Inscribing Difference: Maronites, Jews and Arabs in Mexican Public Culture and French Imperial Practice1
This paper traces the relationship between Arab, Maronite and Jewish populations that have circulated between the Mashreq – contemporary Lebanon, Israel and Syria – and Mexico over the past century and a half. It turns to historical anthropology to argue that a number of factors have contributed to the polarization of the Mashreqi migrant population along ethno-religious axes that were not salient in the same sense during the early decades of the migration, when families and individuals established cross-confessional networks based on a shared spoken language – Arabic – a shared culinary tradition and a shared space of life and labor – downtown Mexico City. It explores the categorization of migrants, through French administrative practice and the migrants’ creation of and participation in institutions, to describe the progressive erasure of common spaces and the privileging of allegiances articulated through ethno-religious categories, turned ethno-national labels. The French Mandate over the Mashreq, the...