Why are there thousands of Brazilians in Lebanon? Dom Pedro 2º is behind
Two first major waves of immigration occurred until 1930. The first records of Lebanese disembarking in ports in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul and the Amazon region date back to the 1880s, but 90% of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants who arrived in Brazil made the crossing years later , between 1904 and 1930, according to the book “Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil”, by researcher Jeffrey Lesser, professor of history and director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at Emory University.
Why did Lebanese move to Brazil? According to IBGE, the majority of Lebanese who took up residence in Brazil, especially in the first wave, were Christians who were fleeing persecution from the Muslim majority and the Turks during the Ottoman Empire. It was at this time that the first Brazilian consulate opened in Beirut, in 1911. Furthermore, there was a shortage of cultivable land in the region for the new families that were formed, who began to look for new homes abroad. By 1939, more than 5,000 Lebanese had already immigrated to Brazil, the third largest community in the Middle East, only behind the Turks and Syrians, according to Lesser’s work.
New wave is Muslim. The Lebanese continued to come to Brazil after World War II to escape French rule and sectarian conflicts, according to the work of historian André Castanheira Gattaz, from the University of São Paulo. During the Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975, another strong round of refugees arrived here, but this time the majority of them were Islamic.
Game has changed. During the 1980s and 1990s, Brazil entered an economic crisis that would only be dispersed with the consolidation of the Real Plan. The Lebanese and their descendants who lived here, very dependent on trade, then decided to return to Lebanon carrying their Brazilian roots with them. Historian Roberto Khatlab, director of the Center for Studies and Cultures of Latin America at the Saint-Esprit de Kaslik University, called this group “Brasilibanese” to the French-Lebanese newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour.
The largest community is in the Bekaa Valley, where Brazilians from Lebanon speak Portuguese and eat our food. Brazilian journalist Guga Chacra, a descendant of Lebanese immigrants, reported in his column for Estadão in 2010 about his time in the valley. “The report did the test and, indeed, the first pedestrian approached spoke Portuguese. It was Hussein El Jaroush. Born in Lebanon, he went to Brazil two decades ago, where he lived for 13 years. He passed through Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Recife , Maceió and, like many fellow countrymen, ended up in Santo André. In the city of ABC in São Paulo, there is even a kind of club, called ‘Chácara Sultan Yakoub’, where people from this village in Lebanon get together on weekends to play football and play. have a barbecue.”
Niemeyer also left his mark on the Lebanese landscape. Khatlab also describes that one of the main streets in Zahlé, the capital of the Bekaa, is called “Brazil street”. “There is another ‘Rua Brasil’ in Beirut, close to the port. In Byblos is the small chapel of Nossa Senhora da Penha do Rio de Janeiro. In Tripoli, the great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer designed the building that housed the International Fair. And for all of Lebanon comes across names in Portuguese for stores, industries, products and others, with Brazil also influencing Lebanese habits, with coffee, and its national flag becoming part of the local landscape at the time of the World Cup in football”, he recalled to L’Orient-Le Jour. Brazilians are also present in other parts of Lebanese territory, such as Dar Beechtar, to the North, and Kabrikha, to the South.