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175 My family history has led me to question national narratives and to uncover discrepancies between the content of historical records and that of oral traditions . This has taken me to U.S. archives to understand how Mexico governed immigration, and conversely to work in Mexican archives to understand how the U.S. governed immigration as an adjacent nation-state.1 The invitation by the editors has enabled me to ask how immigrant and national myths fuse and get translated into family histories. And most importantly, what do our family histories tell us about our national and larger transnational histories? In the case of my family history, there was not a discursive space to talk about Arab immigrants in the Mexican metanarrative, and where my family fits into Mexican history. I would like to think this is changing in Mexican historiography, thanks in large part to scholarly work on ethnicity in Mexico. Moreover, Arab family research histories are reaching mainstream media with such documentaries as Beirut Buenos Aires Beirut that traces an Argentine woman’s journey to understand her great-grandfather’s migration from southern Lebanon.2 My story is similar to hers, but mine begins in Mexico. On my maternal side, I am the great-granddaughter of a Lebanese Shi‘a Muslim who migrated to Mexico, and I am the granddaughter of a Mexican bracero worker who migrated to the United States around . The Bracero Program was an initiative by both the United States and Mexican governments between  and  to bring Mexican workers to the United States to help with labor shortages. Initially, it was conceived to help with the loss of labor caused by American soldiers going to war, but with the end of World War II the need for workers in the agricultural sector continued, and the program was extended.3 My grandfather came to the United States to first work in the coal mines in Pennsylvania and then found work unloading the bodies of dead American 12 From Uncle Mustafa to Auntie Rana Journeys to Mexico, the United States, and Lebanon THERESA ALFARO-VELCAMP 176 THERESA ALFARO-VELCAMP soldiers in the New York City area. He later became a truck driver. (The duration of each job during World War II and afterward remains unclear.) When I read about the history of the Bracero Program or think about its legacy including issues related to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—such as whether to license Mexican commercial trucks in the United States—the image of my grandfather and his truck comes to mind. The inclusion of family history in my scholarship has created an entry for others who want to learn more about their Arab past. For instance, in a popular U.S. newspaper column called “¡Ask a Mexican!,” a reader wrote the following to columnist Gustavo Arellano in April : Dear Mexican: First of all, don’t think that I’m a self-loathing Mexican. . . . For some strange reason, I have developed an intense fascination with— you might say love for—Arab culture, language, cuisine, etc. especially Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, Palestinian and Iraqi, and I don’t even have a drop of Arab blood in me. . . . Do you think I could be of Lebanese ancestry and not know it? . . . Would a DNA test tell me what my ancestry is, and could it turn up libaneses in my family tree? Let me know. [Signed] Wannabe Arab, a.k.a. El Libanés Gustavo Arellano responded: Dear Wab [Wannabe Arab]: Your chances that the sangre [blood] of the Levant courses through your veins are more likely than gabachos [literally French person, White person] may think. As you noted, Lebanese migrated to Mexico throughout the twentieth century and contributed to the patria [homeland] in ways both positive (tacos al pastor, Salma Hayek) and negative (billionaire Carlos Slim Helú).4 Although this curiosity about Arabs and Mexicans has been articulated at a popular culture level, the issue of incorporating family or one’s explicitly ethnic history into larger national or transnational histories is still a delicate subject within Latin American history, and particularly in Mexican academic historiographies. In the following essay, I begin by contextualizing my identity and then explain my journey to understand my family and how that journey has informed my thinking and analyses of immigration. My family story highlights the larger issue of how to write about histories that cross nation-state boundaries in the context of changing geopolitics, and it sheds light on elements of family...

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