The Arab Diaspora in Brazil

Abstract

The Arab diaspora in Brazil refers to the movement of people from countries with Arab populations to Brazil, a process that began in the last decades of the 19th century and reached its height during the years leading up to WWI and the subsequent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. This diaspora was part of a larger movement of people from the Greater Syria area to the Americas, with the United States, Argentina, and Brazil serving as the first, second, and third most popular destinations for these populations. Due to scant record-keeping and a lack of uniformity in travel documents and demographic classifications, it is difficult to find reliable estimates of the number of Arab people who made their way to Brazil. Today, many Brazilians trace their roots to Arab countries. In addition to árabes (Arabs), other common terms for this population that researchers and students should be aware of include sírios (Syrians), sírio-libaneses (Syro-Lebanese), and turcos (Turks), the latter being an older term that was often used pejoratively and has thus fallen out of favor in more current sources. In Arabic, the South American countries to which Arabs migrated are often collectively referred to in the scholarship as al-mahjar al-janūbī (the Southern Mahjar, with “mahjar” meaning place of emigration). Scholarship on this topic has traditionally been divided along linguistic lines, with researchers relying on either Portuguese-language or Arabic-language primary sources. In fact, early primary sources exist in both languages, and more recent scholarship has attempted to bridge this divide by offering translingual and transnational perspectives on the Arab diaspora in Brazil.