More Argentine Than You

Steven Hyland's work is an important contribution to the study of immigrants and national identity in Argentina and the study of ethnic groups in the Americas more broadly. Since most of the immigrants who arrived in Argentina were European, many of the scholarly generalizations about mass migration there have been primarily based on Eurocentric models. Yet as Hyland demonstrates, the immigrant story could unfold in very different ways, as it did for some Arabic speakers in Argentina. Focusing primarily on the Syrian Lebanese immigrant group in the northwestern province of Tucumán, Hyland's study is part of a welcome move within Argentine historiography to expand our knowledge of immigration and ethnic groups beyond Buenos Aires and its surrounding areas. Because of its subject matter, Hyland's work also illuminates the class divisions typical of the northwest through an ethnic lens as well as the economic strains (due to sugar monoculture) that gripped the region during the 1920s and 1930s.Hyland explores the ways that this immigrant group is both typical and atypical of immigrants to Argentina and the Americas. Perhaps the most important way in which this group did not follow the pattern of other groups was in their lack of strong and long-standing communal organizations. The group was fragmented by socioeconomic status: elite merchants in the Syrian Lebanese community garnered wealth and status that set them completely apart from those who worked as day labor on the many sugarcane plantations. Hyland illuminates the ways that “a supposed undesirable immigrant group successfully achieved economic prosperity that many translated into social prestige and political power” (p. 7). He demonstrates that the Syrian Lebanese immigrants (particularly the elite) had become a well-integrated group with political power by the first administration of Juan Perón. This show of ethnic political power, which culminated in the election of Carlos Menem as president of Argentina in 1989, would have seemed very unlikely when the first immigrants arrived and established themselves as peddlers in the late nineteenth century. Yet the immigrants did not forget where they came from: Hyland explores the ways that immigrants continued to be involved in their faraway homelands by staying active in politics in the last years of the Ottoman Empire and in the nationalist movements that followed.In many ways, Hyland's study is stronger for his inability to write a typical communal history focusing on the development of communal institutions, a common methodology for ethnic histories in Argentina. Because of the absence of these institutions among the Syrian Lebanese community in Tucumán, he is forced to look at other ways to approach the group and their history. Hyland uses as the organizing principle of his study the Arabic language, which delineated the boundaries of the group while binding its members together. Arabic speakers of all classes struggled to learn and adjust to a Spanish-language world, created a thriving Arabic-language press, and continued the poetic traditions that they brought with them from the Middle East. He buttresses the sources written by those in the community with government sources on the province, the Spanish-language press, and deep archival work. He does a particularly impressive job with the many instances of Syrian Lebanese people caught up in violence and crime, traced through the local press and the judicial archives. He is able to give more insight into the lives of workers during those sections of the text, but overall poor Syrian Lebanese immigrants received far less attention than the elite, and readers would certainly benefit from more analysis of the former's situations.The breadth of primary sources in the work is outstanding, since few scholars have the Arabic and French skills to delve into the documentation from the premigration Middle East as well as the Argentine Arabic-language press. Scholars of immigration throughout the Americas will find the work useful for its scope and source material. Tucumán was an interior sugar-dependent province with a small capital that did not look like the immigrant metropolis of Buenos Aires. Yet it is precisely because San Miguel de Tucumán was not like Buenos Aires and did not experience massive European immigration that it offers such an important counterexample to the many studies that we have. Syrian Lebanese in Tucumán found ways to integrate into the local society that worked for them and their environment and that were often different from the strategies of immigrants in Buenos Aires.The book overall is well researched and shows the work that scholars of immigration and ethnicity need to do to fully explore the immigrant experience in Argentina. So much of the history of immigrants in Argentina occurred outside Buenos Aires, yet our knowledge at this point for many areas is all too fragmentary. Hyland's book is a great first step toward expanding both our knowledge of immigrants and ethnicity in the rural northwest and our notions of how non-European immigrants fit into conceptions of Argentine national identity

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• Mission and Migration in the Formation of an Arab Middle Class

  Julian Cole Phillips•Social Sciences and Missions•2022

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