The extraordinary visibility of Mashreqis- Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians- in positions of power and wealth in neoliberal Middle America is best understood through a history of the present. Migrant trajectories, polarized early in the migratory process into those of a small migrant elite and a much larger working class, have been structured by axes of differentiation that reflect distinct colonial projects and the pulse of capitalist and imperial expansions throughout the twentieth century. The early socioeconomic diversity of the migration and the French mandate over the Mashreq in the first half of the twentieth century afforded the cultivation of relationships of patronage within and beyond the migrant population that were crucial to class trajectories. Class formation emerges as mediated by discursive practices of sectarianization, racialization, and representation, and includes both the accumulation of resources by increasingly powerful mediators and the erasure of undesirable migrant bodies and categories through material and discursive displacement. The migrants' experience has been shaped by the transnational practice of a variety of agents: transnational migrant families, which shift their centers of gravity according to political and economic crises; French officials, who imagined imperial administration as a global project; religious officials with regional jurisdictions; postcolonial diplomatic missions and revolutionary projects. The intersection, entanglement, and structural and discursive inscription of French imperial, Middle American postcolonial and Mashreqi post/colonial logics of construction of the subaltern and the dominant have allowed Mashreqi migrants to Mexico and Central America to settle into the top deciles of the population in terms of property and into a position of prestige within the popular imagination. The paper is based on ethnographic and archival research.