de lo Civil, en el juicio sumario, promovido por Julián Slim. Autoridad: Quinta Sala” (D.F., 1937–06–­12), Part I, Folio: 525497, 21 fs. TSJDF, “Actor: Sánchez Gavito, Antonio. Juicio: recurso de apelación interpuesto contra el auto dictado del Juez Décimo Segundo de lo Civil, en el juicio sumario, promovido por Julián Slim. Autoridad: Quinta Sala” (D.F., 1937–06–­25), Part I, Folio: 525486, 8 fs. TSJDF, “Actor: Villar y Lledías, María. Juicio: Recurso de apelación contra la sentencia de Juez Décimo Segundo de lo Civil, en las diligencias de jurisdicción voluntaria, promovidas por José Slim en representación de sus hijos Muniz y Pedro Alberto. Autoridad: Quinta Sala” (D.F., 1938–07–­22), Part I, Folio: 560287, 37 fs. TSJDF, “Actor: Slim, José apoderado de Joseph Kanaan, albacea de la sucesión intestada de Victoria Slim de Kanaan. Juicio: Jurisdicción voluntaria. Notificación de Julián Slim, sobre la cesación de mandato y administración del cargo de albacea. Juzgado: Tercero de lo Civil” (D.F., 1938–09–­12), Part I, Folio: 527938, 1 fs. TSJDF, “Actor: Ramos, Manuel. Juicio: Recurso de apelación extraordinaria contra sentencia del Juez Segundo Menor en el Juicio sumario de Desahucio que promovió Julián Slim. Autoridad: Tercera Sala” (D.F., 1939–02–­28), Part I, Folio: 590178, 6 fs. TSJDF, “Actor: Porrero García, Manuel representante de Telas y Novedades La Fama, S.A. Juicio: Jurisdicción voluntaria, por consignación de pesos a favor de José Slim. Juzgado: Octavo de lo Civil” (D.F., 1940–12–­18), Part I, TSJDF Folio: 597183, 15 fs. Secretaría de Gobernación. Dirección General de Gobierno, “Bernardino Mena Brito miembro del Centro de Comerciantes Mexicanos de la Merced denuncia ante el presidente de la república Lázaro Cárdenas las injusticias cometidas por el señor Julián Slim a comerciantes de la merced” (Mexico City, 1940), FO393. SC196, 2/012(29)7, Box 1, File 61. AGN. Tesorería General de la Federación. Comisión Monetaria, “Metales amonedados depósitos y giros en metálico entre otros: García Treviño y Compañía Núñes Hnos., J. Olivier & CIA, Julián Slim, Lacaud e hijo, Banco Mercantil de Monterrey, Azcárraga y Copeland.” (Mexico City and other places), SC226, Book no. 60–25 of various creditors. TSJDF, “Actor: Echevarría, Manuel. Juicio: Recurso de apelación extraordinaria contra sentencia del Juez Segundo de lo Civil en el juicio sumario por des-

Notes to Pages 115–121

269

ocupación que promovió Julián Slim. Autoridad: Quinta Sala” (D.F., 1941–05–­ 14), Part I, Folio: 617621, 16 fs. TSJDF, “Actor: Zendansky, Zacarías. Juicio: Jurisdicción voluntaria, por consignación de pago de pesos a favor de José Slim. Juzgado: Segundo de lo Civil” (D.F., 1941–01–­13), Part I, Folio: 611873, 6 fs. TSJDF, “Actor: Zendansky, Zacarías. Juicio: Jurisdicción voluntaria, por consignación de pago de pesos a favor de José Slim. Juzgado: Segundo de lo Civil” (D.F., 1941–02–­06), Part I, TSJDF Folio: 611874, 6 fs. TSJDF, “Actor: Zedanski, Zacarías. Juicio: Jurisdicción voluntaria, por consignación de pago de rentas a favor de José Slim. Juzgado: Segundo de lo Civil” (D.F., 1941–03–­07), Part I, Folio: 611859, 4 fs. TSJDF, “Jurisdicción voluntaria, por consignación de pesos a favor de José Slim por concepto de arrendamiento. Juzgado: Octavo de lo Civil.” TSJDF, “Actor: Romero, J. Guadalupe. Juicio: Diligencias preliminares de consignación por pago de renta a favor de Julián Slim. Juzgado: Segundo Menor” (D.F., 1946–10–­29), Part I, Folio: 667136, 4 fs. TSJDF, “Actor: Arce, Eduardo. Juicio: Jurisdicción voluntaria, por consignación de pesos a favor de José Slim por concepto de arrendamiento. Juzgado: Cuarto de lo Civil” (D.F., 1947–01–­30), Part I, Folio: 698165, 3 fs. TSJDF, “Actor: Avalos Macel, Jucentino. Juicio: Jurisdicción voluntaria, por consignación de pesos a favor de Julián Slim por concepto de arrendamiento. Juzgado: Segundo Menor” (D.F., 1947–08–­08), Part I, Folio: 694642, 15 fs. TSJDF, “Actor: Avalos Maciel, Juventino. Juicio: Jurisdicción voluntaria, por consignación de pesos a favor de Julián Slim por concepto de arrendamiento. Juzgado: Segundo Menor” (D.F., 1947–09–­04), Part I, TSJDF Folio: 694611, 5 fs. 61. Archivo General de la Nación. DGIPS, Box 752, File 48, Folio 1. 62. AGN. DGIPS, Box 745, File 10. 1941. 63. Denouncers could not keep Arabic last names straight even across members of the same family, with Smeke deformed into Eskeme and Audet and Yaudet listed as different surnames. AGN. DGIPS, Box 78, File 7. 64. MAE Nantes, Mexico B Personnel, 72. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 617, 135. 69. Ibid. 70. 27 Mai 1926. Mexico City Colonie Libanaise Maronite Félicite Gouvernement pour victoire armée et capture Abdel Krim. Joseph Slim (MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 409, 15). 71. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 410, 280. 72. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 410, 286. 73. Established by Bonaparte in 1802, the order is the highest honor in France. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 411, 4–5.



270

Notes to Pages 121–129

74. Ibid., 6. 75. Ibid., 20. 76. Ibid., 44. 77. Ibid., 212. 78. MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais, Dossier general (1914–1928), 257. 79. MAE Nantes. Mexico B Personnel, Dossiers individuels (1915–1926), 73. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., Gorayeb. 82. Josefina E. de Fabela, Documentos históricos de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1960), vol. 20: Las Relaciones Internacionales en la Revolución y Régimen Constitucionalista y la Cuestión Petrolera. 1913–1919, t. 2, 281–287. 83. MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais, Dossier general (1914–1928), 257. 84. MAE Nantes. Mexico, Dossiers de travail (1910–1928), 218. 85. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 408 p. 19. 86. MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais, Dossier general (1914–1928), 257. 87. Lionel Vasse report. MAE Nantes. Mexico, Documents relatifs a la Commision Franco-­Mexicaine de Reclamations (1913–1946), 206. 88. MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais. Dossier general (1914–1928), 257. 89. Ibid. 90. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 411, 128. 91. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 411, 170, 181–182. 92. Ibid., 118. 93. MAE Nantes. Mexico. Dossiers de travail (1910–1928), 218. The committee lists 245 French dossiers and 48 Syrio-­Lebanese. 94. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 617, 175–176. 95. MAE Nantes. Mexico, Documents relatifs a la Commision Franco-­Mexicaine de Reclamations (1913–1946), 206. 96. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 618, 217–218. 97. Ibid., 222. 98. MAE Nantes. Mexico, Documents relatifs a la Commision Franco-­Mexicaine de Reclamations (1913–1946), 206. 99. MAE-­Paris, Serie E Levant, vol. 618, 217–218, 231. 100. Ibid., 222, 272. 101. MAE Nantes. Mexico, Documents relatifs a la Commision Franco-­Mexicaine de Reclamations (1913–1946), 206. 102. Ibid. 103. MAE Nantes. Mexico, Dossiers de travail (1910–1928), 218. 104. MAE Nantes. Mexico, Documents relatifs a la Commision Franco-­Mexicaine de Reclamations (1913–1946), 206. 105. “Es como devolver una oreja de un cameyo!!!,” MAE Nantes. Syro-­ Libanais. Dossier general (1914–1928), 257.

Notes to Pages 130–136

271

106. MAE Nantes. Mexico B Personnel, Dossiers individuels (1915–1926), 73, Ayub. 107. MAE Nantes. Mexico, Dossiers de travail (1910–1928), 218. 108. He argues against the Franco-­Mexican Claims Commission though the refusal notification comes from the Mixed Allocations Committee. MAE Nantes. Syro-­Libanais. Dossier general (1914–1928), 257. 109. MAE Nantes. Mexico, Documents relatifs a la Commision Franco-­Mexicaine de Reclamations (1913–1946), 206. 110. MAE Nantes. Mexico, Documents relatifs a la Commision Franco-­Mexicaine de Reclamations (1913–1946), 206.

Chapter 5 1. El Emir, May 1939: 15. El Emir was published monthly, 1937–1968, in Mexico City, edited by Alfonso Negib Aued. The Biblioteca del Colegio de México holds copies. 2. Duara, Decolonization. 3. The case of Ernest Renan, whom Said treats at length in Orientalism, comes to mind. 4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (1992): 1–26; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 5. On Ottoman imperial practice and imperial rivalries, see Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), and Mostafa Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). 6. Criollos are Latin Americans claiming European descent. 7. On the Nahda, see Leyla Dakhli, Une génération d’intellectuels arabes: Syrie et Liban, 1908–1940 (Paris: Karthala, 2009); and Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss, eds., Arab Thought beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 8. Fayez A. Sayegh, Arab Unity: Hope and Fulfillment (New York: Devin-­Adair, 1958), 3. 9. J. M. Abd-­el-­Jalil, Brève histoire de la littérature arabe (Paris: G.P. Maisonneuve, 1946), 221. On radical ideologies, see Khuri-­Makdisi, Eastern Mediterranean. 10. European powers extended their patronage to particular sectarian populations—Maronites were French clients, the Druze British clients, etc. See Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism and Artillery of Heaven. 11. Amin, Tahrir al-­mar’a, 69–70, quoted in Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 155–156.



272

Notes to Pages 137–140

12. There is much new scholarship on Arab representations of the West. See Nabil I. Matar, Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Matar, Islam in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 13. Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration. 14. Serge Gruzinski, Quelle heure est-­il la bas? Amérique et Islam à l’orée des temps modernes (Paris: Seuil, 2008). 15. The manuscript was translated into French and German, then into English in 1980, but has become more visible through two publications: Gruzinski, Quelle heure est-­il la bas? and Thomas Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of Tarih-­i Hind-­i Garbi and Sixteenth-­Century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990). 16. Bernard Lewis estimates that the manuscript he consulted in the Istanbul University Library was produced circa 1793. See Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 330; and E. J. W. Gibb, History of Ottoman Poetry (London: Luzac, 1900–1909). 17. Lewis, Muslim Discovery, 290. 18. ​Fazil Enderunlu, Zenânnâme—Kadinlar kitabi/The Book on Women (Yenimahalle-­Ankara, Alt-­Ust Yayinlari: Istanbul, 2006), 179. 19. Many other “nationalities” are described as undesirable because they are “black”; they appear as less attractive yet fully human. 20. Enderunlu, Zenânnâme, 22. For a manuscript lacking illustration, see https://archive.org/details/EnderuniFazilHuseyinBey, consulted November 2014. 21. Sema Nilgün Erdogan, Sexual Life in Ottoman Society (Istanbul: Donence, 2000). 22. Archives Nationales. Fonds Anciens des Colonies, Série E Personnel antérieur à 1798. E170. “Elías Cheik Chedid et Kassen de la Maison Kassen, prince chrétien du Mont-­Liban, de nation maronite, a voyage vers les îles de l’Amérique en tant qu’employé du roi de France en 1744, avec l’intention de rassembler des ressources pour la diffusion de l’idée française en Syrie” (Archives D’Outre Mer, Aix en Provence, France). 23. The published texts are the Bibliaspa multilingual edition of Abdurrahman bin Abdullah al-­Baghdadi, El deleite del extranjero en todo lo que es asombroso y maravilloso, trans. Paulo Farah (Rio de Janeiro: Bibliaspa, 2007) and Elias al-­ Musili, An Arab Journeys to Colonial Spanish America: The Travels of Elias Al-­Mûsili in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Caesar Farah (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003). 24. Maslia al-­gharib bi kul amr ajib is the Arabic title given for the book. 25. According to Farah, Rabbat first published it in the Jesuit journal al-­Mashriq in 1905 and later with the Jesuit Catholic Press in Beirut in 1906. He also cites sources who claim 1903 as the date of publication, and who claim the journey to

Notes to Pages 140–143

273

have taken place in the eighteenth century (Farah in al-­Musili, An Arab Journeys, xii). 26. Farah tells us “It is probable the author wrote also for the benefit of fellow Syrians, for Rabbat alleges that he settled in Aleppo after his return, although there is evidence turned up in Spanish archives to suggest that he returned to Spain instead” (ibid., xviii). 27. Ibid., ix. 28. Farah thanks Bernard Lewis of Princeton for suggesting the translation and editing of the manuscript (ibid., xiii). 29. Al-­Musili, An Arab Journeys, 60. 30. Ibid., 61. 31. Ibid., 42, 49; on mines, 59. 32. Ibid., 35. 33. Ibid., 75. 34. Ibid. On infidel and pagan Indians, 32–33; merchants, 20; and bishops, 35. 35. Ibid., 37. 36. Ibid., 49. 37. Ibid., 32, 64. 38. Ibid., 64. One has to wonder, did he consider himself to be an Arab, or is this an image of the Bedouin? 39. Ibid., 41. 40. Al-­Baghdadi’s text was translated by Yacine Daddi Addoun and Renée Soulodre-­La France, through York University, in 2001. It was also published in 2007 with several prologues and introductions by academics and bureaucrats alongside the original text and renditions in Modern Standard Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese as the founding text for Bibliaspa, a project for south-­south cultural cooperation established through a meeting of Arab and South American heads of state in Brasilia in 2005. According to the introduction to the Farah translation, the manuscript, bought by a German from a Turk, was donated to the Berlin Library, where Dr. Farah stumbled upon it. 41. Paulo Farah, “Foreword” to El deleite del extranjero, 44. 42. Al-­Baghdadi often interprets these populations’ practice of Islam as incorrect and speculates that deviations are probably due to the fact that many were torn from their communities young, before they had acquired the faith properly. From his references to the presence of texts in Arabic, to alternate marriage and inheritance practices as well as healing practices using Quranic texts as talismans, it seems more likely that West African Islam as practiced in Brazil presented syncretic forms that incorporated non-­A rab African cultural practices. 43. Al-­Baghdadi, El deleite del extranjero, 193. 44. Ibid., 135–136. 45. Ibid., 146, 148. 46. Ibid., 143–144.



274

Notes to Pages 143–145

47. Ibid., 137. 48. Ibid., 151. 49. Ibid., 167–168. 50. Ibid., 161. 51. Duara, Decolonization, 6. 52. Philip Hitti, The Arabs: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1943), 213. 53. Ernest Dawn argues that this interpretation was first popularized in the West by George Antonius in 1938, in Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (London: Capricorn Books, 1938), and later—though in a more ambivalent and complex form—restated by Albert Hourani. See Hourani, Philip S. Khoury, and Mary C. Wilson, The Modern Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003); Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991). Also Hisham Sharabi, Arab Intellectuals and the West: The Formative Years 1875–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972); and “The Neo-­Patriarchal Discourse: Language and Discourse in Contemporary Arab Society,” in George N. Atiyeh and Ibrahim M. Oweiss, eds., Arab Civilization: Challenges and Responses; Studies in Honor of Constantine Zurayk (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988). Also see Bassam Tibi, Marion Farouk-­Sluglett, and Peter Sluglett, Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); and Ernest Dawn, “The Origins of Arab Nationalism,” in The Origins of Arab Nationalism, ed. Rashid Khalidi et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 3. This interpretation also occurs in Edward Atiyah, The Arabs: The Origins, Present Conditions and Prospects of the Arab World (Edinburgh: Penguin Books, 1958); Abd-el-­Jalil, Brève histoire; Hitti, The Arabs; and Sayegh, Arab Unity. Abd al-­Jalil suggests that a revived concern with the Arabic language initially emerged among Christian populations; he notes that as early as the seventeenth century, a movement championing Arab linguistic purism developed in Christian circles in Aleppo (Abd-el-­Jalil, Brève histoire, 219). 54. Abd-el-­Jalil, Brève Histoire, 7. The author was a professor at the Catholic University of Paris in 1943 when this text was published, and he refers to European Orientalists. 55. Hitti, The Arabs, viii. 56. William Nimeh, Historia del Líbano (Mexico City: William Nimeh, 1946), 282–283. 57. “Duaihi y el renacimiento libanés,” El Emir no. 6 (November 1937): 14–15. 58. Once the Melkite and Maronite churches recognized papal authority, religious scholars of these traditions occasionally traveled to study or teach in Europe, especially after the establishment of the Maronite College in Rome in 1584. See Emile Eddé, El Líbano en la historia (Jounieh, Lebanon: Ediciones Apóstoles, 2001), 2: 135–137. It is important to keep in mind that a majority of the migration to Mexico is Maronite.

Notes to Pages 145–155

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59. Martha Díaz de Kuri and Lourdes Macluf, De Líbano a México, 228. For a discussion of the Mexican Mahjar press, see Pastor, “Palestina como espectáculo,” in Rein, Cano, and Molina Rueda, Más allá del Medio Oriente, 55–76. 60. Ibid., 11. 61. Vasconcelos, ¿Qué es el comunismo?, 105–109. 62. Miguel Zacarías, El Emir, no. 16 (1938): 4. 63. For a discussion of the film El baisano Jalil, see Theresa Alfaro-­Velcamp, “‘Reelizing’ Arab and Jewish Ethnicity in Mexican Film,” Americas 63, no. 2 (Oct. 2006). 64. Zacarías, El Emir, no. 16 (1938): 4. 65. Ibid. 66. “El origen de los libaneses,” El Emir, no. 8 (Esteban Fayad?). 67. Alfonso Aued, El Emir (May 1939): 47. 68. Aued, El Emir, no. 19 (December 25, 1938): 3. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 4. 71. Ibid. 72. José Vasconcelos, ¿Qué es el comunismo? (Mexico City: Ediciones Botas, 1936), 103. 73. Correspondence reproduced in El Emir, no. 73, 16. 74. Nimeh was by profession a gastroenterologist. El Emir, no. 1 (1937). 75. Aued, El Emir (May 1939), 55 76. Nimeh, Historia del Líbano, 88. 77. Ibid., 94. 78. Eddé, El Líbano vol. 2; Carlos Martínez Assad, Memoria del Líbano (Mexico City: Océano, 2003), 188–189. Martínez Assad is a former Guggenheim fellow and senior professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 79. José Vasconcelos, prologue to Nimeh, Historia del Líbano, 9–10. 80. Enrique Castro Farías, Contribuciones libanesas al progreso de América (Mexico City: 1948).

Chapter 6 1. On transnationalism as an emerging analytic, see Rouse, “Mexican Migration”; Glick-­Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc, Towards a Transnational Perspective; James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 302–338; Clifford, Routes; Kearney, “Local and Global”; Levitt, Transnational Villagers; Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick-­Schiller, “Transnational Communities and Immigrant Enterprise—Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society,” International Migration Review 38, no. 3 (2004): 1002–1039. 2. The chronology of institutions used or created by Mahjaris was compiled using three sources: the French Ministry of Foreign Relations (Ministère Français des Affaires Etrangères, MAE) archives, my own interviews with migrants



276

Notes to Pages 155–158

in Mexico and Lebanon, and published accounts, including Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México: crónica de un pueblo emigrante; Hamui de Halabe and Charabati, Los judíos de Alepo; and Páez Oropeza, Los libaneses en México. 3. Syria, a state oriented toward Russia under Ba’ath administration, has been part of an “axis of evil” in North American political discourse since the 2003 Bush administration. Camila Pastor, “Chávez de Arabia: Genealogía de las relaciones diplomáticas entre Siria y Venezuela, 1946–2011,” in “Apuntes para el estudio de las relaciones entre Siria y América Latina,” in Las relaciones exteriores de Siria, ed. Luis Mesa Delmonte (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2013), 337–420. 4. On the Mashriq, see Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron, Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); on Mexico, Marcela Lagarde, Los cautiverios de las mujeres: madres, esposas, monjas, putas, presas y locas (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1993); on modernity, Louise Tilly and Joan Wallach Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978). 5. See Paula Holmes-­Eber, Daughters of Tunis: Women, Family, and Networks in a Muslim City (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), for a similar argument in a Tunisian case. 6. See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), on multiple public spheres. 7. On Mahjari humanitarian efforts in global perspective, see Jackson, “Mandatory Development”; and Fahrentold, “Global Levant.” Given Arabic linguistic ideologies, texts in regional dialects or ’ammiyya are rare, both in the Mashriq and in the Mahjar, as Civantos has noted for Argentina in Between Argentines and Arabs. 8. On the crucial role of memory practices for the (imperfect) continuity of social worlds, see Slyomovics, Object of Memory. 9. The Lebanese Chamber of Commerce probably grouped part of the population settled in Mexico City. 10. MAE, vol. 408, 11-­b. 11. On the great revolt, see Provence, Great Syrian Revolt. 12. MAE, vol. 408., 12. 13. Ibid., 134. 14. Ibid., 90. 15. Ibid., 171. 16. For an excellent analysis of the revolt as a popular uprising see Provence, Great Syrian Revolt. 17. MAE, vol. 408, 98. 18. Ibid., 164. 19. Ibid., 175. 20. Ibid., 180.

Notes to Pages 158–163

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21. Ibid., 201? Page number uncertain. 22. Ibid., 183. 23. Ibid., 186. 24. As to form, they clearly label institutions per mandate preference: the Syrio-­Lebanese Chamber, the “Druze” rebellion. 25. MAE, vol. 408, 187. 26. Ibid., 187. 27. Ibid., 188. 28. Ibid., 171. 29. Michael Provence, in Great Syrian Revolt, has argued that the French authorities’ blaming the Druze made military containment of the movement, which was a collaboration between Hawrani Druze grain producers and notable Damascus nationalists articulated through grain provisioning networks mediated by southern Damascene suburbs, ineffectual. 30. MAE, vol. 409, 15. 31. See Jean A. Meyer, La cristiada (Mexico City: Clío, 1997); and Lorenzo Meyer, “La institucionalización del nuevo régimen,” in Historia General de México (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2000) for further analysis of the conflict. 32. On the revolution and its aftermath, see Knight, Mexican Revolution. 33. MAE vol. 617, 105. The text continues: “L’un et l’autre ne sont autorises, en vertu de la loi cite plus haut, a exercer le culte au Mexique que pour 6 ans, a charge pour eux de former, pendant ce délai, un prêtre, Mexicain de naissance, qui sois susceptible d’assurer le ministère pour les colonies française et syro-­libanaise. Le point de départ de ce délai, pour les deux prêtres en question, remonte a trois années. Lors de la dernière crise religieuse j’avais pu déjà les faire autoriser une première fois. Il ne leur reste donc que trois années pendant les quels ils se trouveront dans une situation légale. Auront-­ils, au terme de ce délai, forme un prêtre mexicain pour les remplacer auprès de leur fidèles de langue française et arabe? C’est peu probable, surtout dans le dernier cas,” 104–107. 34. MAE, vol. 132, 18-­b. 35. Various interviews, especially Z., 2006, and N., 2007. 36. She was succeeded in these two academic spaces by a child of migrants, Professor José Luis López Habib, and recent migrants from the Maghreb. Arabic-­ language classes are now offered in the new Muslim institutional spaces that have emerged since the 1990s throughout Mexico. See Pastor, “Guests of Islam: Conversion and the Institutionalization of Islam in Mexico,” in Crescent over Another Horizon, ed. Logroño, Pinto, and Karam, 144–189. Unsuccessful late twentieth-­ century efforts to launch a school in which Arabic would be taught were coordinated by members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (PNSS). Interview 2006 with G. and informal discussions at the PNSS annual festivities in 2006. The party brings together Druze and Greek Orthodox families and some secularist Maronites.



278

Notes to Pages 164–170

37. http://www.centrolibanes.org.mx/asociaciones/union_asistencial.html, consulted November 24, 2008. 38. Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México; also interview by the author with M. M. family, 2006. 39. The Orthodox group is still active, along with Maronite Youth of Mexico and the National Union of Mexican Youth of Lebanese Descent, established in 1993. En 1993, JOMALI logró formalizarse, constituirse como Asociación Civil, como una corporación apolítica, apartidista y no confesional. Nuestra organización cuenta con una estructura consolidada y dinámica, con un presidente honorario vitalicio que funciona como nuestro consejero, una mesa directiva integrada por ocho miembros de diferentes delegaciones que nos representa y vigila el cumplimiento de nuestros objetivos. Los delegados de los diferentes estados o ciudades de la república y el extranjero tienen la importantísima función de fortalecer los lazos que nos unen y difundir nuestros objetivos en sus respectivas localidades. (http://www.centrolibanes.org.mx/asociaciones/jomali .html, consulted November 24, 2008).

40. Interview with S. by the author, 2007. 41. Interview with S. by the author, 2007. 42. Interview with Z. by the author, 2006. 43. A Mexican consulate staffed with a career diplomat has been established in Beirut since 1927. MAE, vol. 410, 180. 44. Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México. They also tell us that the first ambassador was Joseph Aboukhater, accompanied by Munir Nsouli and Michel Chediak. 45. Currently Mexico does have an honorary consulate in Damascus, but the closest embassy is in Antelias, a Christian suburb of Beirut. 46. Díaz de Kuri and Macluf, De Líbano a México, 245. 47. Ibid. 48. An example of the sort of intervention the union was involved in is tied to the mid-­t wentieth-­century scramble for nationalities in the Mashriq. A flyer states the following: El deseo de la Unión es dar el servicio debido a todos los libaneses y, en este caso, lograr que la ratificación de la nacionalidad, ya sea libanesa o siria, se efectúe dentro del término concedido y que fenece el día 29 de mayo de 1938. Los que hayan cumplido con este requisito no tendrán dificultades de ninguna índole, pero los que no cumplan con el serán condireados en el país de origen, según el tratado de Genova, como súbditos turcos, obligados al servicio militar y a los impuestos vigentes de aquella nación. Hacemos hincapié en que el único gasto que ocasiona todo el trámite es de $0.65 moneda nacional, importe de los timbres consulares. (Ibid., 247)

Notes to Pages 170–177

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49. http://www.centrolibanes.org.mx, consulted November 24, 2008. 50. http://www.centrolibanes.org.mx/historia, consulted November 24, 2008. 51. Interview by the author. 52. A successful politician (a woman of Lebanese descent) pointed this out in an interview. 53. Mahjari women who are successful politicians and state bureaucrats in the national arena underscored their marginalization as political agents within these community spaces during our interviews.

Chapter 7 1. A new literature on social memory has developed through the American reception and recovery of the work of French historian Pierre Nora and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. I am particularly indebted to the work of historical anthropologists Mariko Tamanoi and Susan Slyomovics. For a discussion of the field see Slyomovics, “Memory Studies: Lebanon and Israel/Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 3 (2013): 589–601. 2. Attention to the social construction of time was furthered in anthropological literature by the work of Fabian, Time and the Other; and recuperations of the work of philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Scholars analyzing literature have argued that at some point the Mahjar ceases to be such, and that we must recognize and theorize post-­Mahjar cultural production—when the authors are not migrants, but their children and grandchildren—as distinct. I argue that the Mexican Mahjar is constantly remade in the context of families by a sustained trickle of new arrivals and everyday practices of remembering (like food preparation), in community institutions, and in the production of memory. 3. Akram Khater, “Becoming ‘Syrian’ in America: A Global Geography of Ethnicity and Nation,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 14, no. 2 (2005): 299–331. 4. Phoenicianism as an alternative to Arabism was marginalized by the political integration of Lebanon into the Arab world. It survived among Christian Lebanese nationalists, who continued to express their vision of Lebanon as neo-­ Phoenicia. More pervasively, a “Phoenician grammar” developed through the “awakening” of Phoenicia as Lebanon’s pre-­Islamic, pre-­Arab past, which could be used by all political factions to imagine a national past. See Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia. Dominated by Maronites, the Mexican Mahjar stayed on a Phoenician path. 5. For a survey of the burgeoning field of Middle East food studies, see Camila Pastor, “Comer: el gozo de la creación,” Estudios de Asia y África 1, no. 3 (Sept.–­ Dec. 2015): 779–793. 6. My thinking on cookbooks is informed by Bert Fragner’s “Social Reality and Culinary Fiction: The Perspective of Cookbooks from Iran and Central Asia,” in A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East, ed. Sami Zubaida and



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Notes to Pages 177–185

Richard Tapper, 63–72 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010 [1994]); and Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013). 7. My analysis of the affective work of food owes much to Orit Bashkin, “An Autobiographical Perspective: Schools, Jails and Cemeteries in Shoshana Levy’s Life Story,” in Gender in Judaism and Islam, ed. Firoozeh Kashani-­Sabet and Beth Wenger, 268–310 (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 8. Mexican Mahjar biographies and family histories are increasingly available. See José Martínez, Carlos Slim: retrato inédito (Mexico City: Océano, 2006); Inés Rancé and Juan Sebastián, eds., Mauricio Achar: un librero de nuestro tiempo (Mexico City: Océano, 2005); Olga Frangie de Harfusch and Martha Díaz de Kuri, Que Dios te haga grande México (Mexico City: DEMAC, 2006); Martha Díaz de Kuri, La familia Aboumrad (Mexico City, 2010); Gojman de Backal, Don Jacobo Granat; Andrew Paxman, “Carlos Slim,” in Iconic Mexico: An Encyclopedia from Acapulco to Zócalo, ed. Eric Zolov (Santa Barbara: ABC-­CLIO, 2015). 9. Civantos, Between Argentine and Arab. 10. Participants in military expeditions and resource surveys. 11. Jacobs Barquet, Diccionario enciclopédico, 307. 12. Nimeh, Historia del Líbano, 11. 13. Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia, 117. 14. Ibid., 118. 15. Ibid., 117. On AUB, see Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). 16. Nimeh, Historia del Líbano, 13. 17. Alfonso Neguib Aued, Historia de Líbano (Mexico City: Ediciones Emir, 1945), 38–39. 18. Ibid., 118. 19. Ibid., 148. 20. Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia, 128. 21. Najib Dahdah, Evolución histórica del Líbano (Mexico City: Ediciones Oasis, 1964), 27. 22. Ibid., 41. 23. “intermediarios entre el Oriente y el Occidente en un mundo de conquistas” (ibid., 37). 24. Ibid., 45. 25. Eddé, El Líbano, vol. 2, 293. 26. Eddé, El Líbano, vol. 2, 90. 27. Ibid., vol. 2, 15. 28. Jacobs Barquet, Diccionario enciclopédico, 266. 29. Martínez Assad, Memoria de Líbano, 15. 30. Ibid., 91. 31. Ibid., 151. 32. Ibid., 194.

Notes to Pages 185–195

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33. Ibid., 55. 34. Jacobs Barquet, Diccionario enciclopédico, 106. 35. Ulises Cassab, Líbano desde Fenicia (Mexico City: 2006), 21. 36. A constant theme since Lammens’s popularization of the asile du Liban theory positing Mount Lebanon as refuge for oppressed minorities throughout history. Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia, 33. 37. Cassab, Líbano desde Fenicia, 35. 38. Interview with Ambassador Naffah by the author, 2006. 39. Joseph Naffah, La lucha de mi vida por la educación y la paz (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 2000). 40. Jacobs Barquet, Diccionario enciclopédico, 299. 41. Sofía A. Saadeh, El Líbano: religión y ciudadanía (Buenos Aires: Asociación Cultural Siria, 2010). 42. Hisham Hamdan, Líbano: en medio del juego y del doble discurso de las grandes potencias (Mexico City: El Mundo Árabe en México, 2013). 43. Chronicles preceded efforts toward the digitization of migrant registry cards from the Archivo General de la Nación, published in CD-­ROM format, for the Lebanese and Jewish migrations. 44. Marcos Arana Cervantes, Ramas del mismo cedro, voz viva de la comunidad libanesa de Guadalajara (Mexico City: Centro Libanés de Guadalajara, 2006); María Elena Miguel de Simon and Familia Miguel Afif, eds., Pepe y Nena (Mexico City: Ediciones Gernika, 2013). 45. Castro Farías, Aporte libanés. 46. Hamui de Halabe and Charabati, Los judíos de Alepo. 47. Judit Bokser de Liwerant, ed., Imágenes de un encuentro (Mexico City: UNAM-­Tribuna Israelita-­Comité Central-­Atzmauth Fund, 1992). 48. Jacobo Smeke Darwich and Sofía Mercado Atri, Historia de una alianza (Mexico City: Monte Sinaí, 1999). 49. Arana Cervantes, Ramas del mismo cedro, 19. 50. For a global context, see Rachel Laudan, “Crossroads and Diasporas, a Thousand Years of Islamic Cuisines,” Saudi Aramco 65, no. 6 (Nov.–­Dec. 2014): 27–35. 51. María Manzur de Borge, Manual práctico de cocina libanesa (Mérida: Editorial Zamna, 1952). 52. Interview by the author, May 2015. 53. See, for example, Nawal Nasrallah, Annals of the Caliph’s Kitchens: Ibn Sayyar al-­Warraq´s Tenth-­Century Baghdadi Cookbook (Boston: Brill, 2010). 54. Fragner, “Social Reality and Culinary Fiction,” in Zubaida and Tapper, A Taste of Thyme. On women’s changing domesticity, see Lila Abu-­Lughod, Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 55. Alfonso Neguib Aued, Cocina libanesa (Mexico City: Casa Velux, 1979), 3–4. On woman as queen of the house, see Akram Khater, “‘House’ to ‘Goddess of the



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Notes to Pages 195–204

House’: Gender, Class, and Silk in 19th-­Century Mount Lebanon,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28, no. 3 (1996): 325–348. 56. Aued, Cocina libanesa, 3. Some recipes are identifiable regional specialties: (Egyptian-­Palestinian) mloujia, (Aleppan) karabish halab. 57. Jacobs Barquet, Diccionario enciclopédico, 83. 58. Macluf and Díaz de Kuri, De Líbano a México: la vida alrededor de la mesa, 133. 59. Ibid., 134. The dish appears in Manzur de Borge, Manual práctico de cocina libanesa, 50; “charola del Rosario del dervich,” in Aued, Cocina libanesa. 60. Macluf and Díaz de Kuri, De Líbano a México: la vida alrededor de la mesa, 134. 61. Las Primas, Recetario internacional y árabe (Mexico City: 1999), 474. 62. Reina Samarel de Tacher, Bendichas manos: comida sefardí (Mexico City: Colegio Hebreo Sefaradí, 2012). 63. Conversation with Zoila Popper, Mexico City, May 2015. 64. Macluf and Díaz de Kuri, De Líbano a México: la vida alrededor de la mesa, 1. 65. Jacobs Barquet, Diccionario enciclopédico, 410–411. 66. Interview with Patricia Jacobs Barquet (2006) and with Norma Barquet (2006). 67. Jacobs Barquet, Diccionario enciclopédico, 95–96. 68. Ibid., 170. 69. Macluf and Díaz de Kuri, De Líbano a México: la vida alrededor de la mesa, 6. 70. Yustra Aboul Hosn, Las mil y una recetas: lo más antojadizo de la cocina árabe libanesa (Mexico City: 2004). 71. I thank Silvia Cherem for allowing me to read through her children’s Shorashim projects in 2006. I was also a guest at a Shorashim display and awards ceremony at the Colegio Tarbut in May 2015. 72. The authors consulted with Muhammad Mazeh of Al-­Andalus and Samer el-­Bunni of Adonis, both of whom are Lebanese cooks at leading purveyors of Mashriqi specialties in Mexico. Interviews in Mexico City, 2006. 73. Amelia Romano de Salame, Sefra dayme: cien años de cocina judeo-­damasquina en México (Mexico City: Ámbar Diseño, 2013), front flap. 74. Conversations by the author with Tere M. and Linda Salame. 75. Romano de Salame, Sefra dayme, back flap. 76. Ruthy Mustri also produced a cookbook. Interview by the author with Tere, Mexico City, May 2015. 77. On food and foreignness, see David M. Friedenreich, Foreigners and Their Food (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 78. Miguel de Simon, Pepe y Nena, 11–12. 79. Interview by the author with Zoila Popper, Mexico City, March 2015. 80. Dabbah Askenazi, Esperanza y realidad, 213. Earlier memoirs, like Elías Chibli Chibli’s Memorias (Coahuila, 1939), remain unpublished. 81. Dabbah Askenazi, Esperanza y realidad, 29. 82. Ibid., 39.

Notes to Pages 204–212

283

83. Ibid., 54. 84. Ibid., 87, 90. 85. Ibid., 126. 86. Ibid., 224. 87. Jacobs Barquet, Diccionario enciclopédico, 212. 88. Bárbara Jacobs, Doce cuentos en contra (Mexico City: Martín Casillas Editores, 1982), 115. 89. Jacobs Barquet, Diccionario enciclopédico, 212. 90. Ibid., 307–308. 91. Rosa Nissán, Novia que te vea (Mexico City: Planeta de Agostini, 2005), 36. 92. Nissán, Novia que te vea, 80. 93. Ibid., 117. 94. Rosa Nissán, Hijo que te nazca (Mexico City: Planeta, 2004), 58. 95. Dabbah Askenazi, Esperanza y realidad, 34. 96. Silvia Hamui Sutton, Sucedió en Alepo (Mexico City: Ediciones El Naranjo, 2004). 97. Bertha Betech de Duek, Rachelle: las voces del destino (Mexico City: Editorial Diana, 2005). 98. Betech de Duek, Rachelle, 12. 99. Ibid., 20. 100. Ibid., 102–103. 101. Interview by the author with Suad Helú, Mexico City, 2006. 102. Alfredo Harp Helú, Vivir y morir jugando béisbol (Mexico City: Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú, 2003). Since 2012, in Fundación Harp Helú’s San Pablo Cultural Center in the city of Oaxaca, an excellent terrace restaurant offering local and Lebanese dishes overlooks the library, research center, administrative headquarters, and a small coffee shop selling excellent coffee and Lebanese graibe pastries. 103. María Isabel Saldaña Villarreal et al., Elías Murra Marcos, historia de un esfuerzo: CIMACO (Torreón: Porrúa-­CIMACO, 2005), 36–37. 104. Martínez Assad, La casa de las once puertas. 105. Ibid., 38. 106. Ibid., 41. 107. Ibid., 94. 108. Pastor, “Inscribing Difference.” 109. Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 110. Of forty-­three authors of Latin American literature of Arab origin in Almalafa y caligrafía, a special issue of Hostos Review (the international journal of culture of the Latin American Writers Institute of Hostos Community College-­ CUNY) in 2010, nearly half—seventeen—are Mexican, and most are members of Al-­Fannan.



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Notes to Pages 212–214

111. Everyday interaction occurs through increasingly frequent intercommunity family gatherings and a handful of shared spaces (like the Deportivo Israelita) or events (like the Jewish Film Festival). 112. Parents relate increasing community and family pressure to place children in Jewish schools since the 1980s. Some estimate that over 80 percent of Jewish children in Mexico attend community schools, in marked contrast to earlier generations, the majority of whom attended schools as a function of socioeconomic profile. Interviews by the author, between 2006 and 2013, Mexico City.

Chapter 8 1. Conquistador anónimo. Relación de algunas cosas de la Nueva España, y de la gran ciudad de Temestitan, México: escrita por un compañero de Hernán Cortés, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman and trans. Joaquín García Icazbalceta (Mexico City: Alcancía, 1938), 41, 19, 85. “Solían tener los naturales de esta tierra bellísimas mezquitas, con grandes torres y habitaciones, en las cuales daban culto a sus ídolos y les hacían sacrificios. Muchas de aquellas ciudades están mejor ordenadas que las de acá, con muy hermosas calles y plazas, done hacen sus mercados.” 2. He also states that the locals were circumcised, “a manera de moro o judío.” Letter from Licenciado Alonso de Zuazo to Father Fray Luis de Figueroa, Prior de la Mejorada, about the New World of Yucatán Santiago de Cuba, November 14, 1521. Alonso de Zuazo, Cartas y memorias (1511–1539), ed. Rodrigo Martínez Baracs (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 2000), 188–189. On temples as mosques, see also Hernán Cortés, Cartas de relación, ed. Mario Hernández (Madrid: Historia 16, 1985). 3. On early Arab presence, see Roberto Marín Guzmán and Zidane Zeraoui, Arab Immigration in Mexico in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Assimilation and Arab Heritage (Mexico City: Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, 2003); and the work of Hernán Taboada and Mariam Saada. 4. Cristóbal Colón, Los cuatro viajes de Cristóbal Colon (Mexico City: Alianza Editorial, 2006). 5. Tenochtitlan was the capital of the Aztec empire in central Mexico, which fell to a Spanish-­led alliance in 1525. The colonial Spanish city, Mexico City, capital of the New Spain, was built on the razed “mosques” and palaces of Tenochtitlan. 6. See Alfonso Alfaro, Moros y cristianos: una batalla cósmica (Mexico City: Artes de México/CONACULTA, 2001). 7. My thinking owes much to Edward Said’s foundational definition in Orientalism, to postcolonial and subaltern studies, critical race studies, and feminism. My analysis in this chapter, based on fieldwork in Mexico City from 2003 to 2015, is in conversation with scholars working on American Islam and the Mahjars. See Shohat and Alsultany, Between the Middle East and the Americas; also see Hisham Aidi’s “Let Us Be Moors: Race, Islam, and ‘Connected Histories’”; and “Jihadis

Notes to Pages 214–215

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in the Hood: Race, Urban Islam, and the War on Terror,” in Black Routes to Islam (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009): 121–139 and 283–296, respectively. 8. James Clifford, “Review: Orientalism by Edward Said,” History and Theory 19, no. 2 (Feb. 1980): 204–223, 207. 9. The proliferation of new technologies ensures an increasingly mediated experience of the world, presenting the ethnographer with an explosion of cultural forms that escape national frames. On mobility of cultural forms, see Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2, No. 2 (1990): 1–24; Arjun Appadurai, “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology,” in Fox, Recapturing Anthropology, 191–210. On hybridity see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004); Ulf Hannerz, Exploring the City: Inquiries toward an Urban Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). The anthropology of globalization as an emerging subfield has addressed many of these transformations. On media industries, their impact on popular culture, and their links to state projects, see Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-­Lughod, and Brian Larkin, Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 10. On the political uses of Orientalism in the Argentinian Mahjar, see Christina Civantos’s excellent “Ali Bla Bla’s Double-­Edged Sword: Argentine President Carlos Menem and the Negotiation of Identity,” in Shohat and Alsultany, Between the Middle East and the Americas, 108–129. 11. On Spanish diplomatic instrumentalization of Al-­A ndalus, see Bernabé López García and Miguel Hernando de Larramendi, España, el Mediterráneo y el mundo arabomusulmán: diplomacia e historia (Barcelona: Icaria/Instituto Europeo del Mediterráneo, 2010). 12. On tropicalization see Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “Tropical Orientalism: Brazil’s Race Debates and the Sephardi Moorish Atlantic,” in The Middle East and Brazil: Perspectives on the New Global South, ed. Paul Amar, 119–161 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 13. Fieldwork in Mexico City, 2003–2007. 14. Fieldwork on belly-­dance teaching and performance; interviews with Giselle Habibi, 2016. For the United States, see Amira Jarmakani’s fabulous “They Hate Our Freedom but We Love Their Belly Dance: The Spectacle of the Shimmy in Contemporary US Culture,” in Shohat and Alsultany, Between the Middle East and the Americas, 130–152. 15. On the historical transformation of working-­class women’s leisure, see Kathy Lee Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-­of-­the-­ Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). 16. Camila Pastor, “Guests of Islam,” in Logroño, Pinto, and Karam, Crescent over Another Horizon. Contrast with Hisham Aidi’s discussion of conversion among US blacks as a strategy to exit the West.



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Notes to Pages 216–217

17. On Spanish Orientalism, see Víctor Lezcano, Africanismo y orientalismo español en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 1988). 18. Camila Pastor, “The Thousand and One Nights as Living Narrative: Transgressing the Boundaries of the Textual Tradition,” in One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the “Oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula, ed. Ignacio López-­Calvo, 212–231 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). On colonial fracture see Homi K. Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition,” foreword to Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon (London: Pluto Press, 1986). 19. M. Toussaint, Arte mudéjar en América (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1946). 20. Bernabé López García, Orientalismo e ideología colonial en el arabismo español (1840–1917) (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2011); José Antonio González Alcantud and Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra, El orientalismo desde el sur (Seville: Junta de Andalucía, 2006). 21. See Irene González, Spanish Education in Morocco, 1912–1956: Cultural Interactions in a Colonial Context (Chicago: Sussex Academic Press, 2015); López García and Hernando de Larramendi, España, el Mediterráneo; Miguel Hernando de Larramendi, Irene González, and Bernabé López García, El Instituto Hispano Árabe de Cultura: orígenes y evolución de la diplomacia española hacia el mundo árabe (Madrid: Agencia Española de Cooperación, 2015); Francisco Javier Martínez Antonio and Irene González, Regenerar España y Marruecos: ciencia y educación en las relaciones hispano-­marroquíes a finales del siglo XIX (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2011). 22. On Andalusi romanization, see María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002); and others. On current usage in foreign policy see Anna Ayuso, Camila Pastor, Miguel Fuentes, and Santiago Villar, “Actorness and Opportunities for Interregionalism between Arab Countries and Latin America and Caribbean,” in Interregionalism, ed. Andreas Schechter (New York: Springer Press [forthcoming]). On Brazil, see Karam, Another Arabesque. 23. On various uses of the Andalusi myth in Spain and Morocco, see the work of José Antonio González Alcantud, Eric Calderwood, and Sandra Rojo Flores in Andalusíes: historia cultural de una elite maghrebi, ed. José Antonio González Alcantud and Sandra Rojo Flores (Madrid: Editorial Abada, 2015). 24. Gustavo Barco, “La trata de blancas: el siniestro negocio de la esclavitud sexual,” La Nación, www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=976393, consulted November 7, 2008. 25. On Argentinian nineteenth-­century Orientalisms, see the work of Axel Gasquet. 26. Pastor, “The Thousand and One Nights.”

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27. José Guillermo Celis Romero, “Noches tapatías: desarrollo, auge y decadencia de la práctica cultural cabaretera en Guadalajara, 1942–1987” (Master’s thesis, Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico, 2014). 28. For an analysis of American fiction, see Hsu-­Ming Teo, Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012). 29. For a history of the myth of the white slave trade, see Jean Michel Chaumon, Le mythe de la traite, and Pastor, “Performers or Prostitutes?” JMEWS, July 2017. 30. The treaty is available on the Uruguayan presidential web page, www.presidencia.gub.uy, consulted November 2008. 31. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKj_KY3nEhY, consulted December 14, 2008. 32. “Los árabes son terribles. Era peligrosísimo, los árabes que raptaban muchachas para venderlas. Todo mundo te lo advertía cuando te ibas a Europa, era un fenómeno muy conocido. Mira, la prima de las Rodríguez era una muchacha guapisisísima, alta, muy blanca, con un pelo precioso. Estaba en París, un día salió a pasear y desapareció. Nunca volvieron a saber de ella; todos dijeron que la habían raptado para la trata de blancas. La habrán vendido al harem de algún sultán árabe—el caso es que desapareció, y así pasaba con muchas muchachas, las más bonitas—que no ves que les gustan blanquitas?” Interview with T. M. C., Mexico City, 2007. 33. Mirroring expulsion vulnerability in Mexico described in chapter 5. 34. Interview with M. A., Mexico City, July 2006. 35. This is particularly extreme in the case of Honduras, where descendants of migrants own nearly all the press, television, and radio providers. See Rick. J. Rockwell and Noorene Janus, Media Power in Central America: The History of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). For a comparative discussion of the process in Mexico and Honduras, see Camila Pastor, “Lo árabe y su doble: imaginarios de principios de siglo en Honduras y México,” in Contribuciones árabes a las identidades latinoamericanas, ed. Karim Hauser and Daniel Gil (Madrid: Casa Árabe, 2008). 36. Carlos Martínez Assad and Theresa Alfaro-­Velcamp have both discussed the role of Mashriqis in the Mexican film industry. See Martínez Assad, Memoria de Líbano (Mexico City: Océano, 2003); Alfaro-­Velcamp, “Peddling Identity: Arabs, Conflict, Community, and the Mexican Nation in the Twentieth Century” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2001). 37. Emile G. McAnany and Kenton T. Wilkinson, Mass Media and Free Trade: NAFTA and the Cultural Industries (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). 38. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism,” 304. 39. Steve Brennan, “Telemundo revives ‘El Clon’ for US Latino market,” Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/televisionNews/idUSN1256382420080513. Wiki en español, http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Clon, provides a list of all the national and regional networks on which O Clone was broadcast. Much has been



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Notes to Pages 222–228

written on Clonmania; see Shohat and Alsultany’s introduction to Between the Middle East and the Americas, 3–41; and Silvia Montenegro, “Telenovelas and Muslim Identities in Brazil,” in Amar, Middle East and Brazil, 259–278. 40. In both Colombia and Argentina, for example, 90 percent of the population own televisions; in Brazil 96 percent do, according to John Sinclair in Latin American Television: A Global View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3. In Mexico, 16 million of a total 19 million households do (ibid.). 41. Ulf Hannerz, “Notes on the Global Ecumene,” Public Culture 1, no. 2 (1989): 66–75. 42. McAnany and Kenton, Mass Media and Free Trade. 43. Interview with M. A., 2008, Mexico City. 44. On Islam in Europe, see Jocelyn Cesari, The Oxford Handbook of European Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Nilufer Gole, Islam and Public Controversy in Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013). 45. http://www.fox.es/dvd/nowithoutmydaughter/10140/. English text: http:// foxstore.com/detail.php?item=3930, consulted November 2008. 46. On American popular culture, see Evelyn Alsultany, “From Arab Terrorists to Patriotic Arab Americans: Representational strategies in post 9/11 TV Dramas,” in Shohat and Alsultany, Between the Middle East and the Americas, 153–175. 47. Donna Carlton, Looking for Little Egypt (Bloomington, IN: IDD Books, 1994). 48. Elías Antar, “La danse du ventre,” Saudi Aramco World, http://www.saudi aramcoworld.com/issue/197105/la.danse.du.ventre.htm; also Al-­Ahram Weekly, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/448/cu1.htm, consulted December 18, 2008. 49. See Amira Jarmakani, “Belly Dancing for Liberation: A Critical Interpretation of Reclamation Rhetoric in the American Belly Dance Community,” in Arabs in the Americas: Interdisciplinary Essays on the Arab Diaspora, ed. Darcy Zabel, 145–169 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006). 50. I attended the festival in June 2004. According to various websites, as of 2008 it is called the Belly Dance Carnival, http://scribblinggypsy.blogspot.com /2008/06/cairoer-­mecdas-­belly-­dance-­carnival.html. Also, see MECDA, http:// www.mecda.org/, consulted December, 14, 2008. 51. Participant observation in Mexico and Honduras. 52. See http://www.gildedserpent.com/articles21/brazilbdthania.htm for Brazil; http://www.shira.net/dir-­latinamerica.htm for a directory of Latin American teachers and performers. 53. http://kybraykay.blogspot.com/2008/07/1er-­congreso-­mexicano-­de-­dan za-­rabe-­y.html. 54. SHAKIRA ROMPE RECORD EN MEXICO! martes 29 de mayo de 2007, lasbeths.blogspot.com/2007/05/shakira-­rompe-­record-­en-­mexico.html, consulted November 9, 2008. 55. Interview with M. A., Mexico City, October 2008.

Notes to Pages 228–232

289

56. www.segundamano.com.mx/Distrito_Federal/DANZA_ÁRABE_APREN DE_A_/add28036914_14023 . . . /index2.aspx, consulted November 2008. 57. http://www.danza-­arabe.net, consulted November, 2008. 58. Ibid. 59. Women are often portrayed as classed through consumption: “Women make the stage as class subjects, it seems, when they represent consumption, not work,” Julie Bettie, Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 34. 60. Interview with M. A., Mexico City, October 2008. 61. “Danza del vientre de moda: baile sensual y gran figura,” reportaje de Univision, November 9, 2008. 62. For an excellent history of women performers in Egypt, see Karin van Nieuwkerk, A Trade Like Any Other: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). 63. Participant observation. Mexico City, 2005. 64. This specialized consumption of the Oriental was organized in the US since the late 1970s. See http://www.shira.net/styles.htm. Also see http://www .danza-­arabe.net, a specialized Mexican web portal where events such as festivals, tours, instructors, and “history” cluster. For an event example, see http://www .mozazdancefest.com/arabe.html. 65. http://www.mozazdancefest.com/arabe.html. 66. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Social Panorama of Latin America (Santiago, Chile, United Nations, 2008). 67. On consumption and women’s professional identities, perceived social mobility, see Freeman, High Tech and High Heels. 68. On the uses of media in political mobilization of resistance, see the literature on the late twentieth-­century Zapatista movement. 69. Though the category is often criticized as inherently exclusionary, in fact it is constitutive of the subaltern: “The idea of civil society in its usual sense . . . is itself tied to a normative sense of modernity and a narrative of necessary ‘development’ . . . which by virtue of its own requirements (formal education, literacy, nuclear family units, attention to party politics and business news, property or a stable income source) excludes significant sectors of the population from full citizenship. That exclusion or limitation is what constitutes the subaltern.” John Beverley, “The Im/possibility of Politics: Subalternity, Modernity, Hegemony,” in The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ileana Rodríguez, 47–64 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 70. Described in Euro-­American analyses and media portrayals as a military and/or terrorist organization, Hizballah emerged in the mid-­1980s as a militia in resistance to Israeli attacks and occupation of Shia areas in southern Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley. Since the end of the war it developed into a broader social movement, encompassing a political party with parliamentary representation that



290

Notes to Pages 232–233

coordinates hospitals, orphanages, broadcasts, and the provision of basic services to areas of Lebanon and Beirut. 71. I participated in these activities as part of my dissertation research. 72. See Robert W. Hefner, Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Karin van Nieuwkerk, “‘Veils and Wooden Clogs Don’t Go Together,’” Ethnos 69, No. 2 (2004): 229–246; Karin van Nieuwkerk, Women Embracing Islam: Gender and Conversion in the West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). 73. The CECM is hosted by a Pakistani Muslim, Mr. Niass, and developed through the efforts of Pakistani and Moroccan embassy personnel who were temporarily in Mexico and sought a space of worship. Interviews by the author in Mexico City, 2005. I thank Sherine Hamdy for guiding conversation on Muslim spaces of worship in Mexico City in the 1980s. The CCIM is headed by Omar Weston, a Mexican convert of British ancestry. 74. Conversion is also visible in Chiapas. See Zidane Zeraoui, El Islam en América Latina (Mexico City: Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, 2012). On conversion in Mexico City, see also Mark Lindley-­Highfield, “‘Muslimization,’ Mission, and Modernity in Morelos: The Problem of a Combined Hotel and Prayer Hall for the Muslims of Mexico,” Tourism, Culture and Communication 8 (2008): 85–96. 75. Pastor, “Guests of Islam.”

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Index

Page numbers followed by f indicate figures; those followed by t indicate tables. Abed family members, 33–34, 34, 158, 169, 170, 172t Aboul Hosn, Yustra, 199–200 Aboumrad family members, 40–41, 169, 170, 172t Abud, Salim (Selim), 47, 189, 192 Academia de Lengua Árabe, 162, 163t adab (literature and manners tradition), 194–195 Adj, Abd el. See Kuri, Domingo Ailhoud, Etienne, 76, 159–160 Alam family members, 61–62, 171t Aleppo: and anti-Jewish rioting, 31; and burning of Jewish spaces, 204, 208; and Jewish Mahjaris, 29, 43, 190, 203; and Mashriqi migrants, 90; in Nahda imagination, 145 Al-Fannan, the Centro Libanés Association of Artists and Intellectuals of Lebanese Origin, 184, 211–212, 283n110 Al-Ghurbal, 47, 74, 186, 192. See also periodicals Al-Hoda, 60, 61–62, 76. See also periodicals Alianza Monte Sinaí, 40, 87, 128, 192, 200 Al-Jawater. See Al-Khawater Al-Khawater: and blacklists, 106; and José Helú, 45, 47, 120, 209; and Antonio Letayf, 60, 74, 111; and

Líbano desde Fenicia, 186. See also periodicals Alliance Israelite Universelle, 47, 203 Al-Mashriq, 181–182, 272–273n25. See also Jesuits Almochantaf, Simón, 130–131 American Mahjars, 89–90, 185, 187, 237 American University of Beirut, 180, 187–188 Amin, Qassim, 136, 142 Anatolia, 48 al-Andalus, 214, 216, 254n99 anthropological history. See historical anthropology anthropology, 8, 10, 11–17 anti-Chinese riots, 77, 111, 113–114 antiglobalization activism, 215, 231– 232 anti-Semitism, 67, 114, 257–258n53 Arabic language: and Centro Libanés, 154; and Christians, 274n53; and Eastern Mediterranean, 2; and Eurocentric narrative, 135–136; and Mahjari notables, 66; and Mahjari schools, 162–163, 163t; and migrant education, 79; and Muslim institutions, 277n36; and Nahda, 144–145; and patron-client relationships, 81; in periodicals, 45–46, 74. See also Choueiry, Marie; specific schools



318

Index

Arab Jews, 5, 43–44, 90, 190 Arab League, 179, 181, 190 Arab modernism, 20, 82, 134, 135–137 Arab nationalisms, 2, 6, 48, 60, 134, 144, 180 Arab Orient, 21–22, 213, 239 Arabs: and anti-immigrant rhetoric, 102, 113, 115; and eugenics, 89–90; and Evolución histórica del Líbano, 182; expulsions of, 112; and Great Syrian Revolt, 77; and Historia de Líbano, 181; and Lebanese historians, 179–180; and migration restrictions, 93; and modernist imagination, 5, 20; in al-Musili’s account, 141–142; and Nahda, 134, 135, 144; and Orientalisms, 214– 215; and Phoenicianism, 28; racialization of as white, 143; representations of, 219–222, 224–226; and sexual slavery narrative, 217–218; and travel ban, 79 archives: and coloniality, 236; and community chronicles, 189, 203, 209; and Eddé’s histories, 183; and ethnographers, 14–15; and historians, 16; and particular Mahjars, 4 Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), 15, 35, 192 area studies, 12, 240 Argentina: and belly dance, 227; and community chronicles, 189; and Eddé’s histories, 182–183; and El Emir, 145; and Hamdan, 188; and Lebanese associations, 170; and Mahjar, 178–179, 254n99; and Mashriqi migrants, 3, 29, 32, 237; and Saadeh, 187; and television, 288n40 Armenians, 28, 77, 79, 93 Article 33 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution, 104, 110, 111–115 Arun family members, 32–33, 157t

Ashkenazi Jews, 43–44, 67, 177, 191, 206, 261n27 Assad, Nassario, 183, 184 Aued, Alfonso Negib: Cocina libanesa (1957), 177, 194–195; and El Emir, 271n1; Historia de Líbano (1945), 150, 178, 192; and Mahjari whiteness, 133; on Mashriqis and Spaniards, 148–149; and Phoenicianism, 147–150; works of, 180–181 Australia, 6, 42, 237 Ayub, Antonio, 58, 88, 120, 124, 130, 163–164, 172t Ayub, Pablo, 58, 124, 130 Ayub, Salomón, 124, 130 Ayub, Silvia. See Kuri de Ayub, Silvia Ba’ath Party, 187, 276n3 Baghdadi al-Dimachqui, Abdurrahman bin Abdullah al-, 139, 140, 142–144, 273n40, 273n42 Banca Asturiana, 106, 107 Banco Germánico (Germanic Bank), 104, 106, 107–109 Barquet, Norma, 184, 198, 204 Basha family members, 59–60, 171t Bchir, Antoine, 159–160, 161 Beirut: and Armenian refugees, 28; and Association for Mexican-­ Lebanese Friendship, 153; and family trajectories, 32; and Mashriqi migrants, 90; and Memoria de Líbano, 184, 185; Mexican consulate in, 42, 94, 278n43; Mexican perceptions of, 249–250n29; as point of departure, 3; and sericulture prosperity, 26; and Syrian Jews, 192 belly dance, 220, 226–231, 288n50 Beqaa, 28, 29, 182, 289–290n70 Betech de Duek, Bertha, 202, 208 Bey, Fazil, 137–139, 143 Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria), 26, 139, 144, 155

Index 319 Bitar, Abraham, 87–88 blacklists, 51, 55–59, 60–63, 104–105, 106, 130 Bojalil family members, 62, 157t, 171t Bokser de Liwerant, Judit, 191, 193 borders, 34, 48, 92, 154, 182 Bourge de Letayf, Guadalupe, 106, 107–109, 110, 163–164 Brazil: and al-Baghdadi travel account, 139, 142–144; and belly dance, 227; in Historia de Líbano (Nimeh), 151; and Islam, 273n42; and Leba­nese Union, 170; and Mahjar periodicals, 254n99; and Mashriqi migrants, 3, 237; and migration restrictions, 90; and national histories, 183, 187; and O clone, 222; and postcolonial modernism, 216; and Raoul Spitalier, 116; and television, 288n40 Briand, Aristide (French minister), 75, 121 British Palestine, 41, 49, 90, 155. See also Palestine Budib, Vicente, 157t, 158 Bujaidar, Antonio, 130–131 Bulhosen, Wadih, 31, 95–96 Bustani, Fouad Afram al-, 179–180 Cadmus, Universal Teacher (Cassab 1981), 186 Calles, Plutarco Elías (president 1924– 1928), 75, 110, 146, 161 Capitulations regime, 49, 73, 203 Cárdenas, Lázaro (president 1934– 1940), 102, 114–115, 128 Carranza, Venustiano (president 1917– 1920), 62, 87, 88, 123, 125 Cassab, Ulises, 178, 184, 185–186, 197– 198 Castro Farías, Enrique, 40, 178, 182, 190 Catholic Church, 161, 261n32. See also Christianity

census: and community directory genre, 189, 190; and itinerants, 66; of Lebanon and Mahjar (1921), 64, 67, 73, 105, 116; and mandate authorities, 51, 238; of Mexico (1895), 53. See also Charpentier, Maurice Central America: and directories, 189; and Kalimán’s popularity, 221; and media ownership, 287n35; and Mexican Mahjar, 17–18; and migrant elites, 66; and migration restrictions, 42, 89, 90; and mobility, 70; and Orientalisms, 213–214; and step migration, 31; and television, 222. See also specific countries Centro Cultural Islámico de Mexico, 232–233, 290n73 Centro de Comerciantes Mexicanos de la Merced, 114–115 Centro Educativo de la Comunidad Musulmana, 163t, 232–233, 290n73 Centro Libanés, 171–172t; and AlFannan, 184, 211–212; and charity associations, 163–164, 167–168; and education, 162; Glaciar location, 173–175; Hermés location, 156, 173, 174t; and Líbano desde Fenicia, 186; locations and membership statistics, 174t; on Mashriqis in Mexico, 44t; membership in, 154; naming of, 156, 172; and Phoenicianism, 153; and Ramas del mismo cedro, 192– 193; roots of, 169–170; and sectarianism, 232; and travel to Lebanon, 43. See also Lebanese League; Lebanese Union of Mexico Centro Mexicano-Palestino-Libanés, 174t, 175 chain migration, 5, 36, 44, 71 Chalet Josefita, 44–45 chambers of commerce, 156–157, 157t Chami, Neguib: and Druze Revolt, 158; and Francophile associations,



320

Index

59–60; and Lebanese institutions, 171t; and reparations, 126, 128, 129; and Syrio-Lebanese Chamber of Commerce, 157t charity and humanitarian associations, 82, 163–164, 168, 190 Charpentier, Maurice: and census report, 64–67, 82, 122, 158; and reparations, 130; and Raoul Spitalier, 116–119. See also census Cheban, Amin, 112–113, 124 Cheremonte, José, 46–47, 112 Chinese massacres. See anti-Chinese riots Chmouti, Elías Youssef Tannous, 46– 47 Choueiry, Marie, 162–163, 196. See also Arabic language Christian Arabs, 135–136, 144 Christianity: and Arabs in New Spain, 216; and charity associations, 164; and Eddé’s histories, 183; and Francophile associations, 58; and Mahjari notables, 47; and Ottoman travelers in Latin America, 139; as protection from expulsion, 114; and Ramas del mismo cedro, 193; and Vasconcelos’s vision, 146, 151–152. See also Catholic Church Christian Lebanese nationalism, 8, 27, 154, 176, 279n4 Christians: and Arabic language, 136; and Centro Libanés, 153–154; and denunciations of competitors, 56– 57; and French protégé status, 49, 55, 161–162; and Great Syrian Revolt, 77; and Guerra Cristera, 161– 162; and Hamdan’s text, 188; and immigration restrictions, 147; and Inquisition, 216; and mobility, 27; and Mount Lebanon governorate, 26; and al-Musili’s text, 141; and Nahda, 144; and Phoenicianism,

181; and tales of religious persecution, 24–25, 139–140, 209. See also Maronites; Melkites citizenship: and French mandate, 18, 68–76, 154–155; and Lebanese diaspora, 42–43; and Mahjari Jews, 67; and Mexican Revolution, 122–124; and mobility, 20, 34; and property, 84, 90, 99, 260n14; registry of, 105; Saadeh on, 188; and subalternity, 289n69; and women, 253n85 civil society, 188, 231–232, 289n69 class: and Centro Libanés, 175; and conversion to Islam, 233; and French mandate, 67; and Mahjari texts, 21; and migrant associational life, 239; and sericulture prosperity, 27; and social mobility, 154–155; and textual memory, 212; and transnational public sphere, 20; and women, 289n59 clientelism, 47, 81, 104, 115–116, 129, 155, 238. See also patronage; patronclient relationships; wasta Cocina libanesa (Lebanese food; Aued 1957), 177, 180, 194–195 Cohn, Bernard, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17 Colegio Árabe Español, 162, 163t Colegio de la Asunción, 162, 204 Colegio del Sagrado Corazón, 162 Colegio de México, 163, 198, 204 Colegio Hebreo Sefaradí, 197, 201 Colegio Patria, 162. See also Jesuits Colombia, 42, 89, 90, 221, 222, 288n40 colonialism: and al-Andalus, 216; and coloniality, 236; after the Great War, 48; and language choice, 241–242n6; and Middle American Orientalisms, 214; and Nahda, 135; and political boundaries, 16; and race, 83, 259n8 Colonization and Naturalization Laws of 1883, 84

Index 321 Comité Central Israelita de México, 191, 212 community archives, 186, 189 community chronicles, 8, 10, 176, 189, 281n43; Aporte libanés al progreso de América (Lebanese contribution to progress in the Americas; Castro Farías 1965), 182, 190; De Líbano a México (From Lebanon to Mexico, two volumes; Macluf and Díaz de Kuri 1994 and 2002), 191–192, 197–198, 191–192, 197–198; Historia de una alianza (History of an alliance; Mercado Atri 1999), 192; Ramas del mismo cedro (Branches of the same cedar; Arana Cervantes 2006), 192–193 confessionalism, 188. See also sect conscription, 24–25, 31, 75, 97, 116, 192, 248n9 consumption: and class, 22; and economic depression, 106; of food, 177, 178, 199, 200; and genres, 176, 239; and Mahjari merchants, 32; and Mahjari notables, 155; of the Oriental, 214–215, 226, 289n64; and return migration, 28; and television, 221–222; and women, 21, 228–231, 289n59 cookbooks: Bendichas manos: comida sefardí (Colegio Hebreo Sefaradí 1984–1985), 197, 201; Cocina libanesa (Lebanese food, Yitani 1988), 197; Comida Fácil (periodical), 196; El secreto de nuestra cocina (The secret of our cooking), supplement to Monte Sinaí, 200; and gender, 177, 239; and hidden diversity, 21; Identidad Monte Sinaí (Mount Sinai identity), supplement to Monte Sinaí, 200; La cocina de Ventura (Ventura’s kitchen; Barquet Socille 1982), 196; La cocina libanesa

(Aued 1957), 177, 180; Lo meshor de lo nuestro: un recorrido por la comida tradicional sefardí (The best of our cooking: routes through traditional Sefardi food), 201; and Mahjari women, 177; Manual práctico de cocina libanesa (Practical manual of Lebanese cooking; Manzur 1952), 194; of the Mexican Mahjar, 193– 202, 212; and migrant memory, 176; Recetario internacional y árabe (Las Primas 1984), 196; Sahtein ¡Provecho! Sabores de Líbano (Sahtein: bon appetit! Flavors of Lebanon; Mahmoud 2006), 200; Sefarad de ayer, hoy y mañana (Sefarad of yesterday, today, and tomorrow; Pérez, Levy, and Bejarano 2010), 200–202; and women’s associations, 168 Costa Rica, 92–93, 95, 168 credit economies, 5, 104 criollos: and Arab racialization, 216– 217; and class distinctions, 86; as colonizers and colonized, 17; defined, 271n6; and French schools, 162; and Mexican Revolution, 85; and postcolonial modernism, 133– 135; and Spain’s Arab history, 214 Crusades, 56, 181 Dabbah Askenazi, Isaac, 31, 191, 202, 203–204, 208 Dahdah, Najib, 178, 181–182, 183, 186, 190 Damascus: and child labor, 251n47; and Great Syrian Revolt, 277n29; and Jewish Mahjaris, 43, 47, 192; and Memoria de Líbano, 185; Mexican honorary consulate in, 253n87, 278n45; migrants from, 90; riots in, 25; and Shamis, 177 Dau, José, 62, 171t Dehesa, Teodoro A., 52–53



322

Index

Deir al-Qamar, 5, 25, 29, 45, 53, 105 Dejean, Viscount François, 57, 58, 60, 171t Delange, M., 125, 128 Díaz, Félix, 117 Díaz, Porfirio (president 1875–1910), 29, 80, 83, 87 Díaz de Kuri, Martha, 184, 191–192, 196, 199, 209 Dietrich, Marlene, 185, 217 directories, 189–190, 193, 251n59 domesticity, 156, 206 Douma (Duma), 4–5, 29, 88, 120, 243n14 Druze: Assad Salman and Wasela Abuali as, 100f; and Suleiman Akabani, 188; and Sultan al-Atrash, 160; as British clients, 271n10; and Centro Libanés, 154; and directories, 190; and Druze League, 158; and Evolución histórica del Líbano, 183; and French mandate, 75; and Great Syrian Revolt, 77, 113, 156– 161, 277n29; immigration restrictions on, 95–96; and Islamophobias, 47; and lack of textual memory, 212; Mexico City community of, 31; mobility of, 25; and Ottoman conscription, 31; as percentage of Lebanese Mexican Mahjar, 43; and Syrian Social Nationalist Party (PNSS), 277n36 Druze Revolt, 156–161. See also Great Syrian Revolt Duma. See Douma Dupuy, Alphonse, 117–118 Eastern Uniate churches, 140, 144– 145 economic crises, 81–82, 96, 101, 133 Eddé, Father Emile, 178, 182–183, 184, 186 education: and Christian Arabs, 135–

136; and civil society, 231; and confessionalism, 188; and French schools, 162; and Jewish Mahjaris, 43–44, 207; in Lebanon, 179–180, 254n100; and Mahjari mobility, 28; in Mashriq, 46; and Ottoman class structure, 27; and social mobility, 85; and subalternity, 289n69; and Western modernity, 39, 133–134; and women, 196 El Emir (1937–1967), 133, 145, 147, 149–150, 180–181, 192, 271n1. See also periodicals Elorduy, Aquiles, 126, 129 El Salvador, 34, 42, 89, 168, 170 Enderuni, Fazil-i, 137–139 Enemy Trading List. See blacklists Enlightenment, 83, 135 Estefano, Habib, 145 Estrada, Genaro, 117, 118 ethnography, 8, 11–15, 17, 214, 236– 237 eugenics, 80, 83–85, 89–90, 101–102, 261n35 Eurocentrism, 80–81, 134 European migrants, 80, 84, 89, 243n13, 260n16 exiles, 4, 39, 186, 192 expulsions: and Great Depression, 133, 238; and Great Syrian Revolt, 77; of Jews from Spain, 193; and Do‑ mingo Kuri, 62–63, 159; and Anto­ nio Letayf, 104, 110; of Mashriqis, 51, 79, 101; and Mexican nationalism, 111–115; and Mount Lebanon civil war (1860), 25; and political rivalries, 47–48; of Spaniards, 98, 146 Fadl, Nacif, 58, 59, 61 family business, 32–34, 36 Farah, Caesar, 140, 272–273n25, 273n26

Index 323 Father Chami (Melkite priest), 88– 89 Faysalistes and Emir Faysayl, 65, 160 Feminine University, 206 feminism, 13–14, 17, 284–285n7 fiction: Antología del cuento triste (Anthology of the sad short story, Jacobs and Monterroso), 204; Aquel amor (Macluf 2001), 191–192; Doce cuentos en contra (Twelve stories against, B. Jacobs 1982), 204–205; Gardens of Light (Maalouf ), 185; Las siete fugas de Saab alias El Rizos (The seven disappearances of Saab, alias Curly; B. Jacobs 1992), 205; Las tierras prometidas (The promised lands; Nissán), 206; “La vez que me emborraché” (That time I got drunk, B. Jacobs 1982), 205; Los viajes de mi cuerpo (My body’s travels; Nissán 1999), 206; “Retrato conjetural” (Conjectural portrait, B. Jacobs 1982), 205; Si hubiera mar . . . (Macluf 2007), 192; Sucedió en Alepo (It happened in Aleppo; Hamui Sutton 2004), 208; “Tía Luisita” (Aunt Luisita; B. Jacobs 1982), 205 fieldwork, 13, 15, 284–285n7 film industry, 174, 220–221, 226, 287n36 films: El baisano Jalil (The countryman Jalil, 1942), 221; El barchante Neguib (The berchant Neguib, 1945), 221; El callejón de los milagros, 221; El mago (The magician, 1949), 221; Las mil y una noches (One Thousand and One Nights, 1957), 221; Lawrence of Arabia, 184; Midaq Alley (Mahfouz) adaptation, 221; Morocco (1930), 217; Not Without My Daughter (1990), 225 film stars: Cantinflas (Mario Moreno),

221; Gary Cooper, 217; Sally Field, 225; Tin Tan, 221 First World War, 3, 40, 46. See also Great War Flores, Amalia, 130–131 Fomento Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA), 197–198 food: and construction of memory, 178, 197–198, 202; in fiction, 205– 208; in memoir, 203–204, 208; as practice of remembering, 279n2; as threshold to memory, 209–211 Foreignness and Naturalization Law of 1886, 84. See also Law on Foreignness and Naturalization France: archives in, 6–7, 15, 236; and citizenship, 68–76, 119; and colonialism, 52; as colonial power, 234; and diasporic networks, 2; and French language, 46; and geopolitics, 47; and headscarf controversy, 224; and Mashriqi migrants, 3; and migrant class axis, 66–67; and Mount Lebanon, 248n18; and patron-client relationships, 81; popular culture in, 12; and repatriation, 96–98; and José Slim, 120–122. See also French mandate Franco-Mexican Claims Commission (and Reparations Commission), 105, 125 Francophiles, 65–67, 129–130, 158, 169, 237, 255n107 French Chamber of Commerce, 56, 57, 118, 128 French consulates: and blacklists, 56; and Druze Revolt, 159–160; and intrigue, 115–119; and Antonio Letayf, 104; and Mahjari associa­ tions, 63–64; on Mahjari business, 91–92; and Mexican nationalism, 114; and Mexico’s refusal of “Semitic races,” 92–93; and 1921



324

Index

Lebanon census, 64; and passport issuance, 68, 117–118; and protégés in Mexico, 52–53, 55, 69; and regulation of mobility, 71; and translators, 258n68 French language, 46 French legation: and citizenship registration, 74, 123–124; and Mahjari notables, 59–60; and Mahuad expulsion, 63; and reparations, 126, 128, 131–132; and Raoul Spitalier, 116, 119 French mandate: authorities of, 122, 183; and citizenship, 72–73; and collaborators, 51; discouragement of emigration by, 34; and Great Syrian Revolt, 76–77, 113, 157–161; Lebanon and Syria under, 3; and Mahjaris, 235–236, 237–238; and Mashriqi migrants, 47; and Mexican Mahjar, 104–105; and migrant flows, 41; and migrant loyalty, 67; and migrant mobility, 48–49; and migrant protections, 68–69; and migration restrictions, 50, 262n40; and mobility, 6; and partition, 45; and reparations, 124–125, 131– 132; and repatriation, 96–98; and social mobility, 154–155. See also France French merchants, 27, 53, 56, 91 Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú, 200, 283n102 fusha (formal, literary register of Arabic), 156, 198 Gabriel, Alejandro, 45, 58, 59, 60 Gastine, José, 59, 60–61, 106, 171t gastronomy, 197–199 gender: and community institutions, 156; and confessional identities, 10– 11; and conversion to Islam, 233; in Egypt, 136; and food preparation,

178; in Mahjari fiction, 205; and Mahjari notables, 234; and migrant occupations, 36; and Orientalisms, 22, 217, 220; and sericulture prosperity, 26; and subalternity, 13–14, 214; and terrorist portrayals, 224; and youth organizations, 164 geopolitics, 17, 47, 51, 236 Germanic Bank. See Banco Germánico Germanophiles, 57–58, 65–66, 67, 104, 106, 130 Germanophilia, 47, 71 Germany, 42, 55, 65, 83, 106 Gibran, Kahlil, 184, 188, 198 globalization, 10, 191, 215, 222, 231–232, 285n9 Gojman, Alicia, 189 González Ortega, José, 108, 110 Gorayeb, Jorge, 122–123, 124 Granat, Jacobo, 87 Great Depression, 5, 19, 85, 96, 133 Greater Lebanon, 45, 70, 121, 181, 241n4 Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham), 26, 46, 139, 159, 182, 187. See also Syria Great Syrian Revolt (1925–1927), 71, 76–77, 113, 157, 161, 250n32, 277n29. See also Druze Revolt Great War: and blacklists, 104–105, 106, 130; and denunciations, 77, 112; and French military administration, 48; and Mahjari notables, 71; in the Mashriq, 40; and mobility, 3, 237; and surveillance, 19–20, 55–59, 238. See also First World War; World War I Greek Orthodox: and Aboumrad family, 41; and Centro Libanés, 154, 155–156; and charity associations, 168; and Druze Revolt, 161; and French mandate, 75; as Germanophiles, 65, 67; and Historia

Index 325 de Líbano, 180; and Hizballah, 232; and Homs, 5; and Las Primas, 196– 197; and migrant associational life, 239; and naming of Centro Libanés, 172; Palestinians as, 66, 112; as percentage of Lebanese Mexican Mahjar, 43; Syrians as, 21, 29; and Syrian Social Nationalist Party (PNSS), 277n36 Guatemala: and anti-Levantine campaign, 79–80; and delinquent migrants, 70; and Lebanese embassy in Mexico City, 168; and Mashriqi migrants, 17–18, 23; and migration restrictions, 42, 89; and al-Musili’s travel account, 141; and reparations, 130 Guerra Cristera (Cristiada), 161 Guha, Ranajit, 11, 12, 13 Haddad, Alfredo, 53, 57 Hage, Ali Mohammed al-, 1–2 Haiti: and French protection, 55; and Lebanese embassy in Mexico City, 168; Mahjari population in, 35; and Mashriqi migrants, 3, 17–18, 92–93, 237; and migration restrictions, 42, 89; and step migration, 31, 34; and Zahlani merchants, 29 Hajj, Georges, 96–97 Halabi (Halebi) Jews, 31, 32, 177, 204, 207 Hamdan, Hisham, 178, 188 Hamui de Halabe, Liz, 190 Harfusch, Amado and Said, 63, 157t Harp Helú, Alfredo, 203, 208–209 Hashemite Arab uprising, 40 Hawran plain, 25, 28–29 Hayek, Salma, 220, 221 Helú, José, 45, 47, 106, 120, 126, 208– 209 Henaine, Elías, 169, 170, 172t Historia de Líbano (History of Leba‑

non, Aued 1945), 133, 150, 178–179, 180–181. See also Mahjari national histories Historia de Líbano (History of Lebanon, Nimeh 1945), 150–151, 178–180. See also Mahjari national histories Historia de una alianza (History of an alliance; Mercado Atri 1999), 192 historical anthropology, 6, 8, 11–17, 236 Hitti, Philip, 183, 186, 192 Hizballah, 43, 232, 289–290n70 Honduras: and El Emir, 145; fieldwork in, 15; and Lebanese embassy in Mexico City, 168; and media ownership, 287n35; and migration restrictions, 42, 89; and step migration, 32 housewives, 35–36, 113, 203–204 Imágenes de un encuentro (Images of an encounter; Bokser 1992), 191, 193 immigration: and eugenics, 80, 84–85, 89–90; and fear of competition, 53, 101–102; legislation regarding, 262n42; Mexico’s documentation of, 35; Mexico’s restrictions on, 19, 79, 92–95, 147; and nation-states, 10 import-substitution policies, 85 Indians (Native Americans), 86, 102, 141–142, 210, 213 Inquisition, 191, 216 Iranian Revolution (1979), 223–224 Iraq, 46, 47, 195, 224, 225, 226, 231 Islam: and Arab Spring, 188; in Aued’s history, 181; and clonmania, 222; conversion to, 22, 215, 232–233, 285n16, 290n74; and early travelers to the Americas, 139–140, 142– 144; and Mahjaris, 4; in Martínez Assad’s memoir, 185–186; and



326

Index

Nahda, 136, 144–145; practices of, 273n42; and Quran, 85; and terrorist portrayals, 217 Islamism, 215, 226, 231, 232–233 Islamophobias: and blacklists, 56; and class resentment, 114; and French mandate, 6, 19, 67, 104; and Great Syrian Revolt, 77; and Mahjari notables, 47; and Mahjaris, 217; and Mexican Revolution, 238; and reparations, 129–131; and representations of the Arab, 223–225 Israel: citizenship of, 67; and commensality, 202; and Hizballah, 43, 232, 289–290n70; and Jewish Mahjaris, 43–44; and Jewish migration, 42; and Lebanese civil war, 188, 224; and Mahjari Jews, 191, 204 Jacobs Barquet, Bárbara, 178, 202, 204–205 Jacobs Barquet, Patricia, 182, 184, 186, 197–198 Jebel Druze, 73, 74–75 Jessup, Henry, 4–5, 243n14 Jesuits, 20, 140, 162, 176. See also Al-Mashriq; specific Jesuit schools Jewish Mahjaris: and community cen‑ suses, 190; and community chronicles, 177; and community schools, 284n112; as economic migrants, 24; and food preparation, 200–201; and French mandate, 18, 41; institutions of, 43–44, 47; and life in Mexico, 79; and memoir, 202; and migrant associational life, 239; and migration pattern, 31; political neutrality of, 67 Jewish Syrians, 21, 54f, 156 Jews: and eugenics, 89–90; and exclusion from Mashriq, 82; and French protégé status, 49; in Mexico, 191; as “pernicious foreigners,” 104; as

politically neutral, 67; as targets of expulsion, 114 Jorge, Eusebio and Salomon, 53, 183 judeo-español language (ladino), 193, 201, 207 Kalimán (radio program and films), 221 Kassen, Elías Cheik, 139–140 Keis, Hussein, 159, 160 Kuri, Alejandro, 106, 108 Kuri, Domingo: and Lebanese League, 169, 172t; and Mahuad expulsion, 62–63; and migrant directories, 189; as migrant mediator, 44–45, 59, 159; and Syrio-­ Lebanese Union, 71, 73, 171t Kuri de Ayub, Silvia, 88, 163–164, 167 Kuri Primos y Sucesores, 106, 108 Kwetlis, 29, 88–89. See also Melkites ladino language ( judeo-español), 193, 201, 207 Lafkas, Mary and Stamatias, 56, 57 La France au Liban (France in Leba­ non), 56 Lagarde, Ernesto, 74, 75 Lammens, Henri, 182, 183 Latin American Mahjars, 4, 80, 133, 145, 170. See also specific countries Law on Foreignness and Naturalization, 100–101. See also Foreignness and Naturalization Law of 1886 Laws of Reform, 261n32 League of Nations: and Druze Revolt, 158, 159; and French mandate, 49, 50, 68–69, 70, 237; and mandates, 48; and Mashriqi migration, 24; Mexico’s entry into, 127; and migrant registration, 74, 169; and reparations, 124; and Syro-­ Palestinian Congress, 76 Lebanese Center. See Centro Libanés

Index 327 Lebanese Chamber of Commerce, 77, 111, 127, 128, 276n9. See also SyrioLebanese Chamber of Commerce Lebanese citizenship, 43, 188, 253n85 Lebanese civil war (1975–1992), 5–6, 42, 186–187, 188 Lebanese embassy (Mexico City), 43, 44t, 168 Lebanese League, 64, 145, 158, 169– 170, 172t. See also Centro Libanés; Syrio-Lebanese League Lebanese Ministry of Education, 179– 180 Lebanese Mountain: and American Mahjars, 237; and diasporic networks, 2; and effects of World War I, 40; as geographical term, 241n4; and Maalouf family, 1; and Mashriqi migrants, 5; and Ottoman conscription, 31; and transatlantic journey, 3. See also Mount Lebanon Lebanese nationalism, 8, 27, 60, 176 Lebanese Nationalist Party, 77, 94 Lebanese National Museum, 186 Lebanese National University, 188 Lebanese Union of Mexico, 32, 169– 170, 278n48. See also Centro Libanés Lebanese University, 180, 188 Lebanon: economic reconstruction of, 43; and emigration, 3; and French mandate, 1, 48, 50, 70; and Leba­ nese associations, 170; and Mexican antiwar protests, 232; Mexican perceptions of, 249–250n29; 1921 census in, 64; and pan-Arabists, 46; and political power, 67; as Switzerland of Middle East, 42; and Treaty of Lausanne, 73 Lebanon League of Progress, 63–64, 171t Legion of Honor, 121, 122

Letayf, Alberto Bitar, 87–88 Letayf, Antonio: on citizenship registration, 74; and Germanophilia, 60, 67; legal troubles of, 103–104, 105–111; and Porfirian elite, 87–88. See also Al-Khawater Letayf, Georges, Latif, and Maron, 45, 105, 106 Ley de Relaciones Familiares (family ties law), 107–108 literacy, 42, 46, 93, 231, 254n102, 289n69 López Portillo, José, 186–187 Maalouf, Amin, 1, 4, 36, 39, 184, 185 Maalouf, Botros, 1–2, 39, 241n2 Maalouf, Gebrayel, 36, 39 Maalouf, Nazira, 1–2 Macluf, Lourdes, 191–192, 196, 199 Maguen David, 190–191, 201–202 Mahjari associations: al-Jama’iya alDiria fi al-Meksik (Sociedad Diranesa), 45; Asociación Camarina de México, 45, 250n40; Association for Mexican-Lebanese Friendship, 186; Committee for Syrian, Leba­ nese, and Palestinian Youth, 160f; and cookbooks, 194; and French consuls, 63–64; Islah Beit Mellet (Unión Akkarista de México), 45; Lebanese Medical Association of America, 179; Lebanese Pro-Allies and Free France Committee, 33; Liga Libanesa, 172t; Liga Libanesa de Yucatán, 171t; Liga SirioLibanesa-Palestina-Mexicana, 120; Mothers’ Committee of the Colegio Hebreo Sefaradí, 201; National Union of Mexican Youth of Lebanese Descent, 278n39; Sociedad Diranesa, 45; Sociedad Joseph Bey Karam, 45; Sociedad Libanesa, 170, 172; Sociedad Syrio Libanesa,



328

Index

61; Sociedad Unitaria Arábiga, 163t; Societé Syrio-Libanaise du Mexique, 60, 171t; Syrio-Lebanese Association, 59; Unión Akkarista de México, 45. See also Alianza Monte Sinaí; Centro Libanés; Maguen David Mahjari Jews. See Jewish Mahjaris Mahjari Muslims. See Muslims Mahjari national histories: Evolución histórica del Líbano (Historical evolution of Lebanon, Dahdah), 181–182; La lucha de mi vida por la educación y la paz (My life’s struggle for education and peace; Naffah 2000), 186–187; Lebanese Confessionalism in Citizenship and Conflict (Saadeh), 188; Lebanon in History (Hitti), 192; Líbano desde Fenicia (Lebanon since Phoenicia, Cassab 2006), 186; Líbano: en medio del juego y del doble discurso de las grandes potencias (Lebanon: between the game and the double discourse of the great powers, Hamdan 2012), 188; Memoria de Líbano (Memory of Lebanon; Martínez Assad 2003), 184–185. See also Historia de Líbano Mahjari notables: as absentee landlords, 250n33; and Alliance Fran­ çaise, 61; associational landscape of, 167; and blacklists, 56, 58; and Christianity, 47; claims to whiteness by, 19; and class distinctions, 82; clientelar culture of, 104; as collaborators, 51–52; as colonizers and colonized, 17; and community institutions, 155; and Druze Revolt, 158; and French consular authorities in Mexico, 60–61; and French protégé status, 105; and French support, 59; and Great Syrian Revolt, 71; and Mahuad expulsion,

62–63; and marginalizable Mahjaris, 238; as mediators, 72; and migration restrictions, 82; and Phoenicianism, 239; and reparations, 126, 128; and respectability, 32; and travel ban, 78; and treatment of marginizable Mashriqis, 18 Mahjaris: and administrative practices, 3–4; associational landscape of, 165–167, 275–276n2; and blacklists, 56; and charity associations, 163– 164; chronology of institutions, 247n55; defined, 2; and De Líbano a México, 192; demographics of, 64–66; and Druze Revolt, 157–158; ethnic representations of, 218–220; and French patronage, 84–85; and French protégé status, 52, 119–120, 126–127; and Guerra Cristera, 161–162; and Hizballah, 232; and immigrant narrative, 247–248n3; of Lebanese descent, 44t; literacy of, 46; and media ownership, 287n35; and media representations, 223; and Mexican Revolution, 122; mobility of, 28; and national-­ confessional boundaries, 211–212; and nationality, 72–76; occupations of, 37–38t; and patronage networks, 105; perceived as competition, 101–102; and postcolonial modernism, 134; and reparations, 126; and response to Vasconcelos, 146–147; and Spanishness, 217; and spatialization of class, 155; subjectivities of, 6; and textual memory, 211; ultranationalist threats to, 113–114; Vasconcelos on, 149–150; and whiteness, 81 Mahmoud, Najah Bouchakra and Nouhad, 184, 186, 190, 200 Mahuad, Emilio, 62–63, 71

Index 329 Maronite Church, 4, 181, 236, 274n58 Maronites: and Al-Huruades/Sucesos, 46; and blacklists, 56; and Centro Libanés, 153–154; and class distinctions, 82; and Druze, 157; and Druze Revolt, 161; and Evolución histórica del Líbano, 183; and expulsion of other migrants, 112; as Francophiles, 65, 67; as French clients, 271n10; and French mandate, 18; and French protégé status, 53; and Great Syrian Revolt, 76, 113; and Guerra Cristera, 161–162; and Historia de Líbano, 180; and histories of Lebanon, 178; and Hizballah, 232; as Mahjari majority, 47; and Maronite Ladies, 168; and Maronite Youth of Mexico, 278n39; and memoir, 202; and Memoria de Líbano, 184, 185; and migrant associational life, 239; and migrant flows, 36; migration to Mexico of, 5; and Mount Lebanon civil war (1860), 25; and Nahda, 144–145; and Ottoman collapse, 46; and Ottoman conscription, 31; and papal authority, 274n58; as percentage of Lebanese Mexican Mahjar, 43; priests of, 46, 79, 186; and Ramas del mismo cedro, 193; and Syrian Social Nationalist Party (PNSS), 277n36. See also Christians Martínez Assad, Carlos: foreword to De Líbano a México by, 199; as intellectual, 178; La casa de las once puertas (2015), 209–211; life and works of, 183–185; nostalgic histories by, 197–198; on Palestinian Christians, 209; writing preparation of, 202 Mashriq: and Alliance Israelite Universelle, 47; and Arab migrants, 90; and class, 82; and conscription, 97; defined, 2; demographics of,

43; and Franco, 216; and French hegemony, 234; and French mandate, 33, 48–51, 238; and French protégé status, 69; and geopolitics, 236; and Great Syrian Revolt, 76–78, 161; and late Ottoman Empire, 39; and mandates, 41; map of, 7f; and merchants, 28; migrants’ return to, 3; and migratory patterns, 35; and missionary education, 46; and mobility, 5–6, 154; and Nahda, 134, 135–137, 144–145; and national histories, 179–182; and normative memories, 211, 239; and Ottoman legislation, 34; and representations of the Arab, 218; and return migration, 68, 237; and step migration, 31; and Treaty of Lausanne, 72–73; and World War I, 40; and World War II, 42 Mashriqi migrants: and collapse of Ottoman Empire, 90; and criollos, 134; estimated numbers of, 35t; first appearance in Mexico of, 23; and French mandate, 64–65, 66; and French migrants, 53; and Mexican national history, 8–9; and migration restrictions, 42; and modernist imagination, 136–137; and naturalization, 111; and the New World, 4; from Syria, 43 Mashriqis: as authorized immigrants, 90–91; in Central America and the Caribbean, 17–18; as conquerors, 148; defined, 2; and exclusion of destitute migrants, 82; expulsions of, 112, 114; Guatemalan campaign against, 79–80; and immigration restrictions, 93–94; as merchants, 32; and mestizaje, 152; and Mexican Revolution, 86–87; and migration restrictions, 89–90; and Phoenicianism, 27; and reparations, 125;



330

Index

and trade between North and Latin America, 40 media, 222–223, 287n35 Melkites: as Francophiles, 65, 67; and Guerra Cristera, 161–162; and Kuri de Ayub, 88–89; migration to Mexico of, 5; and papal authority, 274n58; as percentage of Lebanese Mexican Mahjar, 43. See also Christians; Kwetlis memoirs, 176, 178, 202; Esperanza y realidad (Hope and reality, Dabbah 1982), 203–204; La casa de las once puertas (The house with eleven doors, Martínez Assad 2015), 184, 209–211, 252n71; Las hojas muertas (The Dead Leaves; B. Jacobs 1987), 205; Pepe y Nena (Miguel Afif family memoir), 209; Rachelle: las voces del destino (Rachelle: the voices of destiny, Betech 2005), 208; and Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, 205 memory studies, 12, 13–14, 279n1 merchants: and class disparities, 66– 67; and Great War blacklists, 56– 59; among Mashriqi migrants, 35–36; and Mexican Revolution, 86–87; and migration restrictions, 89, 99 mestizaje, 152, 214–215 mestizos, 85–86, 102, 216 Meuregh, M., 73, 74 Mexican Constitution (1917), 102, 104, 110, 111–115, 161 Mexican Department of Migration, 93 Mexican Mahjar: and 1921 census, 116; associational landscape of, 60–64, 155; and Centro Libanés, 154; and colonial modernisms, 6; and community chronicles, 176–177, 189; and concurrent jurisdictions, 104– 105; and creation of Israel, 42; de-

fined, 2; and French mandate, 18; and French protégé status, 49– 50; and literary production, 177– 178; and mobility, 234–235; and Nahda, 144–145; notables of, 23; and Orientalisms, 213–214; and patron-client relationships, 19–20, 81; and postcolonial modernism, 133–135; as regional Mahjar, 4; as transnational, 17–18 Mexican Orientalisms: and consumption, 22, 213–215, 240; and cookbooks, 194; and horizontal Orientalism, 217; and Mahjari diversity, 17; and mandate-era understandings, 6; and NAFTA, 223. See also Orientalisms Mexican Revolution: and expulsion of Spaniards, 146; and Jewish Mahjaris, 192; and Mahjaris, 18–19, 80, 238; and migrant flows, 39–40; and reparations, 105, 125–129 Mexican Secret Service, 111, 115 Mexico: and diasporic networks, 2; and French protégés, 52; and “good immigrant” story, 9–10; and Mahjaris, 5–6; and Mashriqi migrants, 3; and migrants seeking French protégé status, 53; and migration restrictions, 42, 90; nationalization criteria of, 42–43; and patronclient relationships, 81; and postrevolutionary migration policies, 98–101; and refusal of “Semitic races,” 92–93; and Turkey, 75 Mexico City: and antiglobalization activism, 231–232; and Arabiclanguage schools, 163t; and belly dance, 230–231; and Centro Libanés, 173, 174t; and Charpentier census, 65; and family trajectories, 32; and Guerra Cristera, 161; and Jewish Mahjaris, 44; Leba­nese

Index 331 embassy in, 43, 168–169; Leba­ nese leagues and unions in, 171– 172t; and Mahjari Jews, 44; and ­mandate-era migration, 41; and Melkite church, 88–89; and migrant chambers of commerce, 157t; migrant settlement in, 36; and spatialization of class, 155 migrants: and administrative practices, 3–4; and business, 243n10, 252n63; and class disparities, 65–66; and community chronicles, 176–177; and diasporic networks, 4; and difference, 236; and directories, 189– 190; diversity of, 10; in early twentieth century, 18; as entrepreneurs, 84; as focus of analysis, 235; and Lebanese embassy, 168; and literacy, 73–74; and local merchants, 77–78; and media representations, 223; and migration restrictions, 82; and the nation-state, 9; and 1921 Lebanon census, 64; occupations of, 35–36; and Ortiz Rubio administration, 99; perceived as competition, 101–102; and performance of the Orient, 227; political theories of, 244n23; as protégées of France, 69–70; recruitment of, 72; and reparations, 126; terms used by, 253–254n90 Miguel Afif family, 189, 209 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Paris), 52, 69, 71 Ministry of Foreign Relations (Mexico City), 101, 111, 128 Ministry of the Interior, 94, 110, 112– 113 missionary education, 27, 28, 46, 254n100 Mixed Franco-Mexican Claims and Mixed Allocations Committees, 58, 128

mobility: and diasporic networks, 4; and difficulty of tracking migrants, 34; framed through national histories, 9; and French mandate, 50, 68; and industrialization, 2–3; and Mahjaris, 5–6; and Mexican Mahjar, 234–235; mythology of, 8; regulation of, 70–71; and step migration, 31; studies of, 16, 242n7, 244n20; and transhumance, 48 modernism, 20, 82, 133–135, 144. See also Nahda (1860–1920) modernity: and belly dance, 227–228; and civil society, 289n69; and Eurocentric narrative, 133–134; and gender, 156, 205; and headscarf controversy, 224; and Mahjari notables, 20; and Memoria de Líbano, 185; and Nahda, 135, 144– 145; and Ottoman reforms, 23, 24–29; and racial ideologies, 81 Moukarzel, Naoum, 61–62, 76 Mount Lebanon: in Aued’s history, 181; and civil war, 25; demands for autonomy of, 61–62; in Eddé’s histories, 183; and food, 210; governorate of (1861), 26, 249n18; in Martínez Assad’s memoir, 184– 185; and Memoria de Líbano, 185; as Ottoman administrative unit, 241n4; as refuge for oppressed minorities, 281n36. See also Lebanese Mountain Murra Marcos, Elías, 203, 209 Musi, Rafael, 173, 175 Musili, Elias al-, 139, 140–142 Muslims: and blacklists, 56, 57; in Brazil, 142–143; and Centro Libanés, 154; as economic migrants, 24; and exclusion from Mahjar, 82; French targeting of, 237; and lack of textual memory, 212; and Memoria de Líbano, 184–185; and Mexican



332

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antiwar protests, 232; and Ottoman reforms, 248n11; Ottoman restrictions on migration of, 249n21; as percentage of migrants, 41; as “pernicious foreigners,” 104; as politically neutral, 67; as targets of expulsion, 114 Naff, Alixa, 27–28 Naffah, Joseph, 184, 186–187 Nahda (1860–1920): defined, 241n5; and Eurocentric narrative, 135–137; and global hierarchies, 5; ideologies of, 144–145; and Latin America, 20; and Mahjari national histories, 176; and modernist imagination, 2; and al-Musili’s text, 140; and nationalist narrative, 133– 134; and representations of Latin American populations, 239. See also modernism Najm, Jacques, 186, 189, 192 Nasr, Julián, 157t, 189, 192 Nassar brothers, 57, 58–59, 130 national histories: and academic canon, 189; and confessional and class difference, 21, 212; and historians, 16; and independent Lebanon, 211; as masculine genre, 176, 194; and mobility, 9; preservation of, 177; and study of Mahjar, 3, 234. See also specific texts National Institute of Migration, 35, 43 nationalism: and criollos, 80–81; and decolonization, 133; denaturalization of, 16; and Mexican Mahjar, 214–215; and migration restrictions, 82; and national histories, 176; varieties of, 60 nationality: and Centro Libanés, 169, 175; and class disparities, 82; and denunciations, 56; and employment practices, 102; and French

mandate, 69, 72–76, 126; and immigration restrictions, 147; Lebanese policy regarding, 43; and migrant registration, 99 National Pact, 111–115, 188 National Reclamations Commission, 124, 125 National Registry (of Foreigners and Migrants), 35–36, 99, 237 naturalization, 84, 100–101, 111 New Age, 226, 229, 230 Nicaragua, 89, 168 Nimeh, William: Historia de Líbano (1945), 150–152, 178, 192; and Mahjari whiteness, 133; and Sociedad Diranesa, 45; works of, 179–180 Nissán, Rosa, 178, 202, 206–208 North American Mahjar, 4, 18, 29, 40, 61–62, 158, 180 Nuñez, Julián, 130–131 oral history, 176–177, 189, 192 organized labor, 101, 102, 112, 115, 188 Orientalisms: and belly dance, 226; and colonization, 259n9; and cookbooks, 194; and exclusion of Spain from Europe, 216; and French mandate, 104; of imperial powers, 21; and Mashriqi diversity, 17; and Mashriqi migrants, 19, 91–92; and media representations, 223; and Memoria de Líbano, 184; and Mexican Mahjar, 213–214; and Mexican racial ideologies, 81; and Orientalization, 6, 93; and repatriation, 98; and representations of the Arab, 239–240; as resistance, 22. See also Mexican Orientalisms Orientalists, 20, 144, 182, 183, 184, 187, 199, 216 Orthodox Church, 163, 166–167, 186 Ottoman Arab provinces, 5, 16, 24 Ottoman Empire: collapse and par-

Index 333 tition of, 41; discouragement of emigration by, 34; and Evolución histórica del Líbano, 182; and French mandate, 18; and French protégé status, 49–50; and Great War sympathies, 55; and Jewish populations, 203; and Mahjaris, 235–236; and Mashriqi migrants, 90; and migrant flows, 36; and millets, 25; and Sociedad Syrio Libanesa, 61; and Young Turks, 39 Ottoman modernity, 6, 23, 24, 136. See also Ottoman reform Ottoman navy, 29, 140 Ottoman reform, 18, 133, 237. See also Ottoman modernity Ottoman sexuality, 138–139, 217 Palestine: and absentee landholders, 28; and British army, 40, 252n73; negative valence of, 155–156; and pan-Arabists, 46. See also British Palestine Palestinians, 112, 184–185, 209, 232 pan-Arabists, 46–47, 181 Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), 232 passports, 43, 59, 61, 68–72, 93, 262– 263n49 Patriarchs, 182–183 patronage: and community institutions, 155; and Mexican Mahjar, 81; and migrant elites, 87; and racial equivalencies, 18–19, 80; and sectarianism, 271n10. See also clientelism patron-client relationships, 19, 250n43. See also clientelism; wasta Pechkoff, Zinovi, 76 peddlers, 65–67, 80, 82, 106 Périer, Jean (French consul): and alleged French passport racket, 118; and citizenship registration,

75–76; and Druze Revolt, 158, 160; on French protégé status, 52; and Great Syrian Revolt, 77; and Guerra Cristera, 161–162; on Mahjari business, 91; on Mahjari fears of deportation, 94; and Mahuad expulsion, 63; on Mashriqis in Mexico, 85, 86; on Meuregh’s role, 73; and reparations, 125; and repatriation, 97–98; and José Slim, 121, 122; and Raoul Spitalier, 116, 117; and Syrio-Lebanese Chamber of Commerce, 157 periodicals, 254nn98–99; Al-Etedal, 106; Al-Huruades/Sucesos, 46; AlItihad al-Suri (United Syria), 46; Al-Kadaa, 46; Al-Rafiq, 74; AlRakib, 77; Al-Sharq, 45; Courier Franco-Mexicain, 73; Courrier Français du Mexique, 60; Diario Era Nueva, 46; Echo Français, 60; El Correo de Oriente, 46–47, 112–113; El Redondel, 87–88, 261n29; El Universal, 179, 190; Enlace judío blog, 201– 202; Greater Lebanon, 47; Havas Agency, 158; La Criba/Al-Ghurbal, 47; La Unión, 113; Le Temps, 56; Monte Sinaí (2004–2012), 200; Nuestro sazón (Our flavor), supplement to Monte Sinaí, 200; Saut al-Meksik, 45; Syria Unida, 61; Vida Nueva, 45–46. See also Al-Ghurbal; Al-Hoda; Al-Khawater; El Emir (1937–1967) Phoenicianism: absence of, in community chronicles, 177; as alternative to Arabism, 279n4; and Christian Lebanese nationalism, 27; and Charles Corm, 180, 182; and Georges Corm, 183, 186; and criollos, 238; and De Líbano a México, 192; and Eurocentric narrative, 133; and Evolución histórica del Líbano,



334

Index

182; and Historia de Líbano, 150–152, 180, 181; and La lucha de mi vida por la educación y la paz, 187; and Lebanese migrants, 21; and Leba­ nese nationalism, 8; and Líbano desde Fenicia, 186; and Mahjari national histories, 176; and Mahjari notables, 239; and Maronite Mahjari chronicles, 189; and Maronite vision of the Mahjar, 153; and Memoria de Líbano, 185; and trading, 28–29 political affiliation, 20, 46, 154–155 political parties, 46, 76, 187, 277n36 Porfirian elites, 83, 162, 255n107 postcolonial global, 236 postcolonial literature, 245n27 postcolonial nationalisms, 16–17 postcolonial scholarship, 15–16 postcolonial studies, 12–15, 17, 246n46 Rabbat, Antun, 140, 272–273n25, 273n26 race: in Aued’s History, 181; and class disparities, 82–84, 86, 90; equivalencies of, 18–19; and European migrants, 260n16; and Lebanese whiteness, 95; and Mashriqi migrants, 134, 147, 236; and migrant registration, 99; and migration restrictions, 101–102; and nationality, 89; and Orientalisms, 91–92, 215; and transnationalism, 240; and Vasconcelos’s vision, 146, 149–150 racialization: and class distinctions, 81; and immigration restrictions, 93; and Mahjaris, 5, 80; and nationalist narrative, 262n46; and Porfiriato, 83 Rahaim family members, 57, 59, 60, 122 Red Cross, 62, 71 refugees, 25, 28, 48

religious minorities, 25, 166–167 religious persecution, 24–25 remittances, 50–51 Renan, Ernest, 182, 271n3 reparations, 105, 125–129 repatriation, 96–98 return migration, 9, 48, 51, 68 Reynaud family members, 114, 116 Rihbany, Abraham, 27–28 Rustum, Asad, 179–180 Saadeh family members, 178, 187–188 Saba family members, 44, 123–124 Sabag family members, 41f, 132f Saenz, Aaron (minister), 77, 118 Saint Joseph University, 180, 187. See also Jesuits Samra, May, 201–202 Second World War. See World War II sect: and Centro Libanés, 175; and class disparities, 82; and clientelism, 271n10; and Druze Revolt, 160–161; and Hizballah, 232; and migrant associational life, 239; and Mount Lebanon civil war (1860), 25–26; and social mobility, 154– 155; and textual memory, 212; and transnational public sphere, 20. See also confessionalism Sefarad de ayer, hoy y mañana (Sefarad of yesterday, today, and tomorrow; Pérez, Levy, and Bejarano 2010), 193, 201 Sefardis, 177 Sefra dayme: cien años de cocina judeodamasquina en México (Sefra dayme: One hundred years of Judeo-­Damascene cooking in Mexico, Alianza Monte Sinaí 2012), 200–202 Sephardi Jews, 43–44, 76, 243n17 sericulture, 27, 28 Shakira, 220, 227–228

Index 335 Shia, 43, 47, 66, 112, 154, 165f Shorashim (Roots), 200, 282n71 Shouf, 5, 25, 29 Simon family members, 77, 168, 171t slavery, 25, 143 Slim, Carlos, 122, 192, 198 Slim, José, 120–122, 267–269n60 Slim, Julián: and Cámara de Comercio Libanesa, 157t; and Leba­nese League, 169, 172t; and Leba­nese Nationalist Party, 94–95; and legal issues, 114–115, 267–269n60, 267n59; as model mandate subject, 120; and reparations commission, 128, 129; and Carlos Slim, 122 Slim, Pedro, 58, 59 Smeke, Emilio, 128 social memory, 21, 239, 279n1 social mobility, 6, 20, 85, 154, 239 Soumaya Museum, 198 Spain: and Arab heritage, 216–217; and colonialisms, 214, 216; and expulsion of Jews, 193; and al-Musili’s text, 140; and Orientalisms, 21, 239–240; and Phoenicianism, 147, 148–150 spatialization, 44, 155, 166 Spitalier, Raoul: and Maurice Charpentier, 116–119; and citizenship registration, 73, 74–75, 76; and Druze Revolt, 159; and Mahjari notables, 72; and passport issuance, 71. See also Veracruz step migration, 31, 34 Stoler, Ann Laura, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17 subalternization, 13–14, 19–20, 134– 135, 144, 223, 246n46 subaltern studies, 10–11, 12, 13–14, 284–285n7 Sunni Muslims, 43, 47, 154, 249n21 Syria: and Hafez al-Assad, 185; and community chronicles, 193; and conscription, 75; demographics of

migrants from, 251–252n61; and effects of World War I, 40; and emigration, 3; and food preparation, 195; and French mandate, 1, 33, 48, 50, 68–69; and French protection, 126; and geopolitics, 276n3; and lack of diplomatic mission in Mexico, 169; and Leba­nese national histories, 179–180; and Mahjari notables, 105; and migration restrictions, 92; and Nahda, 144–145; negative valence of, 155– 156; and pan-Arabists, 46; and terrorist portrayals, 226; and Treaty of Lausanne, 73; and urban migration, 90. See also Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham) Syrian Jews, 115, 128, 261n27 Syrian nationalism, 60, 61 Syrian Protestant College, 180 Syrians: and census report, 64; and Centro Libanés, 154, 156; and erasure from Mahjar, 169; and exclusion from reparations, 129; expulsions of, 114; and French protégé status, 53, 55, 127; as Germanophiles, 65, 67; as invisible Mahjaris, 21, 239; and lack of textual memory, 212; and Lebanese League, 169; and Mexican migration, 253n87; and migrant associational life, 239; migration patterns of, 27–28, 84; and migration restrictions, 77, 79, 92–95; mobility of, 75; and Nahda, 144–145; as percentage of Mashriqi migrants, 43; and return migration, 97; and Syrio-Lebanese Union, 71; and travel ban, 61, 72 Syrian Social Nationalist Party (PNSS), 187, 277n36 Syrio-Lebanese Chamber of Commerce, 73, 128, 157, 158, 160. See also Lebanese Chamber of Commerce



336

Index

Syrio-Lebanese League, 64–65, 66. See also Lebanese League Syrio-Lebanese Union, 60, 62–63, 71, 72, 73 Syro-Palestinian Congress, 76, 77 Tame, Nasta, 32–33 Tanzimat reforms, 25, 248n9 Tarikh-i Hind-i Gharbi (History of the West Indies), 137, 138 Tayah, Wadih Boutros, 185, 186, 199 telenovelas, 221–222 television, 173, 196, 221–222, 225, 288n40 Tellier, Félix, 74 Tenochtitlan, 213, 284n5 terrorism narratives, 224–226 third-worldism, 232–233 Thousand and One Nights, 185, 217 Trabulse family members, 59, 186, 189 Trad family members, 60, 158 translators, 258n68 transnationalism, 5, 9, 50, 81, 235–237, 239–240 transportation, 5, 30f, 94, 122, 263n52 travel narratives, 142, 178 Treaty of Lausanne, 72–73, 105, 123– 124 Tribuna Israelita, 43–44, 191, 212 Tribunal Superior de Justicia del Distrito Federal, 106–107, 109 Turkey, 61, 75, 92, 112, 193, 218, 251– 252n61 Turkification, 36, 136 Turkish independence, 72–73 Turks: in community chronicles, 209; expulsion of, 112; and Islamophobias, 98, 104; in Lebanese national histories, 144–145, 192; Mexican perceptions of, 219; and migration restrictions, 95, 102; mythology of, 8; and reparations, 126, 169

Uniate churches, 140, 144–145 Union Libanaise (Unión Libanesa), 60, 162, 163t, 171t Union of Mexican Merchants, 113– 114 United States: and anti-Arab/Muslim discourse, 42; and belly dance, 226; and deportations, 106; and eugenics, 261n35; and Great Syrian Revolt, 76–77; and Mashriqi migrants, 3; and migration restrictions, 42, 89; and poverty, 257n51; and representations of the Arab, 223–224, 239–240 Universidad Iberoamericana, 190, 198, 204. See also Jesuits Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), 163, 183, 190, 191, 204, 232 University of Saint Joseph. See Saint Joseph University urbanization, 85, 247n2 Vasconcelos, José, 85, 146–147, 149– 150, 151–152 Vasse, Lionel, 128, 129 Venezuela, 32, 89, 92–93, 189 Veracruz: and Atlantic trade, 247n1; and Domingo Kuri, 44, 62–63, 71, 73, 189; and Mahjaris, 112; and Mashriqi migrants, 23, 32, 37–38t; and migrant associational life, 171– 172t, 174t; and migrant chambers of commerce, 157t; and migrant registration, 74–76. See also Spitalier, Raoul wasta, 81, 88, 98, 120, 129, 163–164. See also clientelism; patron-client relationships whiteness: and Arab racialization, 141, 143; and colonialisms, 83; and domestic labor, 263n72; and employ-

Index 337 ment practices, 102; and French patronage, 19; and immigration, 84; and Lebanese immigrants, 95, 147; and Mahjaris, 80, 81, 238; and Mashriqi migrants, 99 white slavery, 217–218 women: and charity associations, 163– 168; and citizenship, 253n85; and Cocina libanesa (1957), 195; and community chronicles, 176–177; and confessionalism, 188; and consumption, 289n59; and cookbooks, 196; and food preparation, 199, 209, 210–211; and Mahjari Syrian Judaism, 201; and patronage networks, 88; as political agents, 279n53; and Young Turks, 39 working-class migrants: and competition with locals, 101; as invisible Mahjaris, 20–21, 239; and migration

restrictions, 112; ostracization of, 154, 155; perception of as threatening, 218 World Lebanese Cultural Union and League, 183, 190 World War I, 40, 42, 76. See also First World War; Great War World War II, 33, 42, 170, 204 xenophobia, 5, 101–102, 112, 113–114, 238, 239 Yankelevich, Pablo, 98–99, 111–112 Young Syrians, 61–62, 171t Young Turks Constitutional Revolution (1908), 36, 39 Zahleh, 2, 5, 25, 28–29 Zgharta, 5, 45, 168, 195 Zionism, 4, 48, 67, 192