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“Be Civilized but do not Imitate:” How Arabic-Speaking Migrants Brought the World to Interwar Latin America
Abstract
In many ways, migration has characterized the narrative of human connectivity and exchange since the advent of the steamship in the mid-19th century. And while historians of the Middle East have been exploring tales of migration, settlement, and diaspora formation for myriad Middle Eastern populations across the world since Philip Hitti's seminal 1924 work, The Syrians in America, the contributions of these migrants to transnational historical developments have received minimal coverage. This paper explores the role that Arabic-speaking migrants from Greater Syria played in forging local, regional, and transnational cultures of cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and moral citizenship in interwar Latin America, and specifically, 1920s Santiago de Chile. It examines a range of petitions and letters drafted by Arabic-speaking migrants as early as 1918 in Peru, Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico and which were sent to different colonial European offices locally and transnationally, including the desks of the League of Nations in Geneva, demanding national self-determination for the inhabitants of Greater Syria. The number of petitions soared in the aftermath of WWI as European powers transformed the legal, political, and social landscape of Greater Syria and left many nationalist aspirations frustrated, if not squashed, especially in Palestine. In responding immediately and politically to these developments from throughout the diaspora, Arabic-speaking migrants in Latin America introduced to their local communities a new kind of cosmopolitan awareness that was plugged into transnational developments. The paper also examines two Arabic periodicals from 1920s Santiago de Chile, al-Watan and ash-Sharq, to show how Arabic-speaking migrants there were active in promoting patriotic sensibilities among their readers that were at once local, regional, and transnational. Part of this agenda advocated for a new kind of migrant who embodied a modern, moral citizenship modeled on the North American experience. To be sure, this citizen was upstanding, industrious, "civilized but not imitative," patriotic, and, ideally, passably white. The paper explores how Arabic-speaking migrants brought transformative developments in political and social thinking and organization to Latin America through a range of transnational initiatives. Today, Latin America is home to sizable populations of Middle Eastern descent whose migrant ancestors, this research suggests, would have been at the forefront of forging local cultures of cosmopolitan worldliness and nationalism that promoted trendy conceptions of ideal, moral citizenship.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
None
Sub Area
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