shrimpscallop
Joined: 30 Apr 2005
Posts: 60
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 Posted: Fri May 20, 2005 8:44 pm Post subject: Before Made In China...We clothed the Brazilians |
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I am not part of the we but this group of people in one generation within Brazil made good but how long will it last? What does this mean? Businesses stay active for so long until you wiped out be competitors such as China. So where do alot of these business looser end up. Politics.
| Quote: | | Brazilian Parliament: consists of nearly 20% Brazilians of Lebanese decent. |
That is some mighty stuff right there but please do not let me interfere with your learning.
| Quote: | Carrying the past: the Syrio-Lebanese Emigration to Brazil
(c) 2002, Ernesto Capello
Behind much of the discourse on immigration to Brazil lies the question of the country's former dependence on slave labor. There are several reasons for this phenomenon. One is that Brazilian elites and landowners long hoped to diminish the intrusion of slavery into Brazil through subsidizing European immigration. These policies brought in many German, Italian and Portuguese nationals into the Brazilian labor force. During the fin-de-siècle, these immigrants played a major part in the continued development of São Paulo's booming coffee economy. In addition, elites hoped their presence would encourage a process of "whitening" the Brazilian nation through miscegenation. In this view, immigrants would provide the necessary infusion of white blood into a society that had been weakened by the presence of African slavery. 1
Immigration studies have therefore focused on two major aspects of the experience of the masses of foreigners that entered Brazil during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first consists of the ways in which immigrants played a major part in Brazil's export economy, both as displacers of slave labor and as exploiters. Studies of that tackle the immigrant experience in this vein, such as Thomas Holloway's Immigrants on the Land, tend to approach the subject through an analysis of agricultural labor practices. 2 The second tendency is to analyze how immigrants managed to adapt to the Brazilian environment. In one of these studies, Jeffrey Lesser's Negotiating National Identity, the question becomes how immigrants both adopted and altered paradigms of Brazilian nationality in order to simultaneously uphold their heritage and claim an identity as conspicuously Brazilian.
This essay will investigate the immigration experience of one of the smaller groups to enter Brazil during the period of fin-de-siècle: the Syrio-Lebanese. 3 Although the numbers of Syrio-Lebanese migrants to Brazil pales before that of the Portuguese or the Italians, this ethnic group was one of the most successful at adapting to the Brazilian situation. First entering the country during the 1880s, during the rubber boom in the Amazon region, the Syrio-Lebanese became major commercial entrepreneurs during the early twentieth century, especially in the city and state of São Paulo. By the latter twentieth century, several descendents of these immigrants entered politics as well. Most interestingly, however, the members of this community shied away from the agricultural labor for which the Brazil's elites had sought. Their experience, therefore, of largely contradicting the Brazilian notion of the immigrant while simultaneously proving economically and socially viable helps us understand the ways in which immigrants could adapt to their new homeland.
The paper seeks to contribute to a scholarly understanding of the story of the Syrio-Lebanese immigrant, a historiography that deserves further development. As such, it will mostly focus on relating the facts of their migration to Brazil as well as how they were able to rise to such social prominence. It will locate this tale within the greater trajectory of Lebanese emigration during the turn of the century. It will also summarize the existing historiography on the subject. Finally, it will attempt to suggest that scholarly attention to the experience of an immigrant group prior to emigrating ought to become a larger matter within studies of immigration. In the case of the Lebanese, the cultural baggage they brought across the Atlantic often helped their social mobility, by preparing them for the challenges of adapting to a world of changing economic realities.
Before beginning, I should point out that the term "Syrio-Lebanese" will be used throughout, strictly because of the difficulty encountered in disaggregating Lebanese and Syrian immigrants in Brazilian immigration statistics. Until 1926, the two nationalities were lumped into one category by immigration authorities, because Lebanon long remained a part of the Syrian province in the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, prior to 1908, all immigrants from the Ottoman Empire were classified as "Turco-Arabes." It is therefore impossible to achieve reliable statistics as to the number of specifically Syrian or Lebanese immigrants. The focus on the Lebanese emigration in particular, however, stems from the substantial discourse that exists concerning their flight from Lebanon between 1880 and 1930. I will draw upon this discourse in order to reevaluate the importance of origins to the immigration experience of the Syrio-Lebanese.
The area that would eventually become Lebanon was one of the most diverse pockets of the already heterogeneous Ottoman Empire. Its political integrity dates back to Classical times, when the Phoenicians were a major trading group throughout the Mediterranean world. In and around Mount Lebanon, the Maronites became a Christian enclave a few centuries before the advent of Islam, and have remained tied to the Catholic Church until the present day. Besides Maronite Christians, the area harbors several Greek Orthodox populations, particularly in and around Beirut, and naturally a strong Muslim contingent as well. During the nineteenth century, Maronite leaders regained political autonomy after a series of civil wars that culminated in the bloody persecution of Christians between 1859 and 1860. With the help of the French, Mount Lebanon achieved autonomous status by 1864, and would remain as such until the end of World War I, when the region became an independent state under French protection. 4
The civil wars of the 1840s and 1850s began what would become a long history of emigration. This political upheaval was enhanced by difficulties in the silk trade that had come to dominate the Lebanese economy. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the silk economy began to slump, spurring protracted emigration from the mountain. At the same time, a surge in population led to increased density, making the mountain one of the most thickly populated regions of the Ottoman Empire with 159 persons per square kilometer. 5 In the province as a whole, the average density was 93 persons per square kilometer, still above the Ottoman norm. 6 These were the primary factors encouraging emigration. At first, the Maronites spread throughout Lebanon, especially migrating to south of the mountain into Druze regions and to the growing port city of Beirut. By the 1880s, however, several Lebanese left for the Americas and the rest of the world as economic conditions worsened and the problems of political upheaval continued. By 1914, 15,000 to 20,000 people departed from Syria and Lebanon each year. Over 350,000 left Syria during the previous thirty years as well as around 100,000 Lebanese. 7 These émigrés sent remittances home, which soon became a major part of the national economy.
Companies set up to encourage Lebanese emigration appeared soon after the civil wars of the mid-nineteenth century. 8 These organizations flourished during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the transporting of émigrés emerged as a lucrative business. Most had headquarters in the port of Tripoli, but had branches throughout Lebanon as well as in France, particularly in Marseilles and Le Havre. Agents in Lebanon coordinated emigration by transporting people to France. From France, they dispersed throughout the world. 9 At first, the destination of choice was the United States, but as the émigrés eventually landed throughout the Americas, Northern Africa, and Europe. Around the turn of the century, Brazil became one of the largest magnets of Lebanese and Syrian migration, receiving about 100,000 between 1880 and 1940.
The first Syrio-Lebanese immigrants congregated in Brazil's Amazonian region in the 1880s during the rubber boom. Although most Syrio-Lebanese came from rural regions in their homeland, only 18% of their eventual population worked in agriculture, a marked contrast from other ethnic groups. Instead, they came to be a major part of Brazil's commercial economy. 10 In addition, they overwhelmingly settled in the cities of Belem and Manaus, the main hubs of the rubber economy. 11 At first, they worked as peddlers, termed mascates in Brazil. The first wave peddled religious objects they had brought with them from the Middle East as well as matches. Soon, however, they shifted to the peddling of dry goods and notions for Portuguese and Spanish wholesalers. By the 1890s, the Syrio-Lebanese had come to dominate peddling in these products, displacing the Italians who had previously cornered the trade and who shifted to the selling of foodstuffs. 12 This pattern continued as the Syrio-Lebanese population shifted from the Amazonian region to Brazil's major cities after the collapse of the rubber economy.
By the early 1900s, the majority of Syrio-Lebanese immigrants began settling in the southern provinces, especially in Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo. The latter became the location of the largest congregation of Syrio-Lebanese, comprising 38.4% of their total population in Brazil by 1920 and 49.2% by 1940. 13 Over 75% of these settled in the cities, particularly in the city of São Paulo. 14 They soon came to settle in the slum region around Rua 25 de Março, which had previously housed Portuguese and Italian immigrants. They continued to work as mascates, specializing in the peddling of textiles and notions. This specialization followed a citywide trend among immigrant groups during the turn of the century, each of which became identified with a particular form of economic activity. 15 By 1915, the Syrio-Lebanese had taken over the area around Rua 25 de Março, and dominated the city's peddling trade.
The networks they set up as peddlers soon led to their accumulation of capital, which they invested in setting up shops to sell the objects they had previously peddled. Over the next fifteen years, they displaced the Portuguese as the primary wholesalers of textiles and notions. Soon after, they entered manufacturing. The expansion of their economic activities into textile production in the 1920s coincided with the "golden age" of textiles in Brazil. After World War I, Brazilian textile factories grew by 50% as British imports were displaced by national manufacturing. The ethnic group that derived the most benefit from this situation were the Syrio-Lebanese, who emerged as a powerful economic force by the end of the 1920s. 16 By the 1930s, a substantial Syrio-Lebanese presence existed within the Brazilian textile industry as a whole, while they dominated the production of rayon fibers.
Along with their economic success came a corresponding rise in social status. Although the main concentrations of Syrio-Lebanese stayed in the Rua 25 de Março area, many began to move to more distinguished areas of the city. Those with the most wealth and power tended toward the exclusive Avenida Paulista, especially those with social pretensions. Others congregated in the Villa Mariana, which became the home to around 8% of São Paulo's Syrio-Lebanese population. 17 At the same time, many remained in the Rua 25 de Março district, which had been transformed into a vibrant commercial zone, dominated by the presence of Syrio-Lebanese retail and wholesale shops, as well as emerging factories. While the district had long been a home to immigrant businesses, the Syrio-Lebanese were the first to set up permanent residence in the area, which was still the main location of their businesses in the mid-1950s. 18
Besides transforming one part of the city and moving into more exclusive neighborhoods, the economic success of the Syrio-Lebanese led directly into the development of a cultural network as well. As early as 1897, Arab language newspapers emerged in São Paulo. By 1914, fourteen Arabic periodicals were published in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Literary works soon began appearing to complement the development of journalism, and the Brazilian New Andalusian League formed a literary circle that published a monthly journal read throughout the Arab diaspora. Several recent immigrants became poets, such as the al-Ma'lūf brothers and Rashīd Salīm Khūrī, whose works were translated into several languages, including Portuguese. 19
Besides the development of a literary culture, other cultural institutions were set up throughout Brazil, again predominantly in São Paulo. These began as early as 1897, with the formation of a mutual benefit society named the Sociedade Maronita de Beneficiencia. Beginning in 1912, the community founded several private schools teaching in Arabic. 20 By 1917, private clubs emerged that created a space for socialization and organization for the communities. 21 These institutions often harkened back to the world the immigrants had left behind. Many were organized according to the regional and religious divisions that had characterized life in Syria and Lebanon. Others included an alumni association set up in 1922 for graduates of the American University of Beirut. 22
At the same time that the community began to extol its heritage, many also participated in the creation of a Brazilian identity, fostering linkages with the society at large. In 1917 and 1918, for example, several made substantial donations to São Paulo's House of Deputies, which was acknowledged by a celebration by the Brazilian Boy Scouts. In 1922, the Paulista industrialist Basilio Jafet led a commission that erected a fifty-foot monument called Amizade sírio-libanesa to commemorate the centennial of Brazil's independence. The pedestal included images of Syrio-Lebanese contributions to world culture as well as a document of their incursion into Brazil. At the top of the monument, three figures representing "The Brazilian Republic, the Indigenous Warrior, and the Pure Syrian Maiden" completed the idealization of the integration of the Syrio-Lebanese community into the Brazilian nation. 23 In the 1930s, the assertion of the complimentary nature of Syrio-Lebanese identity and Brazilian nationality became doubly important due to the reaction against a League of Nations attempt to house thousands of Assyrian refugees from Iraq in Brazil. 24 In the 1940s, the extolling of Middle Eastern identity became more pronounced due to the formation of independent Syria in 1943, and the elimination of the French protectorate in Lebanon in 1946. In 1945, this sentiment culminated in the publication of Tanus Jorge Bastani's O Libano e os Libanêses.
This work praises the Lebanese contribution to world culture, beginning with the Phoenicians and ending with their successful emigration to Brazil. Bastani's work stresses the cosmopolitan and altruistic nature of the Lebanese, seeking to link their fortunes to the Western world in general, and to Brazil in particular. The work begins with a history of Lebanon, a section that ends with an extended panegyric to Lebanese altruism and cultural worth. Immediately following this section, Bastani begins his discussion of the emigration to Brazil. The juxtaposition of the praise of Lebanese culture with the introduction of their connections with Brazil serves on the one hand to extol their Middle Eastern heritage and on the other to provide local legitimization. Bastani's remaining discussion of the Lebanese experience in Brazil magnifies the association of the positive value of the Lebanese community to their adopted homeland. Bastani goes so far as to argue that Lebanese who had emigrated to Portugal accompanied the first expeditions to the South American colony as early as the seventeenth century, a questionable claim. 25
The engaging of Brazilian identity also resulted in many immigrant families sending their children to elite Brazilian schools where they received a first-class education. Many of the second generation Syrio-Lebanese would become professionals, particularly doctors and lawyers. The first graduate of São Paulo's law school entered in 1917. In the late 1930s, several others followed. By the 1940s, scores had graduated from the Facultade de Direito, Faculdade de Medicina and the Escola Politécnica. A total of 168 first and second-generation immigrants received degrees from one of these three institutions between 1940 and 1950. 26 Besides elevating the community's cultural status, the education the second generation received also increased the economic might of the Syrio-Lebanese community.
A byproduct of the professional education received by second-generation Syrio-Lebanese came in the form of political involvement, again mostly in São Paulo. Although the ties of the community were strong, they did not vote as a block and the descendents of the first immigrants represented several of Brazil's major political parties. The first to be elected was José Joãjo Abdalla of the PSD in 1946, a son of immigrants who had graduated in 1927 from the Faculdade Nacional de Medícina in Rio de Janeiro. Others soon followed, such as the PTB deputy Emilio Carlos Kyrillos and Camilo Ashcar of the PD. In the 1950s, these three and Nicolau Tuma were consistently reelected as deputies for São Paulo. A new group of Syrio-Lebanese politicians emerged after 1958, often bankrolled by Paulo Jorge Mansur of Radio Difusora. Oswaldo Truzzi has argued that the substantial presence of Syrio-Lebanese descendents in the political world constituted a stated of sobre-representaçao, or over-representation, from the 1960s until the present. 27
By the 1950s, the Syrio-Lebanese community in Brazil had risen to prominence as merchants, professionals and even as politicians. This spectacular trajectory led to the beginnings of a historiography discussing their experience which has recently begun to expand, but which is still relatively small. Much of the writing on the history of the community exists in the form of memoir collections. This form of documenting their experience began in the mid-1930s, with Salomão Jorge's Album da Colonía Sírio-Libanesa no Brasil. 28 Jorge's collection formed part of his ongoing debate with Herbert Levy about the desirability of Syrio-Lebanese immigration, a debate that arose out of the nativist furor about the Assyrian refugee scandal mentioned above. 29 Works such as Bastani's O Libano e Os Libanêses no Brasil began to appear in the 1940s, which simultaneously included personal memoirs with discussions of Lebanese history, both before and after emigration.
In the 1950s, Clark Knowlton, an American scholar, conducted the first serious historical analysis of the Syrio-Lebanese in Brazil. His dissertation, Social and Spatial Mobility of the Syrians and Lebanese in the city of São Paulo, Brazil (1955), provided a rounded picture of the demographic and economic realities underlying the experience of the Syrio-Lebanese community. Knowlton's study was eventually published in Portuguese, but has not yet been published in English. The work is filled with useful statistical information and simultaneously provides a helpful description of the living and working conditions of the community, from their days as mascates until their rise to economic prominence. While Knowlton's study is valuable, it tends to dismiss the cultural contribution of the Syrio-Lebanese, both to their community and to the Arab world at large. For example, Knowlton contends that "the interest in literature, poetry and in the arts so characteristic of many Arab groups in the Middle East is not part of the culture of the Syrio-Lebanese colony in São Paulo," a statement contradicted by the important contributions to Arabic journalism and poetry discussed earlier. 30 Knowlton's oversight in his otherwise full treatment of the Syrio-Lebanese community unfortunately stemmed from his ignorance of Arabic, which made it impossible for him to engage this discourse.
After Knowlton, no full-length study of the Syrians and Lebanese in Brazil emerged until the 1980s. However, the tradition of collecting memoirs continued unabated. In 1966, Wadih Safady published his autobiography Cenas e cenarios dos caminhos de minha vida: depoimento e contribuiçao para a historia de imigraçao dos povos arabes pra o Brasil. Originally intended as a two-volume work, Safady only completed the first volume. In 1976, Mansour Challita published Este e o Libano, a collection of documents relating to Lebanon and the Lebanese in Brazil. More recently, two collections of individual portraits have appeared. Gaitano Antonaccio's A Colonia Árabe No Amazonas: Aspectos Ecônomicos, Sociais, Políticos e Profissionais (1996) provides depictions of several outstanding members of the Arab community in the Amazonas region, most of which are Syrian and Lebanese descendants. In 1998, Betty Loeb Greiber, Lena Saigh Maluf and Vera Cattini Mattar edited Memorias da Imigraçao: libaneses e sírios em São Paulo, probably the best collection of this form yet. The authors conducted a series of interviews with several immigrants and children of immigrants living in São Paulo. These were transcribed and together comprise over seven hundred pages of reminiscences.
Historical work has also begun to appear in the past fifteen years, beginning with Mintaha Alcuri Campos' study of the Syrio-Lebanese community in Espírito Santo, which is one of the few works that does not exclusively focus on São Paulo. Campos' Turco Pobre, Sírio Remediado, Libanês Rico: A trajetória do imigrante libanês no Espírito Santo (1910/1940), published in 1987, argues that the success of the Syrio-Lebanese community stemmed from the economic flux of the Brazil to which they entered around the turn of the century. In addition, Campos attempts to illustrate how different identities were adopted to conform to the changing socio-economic situation of the colony.
Two new historians have entered the discourse in the 1990s, Oswaldo Truzzi and Jeffrey Lesser. Truzzi has published two books on the political and social mobility of the Syrio-Lebanese colony in Brazil. The first of these, De Mascates au Dotores: sírios e libaneses em São Paulo (1992) traces the transition from peddling to professionalization during the first half of the century. Although this work presents a vigorous analysis of the economic import of peddling and the legacy of commercial activity in the Middle East, it relies a bit too heavily on Knowlton and therefore makes problematic assertions about the lack of intellectual activity within the Syrio-Lebanese community. Truzzi later turned his attention to the political rise of the group within Brazil, beginning with a chapter in work on immigration and politics in São Paulo, and culminating in his 1997 work Patrícios: Sírios e Libaneses em São Paulo. Again, his analysis of the rise to political prominence is helpful and strong, but he diminishes the importance of the cultural aspect to this development. In these works, however, he at least acknowledges the existence of a Syrio-Lebanese cultural awareness by looking briefly at journalism and educational developments.
Jeffrey Lesser also began writing on the Syrio-Lebanese in 1992, contributing a chapter to Albert Hoarani and Nadim Shehadi's collection The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration, in which he compares the Syrio-Lebanese experience to that of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Lesser continued this comparative approach in his book Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (1999) which looks at how Chinese, Arab, and Japanese immigrants constructed a hyphenated national identity by attempting to embrace Brazilian-ness while simultaneously evoking the important contributions of their ancestral homelands. His chapter on Arab immigration focuses on the Syrio-Lebanese. Although Lesser makes an important contribution to the study of this immigrant group, particularly because of his cultural studies approach, his work suffers by limiting his discussion of the economic and political rise of the Syrio-Lebanese.
With the possible exception of Lesser, the major question asked by the historians who have worked on the Syrio-Lebanese colony concerns the group's rise to first commercial and then socio-political prosperity. Unfortunately, the existing historiography has tended to be more descriptive than analytical, and as such no consistent theories have emerged that attempt to explain this phenomenon. Truzzi has come closest by looking in detail at the phenomenon of mascateçao as well as the importance of the commercial skills some Syrio-Lebanese brought with them from the Middle East. In addition, the existing writings shy away from a substantial discussion of the world from which these immigrants came, a tendency that serves to perpetuate an isolated view of the community's success.
This perspective is flawed considering the relative economic and political success that has followed several Syrio-Lebanese émigré communities throughout the Americas, particularly in Latin America. For example, Ecuador has had two presidents of Lebanese descent during the past decade. In order to understand the prosperity of this group throughout a region, it seems as though factors lying outside the path from peddlers to politicians in a particular country ought to be included within the analysis. In particular, the historical moment the immigrants came from should be addressed, that is, the economic, cultural and political world of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the century. Although this is not the place to try to trace the remnants of the Ottoman experience in Brazil, some parallels between the path of economic and social change in Lebanon and the path of Syrio-Lebanese émigrés can be drawn.
If one takes a macro view of the history of the Syrio-Lebanese population in Brazil, a simple trajectory can be drawn. After first arriving, the new immigrants became peddlers, first of trinkets and then of dry goods, textiles, and notions. As they slowly accumulated capital, they took over the wholesale and retail businesses that other immigrant groups had once dominated, in the process becoming wealthy merchants and eventually industrialists. With their newfound prosperity, they turned their attention to the formation of cultural institutions, most notably in the creation of schools and the education of the second generation. The second generation made use of their education to further the prestige of the community and entered the political arena, with some success, especially in São Paulo.
A similar trajectory can be mapped within Lebanon itself during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The expanding silk trade brought economic integration to the region that would eventually become Lebanon, as Maronites from Mount Lebanon began to trade with European merchants congregated in Beirut. These European merchants, mostly French and British, were privileged under a protection guarantee of consular inviolability that the Ottoman government had conceded to them in order to facilitate economic development. The French and British soon began to incorporate local middlemen into this protected status. The middlemen, mostly Christian including many migrants from Mount Lebanon, soon became indispensable to the successful operation of British and French commerce. Once indispensable, they set up their own retail centers that dealt directly with silk producers from the interior of the country and competed with the foreign merchants. 31 The economic power that resulted from this situation was translated into political power, which the Lebanese used to set up an independent state in 1920, albeit under French protection. Simultaneously, a massive expansion of the region's cultural output ensued during the turn of the century, including the formation of universities, such as American University of Beirut, set up with the help of Protestant missionaries. 32
The parallels between the experience of the Syrio-Lebanese immigrants in Brazil and the Lebanese in Lebanon are striking. In both cases, economic prosperity resulted from a process in which middlemen accumulated capital and removed the necessity of the merchants for whom they worked. Economic prosperity was turned toward the fostering of cultural institutions and toward furthering political goals. When one also considers the heavy amount of regional migration that occurred in Lebanon during these years, particularly by Maronites leaving Mount Lebanon for the south and for Beirut, one could argue that the experiences with migration and economic/political development that took place in Lebanon during the turn of the century prepared the population for the conditions they would eventually encounter in Brazil.
Unfortunately, the existing historiography on the Syrio-Lebanese in Brazil has ignored the formation of the modern nation of Lebanon. Looking more at the ties between the socio-economic reality of immigrants and that of the country from which they emigrated can help develop our understanding of the immigrant experience as a whole, and that of the Syrio-Lebanese in Brazil in particular. The baggage brought to Brazil included much more than the religious trinkets the early mascates peddled in the Amazon. It also included a sense of entrepreneurship that had enveloped Lebanon during the late nineteenth century. Although it is currently impossible to directly trace possible ties between the merchants of Beirut and those that developed in São Paulo, comparative research on the two areas should prove fruitful in the long run toward a fuller comprehension of the phenomenon of the Syrio-Lebanese emigration and immigration. |
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