Until recent years, Mexico did not have many restrictions on immigration, making it attractive to the Europeans and Middle Easterners who took part in the great movement to the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Lebanese were part of that movement, attracted to Mexico by Porfirian development initiatives that encouraged foreign immigration.
In the years between 1880 and 1910, the first wave of Lebanese immigrants arrived in Mexico, driven from their native land by the oppression of the Ottoman regime with its political instability, economic competition and religious tensions. They arrived on Mexico's eastern shores and settled in the Yucatan peninsula and the Gulf coast ports of Veracruz and Tampico.
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. 64% were Catholic, 18% were Jews, 4.6% were Muslims, 6% were Orthodox, and 2% 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.
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