The Lebanese in Ecuador: A History of Emerging Leadership (review)

In the histories of societies as racially and culturally heterogeneous as most of those in Latin America, the story of immigration and immigrants has, from the beginning, commanded a fundamental place. From precolumbian migration through the arrival of millions of Europeans, Africans, Asians, and other groups since the fifteenth century, the study of the push-pull factors that drove so many peoples into what is now Latin America, and the historical impact of each group of arrivals, appears as intriguing as it is inexhaustible. Lois Roberts's meticulous and informative study of the Lebanese experience in Ecuador provides another important piece in this vast jigsaw puzzle.

Inadequate sources, Roberts indicates, do not permit an "all-encompassing" history of the Lebanese in Ecuador. She therefore focused her research on Lebanese families who rank among the nation's economic and political leaders, and upon coastal Guayaquil, in which the Lebanese immigrants and their descendants have been concentrated. In spite of those limitations, she asserts, her work offers understanding of four significant topics in the history of Latin American immigration. It explores (1) the neglected field of Middle Eastern immigration, especially of such entrepreneurial or business-oriented peoples as the Lebanese; (2) the relationships and adjustments made between the traditional noncommercial culture of the dominant Spanish/mestizo population and that of the contrastingly entrepreneurial Lebanese; (3) the case histories of a number of successful Lebanese immigrants and their families, which exhibit the methods by which the Lebanese community established itself so well; and (4) the predictable presence of prejudice, both positive and negative, in the Lebanese experience. She delivers on all four promises.

In the first two chapters Roberts ably sketches the two partners in the story prior to their meeting. First, she explains Lebanese heritage and the conditions in the Levant that propelled ambitious Christian Lebanese into emigration toward the New World after 1860. Significant factors included population growth and overcrowding, economic expansion, and discrimination against Christians in the Ottoman Empire's province of Lebanon. She then highlights the Ecuadoran cultural, economic, and political setting that offered Lebanese merchants opportunities in this relatively remote destination. Ecuador, as in much of Latin America, featured a booming export economy after 1880 that was attractive to this commerce, banking, and trade-oriented people that furthermore favored self-employment in family businesses. In Ecuador it was the rich, cacao-producing coastal region around Guayaquil that lured the "stranger-traders" from the eastern Mediterranean.

The first Lebanese patriarchs began to arrive in the 1870s in small numbers. Here they found a niche within a traditional Ecuadoran culture that placed a stigma upon commercial activities. They specialized in importing cloth and general merchandise for an undersupplied consumer market, an enterprise more lucrative than exporting cacao. With only 1,066 Lebanese immigrants and their descendants in the country as late as 1931 (which had grown to perhaps 50,000 as of the 1990s), the early Lebanese settlers, according to Roberts, posed "no threat to the established businesses and were left alone to develop in their own way." Consequently, aided by an intense family loyalty and intermarriage, capital, a relentless work ethic, and inherited business experience and international connections, the "first patriarchs"—such as Esteban Antón Iza, Jorge Ellas Bucaram, Elfas Ward, and Emelio Isafas—quickly established themselves and their family businesses. Avoiding politics, quickly joining the Catholic church, scorning mixed marriages, and resisting assimilation, the Lebanese devoted their energy to business and encountered little hostility. Initial success led to economic expansion and diversification of the family enterprises into banking, realty, media, and industry. The Lebanese in this manner achieved wealth, high visibility, assimilation, intermarriage, acceptance into the social elite, and political prominence. By the end of the twentieth century, Lebanese descendants had led national political parties, served as mayors of Guayaquil and Quito, and provided two national presidents...