Camila Pastor

The French mandate over Lebanon and Syria linked those former Ottoman Arab provinces to other territories under French tutelage, including North African colonies and protectorates in present day Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. As political boundaries were redefined, new circulations joined earlier migratory circuits and corridors, engendering debates, policy and surveillance over populations in movement. In the global context of women’s movements and women’s growing access to the public, the migration of women in particular became suspect, especially that which lacked the moral and economic supervision of women’s activity by a spouse, a government or another institution. Often identified as “foreign” women by local populations, they increasingly found work in service positions in the Eastern Mediterranean. Yet women workers were suspect. They were tolerated but resented by both the French authorities and former Ottoman officials incorporated into mandate administration, who could all agree on casting women’s presence in public as a moral threat.

Analyzing memoirs from the Arab diaspora and Mashriq, colonial archives, interviews, League of Nations reports, and mandate legal literature, this article tracks the circulation and regulation of mobile women engaging in performance and sex work in French Mandate Syria and Lebanon (1921–46). The French metropolitan system of regulated prostitution was imported yet transformed in the mandate region as women performers were sorted into legitimate, if morally suspect, foreign artistes and autochthonous performers defined as prostitutes by decrees and codes. Regional and transnational mobility and the institutionalization of borders by colonial administrations destabilized their own distinctions between foreign and autochthonous, however. Women used these contradictions, overlapping legal frameworks, and artistry to continue to work and limit the extraction of their resources by a variety of institutional actors who nevertheless expected sexual and entertainment services to be afforded to foreign and local men.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants left the Eastern Mediterranean, the Mashreq, at the turn of the twentieth century. Boarding steamships bound for Mediterranean destinations –Alexandria in Egypt and French ports like Marseille; some settled in France, but the vast majority continued on to cities strung along the America’s long Atlantic coast. Early migrants set up clusters of businesses in New York, Tampico, Veracruz, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires, along the Caribbean coast of Central America, Venezuela and Colombia.
People with very different skills and resources came together in travel, showcasing the diversity which characterized the Ottoman Arab World. Those who settled in Middle America –Mexico and Central America- were mostly Maronites, but there were also Melkites, Greek Orthodox, Jews from Damascus and Aleppo and Muslims.

I will claim that in a postcolonial setting, where hierarchies of race, class, and "civilization" index and constitute each other in complex ways, conversion allows new Muslims in Mexico to step outside of local ideologies of dominance and difference.

This chapter situates debates in Mandate Lebanon and Syria about workingwomen and prostitution in wider Mediterranean contexts. It presents crossed histories that acknowledge colonial spaces and their history of regulating sexuality as well as scandalous public debates on women's work, women's bodies, and women's relation to colonial law.

This paper explores ideologies of difference and mobility constructed in the circulation of Middle Eastern people and texts by framing these migrations through imperial and nationalist narratives produced in the Middle East and
Mexico. The aesthetic and civilizational classifications defended by intellectuals of the Mexican Mahjar debating the Mexican intelligentsia inmigrant and national press which situate Mashriqi peoples as fearless explorers and rightful ‘conquerors’ of less beautiful, less modern Middle American natives have a genealogy in Ottoman representations of New World populations. Cultivated during the nahda, the Arab modernist
‘awakening,’ these hierarchizing claims were concerned, like other anticolonial nationalisms, with situating Arabs as both heirs to a glorious ancient civilization and cosmopolitan moderns. Nahda narratives, an Arab decolonizing discourse, had emancipatory as well as subordinating effects as
they intersected with Criollo nationalism. Mobilizing the universalist hierarchies integral to global modernism, the discursive decolonization of an ‘Arab civilization’ afforded the subalternization of Middle American populations. It enabled Mashriqi and Middle American elites to bisect Middle American nations into ‘primitive’ Indians and civilized Criollos, so that Mahjar notables and Criollo elites could come to understand themselves as partners in a civilizing mission.

Este texto explora la ambivalencia en la producción estructural y discursiva de las posiciones de clase de migrantes que han circulado entre Líbano, Siria y México a lo largo del siglo veinte. Su argumento central es que la inscripción de su subalternidad como sujetos del mandato francés sobre el Mashreq, durante la primera mitad del siglo veinte, ha sido constitutiva de su acceso a una posición privilegiada en el contexto mexicano.

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This paper explores the ambivalence in the structural and discursive production of the class positions of migrants that have circulated between Lebanon, Syria and Mexico throughout the twentieth century. Its central  argument is that the inscription of their subalternity as subjects of the French mandate on the Mashreq during the first half of the twentieth century has constituted their access to a privileged position in the Mexican context.

Las encarnaciones del modernismo global fueron engendradas en cruces de caminos, entre tradiciones regionales de representación del otro y jerarquías ilustradas integrales a la modernidad de la expansión colonial euroamericana. Cuando ponemos en diálogo la producción cultural modernista anclada en el Mashreq –en el este árabe del Mediterráneo- con la de migrantes mashrequíes en las Américas y sus interlocutores locales, resulta que la descolonización de una ‘civilización árabe’ hizo posible la subalternización de poblaciones americanas. De esta manera, facilitó una alquimia combinatoria por medio de la cual las naciones de América Latina fueron biseccionadas tanto por algunos migrantes mashrequíes como por las élites americanas en ‘indios primitivos’ y ‘criollos civilizados’, del tal manera que las élites Mashrequíes y criollas pudieran llegar a entenderse como socios en una misión civilizadora. En el capítulo se exploran las formas que toma el discurso que funda esta colaboración. Discurso que se basa en la construcción de genealogías y paralelos civilizatorios, caleidoscopio de sustituciones en un Mediterráneo fenicio que se extiende a un Atlántico moto con lo andaluz como punto de capitón.

Empezaré con una síntesis de las grandes transformacioens puestas en marcha en el s. XIX, cuando el Mediterráneo oriental emergió como actor de la nueva economía industrial global. Exploraré diversos movimientos sociales que participaron en los debates sobre el cambio social hacia principios del siglo XX, proponiendo o subvirtiendo reformas del Estado y el orden público durante las últimas décadas del Imperio otomano y el periodo del mandato. Al final presento una visión crítica de las formas que la movilización ha tomado en la región en las últimas tres décadas

The Middle American mahjar brought together the diversity of the Ottoman Arab world. Taking a transregional approach, this entry argues that the cross-section of Mashriqi society which found its way to Middle America became increasingly polarized into a small migrant elite and a much larger client class. The decades during which Lebanon and Syria were under French mandate administration (1919–1946) were foundational to migrant trajectories in the Americas since during this period a diasporic public sphere emerged which afforded both a modern politics of the public and a migrant politics of notables. The women's public made it women's work to cultivate and inscribe distinction within the migrant population. As a handful of migrant families accumulated resources in the mahjar they were increasingly successful as mediators between their countrymen clients and state authorities in a classic politics of notables. Shaped by the French colonial imagination and migrant collaborations and subversions of it, the gendered migrant public became a site for aligning categories of sect with categories of race, class and civilization. This resulted in the further accumulation of resources by increasingly powerful mediators and the erasure of undesirable migrant bodies and categories through their material, moral and discursive displacement.

Aunque la comida y las prácticas en torno de su producción, confección, distribución y consumo han sido reconocidas como "buenas para pensar" lo social, al menos desde principios del siglo XX, el auge de los estudios sobre la comida es reciente.