Chile's Palestinian community, as the largest group of Palestinians outside the Middle East, has long played an outsize role in the country's economic, social, and political organization. From textile factories to elected officials and from football clubs to philanthropy, the community has strongly influenced Chilean society since at least the 1930s. Though Chile's Palestinian community came to be identified with business, conservatism, and orthodoxy during the despotic Pinochet regime, those who came of age after Pinochet have begun to occupy a different position with respect to their Palestinian heritage. Beginning with the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982 and intensifying recently following Israel's 2014 war in the Gaza Strip, Chile's Palestinian community has reimagined itself through new ways of claiming Palestinian-ness even while affirming a sense of belonging in Chile. This development has been relatively understudied due to its recent nature and the lack of English academic sources about Chile's Palestinians, though it has significant implications for understandings of diaspora, postcolonialism, and globalization. This paper aims to bridge the gap between academic readings of the Palestinian diaspora, which emphasize post-Nakba communities, and the reality of large Arab communities residing in Latin America, many of whom left the Levant before 1948. More broadly, it reveals a growing trend in grassroots relationships between the Arab World and Latin America. The paper explores the grounded ways in which Chile's contemporary Palestinian community members have come to imagine Palestine as a spatial territory (through the lenses of autochthony and settler-colonialism), as a site of memory (through renewed interest in historical connection to Palestine, including trips to their ancestors' villages), and as a source of identity (through community institutions like Santiago's Palestinos Football Club and the Palestinian Federation of Chile). Drawing on community newspapers, social media, and literature, especially Lina Meruane's Volverse Palestina (Becoming Palestine), this paper foregrounds the new developments in this community's process of imagining itself, its connection to its home country, and its relationship to the land of its ancestors, as significant examples of the shifting nature of diaspora identities in the context of new South-South relationships between the Arab world and Latin America. These transnational connections have allowed Chile's Palestinian community to imagine Palestine afresh, which has manifested in pro-Palestinian activism in Chile, greater numbers of Chilean-Palestinians visiting their ancestors' villages, and increased cultural output by Chilean-Palestinian artists.

Although the Arab presence in Cuba has been documented on several of Columbus' voyages to the New World, the Arab migrations to Cuba occur in three waves: 1850s-1890s, post WWI, and post WWII.The paper examines and contextualizes Arab migration and associational history of Arabs in Cuba in the twentieth-century, but focuses on the activities of the Cuban-Arab Union (UAC for Unión Árabe Cubana), a 'non-government civil society organization' founded from a coalition of older Cuban-Arab organizations in 1979. The UAC's daily and special programmatic activities and its associations in larger Latin American pan-Arab organizations become the lens through which to explore the continuous elaboration of diaspora identities. How does the Cuban legacy of imperial colony and anti-colonial resistance nexus inform the political stances of the organization? How does an organization dedicated to the goal of promoting Arab unity, foster that ideal in practice among its members and in programming that involves the official diplomatic community, whose members are at war or do not recognize one another? How have history and migration impacted the practice of religion especially in an ostensibly atheist socialist-revolutionary society? Who are the bicultural Arab figures who have shaped Cuban history? How does the organization elaborate and pass on an Arab past? What compromises are made to belong in the host society? This paper marks the beginning of a larger study of he Cuban revolution from the margins through Arab immigrants who accommodated and sutured their identities to Cuba's larger social project. Finally the paper uses the creation, institutionalization and activities of the Arab Cuban Union as a way to interrogate the constructs of Orientalism and Occidentalism and solidarities of the Third World.