The Great Arab Revolt, Palestine and a Phoenicianist Civilizing

Abstract

After a brief overview of the development of the Mexican Mahjar press during the first three decades of the 20th century, this paper addresses two crucial debates of the migrant transregional public sphere in the 1930’s and 40’s. The first documented diasporic mobilization around the Great Arab Revolt in British Palestine (1936-1938). The political and social crisis that the Revolt articulated in the Mashriq triggered a storm of press coverage in the Mexican Mahjar which effected a qualitative shift in representation. Palestine was radically transformed. Initially cast as a geography of recreation characterized by natural beauty and Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land, it became the axis of a heated debate around ‘the Palestine question’ and its moral geography. In this process, ways of representing Jewish populations also changed. They ceased to be understood through an Ottoman history of coexistence of religious traditions in the Mashriq, resignified as a homogeneous people, vector of the imperialist project of European Zionism. Coverage of the Revolt elicited no echo from the mainstream Mexican press or interlocution from the Phoenicianist Maronite migrant notability. The debate failed to engage the Mexican Mahjar with Palestinian ‘Arab futures’, except perhaps in the modality of spectacle. In contrast, in the economically difficult and politically impoverished climate in the wake of the Great Depression, the second key debate was a decade-long conversation across the migrant community and Mexican ideologues of mestizaje about the desirability, or not, of Mashriqis as permanent residents of Mexico and the limits to their integration into the mestizo nation. Notables mobilized modernist Nahda narratives to appropriate ancient Phoenician colonization of the Mediterranean, situating Arab migrants in Mexico as partners to local Spanish descent (criollo) elites in a common civilizing effort over mestizos and Amerindian populations.