Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism

Abstract

In October 2002, Carlos Slim Helú, the richest man in Latin America and a Mexican citizen of Lebanese descent, embarked on a project to restore Mexico City, especially the Zócalo area. To do so, he enlisted former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. As a self-appointed “guardian of the Mexican national capital,” Slim Helú states in a New York Times article that he wants to revive “one of the most important places in all the Americas,” one that is “the economic, political, cultural, academic and artistic heart of this country.”1 This effort to redevelop Mexico City has had social repercussions, such as displacing street vendors, and raises an important question: How does someone who is proud of his Lebanese background become a national spokesperson of Mexican cultural preservation? Although Slim Helú has exceptional wealth, his story shows a multicultural Mexico that has allowed foreigners and their descendants to become Mexicans.2This article explores how a few immigrants from the Middle East became Mexican power brokers by positioning themselves socially, politically, and economically in the twentieth century. The experiences of Middle Eastern immigrants in Mexico illustrate how ethnic groups can position themselves to prosper in a nation-state where the prevailing sense of identity is grounded in a discourse of mestizo origins. By exploring how one immigrant group handles the social conditions of a Latin American nation-state, we may begin to expand traditional, racialized discourses of who participates in mestizo nations.3During the presidential administration of Porfirio Díaz (1876 – 1910), favorable immigration policies allowed early Middle Eastern immigrants to settle in Mexico. The Mexican Revolution, however, created a climate in which Mexican citizens became increasingly xenophobic in their rhetoric and practices. In the postrevolutionary period, various presidential administrations sought ways to handle disgruntled Mexican citizens. Some intellectuals drew on Mexico’s past and advocated a Mexican nationalism that depended on notions of mestizaje and an abandonment of specific ethnic characteristics. Despite official attempts to create such a monolithic Mexico, Middle Eastern immigrants, among other immigrants, have helped create a multiethnic Mexico.The ability of Middle Easterners to situate themselves in the Mexican nation was often due to their economic roles. I argue that some developed a “foreign citizen” status in which they chose to naturalize and become Mexican citizens, while keeping elements of their foreign culture. These immigrants’ ability to join the Mexican nation was premised on the idea of bringing valuable skills and capital to help Mexico industrialize. Yet during difficult economic times, Mexicans resented foreigners, causing these foreign citizens to juggle contradictory positions. Middle Easterners sought to be “Mexican” to climb economic and social ladders, yet also came to possess a sense of entitlement and distance from their poorer countrymen. Moreover, as a distinctly Lebanese Mexican identity was forged through presumed business acumen, less economically successful Middle Eastern immigrants were often excluded and joined the Mexican mestizo nation.The article begins with a brief overview of Middle Eastern historical events to explain the context of these immigrants’ departure from their homelands, followed by an outline of their immigrant history in Mexico during the twentieth century. A subsequent section on economic and social positioning is followed by a discussion of the construction of a Lebanese elite class in Mexico. In my discussion of the political positioning and economic dominance of Middle Eastern immigrants, I explore how economic and social positioning laid the foundation for an emerging political presence. I conclude with an examination of how a specific Lebanese identity has developed in Mexico along with the foreign citizen paradigm.4Locating Middle Eastern immigrants and their descendents in Mexican historical records poses many methodological challenges. Unlike many other immigrant groups in the Americas, the homelands of Middle Eastern immigrants changed dramatically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first wave of immigrants, subjects of the Ottoman Empire, left a region known as the provinces of Greater Syria (which encompassed Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine). However, after World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Britain acquired control of Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan, while France took control of the Syrian mandate. Under the French, what are now the nation-states of Lebanon and Syria were treated as colonies. In 1920, when the creation of Greater Lebanon was proclaimed, the French objective was to safeguard the Maronite community by making sure it would not be absorbed into a Syrian Muslim state. In 1926, French officials approved a constitution creating a Lebanese republic. However, Lebanon did not declare independence until 1943, while Syrian independence was delayed until 1946. These geopolitical changes complicate categories of analysis when trying to determine where these immigrants migrated from, how they identified themselves, and how they were identified by others.I use the term “Middle Eastern immigrants” to refer to peoples from the region that comprises the contemporary nation-states of Syria, Lebanon, Pales-tine (the West Bank, Gaza, and British-mandated territory), Israel, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula. Although Armenia and Turkey are not widely regarded as Arab states, peoples from these nation-states are often considered part of the Middle Eastern migration to Mexico.5 Defining appropriate categories of personhood to describe these immigrants has sparked considerable debate. Moreover, both after the creation of the state of Israel following World War II and more recently following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the term “Arab” has become politically charged.6 Scholars such as Zidane Zéraoui and Roberto Marín-Guzmán refer to immigrants from the Middle East as “Arabs,” employing the term as an ethnocultural construct.7 I have chosen to use “Middle Eastern,” preferring its geographic connotations in examining the history of peoples who emigrated from the Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as those who have migrated from the region in the twentieth century. Given the departures of early immigrants from the Ottoman Empire, the term “turco” (Turk) is still used occasionally to describe Middle Easterners.8 “Lebanese” immigrants are thus a subgroup within this larger Middle Eastern migration. In addition, because Lebanon and Syria did not emerge as independent nation-states until the 1940s, immigrants often declared cities and regions as their place of origin and drew on a variety of ethnic and religious identities.9The Mexican case is further complicated by variation among Latin American countries where notable populations of Middle Eastern immigrants have settled. In Argentina and Brazil, the term “Syro-Lebanese” is used in common parlance; in Mexico and Ecuador, the term “Lebanese” is most often used; in Honduras and Chile, the term “Palestinian” is more common. These variations point to both the problematic nature of these historical categories, as well as the particular influx of immigrants and their internal dynamics within each Latin American country. Although “Middle Eastern” can be reductionist (in the same way that “Latin American” can be), it nevertheless offers the most comprehensive nomenclature based on my examination of 8,240 Middle Eastern immigrant registration cards compiled by the Mexican government between 1926 and 1951.10Immigrants from such a complex historical background encountered an evolving Mexican national discourse that could, on the one hand, accommodate, tolerate, and integrate difference but also suppress, disregard, and obscure it. From its inception during the 1910 revolution, mexicanidad drew upon both indigenismo and Europeanness.11 According to José Vasconcelos — postrevolutionary minister of public education and author of the idea of the “cosmic race” — the best of Spanish and Indian cultures would create a new hybrid race. “The advantage of our tradition is that it has greater facility of sympathy toward strangers,” he wrote. “This implies that our civilization, with all its defects, may be the chosen one to assimilate and to transform mankind into a new type; that within our civilization, the warp, the multiple and rich plasma of future humanity is thus being prepared.”12 For Vasconcelos, this was no egalitarian mixture: Spanish or European blood and cultural leadership helped the racially mixed mestizo to “improve.”On the other hand, the notion of the mestizo implied the loss of specific group characteristics. It aimed to temper the influence of foreigners and the visibility of the indigenous, therefore limiting plurality. Yet, despite the intellectuals’ and state’s attempt to construct a monolithic Mexican nation, the populace has come to include diverse immigrants in a multicultural society that allows multiple ways of being Mexican. At the same time, it has become possible for ethnic groups to be Mexican while maintaining transnational ties. Perhaps one key to the flexibility — and one applicable to Middle Eastern immigrants — can be found in the observation of historian Arthur Schmidt: “For decades following the Mexican Revolution, indigenismo and economic development served as powerful hegemonic symbols for Mexico’s national identity, for the image of a homeland that would provide for all Mexicans.”13 In part and as economic actors, Middle Easterners experienced both inclusion and exclusion, although not without protest and controversy.It is within this Mexican and Middle Eastern historical context that immigrants have developed relational and contextual uses of identity. With such uses in mind, Prasenjit Duara, a historian of modern China, productively examines the concept of national communities, defining them in terms of relationships based on inclusions and exclusions and revealing how competing visions intersect with identity formation.14 Considering Duara’s related theory that nationalism is a continually contested and negotiated space for multiple groups to live together, official Mexican discourses appear to dismiss the fluid dynamics of its nationalism. Moreover, descendents of Middle Eastern immigrants often construct a Lebanese Mexican identity — and not an Arab or a singularly Mexican one — to explain their economic success in Mexico as a country of underdevelopment. By drawing on this Lebanese Mexican identity, second- and third- generation immigrants have parlayed their immigrant networks, amassed capital, forged an immigrant position, and become “foreign citizens” in the Mexican nation, a concept and status that will be explained later.Anthropologist Aihwa Ong’s concept of flexible citizenship is useful in explaining immigrant positioning in relation to the host country. “The cultural logics of capital accumulation, travel, and displacement,” writes Ong, “induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political- economic conditions.” As they seek to “accumulate capital and social prestige in the global arena,” Ong’s Chinese immigrant subjects “emphasize, and are regulated by, practices favoring flexibility, mobility, and repositioning in relation to markets, governments and cultural regimes.”15 In the comparable case of Middle Eastern immigrants who arrived in Mexico between 1878 and 1951, their economic, social, and political self-positioning has led to a contemporary Lebanese Mexican elite class in subsequent generations. Ong’s theory of positioning helps to explain how Middle Eastern immigrants have obtained political positions in these second and third generations.The ability of Middle Easterners and other immigrants groups — Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, Spaniards, French, Germans, Italians, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese — to develop commercial enterprises reflects opportunities in the Mexican economy during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.16 Market-savvy immigrants quickly learned how to supply Mexican consumer needs. Some Middle Eastern immigrants experienced growing commercial success by developing market niches, peddling, and offering clients the ability to pay in installments. They began to position themselves both as Mexicans and as foreigners in Mexican society. As government officials sought ways to control immigrant populations in the 1920s through the 1940s, Middle Easterners struggled to find a way to illustrate their value to the Mexican nation. I contend that Middle Eastern immigrants, when confronted with xenophobic threats, decided to acculturate to a certain degree. Many obtained Mexican citizenship while continuing their culinary traditions, endogamous marriage practices, and community networks. However, unlike other immigrant groups that sometimes retained language skills, most second-generation Middle Eastern immigrants lost the ability to speak Arabic.17Middle Eastern immigrants and their descendents often kept their culture and “foreignness” while working in both rural and urban areas in Mexico. Some became wealthy in textile manufacturing, banking, and real estate development, and established themselves among the Mexican elite. Yet, Middle Easterners often appeared to be Mexican in their dealings with rural communities by speaking Spanish or indigenous languages, as well as offering to receive payments by installments over time. Within a few decades, their larger investments in development projects served national interests and enabled them to construct a Lebanese Mexican community.During the late nineteenth century, immigrants came from the Middle East for a myriad of reasons, though most intended to make their fortunes and return home.18 At the turn of the century, however, events in Mexico (especially the 1910 revolution) and in the Middle East (including World War I) indefinitely delayed these homecomings. Consequently, many immigrants settled in Mexico permanently and brought over other family members. Between 1895 and 1940, approximately 36,000 Middle Eastern immigrants arrived in Mexico.19 According to the Centro Libanés Web site, roughly 380,000 Mexicans claim Lebanese ancestry (out of a total population of 100 million).20 Although this group is not numerically large, its members wield disproportionate economic and political power in contemporary Mexico.Much of the Middle Eastern status derived from their roles in the Mexican economy. Early immigrants often brought their initial goods from other countries and then borrowed capital from their immigrant countrymen. According to Lebanese Mexican oral tradition, the first Middle Eastern immigrant to Mexico was Butros Raful, a Lebanese missionary who arrived in the nineteenth century and was later followed by his family. In interviews with members of the Lebanese community, anthropologist Luz María Martínez Montiel notes that “they arrived bearing relics they had brought from the Holy Land. Their oriental attire was looked upon admiringly. People here [in Mexico] kissed their hands and garments, and on learning that they came from the East, would ask them for news of the family of Jesus Christ.”21 The Raful family exchanged the rosaries and crucifixes they had brought for pens, thread, knives, and cloth, and they replaced the sales of relics with glass, hardware, cutlery, perfume, and toys. They made use of family connections and ethnic networks to provide social support and acquire merchandise and skills.22The economic, ethnic, and family links created a network of itinerant sales people. This network was informal, difficult to trace outside of oral testimony.23 This Middle Eastern immigrant network enabled many of the immigrants to participate in the economy by providing initial capital to one another and to Mexicans.24 This initial capital allowed Middle Eastern immigrants to start peddling. For example, when immigrant Yamil Darwich Adí came to Mexico in the 1920s, his uncle helped him start a peddling business. Yet, the uncle also charged Yamil two hundred pesos for living space during his first year in Mexico.25Most Middle Eastern immigrants came to describe themselves as participating in the commercial sector: among Middle Eastern immigrants registered between 1926 and 1951, more than 45 percent listed their occupation as merchants (comerciantes).26 The second-most-reported occupation, housewife, was listed by nearly 34 percent of all registrants.27 Many of these housewives assisted their spouses in a family’s commercial activities.28 By participating in the commercial economy, Middle Eastern immigrants began to acculturate and thereby justified their settlement, while simultaneously constructing a meaningful history for themselves.The construction of Lebanese Mexican identity has perpetuated the notion that Lebanese culture is unique in cultivating profit and that it is “their” Phoenician past which has helped “them” succeed financially. One interviewee stated: “[T]he Lebanese make money precisely because we had the background preparation. . . . We come from the Phoenicians, we are merchants by origin.”29 The emphasis on a six-thousand-year history of trading and their Phoenician roots is echoed throughout Lebanese literature.30 The assertion that the Phoenician ancestry gave Middle Eastern immigrants their enterprising talents to make a profit in Mexican society provides the basis for a community imagined in the spirit of Benedict Anderson’s studies of nations and nationalism. “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”31 Middle Eastern immigrants have drawn on their own cultural constructions and on Mexican historical events to find their niche in Mexican society.During the Porfiriato (1876 – 1910), the violent years of revolution (1910 – 17), and the subsequent years of postrevolutionary state building, Middle Eastern immigrants ventured into varied commercial enterprises. They established commercial networks in major cities, from which many fanned out to peddle in rural areas. They not only “filled a void between peripheral towns and the commercial interior,” as Patricia Jacobs Barquet has pointed out, but they brought goods available on credit to rural populations squeezed by Porfirio Diaz’s economic policies.32 They introduced what would become the abono system: charging a certain price for goods in return for allowing payment over an extended period of time. They could thus both amass capital and provide goods to those with very limited resources. From the city of Torreón in the state of Coahuila, for example, they peddled goods in the towns along the Nazas River in the state of Durango.33 Some traders even learned indigenous dialects before mastering Spanish. For instance, those who went to Yucatán sometimes learned Mayan, while others sold goods to the indigenous communities of Oaxaca.34The Mexican Revolution opened new opportunities. Despite the scarcity of goods and fluctuating prices, Middle Eastern merchants were able to mark up prices and accumulate capital, so that by the 1920s, many had established brick-and-mortar commercial enterprises in cities while continuing to peddle in rural areas.35 In Yucatán, for example, the devaluation of Mexican money during the revolution, along with a lack of trusted currency, reduced property prices. With their savings, Middle Easterners were able to monopolize the circulation of money and invest heavily in real estate, which would later yield large profits.36 Although during the Depression some Lebanese families had to move from Yucatán to Mexico City, those merchants who managed to stay in Mérida developed extensive networks and increased their wealth.37 In Torreón, Don Juan Abusaid and Antonio Achem accumulated sufficient resources to begin lending money. Abdelour Aboumrad opened a small currency exchange, and by 1937 his business had grown to the point that he established the Banco Aboumrad. Miguel Abed also opened a bank in Puebla.38 Thus, Middle Eastern immigrants were providing an important segment of the banking structure of the postrevolutionary economy.But as Middle Easterners became more visible in the commercial sector, the economic woes of the Depression sparked xenophobic protest against them. As early as 1927, the Mexican Migration Department declared that “the immigration of persons of Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Arabic, and Turkish origin has reached a limit that makes itself felt unfavorably in the national economy, on account of the conglomeration in urban centers.”39 Pablo Yankelevich, in analyzing the expulsion of foreigners pursuant to Article 33 of the Mexican constitution, found that not only were Middle Easterners accused of smuggling contraband but that the presidential administrations of Pascual Ortiz Rubio (1930 – 32) and Abelardo L. Rodríguez (1932 – 34) were especially aggressive against immigrant commercial activities.40 In 1932, an organization called the National Bloc for Defense of the Nation (Bloque Nacionalista de Defensa Pro Patria) formed in San Luis Potosí with the idea of placing commerce and industry in the hands of Mexican nationals and preventing the “degeneration of the race” by “Asians.” The organization called for a law that would restrain the immigration of Turkish, Syrian, Lebanese, Czechoslovakian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants and “any of the many nationalities that are invading the markets with serious damage to national commerce.”41 This was one of several organizations that sought to stop Middle Easterners and their economic activities. In 1933, the Committee for the Race (Comité pro Raza) began a letter-writing campaign to President Abelardo L. Rodríguez asking for a quota for immigrants of “exotic” races.42 The committee’s constitution, circulated in October 1933, stated that the “invasion” of undesirable immigrants — such as Chinese, Turks, Arabs, and Lithuanians — ought to be curbed because of their payment schemes and mafia connections.43 In November 1933, five hundred people in Santiago Ixcuintla, Nayarit, demonstrated to protest against foreign merchants, particularly the Chinese.44 During this same month, telegrams to President Rodríguez from the Comité pro Raza of Guasave (Sinaloa), Chihuahua, and Mexico City describe demonstrations of up to eight hundred people protesting the presence of undesirable immigrants.45Immigrants who faced such discrimination, who risked their personal safety and eventually achieved some degree of commercial success, came to embody a contradictory position. They were both victims and victors, targets of xenophobia who also profited from local conditions. It is within this context that the Mexican “Lebanese” community emerged. This community emerged in self-defense but also with cognizance of its importance to economic growth — particularly after 1940, when the economy replaced social redistribution as the primary preoccupation of Mexican governments and public attention.The importance of Lebaneseness and community preservation is perhaps best exemplified in a 1948 census taken in Mexico, which coincided with the newly attained independence of the nations of Lebanon and Syria, each of which tried to imbue distinct national and citizenship identities in its people. Journalists Juan Nasr and Salim Abud spent two years compiling a 621-page census and directory of Lebanese immigrants in Mexico.46 This directory served many functions, including renewing ethnic pride among Middle Eastern immigrants. It was compiled from interviews with families, although it did not report on women or Middle Eastern Jews. Despite these exclusions, it remains one of the most complete sources and was used by Louis Maloof in his 1959 study of Arabic-speakers in Mexico. The directory listed approximately 70 percent of Middle Eastern families living in Mexico at the time, categorizing them as Leb-anese, Syrian, or Palestinian. It counted 10,974 Arabic-speaking immigrants in Mexico in 1948 (table 1). It is likely skewed in favor of upper- and middle-class men and may exaggerate the rate of endogamy (90 percent, according to table 1) among the Middle Eastern population as a whole. With similarly limited data and an exclusive focus on the Lebanese, Mercedes Páez Oropeza found a 73 percent endogamy rate in 1948.47The question of marriage patterns is a controversial one. While some say that shared religion and family customs led to considerable intermarriage with Mexicans, others argue that those who married outside the community did so because they were less financially successful and socially prominent. There seems to be a clear tendency for prosperous Middle Easterners to intermarry either within the ethnic community in Mexico or by finding a spouse in Lebanon. A case in point is Carlos Slim Helú himself, who married Soumaya, the niece of Lebanon’s ex-president Amin Gemayel. Earlier generations of poorer Middle Easterners seem to have had higher exogamous marriage rates. They would not have been able to afford a return trip to the Middle East to find a spouse or to pay for a potential spouse’s voyage to Mexico from the homeland, which would have led these immigrants to look for a spouse within Mexican society.In an interview in 1957, professor Juan Estafan told sociologist Louis Maloof that to Middle Eastern immigrants, “marrying an outsider was like ‘the hand of death crashing down upon the glorious inheritance’ they had received from ‘the cradle of civilization.’”48 Maloof explained that Middle Eastern women wanted to preserve their own “flesh and blood” through endogamous marriages. In some cases, “the Lebanese parents did not permit their children to marry with Yucatecans, saying they did not want to change their race and mix [blood].”49This fear of mixed marriages may have led some Middle Eastern families in the early decades of migration to arrange marriages between first cousins. Although these marriages are not common in Mexico today, first generation Middle Eastern immigrants to Ecuador, for example, and those residing in Lebanon, had cousin marriages as a mechanism for keeping land and capital within family units and establishing social linkages within their communities.50As wives and mothers in Middle Eastern families, women have helped create wealth in their dual roles of helping the family business (as peddlers, bookkeepers, and store employees) and carrying the cultural traditions necessary for the creation and maintenance of ethnic identity.51 As Evelyn Shakir has suggested in the United States, Arab women peddlers were often more effective at selling merchandise than their husbands, because the women could more easily enter the American household. Whether a similar pattern is true of women peddlers in Mexico merits further research. It is clear, however, that although women typically were not paid directly in their families’ businesses, their labor contributed to the consolidation of family wealth.52 This consolidation of wealth by Middle Eastern families can also be described as part of the ethnic identity of the community. Families have tended to be patriarchal symbiotic units in which each member performs a function to help maximize savings and capital; within this economic unit, family members have aimed to maintain their ethnicity and their immigrant positioning in Mexican society.53Carmen Mercedes Páez Oropeza suggests that ethnicity has sometimes been manipulated to serve class interests and argues that Lebanese “clubs and casinos constructed more of a show of class than of an ethnic group.”54 Her informants described a Lebanese colony that often dismissed poorer Middle Easterners in order to create and celebrate a history of wealthy Lebanese profiting in Mexico. While the Mexican government granted Middle Easterners the opportunity to naturalize as Mexican citizens in the 1930s, the community nevertheless established itself on the basis of explicit ethnic ties and implicit elements of class.In particular, the community stressed the notion of Lebaneseness, which became the basis of the Centro Libanés, founded in 1959.55 The planning of the Centro began more than a decade earlier, in 1941.56 During the development process, the Syrian community hoped to join efforts with the Lebanese by making significant monetary contributions. In exchange for such contributions, they asked to have the club named “Syro-Lebanese”; however, in the end, the club was named the “Centro Libanés.” According to one informant, the Lebanese community did not want to attach “Syro” to the Centro because they wanted to establish a Lebanese-only club; they subsequently declined any Syrian donations.57 The ability of the Lebanese to refuse such funds was in part due to their own extreme wealth and not necessarily a reflection of widespread tensions between Lebanese and Syrians in Mexico. Rather, as Martha Díaz de Kurí notes in contrast to the implications of the informant’s perspective, “there are a good number of integrated families in which the mother is Syrian and the father is Lebanese or vice versa.”58During and after World War II, the textile boom generated large profits, especially in Puebla. Mexican and Middle Eastern industrialists began producing all types of cotton and wool to supply national and international demand. This, combined with money lending, enabled many Lebanese to make their fortunes and contribute to the Centro Libanés.59 Ironically, the acculturation of the Lebanese was both facilitated and hindered by the Centro. With its luxurious clubhouses in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Veracruz, Chihuahua, Mérida, Puebla, Monterrey, Tampico, and San Luis Potosí, the Centro became a widespread org