Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil

FOUR • Mixing Christians, Cloning Muslims

R ELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE IS PART of ethnic recognition, especially in a historically Roman Catholic nation such as Brazil. Estimated to make up at least 80 percent of Middle Eastern immigrants in the early twentieth century, Christian Syrian–Lebanese were scrutinized by state immigration experts in terms of their tendency to wed in the homeland and their low rates of “miscegenation.”1 To be Brazilian, in such nationalist thinking, was to be “mixed.” In the late twentieth century, however, this idea of mixture was removed from state immigration policy and, at the same time, adopted by Christian Syrian–Lebanese who now criticize their Muslim counterparts“who don’t mix” in ways similar to their own past marginalization. Often expressed in terms of marriage practices, this religious differentiation in Syrian–Lebanese ethnicity historically has taken shape through two national paradigms of immigration policy in Brazil: race mixture until the late 1970s and economic productivity from 1980 onward. In the earlier model, mostly Christian Syrian–Lebanese were devalued for their apparent endogamy (or in-group marriage). In contrast, the current policy has recognized and supported mostly Muslim Lebanese who engage in the same marriage practices. Attentive to how Muslim Arabs have been singled out as “marrying among themselves” by their Christian counterparts and in the soap opera O Clone (The Clone), this chapter suggests that there have been limits to the greater acknowledgment of Muslim Arabness in contemporary Brazil. My wider aim is to situate this religious difference in ethnicity vis-à-vis national immigration policy. Until the 1970s, “race mixture” served as the F O U R  Mixing Christians, Cloning Muslims 96 F O U R main rationale of Brazilian state policy. Ideologues hoped that non-European immigrants, including Middle Easterners, would“mix”with natives and avoid the formation of “cysts”(Fausto 1993). In 1980–81, though, immigration policy was emptied of references to race mixture and given the primary task of regulating the flow of people for “economic productivity” (Estatuto do Estrangeiro 2000: 18).2 As noted by Benedict Anderson (1994: 323), the regulation of immigration today is less about claims to national belonging than about rights to work in a labor market. The neoliberal policy change also brought about the reclassification of immigrant endogamy that worried earlier authorities. Characterizing marriage between a Brazilian-born citizen and a foreign national as “family reunification,” the current policy has enabled predominantly Muslim Lebanese to marry in Lebanon and return with immigrant spouses to live in Brazil. Though criticized by Christian Arabs in the nationalist idiom of mixture, the neoliberal Brazilian state has tacitly approved of Muslim Arabs who, in the words of one official, “prefer to marry among themselves.” This chapter’s focus on marriage politics engages with scholarship on Syrian–Lebanese immigration and Brazilian immigration policy. Historians have agreed that early twentieth-century Syrian–Lebanese immigrant families primarily avoided “miscegenation,” while later generations increasingly married outside the community (Gattaz 2001; Nunes 1993; Truzzi 1997). Absent in this one-dimensional assertion is any reference to the Brazilian nationalist preoccupation with“racial mixture.” Broader analyses of early twentieth-century Brazilian immigration policy have clearly shown that miscegenation was not a “natural” phenomenon but one of state policy based on nationalist notions of brasilidade (Brazilianness) and race (Fausto 1993; Seyferth 1996; Skidmore 1974). Whether alleged to be “mixed” or “pure,” the practices and politics of marriage must be studied in shifting terms not only of family hierarchy , but also of nationalist ideology and state policy. My sense is that the fundamental change that has taken place across Syrian–Lebanese generations in the twentieth century is not necessarily the ostensible increase of exogamy (out-group marriage) but, rather, the national context in which ethnic claims about marriage have been made, questioned, and validated. Although Christian and Muslim Arabs continue to practice endogamy to varied degrees, their mutually oppositional ways of marking marriage point to the intensification of the Arab ethnic project in Brazil. M I X I N G C H R I S T I A N S , C L O N I N G M U S L I M S 97 DIASPORIC MARRIAGE CIRCUITS BETWEEN THE LEVANT AND BRAZIL In search of suitable wives, Syrian–Lebanese men in Brazil have traveled to elbilad (the [home] country, in Arabic) since the early twentieth century. Marriage was not a matter to be taken lightly, as made evident in a tale...