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Roberto Marín-Guzmán and Zidane Zéraoui offer pioneering scholarship in the fields of Latin America and the Middle East in their laconic manuscripts on Arab and Palestinian migration to Mexico and Central America. The two authors jointly published Arab Immigration in Mexico , which in large part derives from Zéraoui's 1997 work with El Colegio de México (Destino México: Un estudio de las migraciones asiáticas a México, siglos XIX y XX , ed. María Elena Ota Mishima). Marín-Guzmán has impressive publications on the topic of Arab immigration to Mexico and Central America in his own right, such as those published by UNESCO in 1997 (El Mundo Árabe y América Latina , coordinated by Raymundo Kabchi). Drawing on these earlier works, the two scholars offer access to their works to English-speaking (and reading) audiences for the first time by providing synthetic overviews of why Arab and Palestinian immigrants migrated to Mexico and Central America, where they settled, and how they "assimilated."
Arab Immigration in Mexico aims "to explain the Arab immigration in Mexico, and to describe the economic, political and cultural contributions of the Arab immigrants in Mexico" (p. 17). The monograph is divided into eight chapters, excluding the introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1 provides an overview of Arab immigration to Mexico beginning in the 19th century and continuing through five temporal periods to 2000. The chapters that follow are shorter and touch on various subjects, including the state and city of Veracruz as the premier Mexican port of entry (chap. 2); the first Arab immigrants in Mexico (chap. 3); characteristics of the Arab immigrants (chap. 4); economic contributions of the Arab immigrants, with a subsection on the Lebanese (chap. 5); religions of the Arab immigrants (chap. 6); Arab social, religious, and cultural organizations in Mexico (chap. 7); and reflections on the integration of Arabs into Mexican society (chap. 8). This core of the manuscript spans to page 112, yet the book extends another one hundred pages to include extensive appendixes covering Zéraoui's quantitative research conducted at the Mexican national archives.
Zéraoui draws on myriad sources, with a particular emphasis on the Mexican immigration cards gathered in the 1930s-50s. He carefully describes the limitations of the cards (recording 7,533 Arab immigrants), noting that deceased Arabs...