'Peut-on Être Libanais et Brésilien?': The Disappearance of Ottoman Immigrants and the Negotiation of National Identity and Brazilian Citizenship in Syria and Lebanon in the 1930s

Abstract

The objective of this work is to explore the circular immigration process of the old Ottoman immigrants to Brazil and to illustrate how their classification as whites in their new homeland helped them to redefine their sense of citizenship in Brazil and the Levant. In the 1930s, when state bureaucrats abandoned the long-awaited dream of a white Brazilian race, new ideas about race, color and ethnicity propped up an emergent national discourse: Racial Democracy. In this redefinition of race and color, the old groups of Ottoman immigrants constantly negotiated their condition as white immigrants, regardless of their faith. For the members of their community, of all religions, the negotiation of their status in Brazil was a transnational undertaking. During the 1930s in the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon, naturalized Brazilians and their descendants not only reaffirmed their brasilidade; they also continued to identify themselves as white. The idea of a “dual nationality”, Brazilian and Lebanese or Syrian, opened a debate in which the Brazilian citizens had to confront the power of different states that were concurrently enacting laws that secured their citizens’ loyalty to a sole nation. In summary, by blurring the lines/frontiers at a global level, the old Ottoman subjects were key figures in the construction of concepts of race and citizenship.