Diaspora: México

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Diaspora Studies: Mexico (5,591 words) See also: Economics: Paid Domestic Labor, Networks, Migration: Labor and Remittances  more de Maria Campos, Camila Pastor

Diaspora Studies: Mexico Abstract The Middle American mahjar brought together the diversity of the Ottoman Arab world. Taking a transregional approach, this entry argues that the cross-section of Mashriqi society which found its way to Middle America became increasingly polarized into a small migrant elite and a much larger client class. The decades during which Lebanon and Syria were under French mandate administration (1919–1946) were foundational to migrant trajectories in the Americas since during this period a diasporic public

Article Table Of Contents Moving Mashriqis in the Middle American mahjar Transregional studies – a note on method Revisioning Mashriqis in the

sphere emerged which afforded both a modern politics of the public and a migrant politics of notables.

Middle Americas

The women’s public made it women’s work to cultivate and inscribe distinction within the migrant

French subjects of a global

population. As a handful of migrant families accumulated resources in the mahjar they were increasingly

mandate 1919–1946

successful as mediators between their countrymen clients and state authorities in a classic politics of notables. Shaped by the French colonial imagination and migrant collaborations and subversions of it, the gendered migrant public became a site for aligning categories of sect with categories of race, class and

Middle American criollo liberal thought 1920s–1940s

civilization. This resulted in the further accumulation of resources by increasingly powerful mediators and

Gendered geographies of power

the erasure of undesirable migrant bodies and categories through their material, moral and discursive

Distinction and charity: the

displacement.

dynamics of women’s associations

Subject Words

Distinction and women’s

migration – Mexico

leadership

mahjar – Mexico

Early twenty-first century patterns

politics of the public – Mexico politics of notables – Mexico French Mandate

Conclusions Bibliography

Mashriq Syria-Lebanon class – Mexico civilization – Mexico postcolonial – Mexico Middle America diaspora – Mexico transnationalism – Mexico associations – Mexico leadership – Mexico patronage – Mexico race – Mexico women’s public – Mexico charity – Mexico youth – Mexico

Moving Mashriqis in the Middle American mahjar Hundreds of thousands of migrants left the Eastern Mediterranean, the Mashriq, at the turn of the twentieth century. They boarded steamships bound

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Diaspora Studies: Mexico - Brill Reference

for Mediterranean destinations: Alexandria in Egypt and French ports such as Marseille. Some settled in France, but the vast majority continued on to cities strung along the long Atlantic coast of the Americas. Early migrants set up clusters of businesses in New York, Tampico, Veracruz, the Caribbean coast of Central America, Venezuela and Colombia, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. People with very different skills and resources came together in travel, showcasing the diversity which characterized the Ottoman Arab world. Those who settled in Middle America – Mexico and Central America – were mostly Maronites, but there were also Melkites, Greek Orthodox, Jews from Damascus and Aleppo, and Muslims – Sunni, Shiʻa and Druze. Most of these travelers were middle peasants and merchants from regional commercial hubs who brought small but significant resources to their migrant beginnings. Some brought capital and trading skills to expand Mediterranean trading circuits (Gualtieri 2009), others learned trading from fellow migrants who extended credit so that the less well off could engage in itinerant commerce. Many had attended missionary schools where they had learned to read and speak French and a few had benefited from higher education offered by missionary institutions in Beirut, such as the Syrian Protestant College, now the American University. These professionals were journalists, lawyers and doctors; as Arabic speakers, they were soon publishing a lively Arabic language press and establishing a number of competing institutions that spanned the Eastern Mediterranean and the Ottoman, European and American lands of migration – what became known as the mahjar. In 1919, the Pechkoff report on migration to the Americas noted that the early gendered patterns of migration had shifted. Women increasingly joined relatives and fellow townspeople as brides, sisters, and daughters whose labor was important to migrant prosperity in the mahjar. A long Mashriqi tradition of women’s work (Khater 2001) was extended and diversified as women tended family shops, cultivated their own public sphere through a number of women’s institutions, or went peddling as enterpreneurs in their own right. Women’s work also involved making and reproducing difference, specifically class and confessional distinction within the migrant population. Charity associations were among the early institutions established and run by women where solidarity and subordination were produced simultaneously. The cross-section of Mashriqi society which found its way to Mexico, and the Middle Americas more broadly, became increasingly polarized into a small migrant elite and a much larger client class. By 1921, French Consul Charpentier observed a sharp distinction between those Mashriqis who settled in Mexico as families – wealthier and more “respectable” members of “the colony” – and the dispersed peddlers, considered morally and politically suspect by French authorities and migrant notables (Pastor de Maria y Campos 2009). Migrant institutions were privileged sites for the production of difference. Early charities, for example, were concerned with the wellbeing of migrant Mashriqi poor. Such organizations had two distinct effects. On the one hand they became sites for the production of class distinction among migrants and on the other, they constituted networks that provided mobility or at least prevented destitution among the migrant population. Destitute families received support in various forms – one of which was repatriation. The decades during which Lebanon and Syria were under French mandate administration, between 1919 and 1946, were foundational in shaping migrant trajectories in the Americas. A transregional reading of Mashriqi institutions in Mexico from 1905 to 2009 suggests that it was during this period that a diasporic public sphere (Gilroy 1991) emerged which afforded both a modern politics of the public and a migrant politics of notables. Migrant notables interpolated both Mexican and French officials as their legitimate authorities. As a handful of migrants accumulated resources in the mahjar they were increasingly successful as mediators between their countrymen clients and state authorities in a classic politics of notables, the political culture characteristic of Ottoman Arab urban politics (Hourani 1981). Shaped by the French colonial imagination and migrant collaborations and subversions of it, the gendered migrant public became a site for aligning categories of sect with categories of class. The migrant elite argued a European genealogy for themselves, in dialogue with French mandate colonial powers and the Mexican state powers which both sought to classify migrants in order to claim them for their own jurisdictions. By the mid-twentieth century, the migrant notability in Mexico, and in the Middle Americas more broadly, emerged fully racialized as a Christian elite. This resulted in the further accumulation of resources by increasingly powerful mediators and the erasure of undesirable migrant bodies and categories through their material, moral and discursive displacement.

Transregional studies – a note on method Eastern Mediterranean migrations to the Americas have been chronicled in community publications (Hamui and Charabati 1989, Diaz de Kuri and Macluf 1994). Since the 1970s, they have attracted the attention of scholars intrigued by the fact that a visible portion of Mashriqi migrants to Middle America have settled into the top deciles of the population in terms of property and into a position of prestige within the popular imagination (Paéz Oropeza 1984, Alonso Palacios 1983, Gonzalez 1992, Ramírez 1994, Marin Guzman 1996, Zeraoui 1997, Euraque 1998). These circulations have become the subject of revisionist ethnographic and historical accounts over the past decade. One of the fundamental changes proposed by recent scholarship is a shift away from the nation-state as the main frame for movement and towards the recognition of migrant geographies as transregional. This is especially relevant to circulation from the Middle East to the Middle Americas because the logic of migrant movement is shaped by several political authorities at once. The term Middle America has been used in the anthropology and archaeology of the region to index social formations that preceded current nation-states, and has been taken up recently by scholars of media describing the flow of information and media commodities in the region. Therefore, this entry refers to both the nation-state of Mexico, and also to the broader formation of the Middle Americas, in order to signal the transregional trajectories of migrant movement. Earlier accounts bind people in movement into “communities” of settlement. Community chronicles were often concerned with presenting a unified public face for the migrations. These works usually speak for emerging hegemonies within diverse migrating populations, however, telling an official story focused on associational life and economic ascent that elides class, gender and confessional conflict and differentiation within the migrant population. Scholars, seeing matters in the manner of the state, have habitually described migration as a zero–sum game in which migrants must carry prefixes that index their trajectories and commitments. There are emigrants, who lose their place in the nation and its narration, and immigrants, who must conform to an imagined integration into their nation of settlement. Migrant stories are thus reduced to the integration of homogeneous categories defined through “language,” “ethnicity” or “nationality” into single national histories – someone may write the history of Lebanese immigration to Mexico, for example (Alfaro-Velcamp 2007). Ongoing revisions have sprung from a profound shift in sources, methodologies and analytic strategies. Writing histories of mobility challenges researchers to become familiar with many national and regional historiographies, track down authorities and archives in multiple sites, and negotiate

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Diaspora Studies: Mexico - Brill Reference

access to private memory in several languages. They also need to theorize movement – to search for tools to conceptualize circulation as integral to human sociality. A growing trend across disciplines towards a reconceptualization of movement centers attention on moving populations themselves, their cultural production and the various frames of reference and authority with which they interact. Academic accounts of lives in movement increasingly seek to understand migrations as constituting diasporas, transnationalisms and other geographies of political culture, which challenge the normative claims of two powerful ideologies that privilege sedentary continuities: nation-states and the logic of the autochtonous (Clifford 1994). Diaspora and trasnationalism are concepts constantly debated to highlight different aspects of mobility. Diaspora studies attend to people in movement insofar as they sustain a collective experience and identifications derived from a relationship to a homeland. Diaspora scholarship is frequently modeled on particular historical experiences which have acquired paradigmatic status – the Jewish, the African, the Armenian diasporas – and focus on what Clifford calls dwelling-in-displacement. Pointing to the historical depth and wide dispersion of these experiences, diaspora envisions mobility as exile. Modern discourses of diaspora tend to index discomfort, longing and impossibility as affects, cultivating nostalgia for a world before motion, firmly anchored in the myth of a single territory and “nation,” often colored by the intention of return. Recent reworkings of a diasporic perspective however underscore the radical possibilities contained in a decentering of diaspora, in privileging ties to fellow diasporic subjects located elsewhere rather than anchoring experience in an always already lost homeland (Gilroy 1991). Through the metaphors of transnational circuits and social fields (Rouse 1992), transnational studies tend to highlight circulations of persons, resources, and ideologies between sub-national spaces. Transnational studies emerge in the ethnography of contemporary third world migration to the United States. Championed by Nina Glick Schiller and her collaborators (1994) but anticipated by the work of Chicano scholars working on border cultures, the paradigm reflects anthropological concern with everyday social interaction as well as postcolonial and feminist critiques of the theorization of space and boundaries. The migrant household is privileged as a unit of analysis; gendered arrangements become visible as central to initiating and sustaining transnational social networks, securing production and reproduction through the administration of resources and the cultivation of consumption. Transnationalism envisions mobility as a hopeful horizon and a field of practice. The cheerful documentation of displacement, of subaltern migrants who circulate across the global south-global north gap, is colored by their expectation of accumulation and upward class mobility in both their national contexts. States and their policies continue to be important frames for human circulations, but setting movement against a transregional backdrop allows us to recognize state projects as particular and always incomplete and migrants as subject to a number of frames of authority. Migrants have been historically subject to national or imperial states and such normative projects as the surveillance of movement and the expectation of integration into “national” communities. Yet as the case of Middle Eastern migrations to Middle America illustrates, their very movement makes them simultaneously subject to various authorities that define geographies and jurisdictions in different ways. While migrants respond to or circumvent these projects of the powerful, they also recognize that authorities constitute sources of patronage, to which migrants can appeal for protection and privilege. The following observations are based on a range of sources: ethnography and interviews with migrants and their children and grandchildren; the migrant press produced in the Middle American mahjar; the Archive du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, which documents French intervention in the Mashriq during the mandate period (1919–1946); and the Archivo General de la Nacion in Mexico City (Pastor de Maria Campos 2009).

Revisioning Mashriqis in the Middle Americas A small but significant number of migrant families brought with them considerable capital; some as family fortunes, and others in the form of professional education. Along with the widely extended practice of providing credit and employment to fellow migrants, these conditions slowly resulted in the polarization of wealth among migrants, with a few families emerging as a migrant notability. Migrant notables prospered further given extraction from their clienteles and their cultivation of patronage links of their own, especially to Middle American and French government officials (Pastor de Maria y Campos 2009). The logic of French patronage is rooted in the Mashriq’s colonial experience and is linked to the process of sectarianization, particularly in Lebanon (Makdisi 2000). As the twentieth century unfolded, the boundaries of confessional categories were increasingly inscribed by the migrants in tandem with both class and national boundaries proposed by French administration. The migrant’s intelligibility as Latin American elites is afforded by the Middle American colonial experience and the intersection of racial and class formations that resulted from Spanish imperial legal theory and administration. Despite disparate regional histories these different practices of distinction present important continuities with discourses of race and civilization developed through nineteenth-century imperial practice and cultural modernism, particularly those clustering around the idea of a “civilizing mission.” The ambivalence of moving Mashriqi notables in their labor of situating themselves in terms of race and civilization emerged with and perhaps from the transregional social formations which they developed. They found themselves at the crossroads of Ottoman and French civilizing missions and the positivist national projects of Middle American criollo states also intent on imposing Eurocentric models of sociability and administration on postcolonial societies. Since criollos are Latin Americans who trace European genealogies for themselves, criollo states effectively conflated claims of descent with claims to civilizational affinity. Mashriqis profited from important continuities between nineteenth-century imperial modernity and postcolonial civilizing efforts during the twentieth century, rooted in the categories and discourses of a global modernism of which variously situated elites imagine themselves to be a part.

French subjects of a global mandate 1919–1946 French officials imagined imperial administration as a global project and sought to regulate migration to and from territories under their mandate. To legitimize their control of the Mashriq they also sought to cultivate the allegiance of mahjar populations, whom they imagined as more favourably disposed towards the French mandate over Lebanon and Syria because they were predominantly Christian. Just as in the Mashriq where they sought out the local notability and religious authorities as mediators to their presence (Thompson 2000), in the Middle Americas the migrant notability emerged as their privileged interlocutors. The cultivation of relationships with the French resulted in a number of official French interventions in favor of their protégés and in challenge to Mexican postrevolutionary authorities. These included interventions to protect Mashriqi Christian sites of worship in the 1920s; interventions to protect migrant economic interests during the allocation of reparation payments for losses incurred during the revolution in the 1930s; and throughout

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Diaspora Studies: Mexico - Brill Reference

the mandate period, the defense of migrants when Middle American states sought to curb or suspend their circulation. French consuls intervened to protect Mashriqi communities from expulsion in Guatemala and Panama, and from commercial sanctions throughout Central America and the Caribbean (Pastor de Maria y Campos 2009). The inscription of Mashriqis as French (colonial) subjects during the early twentieth century mingled with Middle American genealogies of race and mutually intelligible practices of patronage and mediation in an alchemy that made migrants’ bodies and habits legible as elite. Francophone and francophile cosmopolitan moderns, migrant notables lived side by side with criollo elites in the new residential neighborhoods of Mexico City built in the French style during the early twentieth century.

Middle American criollo liberal thought 1920s–1940s When the postrevolutionary Mexican government developed the National Registry of Migrants in 1932, Mashriqis were required to register along with other non-nationals. Their registry cards are a spectacle of diversity – of all ages, sizes and colors, migrants are, however, systematically assigned the same racial category: they are white. This systematic categorization by lower echelon Mexican officials is especially intriguing given the debates that occurred during the 1930s in the Mexican public sphere. In the process of developing a revised racial ideology for the institutionalized revolution, liberal state ideologues proposed the Mexico mestizo. They celebrated the nation’s mixed Indian-Spanish heritage as the source of its vitality, negating Porfirian immigration and educational policies which had intended to “whiten” the nation in order to achieve order and progress. Postrevolutionary modernity however, was something that criollos could only imagine as European. And criollos remained at the head of the state. The climate of scarcity generated by the Great Depression and postrevolutionary crises encouraged popular and elite mobilization against migration. Debates about desirable and undesirable immigrants raged, foremost among them from state ideologues such as José Vasconcelos, who published statements regarding the undesirability of Mashriqi migrations. The migrant press and other products of the notable intelligentsia responded with indignant protest, proposing an alternative. Notables generated genealogies for themselves which postulated their racial and civilizational equivalence to the Spanish conquerors. Given the continuity in the categories of liberal thought shared by the nineteenth-century imperial discourse of modernity generated in the global colonial encounter and the discourse of Eurocentric Mexican postcolonial elites, a consensus could be reached which bisected Middle American populations into civilized criollos and less civilized natives, and postulated Mashriqi and criollo notables as equivalent partners in a common civilizing mission.

Gendered geographies of power Given various traditions of preferred homosocial association in many areas of both the Mashriq and the Middle Americas, and those imposed by modernity, especially gendered spaces of work and therefore of daily activity, it is not surprising that participation in institutions in the Middle American mahjar has involved gendered patterns. Women have tended to form and cultivate charity and “cultural” associations that display their class status as “ladies” vis-à-vis less affluent migrants and the Middle American poor. Men have dominated commercial and political institutions such as chambers of commerce, leagues, and spaces of “high culture” such as journals written in fuṣḥā, a formal, literary register of Arabic which provided and indexed access to other kinds of resources. The boundaries between gendered spaces were elastic however. The transformation of religious associations, which began as women’s charity groups and youth clubs in the 1920s, into the “councils” of the late 1940s, for example, may indicate a reconceptualization of religious practice. A new set of predominantly political, masculine projects came to dominate public religious discourse, displacing though not replacing women’s and youth organizations. By the late twentieth century, ladies’ associations were largely concerned with the practice of memory and its reproduction. Women’s activities, while less visible in public records, constitute a parallel public space. It is important to look beyond the modern dichotomy that opposes women’s domesticity to men’s engagement with the public to grasp how women’s visiting, marriage brokering and charity work, for instance, constitute another public, though in many ways a subordinate one. It is also crucial to recognize the interpenetration of public and private in a politics of notables, and the ways in which men’s public power often operates through intimate sites, most notably in the cultivation of ties of patronage.

Distinction and charity: the dynamics of women’s associations A number of charitable organizations emerged early on in the history of the migration. Most of them were explicitly ladies’ associations or primarily run by women in collaboration with religious figures. Charitable organizations provide an opportunity for migrants to perform interventions that mark them as better off than those who require or accept their help. They also provide spaces for the development of women as organizers and strategists. While explicitly political associations continue to be dominated by men and charity associations are defined as extensions of women’s moral and affective labor in the home, youth associations, which are also actively involved in charity, provide opportunities for interaction across genders and constitute potential marriage pools. The board of an association now called the Unión Asistencial de Damas Libanesas A.C. (Welfare union of Lebanese ladies) published the following statement on the Centro Libanés webpage in 2008: In the year of 1923 the Unión Caritativa de Damas Libanesas [Charitable union of Lebanese women] was founded in Mexico City, its founders being the Señoras [ladies] Samia Kuri, Zabaide Kuri, Afife Letayf, Silvia Ayub, María Hadad, Wahibe Barquet, Alice Rihan, Virginia Letayf, Waida Helu, Guadalupe Letayf, Laurice Rihan, María Zacarías, Nehle Fadel, Afife Bacha de Zakia and Sofía Bustani. On September 15 of 1927 the first statutes were created, to help all needy Arabic speaking people regardless of their political or religious creed, and especially, one of our goals is that no person of Lebanese origin should find themselves in need in Mexico. As the Orthodox, Melkite, and Maronite family names of the founding ladies of the Unión Caritativa indicate, some of the early associations were Christian coalitions across confessional lines. Other such examples are the Asociación Mutualista de Puebla (Mutual association of Puebla) established in the 1930s, the Voluntarias de la Cruz Roja [Red Cross lady volunteers] coordinated by Antonio Ayub in Mexico City in the same decade, and the Sociedad Benéfica (Beneficent society) established in Mexico City around 1937. Associations established in collaboration with church figures were more narrowly confessional – for example, the Unión Mutualista Ortodoxa founded

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Diaspora Studies: Mexico - Brill Reference

in the 1920s and the Junta de San José or Sociedad de Damas de San José, a Maronite ladies’ charity association established in the late 1930s. Migrantorganized youth organizations provide opportunities for young men and women to interact in morally sound contexts and since they also function as marriage markets, they are often sponsored by churches. In Mexico City the Juventud Ortodoxa Mexicana (Orthodox Mexican youth) was founded in the 1930s; Juventud Libanesa de México (Lebanese youth of Mexico) operated from Venustiano Carranza #136, Mexico D.F. in 1942. The Orthodox group and a Juventud Maronita de México (Maronite youth of Mexico) still meet. Youth clubs and women’s organizations constituted important sites in women’s public sphere.

Distinction and women’s leadership Some early youth organizations were exclusively young women’s associations, for example the Club Femenino Libanés (Lebanese feminine club) organized in the1930s. According to oral history sources, the Club Femenino Libanés initially brought together a handful of girls from the Colonia Roma, an upper class residential neighborhood built in French architectural style in the 1910s and 1920s by emerging business classes. Migrant men all had their businesses in the downtown neighborhood where Middle Eastern migration had initially clustered, and they therefore continued to interact with the migrant population living in these popular quarters. More affluent women whose labor was not required to sustain family businesses and who lived in newer fancier neighborhoods like Roma were less likely to meet and mingle with migrants whose lives centered in the busier, dirtier, crowded historic downtown. Perceiving this growing gap in womens’ sociality, 20 or so girls from the Colonia Roma decided to open up their club and found themselves outnumbered at the first club meeting by the 10 young women “on the downtown side,” who were described as confessionally diverse – including Orthodox, Melkite, Maronite and Druze. Interaction with the unknown women was eased when the narrator identified her father, who was widely known and well loved, but the tension between the two sets of girls was underscored by comments revealing the Roma girls’ class status: “Oh, so the starched-up girls are here…” Though the club became a lively and active institution, the wealthier founders – perceived as “stuck up” or thinking better of themselves, devised a strategy to interact with less privileged girls, and to monopolize the club leadership (Pastor de Maria y Campos 2009). The story traces clear distinctions within the migrant population. Friendships were confined by class until these teenagers on their own initiative decided to weave together a socioeconomically and confessionally diverse space for interaction, which was clearly orchestrated and ultimately dominated by girls from the wealthier families. Distinctions between the Christian confessions structure the possibility for ties of patronage as a wealthy Melkite girl strikes up a conversation across the class divide with families she identifies as Melkite. The class distinction overlaps with questions of confession, politics and taste that had been described twenty years earlier by M. Charpentier in his portrait of the “community.” Another moment in migrant sociability described by the same oral history source referenced above sketches an alternative to current confessional patterns of association among women – a time before confessional boundaries were relevant in organizing the migrant population. In incorporating the less affluent and much larger set of women living downtown, the Club Femenino became a confessionally diverse association. Though we are told that there were not many Muslims and very few Druze girls, they participated seamlessly in club activities. It was not until the 1940s, when local efforts to build up distinct spaces of worship coincided with the arrival of religious leaders from the Mashriq, that confessional divisions were felt. With the Aboumrad family’s women organizing to build an Orthodox cathedral, and Maronite Father Tobias’ arrival from Lebanon, migrants stopped gathering at the houses of notables to celebrate religious occasions, assemblies that brought all of the migrant population together in gift exchanges beyond religious identification. Marriage with non-Mashriqi Mexicans, a common practice for men, especially those who worked away from the main migrant clusters in provincial commercial outposts, became frowned upon. Big houses with their big halls, like Casa Kaim which hosted Christmas mass, or the Ayub house, no longer hosted “the colony.” As opportunities for interaction were eclipsed by sectarian pride projects, girls of the affluent neighborhoods also became increasingly concerned with contrasts. Families living downtown, who formed the bulk of the migrant population, not only had fewer resources, they were also described as “living like in a village,” as curbing their women’s daily circulation and subjecting their autonomy to patriarchal and familial authority. Girls living in the Colonia Roma, who attended public lectures and drove their own cars, refer to their own world by claims such as “on this side we were already French Lebanon” (Pastor de Maria y Campos 2009). Class emerged as a relevant form of distinction, visible through place of residence and degree of adoption of French preferences for female mobility and independence. Spaces such as the Club Femenino or Silvia Ayub’s house continued to bring women together for some time. The Ayub house was described as “the biggest, the best house” and Silvia as “very down to earth”; many women from downtown went there too. The quality and rhythm of participation in these female spaces marked some as more equal than others, however. Such interaction and community building developed patron–client relationships between notables and the less fortunate, experienced by those on the margins as relations of solidarity but also of subordination. Non-Christians participated in Christian ritual in order to participate in “community” events. A woman who described her mother’s visiting patterns from a less fortunate position spoke of her as “getting along with everyone”; she visited, if someone died she went to the funeral. She was too busy with her big family to attend weddings, but where sickness and death were concerned, “she ran off to see them. All those, hi am ta’ml wajibatha [she was doing her duty]” (Pastor de Maria y Campos 2009). A woman less well off not only had less time available to invest in cultivating social networks; perhaps she could not afford the gifts required of wedding guests, or she may not have been invited to events where her “services” (praying, tending the sick) were not needed.

Early twenty-first century patterns Between 2004 and 2008, ladies’ associations were mostly organized confessionally. The most visible associations are nested within the Centro Libanés in Mexico City: the Damas Maronitas (Maronite ladies) with some 40 members; the Damas Ortodoxas de San Jorge (Orthodox ladies of Saint Jorge) also with some 40 members; and, most recently consolidated, in 2001, the Damas Druzas (Druze ladies) with some 12 members. The Unión Asistencial de Damas Libanesas A.C., mentioned at the beginning of this section, is currently led by Greek Orthodox women, while the Damas Voluntarias del Centro Libanés A.C. brings together Maronite, Orthodox and Shiʻa-Druze women. There are also various informal groups which meet elsewhere and are not legally constituted as civil associations. Two examples are the Damas de Zgharta (Ladies of Zgharta), a group of Maronite women from families which migrated from the town of Zgharta, and Las Primas (The cousins), a group of Greek Orthodox women. These associations constitute sites for remembering and narrating, providing a space to meet periodically for

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Diaspora Studies: Mexico - Brill Reference

recounting and gossiping. Women’s groups compete with one another in consolidating and publishing collective memory in the form of “community” cookbooks, but also DVDs documenting the histories of confessional communities and their institutions. And often dismissed and overlooked, they keep track of marriages, births and deaths – the making and unmaking of families and their fortunes.

Conclusions The networks of patronage afforded by the intersection of migrant dynamics and the global imperial practice of France in the administration of its Mashriqi mandates was crucial to accumulation. Mashriqi migrants, a diverse population to begin with, became increasingly differentiated and segregated as the twentieth century wore on, depending on which categories they could claim and cultivate as individuals, families and “communities.” A migrant elite mediated the relationship of the migrants with both the French authorities and changing Mexican governments, and with Mexican public opinion. They intervened in and generated an array of institutional locations within and across nation-state and imperial-state boundaries, constituting a transnational public sphere. These institutions afforded sites of discipline, where emerging boundaries were inscribed and regulated. The migrant population as a whole was racialized to their benefit, but only those with adequate patrons were able to capitalize on local perceptions of “Arabs” as whites. Undesirable migrants were subject to erasure and displacement through their exclusion from institutional participation or even repatriation. It is this migrant elite and their clients which have acquired unprecedented visibility in various Middle American contexts, a fact that is exemplified by an exploration of the gendered public spheres, and it is they who are identified as Mashriqi. Camila Pastor de Maria Campos

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Diaspora Studies: Mexico - Brill Reference

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de Maria Campos, Camila Pastor. " Diaspora Studies: Mexico." Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures. General Editor Suad Joseph. Brill Online , 2012. Reference. BRILL demo user. 12 November 2012

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