The New Ethnic Studies in

Latin America

Edited by

Raanan Rein
Stefan Rinke
Nadia Zysman

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Contents

Acknowledgments VII
List of Contributors VIII

1 Introduction 1
Raanan Rein, Stefan Rinke and Nadia Zysman

2 Remaking Ethnic Studies in the Age of Identities 7

Jeffrey Lesser

3 Factory,Workshop, and Homework: A Spatial Dimension of Labor

Flexibility among Jewish Migrants in the Early Stages of
Industrialization in Buenos Aires 16
Nadia Zysman

4 Becoming Polacos: Landsmanshaftn and the Making of a Polish-Jewish

Sub-ethnicity in Argentina 32
Mariusz Kałczewiak

5 Ethnicity and Federalism in Latin America: Rethinking the National

Experience of Jews and Middle Eastern Descendants in Argentina 52
Mauricio Dimant

6 “For an Arab There Can Be Nothing Better Than Another Arab”: Nation,
Ethnicity and Citizenship in Peronist Argentina 78
Ariel Noyjovich and Raanan Rein

7 Otherness in Convergence: Arabs, Jews, and the Formation of the

Chilean Middle Classes, 1930–1960 99
Claudia Stern

8 The Untold History: Voices of Non-affiliated Jews in Chile,

1940–1990 128
Valeria Navarro-Rosenblatt

9 The Other as a Mirror: Representation of Jews and Palestinians on

Argentinian and Chilean Television Screens 148
Gabriela Jonas Aharoni

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 VI C ONTE NT S

10 In the Land of Vitzliputzli: German-Speaking Jews in Latin

America 166
Liliana Ruth Feierstein

11 Epilogue: The Centesimal Nisman 185

David M. K. Sheinin

Index 201

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 C HAPTE R 7

Otherness in Convergence: Arabs, Jews, and

the Formation of the Chilean Middle Classes,
1930–19601
Claudia Stern

Pedro, an Arab-Chilean, whose father arrived in Chile in 1910 from Bethlehem,

Palestine, followed in his father’s footsteps and became a merchant in a typical
immigrant neighborhood in Santiago. He recalled the conversation with the
owner of his first store when he was just starting out:

“I have nothing, nothing, nothing, just the will to work.” “So how can you
pay me?” “Very easily,” I said. “Fine,” he said. “Here are the keys, we’ll sign
the contract some other day.” So I went to see the little store; you know,
there was room for a storeroom in the back, and . . . a dining room, bath-
room, kitchen and bedroom. Good for getting started . . .2

Pedro’s first experience as a storekeeper in Recoleta entailed many sacrifices;

for him life was a continuous struggle. Pedro was a hard worker and a risk-
taker who invested hard work and personal sacrifice for the sake of his future
descendants. Like many members of the Chilean middle classes of that time,
Pedro was driven by the desire for social mobility, if not for himself then for
future generations.
This chapter examines the linkage between immigrant groups and the
Chilean middle classes in the years 1930 to 1960. Jews and Arabs could gain
access to this class, which were widely dispersed and, as they expanded
and prospered, became more heterogeneous while developing a class
sensibility. However, this growth did not lead to a consolidated social class
identity; cultural, political, and social tensions remained over the three

1 My sincere gratitude to Dr. David M. K. Sheinin and Valeria Navarro-Rosenblatt for their
insightful comments and suggestions in reviewing this article. The article was also inspired
by the comments received during its presentation at the workshop of New Ethnic Studies at
Tel Aviv University in February 2015.
Additionally, I am indebted to Harriet Rubin for her enthusiastic collaboration, to
Maximiliano Melnick SM, and Verónica Tejos for their excellent graphics.
2 Interview with Pedro by the author, 29 November 2011.

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decades in question. Sectored identities were fluid, powerful, and desirable,

thus enabling the integration of Jews and Arabs into those echelons. The two
groups did so by carving out distinct, but overlapping niches, while actually
shaping the evolution of the middle classes. At the same time, ‘chileanization’
of the immigrants as social equals among the Chilean middle classes gradu-
ally increased their level of integration. This meant that many members of the
middle classes admired Arab-Chileans and Jewish-Chileans for their admira-
ble drive, which they saw as similar to their own, with its view of their current
socio-economic status as a transit point to something better. Integration into
Chilean society also came about as a consequence of the social and cultural
strategies of the immigrants themselves. Such strategies emerged in both com-
munities, whereby a middle sphere was created which combined practices
from the public sphere with those from the private one—what this chapter
will describe as a collective sphere. Here, in the observance and performance
of celebrations and important events, Arab-Chileans and Jewish-Chileans
asserted their ethnic identity. For example, at the Arab Olympics and at the
annual Jewish community’s New Year’s Eve ball, they integrated and assembled
new components of their Chilean identities while retaining their ethnic ones.

Local Perceptions towards Chilean Immigrants

In the section titled “The Queuing People,” the 1944 satirical magazine Chilean
Family shows how immigrants were perceived during the integration process.
This is best illustrated by the dialogue between a snobbish banker who grants
loans, and Mr. Armijo, a lower class Chilean from Parral, a rural district south
of Santiago:

– I am Mr. Armijo . . ., excuse me, excuse me . . . If you would allow me . . .

– How can I help you?
– Ah! You don’t remember? . . . I’ve been here seventeen times to talk to
you . . . Two years ago I applied for a loan to continue some housing
construction that my father began . . .
– That’s true! I’m aware of that. It turns out that the bank does not provide
money for construction . . . Indeed, we are out of loans at the moment.
You know that yesterday was the holy day of Don Agamemnon’s Aunt,
and we had to make a loan to this gentleman to buy a fur coat for his
aunt . . . You understand that it couldn’t be postponed . . .
– No doubt . . . It’s just that I need some money to build affordable hous-
ing, which could prove very useful . . .

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OTHERNES S IN C O N V E RGE N CE 101

– Look, my friend Armijo. Houses, we already have enough of in El Golf,

in Ahumada, in Estado, in Huérfanos; so why do we need to build
more? Don’t you agree?
– You are absolutely right . . . Excuse me, excuse me . . .3

Social stratification is expressed in poor communication and the magazine’s

sympathies are with the average Chilean. While Armijo makes his case, the
banker talks at him not with him. While Armijo reasonably asks the bank for a
load in order to build affordable housing, the banker talks of credit he extended
to another client for a fur coat. He notes inanely that there is already plenty of
housing, and recites a list of elite neighborhoods where Armijo would have
no chance of living. The banker stresses the location of existing houses while
affirming that there is no place for low income housing which the Parral-born
Armijo seeks to build. The banker goes on to cheerily cite a loan for extravagant
chandeliers for a European immigrant as a reason for there being no funds
for Armijo.

– It is impossible to help you . . . We also need to lend money to Mr.

Vorortorvicic, who wants to purchase foreign teardrop chandeliers
which are a beauty . . .
– Ah! OK! And he’s called Vororotorvicic . . . European . . .
– Of course! And you are just Armijo . . .
– Nothing more, sir . . . I am sorry. Armijo and I’m from Parral . . .
– Try to do a little business with jewelry abroad and we will talk . . .
– Yes, but how do I change my origins . . .?

And the poor customer walks away, stifling tears worth more than the cost of
teardrop chandeliers.4
“The Queuing People” highlighted the disadvantages of native Chileans
compared with the advantages of European immigrants and the widespread
perception in society that immigrants had access to opportunity and benefits
that the average Chilean struggled unreasonably hard for, often without suc-
cess. Loans were for luxury goods inaccessible to most. There were key differ-
ences between the average hard-working Chilean male and the average diligent
immigrant male, humorously portrayed here as demonstrating opposite strat-
egies for advancement: while the immigrant used imported teardrop chan-
deliers—which he imagined as representing an elite status—for facilitating

3 La familia chilena, no, 3 (4 May 1944), p. 9.

4 Ibíd.

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entry to the upper classes, the native Chilean sought to improve his housing.
Immigrants consumed luxury items as symbols of exclusivity and as part of
their tactics to gain access to the local high society. The same applied to those
involved in economic transactions of ethnic objects, which enabled to state a
position in a dominant social and economic environment. 5 Consumption was
associated with modernity and immigrants with cosmopolitanism; this was a
perfect combination for gaining entry into local society.
Despite the allusion to a preference for immigrants over native working-
class Chileans, society reacted in many ways to the foreigners in their midst.
The paucity of native-born middle classes in business opened a niche for
immigrants who seemed predisposed to filling those spaces.6 Immigrants
fueled modernization. While in 1920 immigrants in Chile accounted for only
2 percent of the population compared with 30 percent in Argentina, 7 their pres-
ence in Chilean cities was significant and grew during the twentieth century.8
In the twentieth century, the middle classes played a leading role in the
Chilean industrialization process. Some claim that this was particularly true
for immigrants and their descendants.9 However, this process cannot be
reduced to a specific niche associated with the middle classes or only with the
immigrant segment. Moreover, immigrant groups experienced countless fates
even though, according to various observers, immigrant groups in general were
a stimulus to the local middle classes.10 Immigrants were both recognized and
denigrated by locals: “All commerce is the exclusive property of foreign capital
and countless times they arrive with nothing more than their hands.”11
Nineteenth-century German and British immigrants brought dynamism to
Chile through their symbolic capital, such as experience in their professions
and the associated prestige.12 They came with trades and diplomas. Some

5 Sylvia Ferrero, “Comida sin par. Consumption of Mexican food in Los Angeles: ‘Foodscapes’
in a transnational consumer society”, in Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton eds., Food
Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies (Routledge: New York, 2002), pp. 194–219, 196.
6 Leonardo Mazzei, “Inmigración y clase media en Chile,” Revista Proposiciones, no. 24
(1994): 152–58, 156.
7 Ibíd., p. 153.
8 Ibíd., pp. 156–58.
9 Cristián Gazmuri, “Tendencias de la historia en el siglo XX,” in Gazmuri Cristián, et al.,
100 años de cultura chilena 1905–2005 (Santiago: Zig-Zag, 2006), pp. 7–60, 30.
10 Julio Pinto and Gabriel Salazar, Historia Contemporánea de Chile II. Actores, identidad y
movimiento (Santiago: LOM 1999), p. 78.
11 Mazzei, “Inmigración,” p. 156.
12 As of 1850 the Chilean government promoted legal, planned, and selective immigration,
Ley de inmigración selectiva, orientated towards European immigrants with some level of
technical knowledge and literacy; they received financial support for their immigration

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OTHERNES S IN C O N V E RGE N CE 103

wealthy immigrants invested their personal fortunes in the country’s

development.13 In the twentieth century, immigrants came mainly from Italy,
Spain, the Arab world, Germany, and Eastern Europe. These immigrant groups
were disdained by the host society since they were considered less desirable
compared with British immigrants. Furthermore, according to public opinion,
Middle Eastern immigrants could not be absorbed as well into Chilean culture
as Europeans.14
As in other Latin American societies of the time, the linkage of moderniza-
tion with new products and technologies changed practices and their mean-
ings at the social level, facilitating the immigrants’ integration into Chilean
society. The Chilean middle classes were formed and transformed by becom-
ing more heterogeneous, enabling immigrants to enter those echelons. The
immigrant’s profile as a modern, cosmopolitan person who used products
such as imported refrigerators, the rapid economic mobility of some of them,
the professional experience of others, and later, of their descendants who ide-
ally became professionals, connected immigrants with modernization. In their
new country Chile, immigrants led industries such as the first modern cotton
mill, which was opened in 1937 by Juan Yarur, a “modest Arab who made his
America in Santiago.”15
Although Jews had come to Chile from Eastern Europe, by the end of the
nineteenth century most of them had arrived from Argentina in order to
improve their lot, and this trend continued.16 Arab immigration to Chile began
in the 1880S.17 By the first decade of the twentieth century, most Arab groups
originated from the areas of Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon.18 By 1930, according

to Chile. For Vicente Pérez Rosales, who was in charge of the project, Germans were the
ideal candidates for settling the south, as in Argentina but on a larger scale. Vicente Pérez
Rosales, Recuerdos del Pasado 1814–1860 (Barcelona: Editorial Iberia, 1962), pp. 368–75;
Judith Laikin Elkin, Jews of the Latin American Republics. (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1980), p. 36.
13 Gazmuri, “Tendencias,” p.15.
14 Brenda Elsey, Citizens and Sportsmen in Chile: Fútbol and Politics in Twentieth-Century
Chile (Austin, TX.: University of Texas Press, 2011), p. 148.
15 Peter Winn, Tejedores de la revolución: Los trabajadores de Yarur y la vía chilena al social-
ismo (Santiago: LOM, 2004), p. 43.
16 Moisés Senderey, Historia de la colectividad Israelita de Chile (Santiago de Chile: Editorial
Dos Ydische Wort, 1956), p. 55.
17 Myriam Olguín and Patricia González, La inmigración Árabe en Chile (Santiago Chile:
Instituto chileno árabe de cultura, 1990), p. 69.
18 Lorenzo Agar and Antonia Rebolledo, “La inmigración árabe en Chile los caminos de la
integración,” in Lorenzo Agar et al., El Mundo Árabe y América Latina (Madrid: Libertarias
Prodhufi, 1997), pp. 283–309, p. 285; Erick Jerez Iturrieta, “La prensa árabe en Chile,

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to official national census figures, there were 3,697 Jews in Chile out of a popu-
lation of 4,207,000,19 while the Arab population stood at 6,661.20 The number of
Jews in Chile increased due to events in Europe. In 1937 it had risen to 12,000, and
by 1941 to 20,000. By 1940, some 5,000 more Arabs had entered Chile.21
The prevailing vision of Chile was of a homogeneous society, mainly of
European heritage, with a small indigenous population. Local society hardly
debated the presence of racial hierarchies, and there was little interest in the
indigenous groups. However, according to Elsey, a racial hierarchy “shaped
understandings of class differences, national identity, and immigration.” 22 In
the case of Arabs, the Chilean indigenous population “created a permanently
foreign status for Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian Chileans,”23 and “racial
hierarchies made it difficult to translate economic success into acceptance
within cultural, social, and political spheres.”24 The narrative of Chile as a
homogeneous, harmonious nation of mestizos of dominant European heri-
tage was based on the exclusion of Arab-Chileans and other non-European
migrants who, according to the stereotype, were considered outsiders.25 Thus,
Arab-Chileans, as well as Jews, especially Middle Eastern Jews, were at a dis-
advantage. Nevertheless, as in the reality of other Latin American countries,
this alleged disadvantage did not prevent them from gaining entry into local
society.26

1912–1950,” thesis for B.A. in History and Geography of Chile, Faculty of Humanities,
Department of History, USACH, Santiago, 1999 (unpublished), p. 3.
19 Data from Moshé Nes-El, Estudios sobre el Judaísmo Chileno (Jerusalem: Ediciones Revista
de Oriente y Occidente, 2009), p. 51.
20 Olguín and González, La Inmigración, p. 72.
21 Ibid., p. 153.
22 Elsey, Citizens, p. 162.
23 Ibid., p. 150.
24 Ibid., p. 162.
25 Ibid., p. 163; Lorenzo Agar, and Nicole Saffie, “Chilenos de origen árabe la fuerza de las
raíces,” Revista Miscelanea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos, Sección Árabe-Islam, vol. 54
(Universidad de Granada, 2005): 1–23, 3.
26 Jeffrey Lesser and Rein Raanan, “New Approaches to Ethnicity and Diaspora in Twentieth
Century Latin America,” in Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein eds., Rethinking Jewish-Latin
Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2008), pp. 23–40, 32.

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OTHERNES S IN C O N V E RGE N CE
105

The Collective Sphere among Arab- and Jewish-Chileans

Immigrants created their own meeting spaces such as social clubs. By 1949, the
Stade Francais, the Estadio Italiano, and the Estadio Español were located in
Santiago, while Club Palestino, and Estadio Sirio were being planned,27 and the
Club Deportivo Estadio Israelita was established in 1953. In order to get into
the immigrant stadiums, there was a membership fee, which was exclusive
to specific immigrant groups. The exclusiveness of the stadiums, which was
maintained also by French-, Spanish-, and Italian-Chileans, was an expression
of immigrant self-segregation and a subject of criticism by the locals. Ethnicity
was a marker of immigrant identity;28 the immigrants who retained their eth-
nicity were generally affiliated with those exclusive meeting places, framed in
this chapter as a collective sphere. A collective sphere indicates a set of physi-
cal, social, and cultural spaces where immigrants find ways to hold on to their
ethnicity of origin while incorporating local traditions and social customs that
they observe privately.
As in every social group there were internal tensions. These frictions, which
evoked social and cultural displacement, derived from differences between
the more or less conservative sectors of immigrants groups, including those
who had become more secular and those who preferred to remain unaffiliated.
The monopoly of wealthy Arab-Chileans and Jewish-Chileans who headed
their respective associations increased intra-group tensions. In addition, there
were internal ethnic differences, such as between Jews from the Middle East
and those from Eastern Europe, and among Arabs from Palestine, Syria and
Lebanon.29
The openness of the younger generations of Arab- and Jewish-Chileans
towards Chilean society also conflicted with the attitude of the more closed
older generations, due to the differences between their perceptions of the pri-
vate versus the public sphere. This receptivity was manifested by their partici-
pation in the public sphere, and in the way they expressed this in the private
collective sphere, that is, in their imaginary Arab- and Jewish-Chilean worlds.
While for first generation immigrants, the private sphere was to be preserved,
the secular component of Jewish-Chileans sought the integration of local
traditions acquired from the public sphere. The young “queen” of the Jewish

27 Estadio (24 September 1949), pp. 14, 15, 30.

28 Lesser and Rein, “New Approaches,” p. 25.
29 An example of internal Jewish segregation is presented by Valeria Navarro-Rosenblatt in
this volume.

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community, Sara Topelberg,30 for example, sent greetings to the “community”

through the Jewish weekly Mundo Judío for the new Gregorian year yet failed
to do so for the Jewish New Year.
In their interactions in the private ethnic sphere, both Jewish-Chileans and
Arab-Chileans showed an open and fluid identity.31 They were expressing their
ethnicity while acculturating; their identities were in motion and were inter-
acting as part of their mosaic selves. They strengthened their sense of belong-
ing by celebrating Chilean traditions which were associated with middle- class
practices.
The following diagram illustrates the collective sphere:

F IGURE 1 Collective sphere.

These middle- class practices included the celebration of social events as

imagined symbols of elite status. The level of glam depended on the organiz-
ers and the occasion, such as the Firefighting Brigade #5 Bomba Israel ball at
the Crillón Hotel in 1958. The hotel was the contemporary icon of Santiago
city and its upper classes. Its opening was seen as an achievement of modern
urbanization. The Crillón marked social and intellectual aspiration. The hotel’s
tea rooms hosted the most select sectors of high society in the late 1930s. By the
1950s, though still a status marker, the Crillón had become more accessible to a
wider array of Chileans, and less exclusive than it had been, as a faded emblem
that had changed over time. That immigrant groups could now hold their cel-
ebrations in the hotel’s rooms, once reserved for the upper classes, shows the
linkage of immigrants to the middle classes and parvenu, but also demon-
strates local openness towards Jewish immigrants, their social activities, and

30 Mundo Judío (31 December 1936).

31 Daniel Linger, No one Home: Brazilian Selves Remade in Japan (Stanford, CL.: University
Press 2015), p. 271.

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OTHERNES S IN C O N V E RGE N CE 107

their visibility in the middle classes. The Firefighting Brigade was founded
in Ñuñoa district. Ñuñoa was considered a “middle class” quarter due to its
evolution in parallel with its neighbors,32 which were also associated with the
middle classes. In its social section El Reporter, the Ñuñoa local weekly of the
time, reported briefly on the great annual Bomba ball at the Crillón in which “a
select group of young ladies from the resident Jewish community made their
debut into society.”33
The Club de la Unión was more restrictive. The club founded in 1864 was
an exclusive bastion of the most entrenched upper sectors of Chilean society.
Octavio, founder of Firefighting Brigade #5 Bomba Israel in 1954, recalled:

I was a member of Club de la Unión. It was so hard for me to become a

member of Club de la Unión; they wouldn’t let Jews in; this was in 1968.
The first president of the National Firefighting Brigade Board of Chile
was a member of the board of the Club de la Unión.34

Surely, the fact that one of the club directors was the first president of the
National Firefighting Board made it easier for Octavio to join this very exclu-
sive institution. As he notes, this was the end of the 1960s when Jewish immi-
grants had already achieved some degree of integration in Chile and had
attained social visibility. Octavio himself demonstrates the presence of immi-
grant groups in various strata of society—a trend that can also be seen as a
heterogeneous feature of immigrant groups. It is probable, too, that by 1968 the
club’s criteria may have become more flexible, thus allowing Octavio to enter
this circle. However, this case shows that there was another level of openness
extended to some Jewish-Chileans. The same was true for some Arab-Chileans:
the Club de la Unión hosted Juan Yarur as an honored guest when he visited
Chile before he immigrated to the country.
In general, once the middle classes attained icons such as the Crillón Hotel
it meant that were not so exclusive anymore and the elite had already found
a better, newer marker of social status. Another factor which led to this open-
ness lies in Chilean society’s evolution into mass-consumerism, fostering the

32 Claudia Stern, “Transformaciones en los modos de vida santiaguinos: Ñuñoa y sectores

medios ¿Un florecimiento conjunto? (1932–1962),” Revista Hache, Arquitectura y Ciudad 2,
no. 2, Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo, Universidad de Buenos Aires, FADU
UBA. Buenos Aires (2015): 24–41, 30–32.
33 El Reporter, no. 571 (12 April 1958), p. 5.
34 Interview with Octavio by the author (22 October 2011).

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idea that money can buy everything35—including access to the most exclu-
sive social places. The Arab-Chilean Yarur, for example, was welcomed into the
Club de la Unión mainly because of his wealth. The media of the time played
an essential role in constructing and spreading new social models for Chilean
society.
Magazine ads were another marker of consumerism that became guides to
aspiration and probably to consumption for the ordinary man in that epoch.
Moreover, at the time, imported household items and furniture were admired
and incorporated into Chilean society, which was obsessed with imported
products. These were considered “almost a hallmark of Chilean culture”36 and
also influenced the image of immigrants.
However, since the prosperity portrayed in the ads was neither constant
nor univocal, one wonders in what way immigrants played a leading role in
Chilean progress and how this alleged progress was expressed in the immi-
grants’ daily life at the time.

Inside the Migrant’s Written Word: Ethnicity, Networks, and the

Struggle towards a Renewed Sense of Belonging in Mundo Judío
and Mundo Árabe

Generally speaking, a common feature of immigrant groups is the importance

they assign to the written word. The newspaper, as pointed out, was a basic
tool for establishing an imaginary community.37 The written press was con-
sidered a platform for guiding the new arrivals through the local environment.
For Chile, this can be seen in the advertisements for Arab and Jewish boarding
houses and the professional directories, published both in Mundo Judío and
Mundo Árabe. Thus, the written press was the medium linking the immigrants
to each other as they integrated into their new country.38 The main goal of dai-
lies, weeklies, magazines, andbrochureswastogeneratebelonging, information,

35 César Cerda Albarracín, Historia y desarrollo de la clase media en Chile (Santiago: Ediciones
Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana, 1998), p. 137.
36 Pía Montalva, Morir un poco: Moda y sociedad en Chile 1960–1976 (Santiago: Random
House Mondadori 2004). p. 28.
37 Mollie Lewis and Raanan Rein, “Judíos, árabes, sefaradíes, sionistas y argentinos: el caso
del periódico Israel,” in Raanan Rein, ed., Árabes y Judíos en Iberoamérica/ Similitudes,
diferencias y tensiones (Seville: Fundación Tres Culturas del Mediterráneo, 2008), pp.
83–115, 84.
38 Eduardo Míguez in Lewis and Rein “Judíos” p. 98.

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OTHERNES S IN C O N V E RGE N CE 109

and permanence, as well as providing a means for expression, orientation,

and accessibility. All in all, the immigrant press facilitated the creation of an
imaginary collective perception. As well as the stadiums, groups of immigrants
to Chile had, and still have, their own press, such as the Spanish La Colonia
Española en Chile and the Italian La Vocce de la Colonia. The local immigrant
press reflects the intention to integrate while at the same time it tries to retain
an ethnic identity component. The ads of immigrant groups in their respec-
tive newspapers and notices for celebrations in the private space reinforce this
idea. Immigrant groups did not want to be oblivious to local social practices.
The press was considered an efficient weapon against the disparaging atti-
tude of some locals.39 The disapproval of immigrants generally, and of Jews
and Arabs specifically, came from particular layers of society. Chilean intel-
lectuals felt that the rapid ascent of immigrants into the business market took
away opportunities from Chilean natives.40 The reality, however, was rather
different: the local middle classes were not attracted to manual labor and, con-
ditioned by the “philosophical spell” of education preferred intellectual work.41
The critical attitude of some was not an obstacle for immigrants to retain their
ethnicity while achieving full civic participation in local society. The same can
be seen in Brazil where the perception of Jews and Japanese was simultane-
ously positive and negative: both were viewed as “part of a category that would
both ruin Brazil from afar and save Brazil from itself”.42
The years 1912–1959 marked the period of the largest Arab press output in
Chile.43 The publisher La Reforma launched the illustrated Spanish-language
magazine Mundo Árabe (1932–1933). During its short life it complemented the
Arabic-language weekly La Reforma (Al-Islah). The principal writers in Mundo
Árabe were Arab-Chilean intellectuals.
The Chilean weekly Mundo Judío, launched in 1935 and published by the
Federación Sionista, was the official press medium of Jews in Chile.44 The peri-
odical was established in an attempt to influence Chilean public opinion and
to respond to the xenophobia that was rampant in many parts of the world

39 Jerez, La prensa, p. 39.

40 Mazzei, “Inmigración,” p. 156.
41 Jaime García Covarrubias, El partido radical y la clase media. Relación de intereses entre
1888 y 1938 (Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1990), p. 68.
42 Jeffrey Lesser, “How the Jews Became Japanese and Other Stories of Nation and Ethnicity,”
in Lesser and Rein, Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, pp. 41–54, 48.
43 Jerez, La Prensa, p. 8.
44 However, the editorials were anonymous, without any reference to legal responsibility,
during the first twenty years of the weekly.

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during that period.45 At the same time, it signaled integration into local society
since it was sold at local kiosks, and during its first years included an impres-
sive range of leisure ads associated with middle-class consumption, such as
cinema, sports, schools, and the Casino Municipal of Viña del Mar, another
exclusive social marker since its opening in the 1930s.
In order to examine the attention given to Mundo Judío and Mundo Árabe
by local society and its respective immigrants, I searched but did not find any
accurate references to the circulation of either. According to Nes-El, during
the 1930s and 1940s Mundo Judio’s circulation was between 2,000 and 3,000.46
This is similar to the estimate of Marcos Levy, journalist of the weekly from
1974 to 1975.47 Nes-El states that commercial advertising in Mundo Judío fol-
lowed a process similar to that of ads published in the national press at the
time—through advertising agencies, with advertising rates similar to those of
the national press. In regard to Mundo Árabe, there was no reference to circula-
tion in the magazine issues either. Jerez, in his comprehensive analysis of the
Arab Press in Chile, did not mention Mundo Árabe; nor did El Attar. In respect
to advertisements in Mundo Árabe, those published were linked to local Arabs,
such as Flores de Pravia soap. Thus, both publications were overlooked by
scholars.
The periodicals’ names—Mundo Judío and Mundo Árabe—represented a
negotiation between imagined universal and local context. Looking at the divi-
sions, both by provenance and interest of Chile’s Jews and Arabs at the time,
these periodicals invited—and did not exclude—any local Jewish or Arab
immigrant, respectively. They ignored sub-ethnic divisions, lifestyle, religious
differences, and class. The communications strategy of the publishers of news-
papers alluded to a global aspect, which was less compromising and focused
on heterogeneity—even taking into consideration the ideological meaning of
the word Mundo (world) in both newspapers’ titles.
Since the Jewish weekly was published by the Federación Sionista, it
could have been named differently in order to express a specific association.
However, Mundo Judío appealed to both Jewish immigrants as well as local
readers, without locking itself into a more defined category such as Hebrew,
Israeli, or Zionist. On the other hand, Mundo Árabe could have called itself,
for example, Bethlehem, since most Arab immigrants to Chile came from that
Palestinian city. Equally so, both Mundo Judío and Mundo Árabe differentiated

45 Mundo Judío (3 JANUARY 1935), p. 3.

46 Telephone interview with Moshé Nes-El by the author (7 May 2013).
47 Telephone interview with Marcos Levy by the author (14 July 2011).

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OTHERNES S IN C O N V E RGE N CE 111

themselves by being published in Spanish—an infrequent feature of immi-

grant periodicals at the time.
As stated by Elkin, the immigrant press was usually in the native language.
I analyzed two Chilean weeklies: La Palabra israelita = dos yidische wort
(launched in 1944) and the Arab immigrant weekly Mundo Árabe (launched in
1947)—a different publication with the same title than its intellectual name-
sake; both weeklies were wholly in Yiddish and Arabic, respectively. El Attar
has pointed out that the Arab and Jewish immigrant press in Latin America
shifted from the native language to a bilingual format before being published
solely in the local language.48 In this sense, both Mundo Judío and the original
Mundo Árabe were atypical.
For both Mundo Judío and Mundo Árabe, their press value was clearly a
cohesive tool. Using the local language symbolized a modern vision: maintain-
ing group solidarity while catering to the immigrants’ individual needs within
local society. However, the use of the local language linked the second Arab
and Jewish immigrant generations, which had already “castilianized” into an
imaginary world—Jewish-Chilean and Arab-Chilean, respectively.
Thus, Mundo Judío and Mundo Árabe can be understood as tools for inte-
grating immigrant groups into an imaginary collective, or a collective sphere,
in which acculturation signs can be spotted for both groups through these
periodicals. Both Arabs and Jews in Chile clearly signaled their adoption of
local customs, with the peculiarity that they were celebrated in their collective
spheres.

Inside the New Chilean Mundos

The hybridism of these groups was reflected in their weeklies. This was evident
in the advertisement for pannettone by Tong Fang, published in Mundo Judío
(Figure 2). A pastelería-salón (tea and pastry house) owned by Chinese immi-
grants, located in the capital’s downtown, advertised Italian pannettone in the
Jewish immigrants’ weekly. This was a traditional food item for local consum-
ers during the Christmas period, and was alien to both Chinese and Jewish
culinary tradition.49

48 Hebat-Allah El Attar, “Jewish and Palestinian Communal Press in Chile: A Comparative

Approach,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 6, no. 2 (July 2011): 189–206, 192.
49 For a general idea of food studies, the second edition of Food and Culture: A Reader and
Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies is relevant since they combine the leading

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F IGURE 2 Tong Fang pannettone ad, Mundo Judío, 1935.

The same held true for the women’s section in Mundo Árabe, which was an
acculturating instrument from its first issue. All the recipes I saw in the avail-
able published editions were local dishes of that time, including Chilean foods
and flavors such as papas rellenas and flan de duraznos, as well as other immi-
grant recipes such as huevos galos and arroz a la milanesa (French and Italian,
respectively), but none were for Arabic food.50 This is partly due to the fact
that food, together with clothing and ideas, follows fashion,51 which can also
be considered ways of acculturating. Therefore, presenting local customs was a
means for immigrants to “adopt fashion” and was one of their key entry strate-
gies. Food as a marker in modern life acquires relevance since the act of eating
is considered a behavior that develops naturally, like work, sports, celebrations,
or leisure; however, in this case every single activity is represented via food.52
Hence, creole recipes published in Mundo Árabe magazine symbolized the
local cuisine, and the act of replacing the immigrants’ usual comestibles with
new ones, denoting other customs, in line with the modern middle classes
which also followed this fashion.

essential and classical approaches to the field. See Carol Counhan and P. Van Esterik eds.,
Food and Culture: A Reader, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2008).
50 For récipes, see Mundo Árabe, nos. 6, 7, 9.
51 Michel De Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, La invención de lo cotidiano, T. 2:
Habitar, cocinar (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1999), p. 192.
52 Roland Barthes, “Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,”
Annales E.S.C. no. 5 (September–October 1961): 977–86. Reprinted in Counhan and Van
Esterik, Food and Culture, pp. 28–35, 33.

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OTHERNES S IN C O N V E RGE N CE 113

This did not mean the immigrants did not prepare traditional recipes in
their private spaces. Eating one’s own cultural dishes is the longest-standing
habit, especially when in exile—whether as daily meals or during special
celebrations.53 The presence of local recipes in Mundo Árabe shows equally
how they “inspired customs, practices, [and] preferences stemming from
mentalities and sensitivities, which were marked also by an insertion into time
which acts at various levels.”54
The warm feeling of family, the encounter associated with preparing the
food, the roles assumed when making it, and later the act of eating it, reflected
the traditions and flavors which people did not want to forget; nor did they
wish to modernize the process of making it. In this sense, the boundaries of
ethnicity occasionally turned into new forms of sociability, and ethnic food
was considered a “symbolic marker of identity.”55 The ad for the La Bahía
Restaurant in the Arab weekly El Orden reinforces this symbolic marker of
identity in its statement: “The Arab Colony has two places for eating well: their
own and La Bahía Restaurant (Figure 3).56

F IGURE 3
The ad for the La Bahía
Restaurant in the Arab weekly
El Orden.

53 Giard, La invención, p. 190.

54 Ibid., p. 192 (italics in the original).
55 Ferrero, “Comida,” p. 194.
56 El Orden (18 September 1943).

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For Iris, born to Italian parents, Sunday lunch since her childhood had featured
Italian flavors and included rituals from her family traditions, such as visiting
La Nonna to prepare pasta by hand:

When we were young we used to go to the fresh pasta factory at my grand-

mother’s home and we’d make pasta. My Dad kneaded the dough with
the machines; he made it with eggs the way egg pasta should be, and
then he would make the ravioli with the dough. And then we and Nonna
would make the filling for the ravioli, which even had calf’s brains, or
tortellini. And the sauce, it would all start a day earlier.57

The menu at Iris’s Sunday lunch distinguishes one immigrant group from the
other. Symbolizing food as ethnic belonging also reinforces the argument that
“the further away from the mother country the more crystallized the culinary
identity.”58 On Sundays in Chile there was, and still is, a family lunch, usually
attended by guests and relatives, which in the case of immigrants is an oppor-
tunity to reminisce over the traditional flavors of their culture of origin.
Therefore, the idea of food as a “marvelously plastic kind of collective
representation”59 becomes relevant. The two sisters whom Pedro’s father had
brought over from Palestine helped their sister-in-law, his mother:

The three prepared grape leaves. They would spend hours and hours
preparing grape leaves. Because these could not be missing for Sunday
lunch.60

These flavors were not only maintained over time, but were also remem-
bered as atrocious by Iris, the Italian-Chilean who had married Pedro, the
Arab-Chilean:

They asked me to lunch at their home and they had little grape leaves.
As if this was something quite wonderful. It was awful, awful, I will never
forget it, swallowing those little grape leaves with yogurt, can you imag-
ine? At the time yogurt wasn’t popular like now, and swallowing that little
grape leaf was terrible. 61

57 Interview with Iris by the author (30 November 2011).

58 Warren Belasco, “Food Matters: Perspectives on an Emerging Field,” in Belasco and
Scranton, Food Nations, p. 13.
59 Arjun Appadurai in Belasco, “Food Matters,” p. 2.
60 Interview with Pedro by the author (29 November 2011).
61 Interview with Iris by the author (30 November 2011).

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OTHERNES S IN C O N V E RGE N CE 115

Food can be considered a “symbolic marker of membership (or non-member-

ship) in practically any sort of social grouping.”62 Iris’s experience at Pedro’s
familiar Sunday lunch represents a symbolic marker of her non-membership.
At this Sunday lunch she was an outsider.
Likewise, the practice of culinary traditions by Palestinians and Italians in
Chile support Barthe’s idea of food as a marker, Appadurai’s observation about
food as a deeply established social experience, Giard’s writings about the cul-
tural transcendence of food for each ethnic or cultural group, and the relation-
ship between the original flavors, as Ferrero points out.63 Filling Palestinian
grape leaves or Italian ravioli by hand by the first generations of immigrants
to Chile during the weekends for Sunday lunch are customs that would not
change in spite of the countless aluminum gadgets that entered Chilean kitch-
ens during the twentieth century. Thus, food and its preparation nourished the
feeling of being at home, and had an important role for immigrants in main-
taining their traditions, while taking up new ones, such as eating pannettone
or making creole recipes. Food as an indicator of who we are, where we came
from, and what we want to be, is significant both for locals and immigrants.64
In the case of immigrant groups to Chile, it can be seen that the “exploration of
the culinary other”65 led, in turn, to a reciprocal experience.

Modern Practices of Arab- and Jewish-Chilean Youth

Mundo Árabe presented complete coverage of the First Arab Olympics in

Chile,66 held during Chile’s national holidays in September 1933, in its ninth
issue. Delegations from Valparaíso, Quillota, Talca, and Concepción, as well as
from Palestina Sport Club and Deportivo Sirio, took part in the competition.67
Sport has an important role in the modern socialization of immigrant groups.

62 Sidney W. Mintz, “Food and Eating: Some Persisting Questions,” in Belasco and Scranton,
Food Nations, pp. 24–32, 26.
63 Barthes, “Towards a Psychosociology,” p. 33; Belasco Food Matters, p.2; Giard, La invención,
p. 189; Ferrero, “Comida,” p. 197.
64 Belasco, Food Matters, p. 2.
65 Ferrero, “Comida,” p. 202.
66 Mundo Árabe, no. 9 (December 1933), pp. 45–46.
67 Schedule of the Olympics: “On Sunday 17th, the province delegations arrived at Mapocho
Station and Central Station; there were received by special committees and numerous
partners, relatives and friends of the contestants. That day the agenda was set, together
with other organized events. On days 18 and 19, all basketball games took place.
“The cups were donated by various Arab bodies: Arab Center of Concepción, Arab
Union Society of Valparaíso, Industries Sederías United Atlas, Musalem Brothers, Lamas

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Arab immigrants began to create their own sports clubs during the 1910S.
According to Elsey, Arab sports directors—Palestinian-, Syrian-, and Lebanese-
Chileans—hoped that sports clubs would create a positive image of the
immigrant groups within Chilean society and facilitate their access to “full par-
ticipation in civic life.”68
Prizes for the Arab Olympics were given out in the afternoon of 20
September and were followed by a social event with a “good orchestra,” which
lasted several hours. Mundo Árabe made no mention of the kinds of food that
were served, whether it was Arabic or Chilean. If the Arab-Chileans held the
Olympics during the Chilean national holidays, is it possible that the luncheon
or dinner menu included traditional creole dishes prepared for the celebra-
tions, such as empanadas or asado, rather than kibbeh or kebabs (traditional
Arabic dishes)? Similar questions arise regarding the music the “good orchestra”
played at the ball; was it local or Arabic music? It can be supposed that accord-
ing to the rest of the schedule at the Olympics party, Arabic music was not a
main feature.
The sports represented at the competition were basketball, tennis, ping-
pong, chess, and taule (Arab chess), better known in the West as backgammon—
the only Eastern game played at the Olympics. Maintenance of the original
name of the game symbolized resistance against the Western name for the
game “backgammon”; that is to say, backgammon represented an appropria-
tion of the cultural practices of other ethnic groups,69 which engaged with
other modern sport practices played at the Arab Olympics.
The success of these Olympics showed that:

The high degree of development achieved by sports in our community, as

well as the spirit of culture, discipline, and fraternity animating not only
the participants but also the distinguished and caring spectators who,
with their applause, have stimulated a noble and great undertaking.70

The above was published by acculturated Arabs in Chile who participated in

the Arab Olympics during Chile’s national holidays. Acculturated Jews held
similar events. A matinée dance for Jewish-Chileans also took place during the
Chilean national holidays in 1935. The Jewish newspaper ad read: “Don’t be

House; the medals were donated by La Reforma, Boletín Árabe and the prestigious indus-
trialists the Awad brothers. All the above expressed support for the initiative.” Ibíd.
68 Elsey, Citizens, p. 149.
69 This can be seen too in the case of food. Ferrero, “Comida,” p. 205.
70 Mundo Árabe, no. 9 (December 1933), pp. 45–46.

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OTHERNES S IN C O N V E RGE N CE 117

shy . . . be a good Chilean, start celebrating Chilean Independence Day on the

15TH instead of the 18TH . . . Endiecióchese from the 15TH.”71 Aside from being a
good Chilean by celebrating the national holidays for three days, they were
expected to mark them according to the local popular rhythm of that time, the
music of the matinée: joró from central Latin America, the Argentinian tango,
American swing, the Chilean cueca and tonada, and the African-American “big
apple,” among others. It seems, that the young Sephardic Jews who organized
the matinée dance had no interest in playing Jewish music.
Another apparent sign of the acculturation of Jews and their incorpora-
tion into Chilean civil traditions was promotion of the New Year’s Ball at the
Círculo Israelita, which was described as “traditional”. This is ironic when one
wonders for how long Jews had celebrated the New Year by dancing? When did
this custom become traditional for Jewish-Chileans?
These examples show the ambiguity in which Arab-Chileans and Jewish-
Chileans lived, and reflect the ideals that these societies tried to advance.
Immigrants of both ethnicities adopted local customs and traditions as their
own, but celebrated them solely in the collective sphere.
Both periodicals also mirrored the transformation of society in general,
as well as the particular cases of Jewish-Chileans and Arab-Chileans in the
1930s. Like the vast majority of middle classes, the first generations of Jewish-
Chileans and Arab-Chileans were usually the first university graduates in their
families. The evolution of the professional directories in both periodicals con-
firms this impression.
The ascent to the top for a significant portion of Arab-Chileans and Jewish-
Chileans began uncertainly since arrival in the country depended partly on
the contacts these immigrants had. Nevertheless, those who came to Chile
with a considerable fortune—such as the Yarur family—offer an alternative
approach to the accepted narrative in regard to social immigrant mobility and
epic histories, while that of the self-made man was similar for Arab and Jewish
immigrants in other Latin American countries, such as Argentina and Brazil.72
Additional similarities were observed in the following testimonies of
Abraham and Pedro, reflecting the immigrants’ diversity and their strategies to
gain some level of integration into local society.

71 Mundo Judío (7 September 1935). Endieciochese has come to mean that people should
start celebrating the National Holiday even before 18 September, which is the actual date
of Chilean independence.
72 Elsey, Citizens, p. 156.

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F IGURE 4 Map of Santiago-Chile, 1930–1960.

Abraham and Pedro: The Antagonism of the Business World

Immigrants settled mainly in slums or poor neighborhoods such as San Pablo,

San Diego, Estación Central, and Chacabuco. As a result, their first contact
with locals in their first years took place with the lower classes.73 Abraham was
born on 28 October 1929 in a cité (tenement) in the Santiago neighborhood
of Yungay, to which most Jews and other immigrants, such as Arabs, initially
flocked. Abraham was the first male among five brothers and sisters, born to a

73 Olguín and González, La inmigración, p. 93.

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OTHERNES S IN C O N V E RGE N CE 119

woman from Romania who had come to the country in 1911, and a man from
Bessarabia who arrived in 1923. They were introduced in Santiago by a match-
maker and married that same year.

My dad died suddenly in 1945. I turned 16 that month. The day of my

father’s funeral, I don’t know who pushed me to it because I couldn’t have
done it by myself, I went out before the funeral to collect from the people
who had to pay him that day. Everybody talked about that at the time.
That attracted people’s attention.74

Abraham’s father had been a peddler, selling on credit from door to door. This
was a common line of work, both among Arab and Jewish immigrants, since
they did not need to know the language well.
When his father died, Abraham was in his fourth year of high school, study-
ing liberal arts:

So I finished the fourth grade and started to study nights; next year I stud-
ied nights at the Liceo de Aplicación (Liceo Hansen). I studied, went to
Hashomer;75 I took over as household head in a very normal manner.76

Abraham’s mother, who was illiterate in Spanish, did not work. This back-
ground, which Abraham remembers as his mother’s inability to take over as
household head after being widowed, replicated that in Argentina, and showed
the difference between native and immigrant women: “A woman as head of
the household in an immigrant family is an infrequent phenomenon, unlike in
the local household.”77 Under these circumstances it was her elder brother—
who had brought her over to Chile—who supported Abraham:

He paired me with one of the brothers-in-law he had brought over, a griner

[greenhorn]; this whole generation spoke bad Spanish; he was a very
likable Jewish griner; he’d go out into the streets with a bundle of fabric

74 Interview with Abraham by the author (28 October 2011).

75 Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth movement, with some features of the scout move-
ment, originated in Poland and expanded into Latin America during the 1920s.
76 Interview with Abraham.
77 Eduardo Míguez, “Familias de clase media: La formación de un modelo,” in Fernando
Devoto and Marta Madero coord., Historia de la vida privada en la Argentina. vol 2: La
Argentina plural: 1870–1930 (Buenos Aires: Taurus, 1999), pp. 21–45, 27.

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120
and knock on doors: “Knock knock, lady, lady, fabrics!” Fabrics were a
bestseller because women made their own clothes.78

About his experience as a boy in the adult labor market, Abraham continued:

Between the ages of 16 and 19, in three years, I had become a consummate
peddler. I was supporting one family and venturing into another.

On the abandoned projects of his youth, this later prosperous businessman

admitted:

I thought I would be free to study. All the Jewish immigrants wanted their
sons to be doctors and play the violin. That haunted me for a while, but
I think I got over it as I started to succeed and compared myself with
others who had a college degree and were either idiots or were wan-
dering aimlessly in life, both in their romantic relationships as well as
professionally.79

As an immigrant descendant of Arab origin, Pedro had a similar story. Pedro’s

father travelled from Palestine to Chile at age 15. Pedro was born in 1928 in
Lota (a miner zone located south of Santiago) and moved to Santiago with his
family in the 1940s. His brief experience as a boarding student in the priest-run
school of San Pedro Nolasco removed him forever from the classroom:

My father would leave Sunday night, drop off my four sisters in school
at the Santa María Semillón and us three brothers at San Pedro Nolasco,
where we were boarding students. One day I had an argument with a
priest and they expelled me from school. So my dad said to me: “It looks
like you don’t like studying.” “No,” I said. “OK, I need you; come with me
to the factory.” We set up a very small store, because at the time large
carts came from Conchalí, not trucks like nowadays; they would come
in through Pérez Cotapos St. where we had the factory, buy what they
needed, and go straight to their shops at central market at the back.80

78 Interview with Abraham.

79 Ibíd.
80 Interview with Pedro.

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After Pedro became independent, he recalled his beginnings as a storekeeper:

That was life, struggling, struggling, and struggling. I would get off at the
market, which was about a quarter-of-an-hour from the bus, and buy
things they sold there: sausages, Mortadela, things like that for people in
the neighborhood; in Recoleta. I would sell them, close the store and go
for more.81

Pedro struggled on many fronts. He was a victim of fraud and had to start again
from scratch. He drove a taxi, first the night shift and then runs from Santiago
to Mendoza. As Pedro admits, the idea of being a taxi driver was unthinkable
for him since in Chile during that period such a job was for people of low
status since it involved only physical work. This was a middle classes'
viewpoint, since being a taxi driver was perceived as a lower-class occupation
than middle-class, white-collar work. Pedro’s wife also had to get a job,
something even more inconceivable for this machista (chauvinist male)
regarding a woman’s role as housewife and mother. Throughout the 1950S a
dramatic change took place demonstrating how local society was evolving:82
women went out of the house to work. Iris followed this trend later when she
was the mother of three young boys.
Both testimonies share the immigrants’ initial sacrifices, their interrupted
youth, and a view of life which, like every businessman, included risky deci-
sions. Although their luck differed, Abraham and Pedro strove to progress and
improve their family conditions. The sacrificial image incarnated in these tes-
timonials, and also associated with the middle classes, gave rise to the pro-
file I have categorized as ‘the selfless Chilean’, a main feature of which was
“a willingness to sacrifice.” Through hard work, they became stronger—which
was also relative and subject to market fluctuations, as we saw with Pedro and
Abraham. ‘The selfless Chilean’ generally did not have an academic degree;
in some cases he had graduated from high school and sometimes not; a few
had some technical education, strongly wished their offspring to have an aca-
demic degree, and were willing to sacrifice almost everything to achieve that.
This was their family strategy. For immigrants and their offspring, the “Chilean
character” became particularly relevant due to its association with the middle

81 Ibíd.
82 Juan Luis Salinas, Revista Ya, no. 1600 (20 May 2014): 70–76, 74; idem, Linda, regia, estu-
penda: Historia de la moda y la mujer en Chile (Santiago: El Mercurio Aguilar, 2014).

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classes, and especially since it was those sectors that were generally accepting
of immigrants and treated them as chilenos (Chileans), as equals.83
Another detail of immigrant linkage with the middle classes can be seen
in both Pedro’s and Abraham’s stories: each of their children graduated from
college. This reinforces the central position of education in these profiles.
At the same time, it shows an archetype of middle-class strategies during
that period, with the nuclear family at the axis. If they (the parents) did not
achieve upward social mobility, they would make sacrifices so their children
did. And the presumed guarantee for this achievement was education, a col-
lege degree—even if they themselves were denied access to education, as was
the case of Abraham, on whom his failure to attend college weighed heavily
for several years. He considered access to college crucial for the following gen-
erations in spite of the added sacrifice that education meant for the family.
In Pedro’s case, his taxi-driving period was precisely when his children were
going through college. Here the association of the middle classes with sacrifice
is again evident. ‘The selfless Chilean’ featured prominently here fits not only
Armijo from Parral, from the Chilean satirical magazine, but Abraham the Jew
and Pedro the Palestinian, too.

Arab- and Jewish-Chilean Visibility

During the years on which this analysis focuses, most Jewish and Arab immi-
grants were in trade or were breaking into manufacturing,84 starting out shak-
ily and achieving, in some cases, remarkable success, as shown in the above
testimonials. In the 1940s, Mundo Judío included advertisements for Yarur
products, made by Palestinian immigrants, demonstrating business relations
between Jewish and Arab immigrants. At the same time that the Yarur fam-
ily opened their factory some Jewish-Chilean were starting in the textile busi-
ness as well. According to Mundo Judío, by 1938, there were 70 Jewish-Chileans
working in the textile trade.85 Thus, it can be inferred that they were in some
kind of business relationship with the Yarurs. During that period Chile was

83 This aspect reinforced the link between the middle classes and immigrants, pointed out
by Mazzei in “Inmigración,” Pinto and Salazar in Historia Contemporánea, and Cristián
Gazmuri in “Tendencias de la historia en el siglo XX,” in Cristián Gazmuri et al., 100 años
de cultura chilena 1905–2005 (Santiago: Zig-Zag, 2006), pp. 7–60.
84 “Los judíos en la vida económica de Chile,” Mundo Judío (31 November 1938), p. 1; Mundo
Árabe, no. 9 (December 1933), pp. 30–31.
85 Mundo Judío (31 November, 1938).

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OTHERNES S IN C O N V E RGE N CE 123

applying the model of import substitution (ISI), 86 which facilitated both

groups’ industrial development and enabled them to gain visibility, if they suc-
ceeded in gaining social mobility.
In the long run, advertisements reflected the transformation of certain prac-
tices, reshaping these immigrant groups and the way they “normalized” local
customs they had acquired: marking national holidays and Christian holidays
such as New Year, and folk celebrations such as spring festivals. The peculiar
feature of this normalization was that immigrant groups celebrated these
occasions in the collective sphere. This can be linked to the hybrid nature of
Jewish-Chileans and Arab-Chileans, respectively. Local society was porous at
the time, confused by its wish to improve its lot and to progress, while at the
same time strongly influenced by, and dependent upon, foreign markets and
policies.
The ambiguity of local society towards immigrants stems from this ten-
sion. On the one hand, they were vilified; on the other, they were admired for
their drive and their ability to imitate, such as the customs of the local middle
and upper classes. I suggest that vilification of immigrant groups by upper
class elites might derive from the association of immigrants with the middle
classes, as previously pointed out. This occurred because the middle classes
(except for the intellectual sectors) helped the immigrants become more
Chilean. For an immigrant, given his ambiguities and aside his financial
prowess, inclusion in the host society made a difference and was a mission.
That is why the success of parliamentarians such as Ángel Faivovich and Rafael
Tarud was significant for these groups. They were the first from their respective
ethnicities to attain important positions on a national scale. Faivovich ran for
deputies election on 1937 with Natalio Berman and Marcos Chamudes, other
Jewish-Chileans. Like Faivovich, who continued in politics, Tarud represented
the ideal Chilean profile and was the first Arab-Chilean to gain a seat in par-
liament. They were graduates of prestigious public schools and Universities
(Instituto Nacional and Universidad de Chile), had college degrees in liberal
professions, and served their country with their knowledge and experience.
Moreover, they achieved not only the social mobility expected by their parents
but also a more valuable degree of integration into Chilean society. Thus, as
integration increased, as well the presence of immigrants in public life, Jewish-
and Arab-Chileans filled the gap between immigrants as foreigners and partic-
ipation in civic life, which would eventually enable them to lead the country.

86 Sofía Correa Sutil et al. Historia del siglo XX chileno: balance paradoja (Santiago: Ed.
Sudamericana, 2001), p. 135.

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124

Conclusions

During the twentieth century, the Chilean middle classes were expanding
as a consequence of Chile’s modernization process. Migrants such as Pedro
the Arab and Abraham the Jew represent two sides of the same coin,
exposing the commercial path of incorporation into the middle classes. In
those echelons they were treated as ‘Chileans’, as equals. On the other hand,
we can see that the openness of the middle classes—with the exception of
intellectuals—towards immigrants might rest on their mutual goal, to gain
social mobility. In addition, the election of middle-class political figures such
as Tarud and Faivovich to the national parliament helped immigrants find a
niche in those sectors.
Similarly, the niche filled by immigrants in the local middle classes reveals
the dispersion of Chileans in those echelons in that period. In Chile, their
expansion lead to a class sensibility rather than an extended identity of mid-
dle classes in that period. On the contrary, they were sectored in part because
what was beneficial for one sector was detrimental to the other. For instance,
the law for private employees was biased against small traders. 87 This
drawback facilitated immigrant group access to those ranks.
I suggest that the collective spheres of Arab-Chileans and Jewish-Chileans
symbolized their multiple spaces of sociability which enabled them to main-
tain their ethnicity. This does not mean that immigrants did not seek to
increase their integration in Chilean society; the immigrants acquired local
customs which they were eager to emulate, adopt, and adapt as their own, in
new social spaces in their collective spheres, with their own rules and strate-
gies. Thus, immigrant social activities reinforced the sense of belonging to a
collective Jewish- or Arab-Chilean imaginary.
Local immigrant publications also strengthened the collective imaginary.
Mundo Judío and Mundo Árabe contributed to understanding Chilean
middle-class social patterns in that period, and provided immigrant
strategies to attain acceptance into various social spheres and to integrate
into the public and private space. Immigrants such as Tong Fang and Yarur
who advertised in other immigrant newspapers showed the openness and the
variety of tactics used by immigrants in order to gain entry. The immigrant’s
profile as the mod- ern man was reinforced by their newspapers.

87 Juan Pablo Silva, “Repensando aspectos de las relaciones de clase en el Chile del siglo
XX,” in Sergio Visacovsky and Enrique Garguin eds., Moralidades, economías e identi-
dades de clase media; Estudios históricos y etnográficos (Buenos Aires: Antropofagia 2009).
pp. 123–59.

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OTHERNES S IN C O N V E RGE N CE 125

Both Arab-Chileans and Jewish-Chileans wanted to belong to local society,

and neither immigrant group gave up until their members had gained full civic
participation. Furthermore, they took advantage of the niche they filled within
the middle classes. Despite any vilification they might have experienced along
the way to further integration. Arab-Chileans and Jewish-Chilean converged,
yet remained apart with their otherness, as they advanced the formation of the
Chilean middle classes.

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La familia chilena, no. 3, 4 May 1944, p. 9.
Mundo Árabe: All available volumes were examined.
Mundo Judío: All available volumes were examined.

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