The Mexican Mahjar
The Mexican Mahjar

Author: Camila Pastor

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2017-12-06

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1477314628

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Migration from the Middle East brought hundreds of thousands of people to the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time the Ottoman political system collapsed in 1918, over a third of the population of the Mashriq, i.e. the Levant, had made the transatlantic journey. This intense mobility was interrupted by World War I but resumed in the 1920s and continued through the late 1940s under the French Mandate. Many migrants returned to their homelands, but the rest concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Haiti, and Mexico, building transnational lives. The Mexican Mahjar provides the first global history of Middle Eastern migrations to Mexico. Making unprecedented use of French colonial archives and historical ethnography, Camila Pastor examines how French colonial control over Syria and Lebanon affected the migrants. Tracing issues of class, race, and gender through the decades of increased immigration to Mexico and looking at the narratives created by the Mahjaris (migrants) themselves in both their old and new homes, Pastor sheds new light on the creation of transnational networks at the intersection of Arab, French, and Mexican colonial modernisms. Revealing how migrants experienced mobility as conquest, diaspora, exile, or pilgrimage, The Mexican Mahjar tracks global history on an intimate scale.

The Mexican Mahjar
The Mexican Mahjar

Author: Camila Pastor

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2017-12-06

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 1477314644

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This prize-winning study of Levantine migration to Mexico brings “a new and revelatory light” to the subject (Christina Civantos, author of Between Argentines and Arabs). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, migration from the Middle East brought hundreds of thousands of people to the Americas. After a pause during World War I, this intense mobility resumed in the 1920s and continued through the 1940s under the French Mandate. A significant number of these migrants settled in Mexico, building transnational lives. The Mexican Mahjar provides the first global history of Middle Eastern migrations to Mexico. Making unprecedented use of French colonial archives and historical ethnography, Camila Pastor examines how French control over Syria and Lebanon affected the migrants. This study explores issues of class, race, and gender through the decades of increased immigration to Mexico, looking at narratives created by the migrants themselves. Pastor sheds new light on the creation of transnational networks at the intersection of Arab, French, and Mexican colonial modernisms. Revealing how migrants experienced mobility as conquest, diaspora, exile, or pilgrimage, The Mexican Mahjar tracks global history on an intimate scale. Winner of the 2018 Khayrallah Prize in Migration Studies

Forging Ties, Forging Passports
Forging Ties, Forging Passports

Author: Devi Mays

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2020-08-25

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 1503613224

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Forging Ties, Forging Passports is a history of migration and nation-building from the vantage point of those who lived between states. Devi Mays traces the histories of Ottoman Sephardi Jews who emigrated to the Americas—and especially to Mexico—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the complex relationships they maintained to legal documentation as they migrated and settled into new homes. Mays considers the shifting notions of belonging, nationality, and citizenship through the stories of individual women, men, and families who navigated these transitions in their everyday lives, as well as through the paperwork they carried. In the aftermath of World War I and the Mexican Revolution, migrants traversed new layers of bureaucracy and authority amid shifting political regimes as they crossed and were crossed by borders. Ottoman Sephardi migrants in Mexico resisted unequivocal classification as either Ottoman expatriates or Mexicans through their links to the Sephardi diaspora in formerly Ottoman lands, France, Cuba, and the United States. By making use of commercial and familial networks, these Sephardi migrants maintained a geographic and social mobility that challenged the physical borders of the state and the conceptual boundaries of the nation.

Unmentionables
Unmentionables

Author: Stacy Fahrenthold

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2024-12-03

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 1503641317

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As weavers, garment workers, and peddlers, Syrian immigrants in the Americas fed the early twentieth-century transnational textile trade. These migrants and the commodities they produced—silk, linen, and cotton; lace and embroidery; undergarments and ready-wear clothing—moved along steamship routes from Beirut through Marseille and Madeira to New York City, New England, and Veracruz. As migrants and merchants crisscrossed the Atlantic in pursuit of work, Syrian textile manufacturing expanded across the hemisphere. Unmentionables offers a history of the global textile industry and the Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians who worked in it. Stacy Fahrenthold examines how Arab workers navigated processes of racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation. She writes women workers—the majority of Syrian garment workers—back into US labor history. She also situates the rise of Syrian American industrial elites, who exerted supply chain power to combat labor uprisings, resist unionization, and stake claim to the global textile industry. Critiquing the hegemony of the Syrian peddler in histories of this diaspora, Unmentionables introduces alternative narrators: union activists who led street demonstrations, women garment workers who shut down kimono factories, child laborers who threw snowballs at police, and the diasporic merchant capitalists who contended with all of them.

Arab Routes
Arab Routes

Author: Sarah M.A. Gualtieri

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-11-26

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1503610861

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“This ingenious study . . . will transform how we conceptualize immigration, race, gender, and the histories and boundaries of Arab and Latin America” (Nadine Naber, author of Arab America). Los Angeles is home to the largest population of people of Middle Eastern origin and descent in the United States. Since the late nineteenth century, Syrian and Lebanese migration to Southern California has been intimately connected to and through Latin America. Arab Routes uncovers the stories of this Syrian American community, one both Arabized and Latinized, to reveal important cross-border and multiethnic solidarities in Syrian California. Sarah M. A. Gualtieri reconstructs the early Syrian connections through California, Texas, Mexico, and Lebanon. She reveals the Syrian interests in the defense of the Mexican American teens charged in the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder, in actor Danny Thomas's rise to prominence in LA’s Syrian cultural festivals, and in more recent activities of the grandchildren of immigrants to reclaim a sense of Arabness. Gualtieri reinscribes Syrians into Southern California history through her examination of powerful images and texts, augmented with interviews with descendants of immigrants. Telling the story of how Syrians helped forge a global Los Angeles, Arab Routes counters a long-held stereotype of Arabs as outsiders and underscores their longstanding place in American culture and in interethnic coalitions, past and present.

Transnational Palestine
Transnational Palestine

Author: Nadim Bawalsa

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2022-07-26

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 150363227X

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Tens of thousands of Palestinians migrated to the Americas in the final decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. By 1936, an estimated 40,000 Palestinians lived outside geographic Palestine. Transnational Palestine is the first book to explore the history of Palestinian immigration to Latin America, the struggles Palestinian migrants faced to secure Palestinian citizenship in the interwar period, and the ways in which these challenges contributed to the formation of a Palestinian diaspora and to the emergence of Palestinian national consciousness. Nadim Bawalsa considers the migrants' strategies for economic success in the diaspora, for preserving their heritage, and for resisting British mandate legislation, including citizenship rejections meted out to thousands of Palestinian migrants. They did this in newspapers, social and cultural clubs and associations, political organizations and committees, and in hundreds of petitions and pleas delivered to local and international governing bodies demanding justice for Palestinian migrants barred from Palestinian citizenship. As this book shows, Palestinian political consciousness developed as a thoroughly transnational process in the first half of the twentieth century—and the first articulation of a Palestinian right of return emerged well before 1948.

Practicing Sectarianism
Practicing Sectarianism

Author: Lara Deeb

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2022-11-22

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 150363387X

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Practicing Sectarianism explores the imaginative and contradictory ways that people live sectarianism. The book's essays use the concept as an animating principle within a variety of sites across Lebanon and its diasporas and over a range of historical periods. With contributions from historians and anthropologists, this volume reveals the many ways sectarianism is used to exhibit, imagine, or contest power: What forms of affective pull does it have on people and communities? What epistemological work does it do as a concept? How does it function as a marker of social difference? Examining social interaction, each essay analyzes how people experience sectarianism, sometimes pushing back, sometimes evading it, sometimes deploying it strategically, to a variety of effects and consequences. The collection advances an understanding of sectarianism simultaneously constructed and experienced, a slippery and changeable concept with material effects. And even as the book's focus is Lebanon, its analysis fractures the association of sectarianism with the nation-state and suggests possibilities that can travel to other sites. Practicing Sectarianism, taken as a whole, argues that sectarianism can only be fully understood—and dismantled—if we first take it seriously as a practice.

The Others
The Others

Author: Pablo Yankelevich

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-30

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1000652807

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The Others reconstructs the history of migration and naturalization of foreigners in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. Despite never receiving large influxes of foreigners, paradoxically Mexico has applied particularly tight controls on migration and naturalization. Why did it choose to limit the arrival of foreigners when their numbers were so low as a proportion of the total population? In a nation riven by ethnic prejudices and with post-revolutionary governments swift to criticize racial discrimination, what can explain the strong racialization of naturalization and migration policies? First published in Spanish, this award-winning book sheds light on the origins of many migration-related problems still plaguing the Mexican government: irregular migration to the United States, the lack of any genuine control over the arrival and residence of foreigners in Mexico, immigration and naturalization red tape, the authorities’ corruption and arbitrary decisions, racism, and discrimination in its migration policy. These are all issues overlooked by historical research in Mexico and explored in depth for the first time here. This book will be invaluable to students and scholars of Mexican history, borderland studies, and those interested in the relationship between the United States and Latin America.

Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America
Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America

Author: Cristián H. Ricci

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-30

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1000828522

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This volume considers the Arabic and African diasporas through the underexplored Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Africans, and Mahjari (South American and Mexican authors of Arab descent) experiences in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. Utilizing both established and emerging approaches, the authors explore the ways in which individual writers and artists negotiate the geographical, cultural, and historical parameters of their own diasporic trajectories influenced by their particular locations at home and elsewhere. At the same time, this volume sheds light on issues related to Spain, Portugal, and Latin American racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of the Middle East and Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American economic crunches in shaping attitudes towards immigration. This collection of thought-provoking chapters extends the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, forcing the reader to reassess their present limitations as interpretive tools. In the process, Afro-Hispanic, Afro-Portuguese, and Mahjaris are rendered visible as national actors and transnational citizens.

Jewish Identities in the American West
Jewish Identities in the American West

Author: Ellen Eisenberg

Publisher: Brandeis University Press

Published: 2022-11-24

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 1684581281

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"With essays that cover the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this volume presents a collective portrait of change over time that allows us to view the shifting nature of Jewish identity in the U.S. West, as well as the evolving frameworks for racial construction"--