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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Mapping Newcomers in Buenos Aires, 1928

by Joseph Leidy

GuiaPublished in 1928, the Guía Assalam del Comercio Sirio-libanés en la República Argentina, or, the “Assalam Guide to Syro-Lebanese Commerce in the Republic of Argentina,” contains tens of thousands of names and addresses for shops, services, and professionals from among or affiliated with the Syrian and Lebanese communities of Argentina. “Syro-Lebanese” here corresponds with the Spanish siriolibanés, a term that gained some popularity throughout Latin America after WWI to designate a community wherein árabe (Arab), libanés (Lebanese), and sirio (Syrian) were associated with particular political movements. It also contrasted with turco, with which Levantine migrants were (and continue to be) labelled, having initially come with Ottoman documentation.

The guide features both cities with significant populations of siriolibaneses, like Buenos Aires, Santiago del Estero, and San Miguel de Tucumán, and the rural areas where many Syrians and Lebanese established themselves, including future Argentine president Carlos Menem’s father, who owned a store in the small town of Anillaco in La Rioja providence. The first map below presents the locations of the 1,633 entries for the city of Buenos Aires, providing a snapshot of the commercial and social geography of Arabic-speaking immigrants and their descendants in Argentina’s capital.

Beunos Aires1

GIS data was imported from Google Maps. Some street names and numbers in Buenos Aires must have changed between the 1920s and the present, when coordinates were matched with addresses. However, these changes should not have had a major impact on this map, as most of the city’s main road infrastructure – on which the majority of the above entries are concentrated – have not changed significantly since the late nineteenth century.

A closer view with major avenues shows Syrian and Lebanese businesses throughout the city. Since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Buenos Aires had sported a vigorous transportation network and was known as the “City of Trams.” Unsurprisingly, then, the establishments listed in the Guía could be found on and around most major thoroughfares. Concentrations, however, are evident (1) on Tucumán and Lavalle Avenues in the Balvanera neighborhood, (2) Reconquista in today’s downtown Retiro and Centro neighborhoods, and, to a lesser extent, (3) along Rivadavia in the late nineteenth century suburbs of Flores and Floresta and (4) on Patricios between the working-class neighborhoods of Barracas and La Boca.

BAires2

Many Syrian and Lebanese migrants to the Western Hemisphere established themselves initially by peddling various goods to rural markets. These mercachifles, or peddlers, played an important role in bringing urban consumer goods to rural Argentina, following burgeoning railway networks and often setting up permanent storefronts. Within the urban context of Buenos Aires, Syro-Lebanese businesses also spread throughout the city to market dry goods and consumer items. Tiendas, or “stores,” in green on the map below, are around 1,000 of the 1,633 addresses listed in the Guía. The vast majority of these were also mercerías that sold sewing supplies and could be found in the city center as well as the surrounding neighborhoods. Much of the city’s population must have had access to these corner shops.

BAires3

The guide also includes around 350 businesses involved in the sale of clothing products, mostly tejidos, or general textiles, in addition to specialty shops like camiserías (for shirts), sederías (silk), and artículos de punto (knit woolen clothes). These are displayed in blue below; green dots indicate auxiliary industries, such as mercerías and confecciones (alterations).

BAires4
Importers, like the textile businesses, were located for the most part in two downtown neighborhoods, (1) and (2) above. For example, the advertisement for Tufik Sarquis & Hno, on Reconquista Avenue in the Centro, shows the company to have commercial connections to European textile centers Paris and Manchester and a number of registered trademarks. Import businesses are displayed below in yellow.

BAires5

 

Communal institutions, such as societies, publications, and religious institutions, in addition to professionals (mainly lawyers, dentists, and doctors) generally clustered around the downtown Reconquista Avenue, where much of the siriolibanés import and textile businesses were concentrated. Here, the Syro-Lebanese elite built a public life from commercial prosperity. Communal institutions are shown below in blue, while professionals are in purple.

BAires6

This important area, pictured in detail below, provides a portrait of the urban layout of this Syro-Lebanese public sphere. The newspaper al-Mursal was affiliated with the nearby Misioneros Libaneses Maronitas, or the Lebanese Maronite Mission, while Bunader Y Rustom published the Lebanese periodical Azzaman. On the other hand, Imprenta Assalam, in addition to publishing the guide itself, issued the periodical Assalam, while community luminary José Moisés Azize, founder of El Banco Siriolibanés and president of El Club Siriolibanés, would later issue the first daily bilingual Arabic and Spanish newspaper in Argentina, El Diario Siriolibanés.

BAires7

The only communal institutions that lay outside of downtown Buenos Aires are the Sociedad Islámica de San Martín (San Martín Islamic Society), the Sociedad Siriana de Socorros Mutuos (Syriac Mutual Aid Society), and La Natura, later Natur-Islam, a newspaper with a pan-Islamic political and religious orientation. That these religious minorities among Syro-Lebanese immigrants (the majority of whom were Maronite and Greek Orthodox Christians) are peripheral in a geographical sense is mainly indicative of the smaller size and financial weight of these communities. Note, as well, the Círculo Social Israelita, or Jewish Social Circle. The Guía features many Jewish and joint Jewish-Levantine businesses; connections between merchants of both communities was likely common, especially when many Jews from the Syrian city of Aleppo migrated to Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

TufikadAs a whole, the Guía Assalam gives us a sense of the social and economic structure of the Syro-Lebanese community in Buenos Aires on the eve of the Great Depression. Importation firms, communal institutions, and professional services were based in certain downtown areas of the city, while textile and dry goods stores spread throughout the urban landscape. The guide also captures the diversity of Syro-Lebanese commerce, which included Sunni Muslims, Jews, Druze and various Christian sects and their respective communal organizations. At the same time, the Guía on its own fails to provide sufficient information for the typical migration history. It lacks, for example, the birthplaces or origins of the men and women it lists, unlike an otherwise similar 1908 Syrian Business Directory from the United States. Only when paired with other sources, like censuses, would the guide tell us much about family or hometown networks and the fates of migrant businesses over time.

The Guía Assalam is, nonetheless, a fascinating document on its own merits. What prompted the creation of this “ethnic yellow pages,” and what prompts similar efforts like the Syrian-American Directory mentioned above? The answer lies in part in an effort to control and project communal reputation. The guide serves as a means for the Imprenta Assalam, the guide’s publisher, to advertise the community’s commercial reach throughout Buenos Aires and the rest of Argentina. An introduction to the guide explains the Assalam-affiliated Oficina Consultativa del Comercio Sirio, or Consultative Office of Syrian Commerce, as follows:

There are no textile trading firms that do not have hundreds of Syrians among their clientele. Being as we are the most well-suited to know the community as a whole, we are, precisely for that reason, the most consulted to provide our opinion with respect to the commercial capacity of such clients.

The Guía simultaneously displays the informational capabilities of the Oficina Consultativa and attests to the commercial success of Syro-Lebanese businesses. More than just a directory of use to other Syrians and Lebanese, then, the guide represents the positioning of Assalam and its Oficina Consultativa as a conduit for interactions between the community and the wider Argentine economy and society.

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Further Readings

Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, So far from Allah, So Close to Mexico: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico (2007).

Christina Civantos, Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity (2006).

“Colectividades Siria Y Libanesa.” Buenos Aires Ciudad – Gobierno de La Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires.

Akram Fouad Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920 (2001).

Klich, Ignacio. “Arabes, Judíos y Árabes Judíos en la Argentina de la Primera Mitad del Novecientos.” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina Y El Caribe, 1995, 109–143.

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Read more by Josephy Leidy here.

Seth Garfield on the Brazilian Amazon

At 2,700,000 square miles, the Amazon Basin is three-quarters the size of the continental United States, and a million square miles larger than all of Europe exclusive of Russia.  Covering two-fifths of South America and three-fifths of Brazil, the Amazon Basin contains one-fifth of available fresh water in the world, one-third of evergreen broad-leaved forest resources, and one-tenth of the world’s living species.  The Amazon river, the longest in the world (at 4,255 miles), has some 1,100 tributaries, seven of which are over 1,000 miles long.

And the Amazon’s forests, along with the adjacent Orinoco and Guyanas, represent over half the world’s surviving tropical rain forests. While contemporary accounts of the Amazon often begin by rattling off such statistics to provide readers with seemingly definitive answers, I raise them to make a fundamental point about the region. The Amazon is often imagined as a pristine, and increasingly endangered, realm of nature, but it should be seen as a region that has been constructed by public policies, social mediators, and cultural representations that operate at multiple scales:  local, national, and global.

During World War II, the governments of Brazil and the United States made an unprecedented level of joint investment in the economy and infrastructure of the Amazon region. The dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1937-45) trumpeted the colonization and development of the Amazon (christened the “March to the West”) as a nationalist imperative to defend a sparsely settled frontier covering some sixty percent of Brazilian territory. The Vargas regime subsidized labor migration and agricultural colonization, modernized river transportation, and rationalized rubber production in The Amazon. These fledgling efforts were given an unexpected boost when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and subsequently invaded the Malayan peninsula and Dutch East Indies, which deprived the United States of more than 92 percent of its rubber supply.

Unlike other types of tropical flora, rubber was indispensable for modern warfare, ensuring the mobility, speed, and efficiency critical for military defense. The United States, which consumed more rubber than the rest of the world combined in 1940, was dependent on Southeast Asian rubber sources, having failed to develop a synthetic rubber industry, or diversify its sources of natural rubber, or stockpile in preparation for emergencies. In 1942, Brazil agreed to sell its surplus rubber to the United States for a fixed rate for five years.  The United States, in turn, invested millions of dollars in health and sanitation programs, public finance, and the relocation of tens of thousands of migrant workers from Northeastern Brazil to tap rubber in the Amazon.

In the context of binational wartime mobilization, a host of new (or renewed) claimants on Amazonian resources and populations emerged. Agronomists, sanitarians, physicians, botanists, engineers, technicians, army officials, intellectuals, consumers, migrant workers, and the media all became involved in Amazonian development.  As Earl Parker Hanson noted in 1944: “It is probable that the past two years have seen more actual exploration of the basin, more knowledge gained about its physical nature than have all the four centuries since that early conquistador, Francisco de Orellana, was the first white commander to traverse it.”

Despite wartime pronouncements exhorting the peoples of Brazil and the United States to join in battle against the Axis and the forest, the Amazon’s vast territory, varied natural resources, and charged ideological significance precluded any uniform ideas or policies. National interests and cultural biases often divided people despite shared professional backgrounds or technocratic mindsets that might have united select Brazilian and U.S. policy makers in their efforts to develop the Amazon. Headiness marked an economic boom, but rubber tappers and their bosses jousted over revenues and resources, while migrants pursued varied livelihoods in the region. 

Today the landscape of the Amazon reflects the legacy of such wartime tensions and transformations. The creation of Brazilian banking and public health institutions, alongside the expansion of airfields and transportation infrastructure, heralded the postwar advance of capital markets and state consolidation in the region.  Mass wartime migration from Northeastern Brazil contributed to the region’s rapid demographic growth and urban expansion.  Forest populations’ maintenance of traditional patterns of extraction, slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting, and fishing preserved tropical ecosystems and systems of local knowledge. And the U.S. development of a domestic synthetic rubber industry by 1944-45 redirected postwar foreign investment in the Amazon from the wild rubber trade to mineral extraction. The history of wartime Amazonia also illustrates the shifting appropriation of the region’s resources. The Amazon’s  reincarnation as ecological sanctuary resulted not only from postwar deforestation, but the rise of a global environmental movement, the emergence of new fields of scientific inquiry, and the grass roots mobilization of forest dwellers. 

By melding the concerns and approaches of environmental, diplomatic, labor, economic, and social history, we can see Amazonian landscapes and lifestyles as the products of ecological, material, and political forces that a competing set of social mediators brought to bear on the meanings and uses of nature. This little known chapter of World War II history illuminates the ways outsiders’ very understandings and representations of the nature of the Amazon have evolved over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Seth Garfield, In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region.

Further Reading

John Tully, The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber (2011).
In a social history that spans several centuries and continents, John Tully chronicles the central role of rubber in shaping the modern world through its multiple uses in industrial machinery and consumer goods, as well as its devastating toll on the global workforce that has produced and manufactured it.

Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, (2009).
A finalist for the Pulitzer prize, Fordlandia chronicles how Henry Ford’s megalomaniacal efforts to create rubber plantations and a model American-style company town in the Amazon—  to circumvent the British and Dutch colonial Asian monopoly in supplying tires for his automobiles—was doomed by hubris and ignorance toward Amazonian ecosystems and social mores.

Susanna B. Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest:  Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon, (2011).
A sweeping, historically-informed account of the Amazon that traces the longstanding and varied efforts by outsiders to transform human populations and natural landscapes in the region.  The period of authoritarian rule (1964-85) is particularly spotlighted as a watershed in the destructive development of the Amazon:  Brazil’s military government, guided by geopolitical doctrines and alliance with both industrial capital and traditional oligarchs, spearheaded highway construction and population resettlement, subsidized the expansion of cattle ranching, and oversaw vast mining operations which would have highly deleterious consequences for the natural environment and traditional populations.

Antonio Pedro Tota, The Seduction of Brazil: The Americanization of Brazil During World War II ,(2009).
The cultural politics of the Good Neighbor Policy undergirding the Brazilian-American alliance during World War II are explored in this diplomatic and cultural history by Brazilian historian Antonio Pedro Tota. While primarily focused on the public relations activities of Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of  Inter-American Affairs — established in 1940 and tasked with improving U.S. relations with Brazil and other Latin American countries — the book underscores the agency of Brazilian officials in selectively adopting or adapting wartime programs and propaganda for nationalist ends. 

David Grann, The Lost City of Z:  A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, (2009).
The unsolved mystery  of the disappearance of British explorer Percy Fawcett and his son in  the Amazon in 1925, while in search of an ancient lost city, is delightfully recounted by journalist David Gann in an account that blends the genres of biography, detective novel, and travelogue.  Fawcett’s “personal” obsessions are historically contextualized within an age of Victorian exploration, scientific racism, and the enduring allure of the Amazon as El Dorado.  Although the book’s suspenseful climax does not resolve the enigma surrounding Fawcett’s death, it does suggest that the explorer may ultimately not have been misguided in pursuing the remnants of a great cultural civilization in the Amazon.

Cinema, Aspirins, and Vultures, (2005). Directed by Marcelo Gomes.
Set in the parched backlands of Northeastern Brazil in 1942, this poignant Brazilian feature film captures the historical saga of hundreds of thousands of residents of the outback confronting natural disaster, economic  privation,  wartime nationalism, and newfound opportunities to tap rubber in the Amazon, by following the personal odysseys of a German pharmaceutical salesman and a drought refugee.

You may also like:

Cristina Metz’s NEP review of Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia
Elizabeth O’Brien on labor history in the sugar industry in Brazil 
Eyal Weinberg on labor history in Sao Paulo
Darcy Rendón on the social history of the lottery in Brazil

Photo Credits:

Hydroplane used by the Rubber Development Corporation, a U.S. government organization delivering tapping supplies and foodstuffs to upriver locations during WWII. Courtesy of US National Archives.

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