Scholar Reveals History of Middle Eastern Immigration in Mexico

Professor Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp

Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp's great-grandfather was originally a Lebanese Muslim, but in 1881 he immigrated to Mexico, joining the large diaspora of Lebanese immigrants in America. On April 16, his great-granddaughter paid scholarly homage to him and his Lebanese compatriots in Mexico in a lecture hosted by the Prince al Waleed bin Talal Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR). Held at Auditorium B in West Hall, the lecture was entitled "The Lebanese Abroad: Leaving and Locating the Levant in Mexican History."

An associate professor of history at Sonoma State University in California, Alfaro-Velcamp spoke of the methodological hurdles she faced while researching her latest book, So Far From Allah, So Close to Mexico: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico, (2007) and traces the historical and cultural challenges faced by those immigrants more than a century earlier.

For instance, Ottoman restrictions on Muslim immigration fostered a culture of secrecy among immigrants who often claimed to be Catholic, both to escape Turkish scrutiny and to appease the Christian authorities of their host country, Mexico. Mexican immigration and naturalization service records were themselves problematic, Alfaro-Velcamp said, given that all immigrants from the Levant in the nineteenth century were referred to as Turks and that later, in the twentieth century, all Lebanese immigrants were registered as Syrians.

Alfaro-Velcamp referred to all Levantine immigrants as Middle Eastern in order to encompass the various flows of migration to Mexico while avoiding the quandary of delineating elusive immigrant nationalities. Furthermore, inaccuracies occurred in the geopolitical distribution of immigrants in official Mexican documents as a result of the civil war in Mexico between 1911 and 1920. Those inaccuracies were yet another "hurdle" that Alfaro-Velcamp had to factor into her research, especially since the "areas of conflict were usually areas of opportunity" for the incoming immigrants, thus eclipsing the reality of immigrant distribution in other less turbulent regions of the country.

The issue of illegal immigration presented another methodological problem. "To register themselves legally, immigrants had to pay a fee in pesos or the equivalent of a thousand dollars in United States currency today, and many simply could not afford it," Alfaro-Velcamp said, explaining why the immigration rates available are probably skewed.

More than 8,000 Middle Easterners were legally registered as immigrants between 1878 and 1951. During that period, there were 4,522 Lebanese immigrants in Mexico, out of a total of 8,036 immigrants. Hence, those coming from various areas in Lebanon constituted 56 percent of all immigrants. In addition to these statistics, Alfaro-Velcamp also provided a statistical distribution of Lebanese immigrants according to religion. The majority, 64 percent, were Catholic, 18 percent were Jews, 4.6 percent were Muslims, 6 percent were Orthodox, and 2 percent were Druze.

Lebanese immigrants sought to integrate themselves in their new societies, despite the often painful discrimination they faced from the aboriginal people, who felt threatened by the economic prowess of the Middle Eastern immigrants. And yet, paradoxically, as Alfaro-Velcamp pointed out, foreignness, when coupled with wealth, was "a passport to elite status and legitimation" in the Mexican community.