The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate

THE MEXICAN MAHJAR

Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate

CAMILA PASTOR

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

Austin

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Pastor, Camila, author.

Title: The Mexican Mahjar : transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French mandate / Camila Pastor.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017009440

ISBN 978-1-4773-1445-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1462-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1463-0 (library e-book)

ISBN 9781477314630 (non-library e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Arabs—Mexico—History—20th century. | Jews—Mexico—History—20th century. | Maronites—Mexico—History—20th century. | Mexico—Emigration and immigration. | Middle East—Emigration and immigration. | Mexico—Ethnic relations. | Mexico—Ethnic identity. | Mexico—Civilization—Arab influences.

Classification: LCC F1392.A7 P37 2017 | DDC 305.800972—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009440

doi:10.7560/314456

Para Rania Lawah y Samer El-Bunni

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1. THE MEXICAN MAHJAR

Chapter 2. MANAGING MOBILITY

Chapter 3. RACE AND PATRONAGE

Chapter 4. MIGRANTS AND THE LAW

Chapter 5. MODERNISM

Chapter 6. MAKING THE MAHJAR LEBANESE

Chapter 7. OBJECTS OF MEMORY

Chapter 8. THE ARAB AND ITS DOUBLE

CONCLUSION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES

ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1. Map of the Mashriq (Nimeh, Historia del Líbano, 1945)

1.1. Map of Mexican Railways 1890. Carta de los Ferrocarriles de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos 1890, Impreso y grabado por Erhard Hnos., Paris MX09017AGN-0000021558927, procedente del Archivo de Miguel Rul y Azcarate, Archivo General de la Nación

1.2. The Shia family of Mohamed Hassan Ahmad Sabag

2.1. The young Isidoro Duek of Aleppo, a Jewish migrant to Mexico, peddling with his indigenous Mexican porter in 1924

3.1. Wasela Abuali and her husband Assad Salman Abuali, a Druze couple who returned to Lebanon

4.1. The Lebanese-Mexican family of Mohamed Hassan Ahmad Sabag

6.1. Meeting of the Committee for Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian Youth

6.2. The Druze-Shia wedding of Farid Said and Alia Yaffar, 1950s

TABLES

1.1. Mashriqi Migrants in Mexico

1.2. Mahjari Arrivals in Mexico 1878–1951

1.3. Mashriqis in Mexico

6.1. Migrant Chambers of Commerce

6.2. Arabic-Language Schools in Mexico

6.3. Lebanese Leagues and Unions in Mexico

6.4. Lebanese Centers in Mexico, 2017

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book, produced over many years of work and conversation, has incurred enormous debts of guidance, collegiality, and intellectual companionship. I first want to acknowledge the team of scholars who encouraged the beginning of this project as my graduate school mentors, whose work has been foundational to my scholarly and personal development: Mariko Tamanoi, Sondra Hale, Jim Gelvin, and Kyeyoung Park. While at UCLA I was fortunate to also learn closely from Susan Slyomovics, Sandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, Sherry Ortner, Akhil Gupta, Karen Brodkin, and Andreas Wimmer. My parents, Rodolfo Pastor and Teresa de Maria Campos, were my first readers; the book owes much to their reactions and suggestions and to their own scholarship on Latin America. I also want to thank companions and fellow graduate students who, in sharing homes, meals, anxieties, and assigned reading, remain some of my earliest and very personal guides to the Middle East and other geographies: Ganesh Raghuraman, Anja Vogel, Clarice Rios, Shawqi el-Zatmah, Awad Awad, Zeynep Turkylmaz, Melis Hafez, Ziad Abu-Risch, and Anindita Nag.

My explorations as an ethnographer were facilitated by the warm welcome extended by scholars who guided and made possible my fieldwork, providing contacts and letters of introduction across Mahjar and Mashriq: Pati Jacobs, Martha Díaz de Kuri, Guita Hourani, Liz Hamui, Silvia Cherem, and Kathy Saade. I particularly thank my language tutors, who not only developed my fusha into more conversational Arabic but taught me to live in Lebanon: Issam Hourani, May Ahmar, and especially my dear friend Rania Lawah, her husband Samer el-Bunni, and their beautiful family in Tripoli. As an anthropologist, I am indebted to everyone who invited me into their home and into their memory, sharing family stories and community histories, books, photographs, al jubz wal milh. A list of my interviewees is included in the section on sources, but I would like to especially thank the family members who negotiated permission to reproduce family photographs: Alberto Said, Nacif Sabbagh, and Raquel Fredi Charabati.

As I grappled with the process of developing a narrative, participation in the UC Subaltern-Popular Multicampus Research Group provided precious intellectual examples and interlocutors who were crucial to the development of my analytic imagination and my moral compass as I navigated archives and field sites. I especially thank Swati Chatopaddhay, Parama Roy, Michael Provence, Paul Amar, Nuha Khoury, Sudipta Sen, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Bhaskar Sarkar, David Lloyd, Freya Schiwy, Kamala Visweswaran, José Rabasa, and other members of that collective who offered questions or encouragement and modeled postcolonial engagement.

During the years of revisiting archives and developing the book, I was fortunate to be interpellated by scholars who challenged me to articulate arguments and seek out literatures. Sarah Gualtieri, John Karam, Christina Civantos, Raanan Rein, Jeffrey Lesser, and Mariano Plotkin were important interlocutors. The encounters facilitated by Casa Árabe of Madrid under Gema Martín Muñoz’s direction, through the Arabia Americana program implemented by Karim Hauser, launched an important Iberoamerican conversation and collaboration with Isaías Barreñada, María del Mar Logroño, Paulo Pinto, María Cardeira, and the TEIM team: Ángeles Ramírez, Miguel Larramundi, Bernabé López García, and Ana Planet. Conversations on Mashriq and Mahjar at the conferences organized by Akram Khater, John Karam, and Andrew Arsan at the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies have been central to my work, and I especially thank Stacy Fahrentold, Simon Jackson, Jacob Norris, Devi Mays, Reem Bailony, Steve Hyland, and Sally Howell for discussion. The Mandate Studies workshop organized by Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan at Princeton helped me develop new avenues of research; I thank them, and especially Elizabeth Thompson and Orit Bashkin, for their questions and comments.

I thank my colleagues at CIDE, Colegio de Mexico, and Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, whose complicity and insights have been crucial since I returned to teach and work in Mexico: Luis Mesa, Jean Meyer, Antonio Saborit, Gilberto Conde, Marta Tawil, Indira Sánchez, Mariam Saada, Laila Hotait, and especially my friend and mentor Clara García. I thank CIDE for institutional support over the past six years and for encouraging and partially funding my frequent research travels. I thank archivists and library staff at CIDE, Colegio de México, the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères at La Courneuve and Nantes, the Archivo General de la Nación, the Archivo Municipal of Torreón and Saltillo, the Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman Library at the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in Aix en Provence, the Services Patrimoniales of the Marseille Chamber of Commerce, and the Widener and Schlesinger libraries at Harvard for their help and cheer. And I thank my students at UCLA, Colegio de México, Instituto Mora, and CIDE, who challenged me to refine ideas through their questions and encouraged me through their enthusiastic engagement with historical ethnography.

I have been fortunate to develop conversations on Middle Eastern mobility with scholars from intellectual traditions beyond my initial Anglophone formative background. I especially thank Aude Signoles and Bernard Botiveau for hosting me on sabbatical at Sciences Po, Aix en Provence; and Anton Escher, Paul Tabar, Midori Iijima, and Hidemitsu Ku- roki for their invitations to present my work to enriching audiences in Mainz and Tokyo. I thank the people who made the production of this book possible: my editor Jim Burr of University of Texas Press, who welcomed the project enthusiastically, and the wonderful University of Texas Press team. The careful archival and editorial aid of my research assistants at CIDE, especially Miguel Fuentes and Ruth García, has been invaluable.

I thank my family, my transnational context of origin: my aunt Beatriz, my brothers Rodolfo and Jerónimo, my grandmothers Teresa and Gladys, and my dear friends Mariana Avendaño, Esmeralda Urquiza, Aida Orea, Patricia Cabrera, and María José Roa, for cultivating the affective continuities that anchor my intellectual projects. I thank Sergio Rajsbaum, my partner, for his humor, his company, and our travels.

Finally, I thank the editors of various journals where earlier drafts of my work have been published for permission to use this material. Earlier versions and fragments of chapter 4 appeared in El modernismo en un Atlántico moro: historias de viaje, in Andalusíes: historia cultural de una elite magrebí, ed. José Antonio González Alcantud and Sandra Rojo Flores (Madrid: Editorial Abada, 2015) and The Mashriq Unbound: Arab Modernism, Criollo Nationalism, and the Discovery of America by the Turks, Mashriq & Mahjar 2, no. 2 (2014). Earlier drafts of chapter 6 appeared in La creación de un ámbito público transnacional (segunda parte), Estudios de Asia y África 48, no. 1 (2013), 99–134; La creación de un ámbito público transnacional (primera parte), Estudios de Asia y África 47, no. 3 (2012), 485–520; and Invisible Hands: Twentieth-Century Networks and Institutions of the Mashreqi Migration to Mexico, Palma Journal 11 (2009): 31–37.

INTRODUCTION

Six days after his death in August of 1924, Botros Maalouf of the Lebanese Mountain, grandfather of the celebrated writer Amin Maalouf, was addressed in the following note by a former student. The young man announced his intention to travel from Paris to Mexico:

I leave Paris three days from now, for Bologne, where I will take to sea the 30th of this month. I will be taking with me my misery and my concerns, which are so heavy that I fear to see the steamship founder. Ah, yes, I finally leave for this faraway country, Mexico, which may fulfill my dreams or destroy them. I may stay there forever and be buried in its soil, or I may leave it in a month’s time. I know nothing. I have the feeling today that the entire world is narrow. In saying this, I must seem arrogant, which I am not . . . I dreamed of fighting for the law and for God under your flag . . . but the circumstances that no one ignores forced me to leave the country and abandon the ambitions that I had nourished in my homeland. . . . You must write to me, dear professor, for your letters will be the only light in the black night of my life. I hope you will not forget this young man who found in you the confessor to his spirit. Write to me at Sr. Praxedes Rodríguez, San Martín Chachicuatla, Mexico, requesting for mail to be forwarded.

A sad young man

Your spiritual son

Ali Mohammed al-Hage

N.B. In any case, I would like you to greet the land of Lebanon, and to say goodbye to it for me since it seems to me that I will never see it again.¹

As French mandate administration over Syria and Lebanon was consolidated, Ali, a young Muslim exile, sought guidance from his Melkite professor, who had embarked on a failed American adventure in 1900.² The rest of the correspondence carefully preserved by Botros’s widow Nazira in the family archive, a suitcase, were letters of condolence for the Maalouf family: more than twenty-four messages from the mountain’s villages, Zahleh, Beirut, Aleppo, Cairo, New York, São Paulo, and El Paso, Texas.³ The salience of singular subjects in diasporic networks shines through in the cosmopolitan condolences spiraling from the world to the mountain. A complicated story of modernism, nationalism, interconfessional alignments, uncertain horizons, and exile facilitated by steamship webs linking the Eastern Mediterranean, France, and Mexico darkens Ali’s letter. There is no official record of his arrival in Mexico. Did he disembark? Did he travel?

What do Ali, Botros, and Nazira tell us about the relevance of mobility, as project and practice, to lives anchored in the Lebanese Mountain and other localities of the Eastern Mediterranean at the beginning of the twentieth century?⁴ What horizons of possibility did migration inaugurate and how do we access their history? How did the modernist Nahda imagination of Arab nationalisms situate Middle American geographies and populations?⁵ Who undertook the leap of faith of transatlantic travel and crucially, how did France mediate these transits? This node in migrant sociability highlights some of the core processes structuring the Mexican Mahjar, a transregional formation that straddled political transitions and linked subjects anchored across Mashriq and Mahjar.

Mashriq is a geographical term referring to Arabic-speaking countries of the Eastern Mediterranean; it will be used throughout this book to refer to the region.⁶ Mashriqi refers to its inhabitants, an alternative to the modern national categories slowly and incompletely produced during the twentieth century. Mahjar—space of migration, diasporic homeland, dwelling in movement—was the term used by Arabic speakers to describe geographies and sociabilities inhabited by muhajirin, migrants, since the late nineteenth century.⁷ The Mahjar was a transnational field, weaving together social formations across distinct national, imperial, and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. I will use the terms Mahjari and migrant to refer to people who moved and to their descendants, insofar as they continued to engage the Mahjar as a social space, dwelling at a crossroads, in transit, subject to multiple sovereignties.

Unprecedented numbers of people were set in motion by economic and political transformations in the last third of the nineteenth century.⁸ Rural and marginal populations left Europe and the Mashriq, East and South Asia. The industrializing American nations absorbed much of this labor force. As part of this global mobility, hundreds of thousands of people boarded newly available steamships in Beirut, Jaffa, and Alexandria; traveled through Marseille and often Havana; and were deposited in the Atlantic ports of the long American continent, anywhere between Canada and Buenos Aires.⁹ Doctor Bollamir, a Mashriqi resident of Marseille, noted their circulation’s economic and affective logics in 1901:

The emigration of the inhabitants of Syria and Lebanon, which has taken on very important proportions, began about twenty years ago. Marseille has remained the usual route for travelers, and on their way out or as they return, they spend more or less time there . . . most migrants . . . hurry to return after a few years away from their homeland, along with their families, who have shared this voluntary exile. This return is not definitive, however . . . having immersed himself in his native soil, the migrant is taken with nostalgia for a new voyage, and we find him again on the road to America. . . . The growing number of emigrants has reached three hundred thousand, of which a third has returned permanently to their homeland, and the rest constitute a population dispersed across the different countries of the New Continent, dedicated to commerce which is the main goal of these displacements. Some have managed to create very prosperous situations and to establish great commercial houses with very important business ties to France.¹⁰

Between 1870 and 1901, three hundred thousand estimated migrants circulated between Mashriq and Mahjar. By the time the First World War exploded and the Ottoman political system collapsed in 1918, between a third and a half of the population of the Lebanese Mountain had made the transatlantic journey.¹¹ Their intense mobility was interrupted by the Great War, but resumed in the 1920s and continued through the late 1940s, when the new states of Lebanon and Syria were under French mandate. Many migrants returned definitively to the Mashriq; the rest concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, with important communities in Haiti and Mexico.¹²

The Mahjar has long been studied through national histories of reception of Arabic-speaking migrants. This book argues that the Mahjar was a multifaceted transregional formation that migrants inhabited as the floating world of elsewhere once they had shaken their moorings in village and Ottoman belonging. This global Mahjar of the migrant imagination was, however, fragmented by the legalities of national and imperial constructions. Migrants were subject to distinct administrative practices that operated simultaneously, constituting overlapping frames to migrant trajectories. When we read different archives in conjunction, particular national and regional Mahjars become apparent—the Mexican Mahjar, the Latin American and North American Mahjars—in which national and regional politics intersected first with Ottoman and later with French imperial practice. Mahjaris have also been the object of interventions by the universalist jurisdictions of religious institutions—initially the Maronite, Greek Orthodox, and Melkite churches, later also Zionist Judaism, and eventually a proselytizing Islam. This book recognizes the importance of national jurisdictions channeling mobility, while attending to imperial circuits and migrant notables framing migrant trajectories, to offer a colonial history of mobility centered on migrants as agents crafting networks and mobilizing discordant authorities.

The migration’s pulse reflects the bewildering variability of individual experience as well as social processes framing divergent trajectories: the social location from which a journey was initially undertaken; its timing; and the social and political conditions organizing departures, arrivals, transits, and returns. In Amin Maalouf’s family memoir young men hope for economic success, political exiles flee regional reconfigurations, journalists and professors address global Mahjari publics, and women work in the administration of memory.¹³ Their mobility was experienced and narrated as conquest, diaspora, exile, or pilgrimage. Making Mashriqis in movement the unit of analysis, I follow mobilities and migrant constructions of memory, attempting to track their logics and make sense of their constraints, intending to grasp the human experience of broad structural and discursive phenomena, to explore global history on an intimate scale.

MOVING MASHRIQIS

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Mashriqi migrants were headed for the Americas, which they conceived as a vast and undifferentiated land of opportunity, the New World. In the Ottoman imaginary, Amrika was not a single country or cultural or political beacon. It was a place where people could go to make money and return home rich, traveling repeatedly rather than settling overseas. As American Protestant missionary Henry Jessup observed about Douma in 1910:

Since those days [1858] the village has been completely transformed. Emigrants to North and South America have returned enriched and have built beautiful homes, with tiled roofs, glass fronts and marble floors, vying with city houses. Indeed this holds true of the Lebanon villages for a hundred miles along the mountain range. Everywhere the people say This was done with American money.¹⁴

According to oral history, in the beginning, destination was sometimes determined by the first port of call of the next available ship of the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, the Société Générale des Transports Maritimes, or the Compagnie Cyprien Fabre proposed by an emigration agency.¹⁵ By the 1920s, 90 to 95 percent of migrants reported that they intended to join family, fellow villagers, or friends, constituting a classic case of chain migration.¹⁶ While the initial destination was often chosen because kinsfolk were already there, once migrants found their footing, they remained extraordinarily mobile across American geographies.

If Amrika was a land of plenty, Latin America, Amrika al Jnubiya, was narrated as a place to discover and conquer. Arriving as liberal Latin American states invested in infrastructure in order to better link up with a global industrial order, Mashriqis contributed to the creation of regional markets through their itinerant credit economies and transnational business networks and profited from the expansion of emerging economies in the Belle Époque global moment. Ottoman subjects brought with them newly articulated Nahda claims regarding the place of Arabic speakers in modernist global hierarchies, which imagined Native American populations as racially and civilizationally subordinate to Arabs. Mahjari racialization as white in Middle American postcolonial formations, though briefly contested by xenophobic nationalisms in the wake of the Great Depression, consolidated their reading as potential local elites.

Migrants who arrived in Mexico in the final Ottoman decades came mostly from the Lebanese Mountain, with many arrivals from the northern districts—especially from Zgharta, Akar, and Zahleh—and from the Shouf, initially from Deir al-Qamar. Over the next decades, migration diversified and the mostly Maronite and Melkite pioneers were joined by a growing Arab Jewish migration and compatriots of all confessions arriving from Tripoli, Aleppo, Homs, Damascus, Bait Laham, and Bait Jala, among numerous cities and villages of the Ottoman Arab provinces. Many arrived in Mexico from other Mahjars; tens of thousands stayed; others moved on in the pursuit of kin, stability, or profit.¹⁷ As the twentieth century unfolded, mobility reflected the pulse of political and economic life across Mashriq and Mahjar, dwindling during the early decades of Middle Eastern independences, to peak again with the eruption of the Lebanese Civil War. As with other Latin American destinations, Mexico’s attraction declined along with the promise of the Mexican economy, from a late nineteenth-century moment pregnant with potential, to a more difficult early twenty-first-century present. Changing global conditions redirected flows from Latin and North America to Australia and the oil economies of the Arab Gulf.

Much scholarship has focused on the national projects migrants had to contend with in the Americas and the Arab nationalisms that they developed through homeland politics.¹⁸ While national projects were important, political jurisdictions other than the nation intersected with nascent nationalist imaginaries to frame trajectories. I will argue that the transnational field woven across Mahjar and Mashriq by the ebb and flow of migrant circulation from the late nineteenth century through the present is best understood in light of the circumstances framing the two peaks in mobility in the Mashriq-Middle American circuit: Ottoman modernity and the French mandate. These two political moments were times of social reconfiguration that built on existing social formations but also produced new subjects, discourses, and cultural practice that continue to inform Mahjari practice in the early twenty-first century.¹⁹ The recognition of Mahjaris as simultaneously imperial subjects (Ottoman, French) and postcolonial national subjects (Lebanese, Syrian, Mexican) alerts us to the fact that they navigated geographies framed by distinct and unequal projects. Trajectories in the Mexican Mahjar were afforded by the intersection of Arab, French, and Mexican colonial modernisms.

An exercise in historical anthropology, this book will explore the transition from the Ottoman to the mandate moment in the making of the Mexican Mahjar. The transition was vital, establishing new boundaries within Mahjar networks and communities, organizing institutions, aligning categories of subjects. It was essential to migrant social mobility during the second half of the twentieth century, when geographic mobility diminished and Mexican Mahjar dynamics were fundamentally focused on migrants’ differential access to material and moral accumulation. Mandate-era understandings continue to structure migrant memory work, Mahjari self-orientalizations, and Mexican Orientalisms and Islamophobias—conditioning trajectories, as recent arrivals with the right connections and attributes capitalize on definitions of Mashriqi privilege in Mexican public culture.

The first chapters rely on crossing the official archives of imperial and national administrative, commercial, diplomatic, and punitive institutions housed in libraries, state archives, and universities in France, Lebanon, and Mexico. My training as an anthropologist informs my reading of these archival formations. The final chapters are ethnographic. They center migrant memory, accessed through personal and family archives, in-depth life history and oral history interviews, community publications, and ethnography, as well as representations and appropriations of migrant practice by Mexicans of other genealogies, accessed through the press, online publications, interviews, and participant observation between 2003 and 2015.

FIGURE 0.1   Map of the Mashriq (Nimeh 1945).

THINKING THE MEXICAN MAHJAR

Middle East mobility studies produced by anthropologists and historians trained in regional historiography and languages have only come into their own in the past decade and a half. The recognition of mobile subjects as central to the region’s modern history is gradually shifting the historical narrative and opening up avenues of inquiry.²⁰ This section briefly reviews the theoretical and methodological approaches to mobility that inform my analysis throughout the book. I use analytic tools developed by scholars of transnationalism, subaltern and feminist studies, and historical anthropology to argue that crucial insights emerge when we approach migratory processes through historical ethnography.

Most scholars writing about mobility before this shift focused on diaspora—as migrants, their children, grandchildren, or spouses—working to produce community and family memory. In community histories and the oral history elicited through my ethnographic process, migrants generate a mythology of mobility. Some of the core tropes in migrant memory, terrible Turks and Phoenician propensities to travel and commerce, constitute Christian narratives appealing to Western Christendom’s hospitality or constructing Lebanese nationalism. Chapter 7 offers a brief social history of the production, confessional diversification, and circulation of memory literature in the Mexican Mahjar. Community histories of varying degrees of professionalization memorialize the migration, narrating through an affective lens that defends the migrant as a morally sound citizen of the receiving state. This moral imperative impoverishes analyses of mobility, confining narratives to the celebratory and foreclosing complexity.

Professional historians situating Mashriqi migration within Mexican national history respected and reproduced migrant narratives as the historical truth of immigrant origins. Even when they don’t work within policy-oriented, government-funded fields that demand analyses intelligible to state institutions, scholars, too, are subjects produced by states. The twentieth-century project of the homogeneous nation-state has deeply structured how we imagine and narrate history. Framing mobility through national histories reflects a national imagination at work, producing what Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick-Schiller have called methodological nationalism.²¹ Methodological nationalism has ensured that, until very recently, histories and ethnographies of migration focused on migrants’ lives in the context of reception, with little serious attention to their sustained mobility, the history of their place of origin, or the ways in which that context continues to inform their trajectories as they dwell in movement. Notable exceptions have explored return migration.²²

Moving people rub against the grain of the nation-state, according to which subjects are members of one and only one state-nation-territory-language; those who live otherwise are represented and managed as deviant.²³ In normative policy and social science diagnosis, the migrant is deviant unless she submits to the nation-state logic, making a national choice. The national lens encourages scholars to portray the migrant as emigrant and immigrant, figures that fit nation-state ideologies even though they do not necessarily reflect all migrants’ projects, affective investments, or expectations. In order to describe migrants as morally adequate beings, movement needs to be construed as unidirectional and permanent. Emigrant populations leave one national context, often cast in migration literature as problematic or structurally flawed. Sending countries are portrayed as poor, underdeveloped, overpopulated, politically unstable places anyone would want to leave. Receiving countries are defined as rich and modern places providing security and opportunity, where everyone would like to settle. Such states expect that migrants should want to rid themselves of the habits and markers of their former nation and do their best to assimilate, to become as much like their host’s hegemonic culture, or mainstream, as they can manage. This process is construed as taking time, one or two generations. The achievement of cultural similarity is assumed to cultivate a concomitant shift in political allegiance to the new nation. Focusing on mobility between two world peripheries is a way out of such assumptions, of finding new questions.

Migration studies additionally tend to define migrants—assorted individuals who share the fact of movement—through the marked collective category of the ethnic and as communities.²⁴ Migrants from culturally distant sites are produced as ethnic groups in contrast to a national norm, and the study of immigrant populations consists of tracking the progress of their assimilation into the mainstream. The good immigrant story, prevalent in Mexico and other areas of migrant destination in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tells the tale of a hardworking foreigner. He arrives with no resources other than his willingness to work and emulate local society and thus eventually—through hard work, thrifty habits, and sagacious investment—achieves local middle-class status. Celebrations of migration describe migrants’ contributions to the adopted nation and their role in local nation-building projects. Accounts attempting empathy with the challenges of mobility quickly slide into a politics of sentimentality that favors nostalgia and migrant struggles with belonging.²⁵

New paradigms that emerged in the past two decades encourage us to retain the state as a fundamental producer of subjects and boundaries while recognizing other processes simultaneously at work, undoing or at least complicating some state effects. Transnational studies emerged in the work of sociologists and anthropologists engaged in ethnographies of migration.²⁶ Anthropologists of globalization, tourism, travel, and migrancy have attempted to reconceptualize movement as central, rather than marginal, to human sociality.²⁷ These conceptual shifts set our analytic imagination free from national expectations, allowing us to explore the diversity within movement. Current nation-states, their boundaries, and the variety of mechanisms developed to reify them—travel documents, visas, and immigration checkpoints—become visible as recent historical projects.²⁸ Ideologies of mobility and reception shape the administration of mobility, informing migrant choices and behavior, which are historically specific.

Historical anthropologists have noted the importance of contextualizing movement, attending to agents’ categories and narratives and exploring the role of sites and practices of remembering in the construction of national and community histories.²⁹ Migrants arriving in particular national contexts face changing demands and opportunities. Their experience can highlight axes obscured in political histories of the nation—such as differential experiences of class, religious tradition, or political participation—affording richer, more textured histories of multifaceted processes.³⁰ Attending to the diversity of migrants and their trajectories and to the transformations of the discursive frameworks through which they narrate and enact their lives affords glimpses beyond hegemonies. While confessional identities have been historically important in the Mashriq and have taken on crucial political dimensions since the mid-nineteenth century, they tend to displace and/or subsume other locally relevant social fault lines in popular and expert discourse, notably class and gender difference. I will explore these intersections through the conjunction of historical ethnography and subaltern studies.

HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Historical anthropology has emerged as a recognizable body of literature that moves beyond the ambivalence of interdisciplinary work and debates about exchanges of method and theory between history and anthropology conceived as distinct disciplines. Though the field is characterized by overlapping conversations with distinct genealogies, shared sensibilities, concerns, and politics have generated common strategies for knowledge production. It was perhaps anthropologist Bernard Cohn, working at the University of Chicago, who first formulated the perspective foundational to current historical anthropology.³¹ Pieces published by Cohn between 1962 and 1981 were brought together in a volume titled An Anthropologist among the Historians in 1987. Historian Ranajit Guha, founder of the influential Subaltern Studies collective, wrote the introduction to the volume, revealing the extent to which Cohn’s scholarship cultivated conversations with Subaltern Studies in the twenty-five-year interval it took him to define the field. The enterprise of historical anthropology, which Guha labeled anthropological history, was constituted in this encounter, with questions about power providing a joint frontier.³²

Guha and Cohn define historical anthropology as an intellectual exercise that treats cultural categories as processes constructed in the interaction of differentially situated subjects.³³ The colonial encounter is privileged as a site for the study of power through the making of categories in the interaction of dominant and subaltern subjects.³⁴ Concerned with the themes of national and colonial effects, Cohn’s work transformed the analytic horizon by centering the colonial situation. He moved firmly away from earlier anthropological articulations of impact, culture contact, and influence, which implied the possibility of disentangling a primitive pristine from European modernity. Situating the European colonialist and the indigene in one analytic field forced recognition of savage and civilized as inhabiting a common temporality, of their difference as an effect of power differentials structured in the colonial encounter.³⁵ It created the possibility of analyzing how such differentials are produced and distinctions stabilized through the colonial administration of subjects and categories of rule.

From an anthropologist’s perspective, the field has been built by scholars seeking alternatives to epistemologies acknowledged as problematic in the discipline’s debates of the 1980s. Talal Asad first recognized in 1973 that constructions central to our analytic and narrative work stem from anthropologists’ unacknowledged collaboration with colonial administrations.³⁶ As Eric Wolf, working in a political economy key, produced Europe and the People without History, Johannes Fabian questioned the convention of the ethnographic present in describing the Other, noting that the Other’s historicity was eliminated by this narrative fiction.³⁷ Renato Rosaldo and critics of area studies like Lila Abu-Lughod and Michael Gilsenan challenged the construction of cultures as bounded, discontinuous entities, and Susan Slyomovics scorned anthropology’s romance with the anonymous subject.³⁸ Ann Laura Stoler dissected the production of the colonial state in intimate interaction. These contributions suggested alternatives: ethnography directly concerned with colonial modernity and the colonial encounter, committed to situating singular subjects in time, bent on telling connected histories.

From a historian’s point of view, anthropological history is also characterized by subversive ruptures and rethinkings of core disciplinary practice. With a strong history of historicism through the first half of the twentieth century, the goal for many historians is still to understand an age in its own terms, priority given to politics and great men. This often produces event-based, particularistic, atheoretical, intuitive, supposedly factual and truthful narrative histories.³⁹ Though strong reactions to the historicist paradigm developed on several fronts—with French historians after World War II defending an analytic, theoretical, comparative history of society that set the stage for the emergence of schools of social and cultural history—historicism is alive and well as disciplinary common sense. Unruly innovations included E. P. Thompson’s social history of the making of the English working class, Robert Darnton’s histories of popular culture in eighteenth-century France, and Natalie Davis’s attention to extraordinary subjects like Martin Guerre and her three women on the margins. Perhaps productive tension is best exemplified by Michel Foucault’s monumental oeuvre, which he defined as a history of the limits of Western reason. A passion for margins also fueled the Subaltern Studies project, with Guha welcoming Cohn’s explorations as a breath of fresh air, pointing scholars in the direction of a new sense of wonder and the play of an insatiable doubt.⁴⁰

Foucault, however—like Gramsci, who informed subaltern and other postcolonial production—is often read as theory and cast out of history by fellow historians reluctant to engage with what they perceive as bad history, obscure theorizing. Anthropologists are often received with suspicion on historians’ terrain with similar arguments. Historians’ preference for periodization as explicative and narrative strategy can stump the anthropologist, exhortations to flag our chronologies falling on the deaf ears of those trained to organize analysis through theory. Cohn offers us a fieldwork metaphor, claiming that historical anthropology is best made by bicultural subjects who are familiar through immersion with the professional histories, life-worlds, and practices of both traditions and fully conscious of their differences.⁴¹

In spite of institutional configurations that continue to enforce disciplinary distinction, tinging efforts to consolidate the field with anxiety, its articulations are ever richer. Robert Darnton’s 1984 invitation to write history in the ethnographic grain is enticing, as he moves away from individuals and events in his reconstruction of social meaning.⁴² The Comaroffs’ Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992) is a theoretical tour de force, a passionate plea for the sustained relevance of ethnography—as a modality of theoretically informed practice—to an anthropology that needs to become historical. They defend historical anthropology’s potential to dissolve the great analytic divide between tradition and modernity.⁴³ Cooper and Stoler’s joint introduction to their edited volume Tensions of Empire (1998) became an important landmark, revisiting the centrality of the colonial encounter as analytic horizon.⁴⁴ Keith Axel (2002) and Saurabh Dube (2007) have compiled important collections, imagining futures for historical anthropology.⁴⁵

SUBALTERN STUDIES AND FEMINISM

Historical anthropology’s concerns with the social construction of power have facilitated conversations with subaltern and postcolonial studies, the theoretical centers of gravity of colonial studies during the 1980s and 1990s. The Subaltern Studies project of reading the archive—sometimes along the grain and sometimes against it, for processes of subalternization, for the production of a power differential between social actors, in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak’s seminal definition of the subaltern—is central to my analysis.⁴⁶ I also rely on a vast postcolonial literature exploring the dynamics of colonial projects and anticolonial resistance, noting the role of transnational populations and movements in enforcing and extending colonial projects into intimate realms as well as in orchestrating public challenges to the state.⁴⁷ Mariko Tamanoi’s work on the gendering of Japanese nationalism and differential erasures of national memory in postcolonial Japan has been particularly useful in thinking through non-Western colonial projects, as has Prasenjit Duara’s work on decolonization.

Beyond Spivak’s seminal question of whether the subaltern can speak, a necessary point of departure, feminist analytics of intersectionality have informed my analysis of formations enforcing subalternity through the articulation and mutual constitution of axes of difference and hierarchy. I am particularly indebted to the theoretical work of Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality and to Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s attention to differential feminisms. Nadje al-Ali’s work moves beyond the coconstruction of racial, gendered, and class subjections to insist on ethnographic inquiry into which intersections are relevant for the analysis of a particular historical process. I follow Adrienne Rich in centering the body as a strategic beginning, source of questions, and compass of a grounded politics; and Kamala Visweswaran on narrative alternatives in feminist ethnography.⁴⁸

ETHNOGRAPHY IN THE ARCHIVE

Ethnography approaches the document, the archival artifact, as relevant for whatever it may tell us of the conditions of the past and for what we may read in it of the discursive formation within which it operated.⁴⁹ Ethnographers have questioned archival authority and archival transparency by posing questions about how archives are produced and about what, exactly, constitutes an archive. Asking, with Akhil Gupta, through what alchemy today’s secondary sources—press accounts, for example—are rarefied into the truth of the past. Questioning the processes that produce the archive as truth invites inquiry into the institutional location of archival material and the politics of archiving practices, beautifully theorized by the Subaltern Studies