Postdoctoral Fellow, History Department
Abstract Title: Home on Both Sides of the Border: Muslim Diasporas across South American frontiers, 1950–2010
Abstract: This is a socio-historical and comparative study that examines the additional and particular challenges that Muslim immigrants have faced in international trans border cities across the Southern Cone of Latin America in recent decades. Such a study promotes a trans-regional, multidisciplinary and analytically rigorous focus on the integration strategies of immigrants in their host societies while engaging transnational interactions with homeland societies. Drawing upon what I call “dual transnational identities,” I show how Muslims and their descendants in these trans-border cities have managed to reconcile two sets of transnational identities: a) The transatlantic identity— based on the complex relationship of origin and destination, and b) the transregional identity which incorporates constant negotiation with the two discrete political, judicial, and cultural spheres in which they live – on both sides of an international border. The research consists of a two-part comparative study. The first examines the Muslim-Lebanese community living in the “Triple Frontier” region of the cities of Ciudad del Este (Paraguay) and Foz do Iguaçu (Brazil), and two other, lesser-known, concentrations of Lebanese in adjacent cities along the Brazil-Paraguay and Paraguay Argentina borders: Ponta Porã-P. J. Caballero, and Encarnación-Posadas, respectively. The second part of the study compares these three Muslim-Lebanese communities with Muslim-Palestinian communities who have inhabited three pairs of cities across Uruguayan-Brazilian border (Artigas-Quaraí/Chuy-Chui/Rivera-Santana do Livremento), which share no more than a street as an international border. Unlike Christian-Arabs, who mainly settled in the urban centers, Muslim-Arabs have significantly gravitated toward the peripheries of South American countries, to benefit from state incentives aimed at stimulating trans-border trade. Most of them arrived as young, uneducated, men with no resources, but fired with a spirit of entrepreneurship. My research highlights this phenomenon whereby immigrants are implementing national development projects, thanks not to the efforts of their respective national authorities but to the intersection of individual and state interests. Despite bridging South American economics and promoting regional trade, these Muslims were also individually and collectively seen as a security threat to their new homelands. In recent decades, they have had to contend with swiping demonization and terror accusations that cast doubt on their economic, political, and civil loyalties to their host countries. My research challenges the veracity of these allegations, and re-orient the discussion away from the islamophobic paradigm toward an ethnographically and historical understanding of Muslim immigrant communities.