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Mashriq & Mahjar 7, no. 1 (2020), 90–93 ISSN 2169-4435 CAMILA PASTOR, The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate (Austin: University of Texas, 2017). Pp. 352. $90.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. ISBN 9781477314623. REVIEWED BY EVELYN DEAN-OLMSTED, University of Puerto Rico; email: evelyn.dean@upr.edu Pastor’s work of historical anthropology is a critical contribution to the study of race, citizenship, and nationalism in the Americas, as well as that of Arab or Mashriqi global diasporas. Her rigorous examination of cross-continental archival sources is enriched by ethnographic segments and expositions of fiction, travel writing, communally published histories and cookbooks, and popular culture. Although this broad sampling of texts reaches into the twenty-first century, those from the earlier twentieth receive the full force of the author’s analytical skill. The book is rare in its inclusion of Muslim and Jewish subjects for consideration, in addition to the most visible Maronite Christian population. However, not all receive equal treatment, as the subtitle would imply. Nonetheless, Pastor’s elucidation of migrant experiences, and their representation by various social actors, is essential reading for understanding the often-hidden diversity of modern Mexico. In the introduction, Pastor defines the term Mashriq, which refers to Arabic-speaking regions of the Eastern Mediterranean, and Mahjar, which is the transnational “space of migration . . . the term used by Arabic speakers to describe the geographies and sociabilities inhabited by muhajirin, migrants” (4). She avoids the pitfalls of methodological nationalism by making her unit of analysis the migrants themselves. She alternates using Mashriqi with Mahjari in referring to her subjects. While this sometimes causes confusion for the uninitiated, her use of these terms is important toward eschewing colonial regional designations (such as “Middle East”) as well as imprecise or anachronistic terms such as Arab, Levantine, Syrian, and Lebanese, among others. Reviews 91 The introduction and first five chapters constitute the strongest part of the book. Dedicated to the examination of twentieth-century documentary sources, they form a coherent portrait of the diversity of Mashriqi experiences in Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century. Pastor effectively dismantles the mythologized narratives that still often pass for official history, such as those of migrants’ “Phoenician” wanderlust, their innate knack for commerce, or their uniform rise from rags to riches. Instead, she demonstrates how migrant destinies were shaped by the imperial and nation-building projects of the Levant, Europe, and the Americas, as well as networks of patronage operating at multiple scales. Particularly in her analysis of official communiqués, Pastor is adept at drawing out the intertwined discourses of race and class that served in classifying individual Mashriqis as desirable or undesirable, deserving or undeserving; as subject, citizen, protégé, or none of the above. Chapter 1, “The Mexican Mahjar,” lays out the “numbers, pulse, and patterns” of Mashriqi migration to Mexico (23). This includes a panorama of push factors compelling migration from the Ottoman Empire/French Mandate Syria and Lebanon, as well as conditions in Mexico under a liberal dictatorship at the end of the nineteenth century and a post-revolutionary government starting in the early twentieth century. We are introduced to the Mahjari “notables,” whose pre-migration wealth and status positioned them as patrons of their poorer compatriots, as well as intermediaries between these and more powerful Mexican and French actors. Pastor underscores that notables were both colonizers vis-à-vis poor and indigenous Mexican populations, as well as colonized in their vulnerable positions within the Mexican nation-state and French Empire (17). In this nuanced account of Mashriqis’ differential positioning within multiple social fields, the author avoids the reductionist tendency of many social histories to depict binaries of good versus evil, rich versus poor, or dominant versus dominated. Chapter 2, “Managing Mobility,” continues to trace the evolution of classificatory schemes applied by mostly French officials to Mashriqi migrants. This is when distinctions of wealth, phenotype, religion, political allegiance, and place of origin were used to grant or deny official privileges. Chapter 3, “Race and Patronage,” explores how Mexican officials applied the (il)logic of scientific racism toward calculating immigrants’ relative desirability. Although their features were described as “dark” and...

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