01 July 2014
RIO DE JANEIRO: Pouring Kaslik-pressed olive oil atop pots of fresh hummus as a faint sea-breeze blew past, guests sitting on the sidewalk tables of Amir Restaurante relished what could have been a fine Mediterranean afternoon.
Lebanese, Brazilian and hyphenated iterations of the two have enjoyed authentic Levantine fare at the eatery, located just off Rio de Janeiro’s Copa Cabana Beach since 2001 when owner Nicolas Haber set up shop. “The Brazilian-Lebanese, we’re like the Phoenicians,” Haber told The Daily Star. “We like to discover.”
Haber is one of several million Lebanese and their descendants living in Brazil.
While some have suggested it may be as high as 12 million, the number of people of Lebanese descent currently living in Brazil hovers somewhere around 4 million, according to Roberto Khatlab, director for the Center of Latin American Studies at Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik.
The epicenter of the Lebanese community in Brazil today is, without question, Sao Paulo, the country’s largest city and commercial nerve center. There, thriving Lebano-Brazilian businesses, politicians and cultural activities are highly visible, says John Tofik Karam, a professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at De Paul University.
In Rio, however, a smaller but well-established Lebanese community has woven itself into the city’s dense social fabric. Stores and restaurants bearing the Lebanese flag are nestled innocuously in between T-shirt shops flush with Brazilian football jerseys. Nossa Senhora Do Libano, the local Maronite Church, has an appreciable congregation, and fast food vendors sell sfiha alongside traditional Brazilian eats.
While new waves of immigrants have been drawn to Sao Paulo’s commercial and industrial hum over the past half-century, Rio remains a city of vestigial empire and of beachside romanticism.
Most, though certainly not all, of the Lebanese currently living in Rio are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Christian immigrants from what was then the Ottoman Empire.
“They are the descendants of an older migration wave,” Karam said.
In his book “Another Arabesque,” Karam says some 300,000 Arabs, mostly from what is now Syria and Lebanon, arrived in Brazil between the 1870s and the 1930s. Most would have disembarked at the port of Rio, which was the capital city at the time.
Many worked as peddlers and later as traders and businessmen. Saara, a shopping district in downtown Rio not far from the port, was the first major commercial center for Sirio-Lebanese, or “Turkish” immigrants. Today, many chotchke shops and restaurants in the area are owned by the descendants of these early immigrants.
With the community’s upward mobility religious establishments, charitable institutions and Lebanese social clubs were erected in Rio. While many churches and clubs still stand today, residents say they are ill-attended and, unlike the well-funded counterparts in Sao Paulo, offer few cultural or educational activities for the Lebanese community.
Jamal Elias, a Rio-based jeweler, lamented the fact that Lebanese in the city seem to be speaking Arabic less and less. “In Sao Paulo, the main directors of the clubs of the Arab and Lebanese institutions, they speak Arabic. Here, they don’t.”
Until the late 1990s, Elias said he ran an Arabic language and culture program for Lebanese in Rio, but closed down when other business projects arose.
Madeline Ofeiche, who runs Lebanon Exchange, a currency exchange bureau in Copa Cabana, says her children speak enough Arabic to converse with their grandmother in Kib Elias.
If the Sao Paulo Lebanese community is known for its conspicuity and clout, some Lebanese in Rio are proud to blend into the cultural medley of their city.
“New Lebanese, here in Brazil they are proud to be Lebanese,” said Bilal Khoury disparagingly as he enjoyed an early lunch at Amir. “I see people when they come from Lebanon [today] they are not open minded to learn about the Brazilians,” he added.
Both Ofeiche and Haber said that the majority of their friends were non-Arab Brazilians.
“Unlike in Sao Paulo, in Rio [the Lebanese community] has lost its connection to Lebanon,” Université Saint-Esprit’s Khatlab said.
Marcos Moussallem, the secretary for the Consul General in Rio, agreed the bridges between the community and it’s Mediterranean heritage needed to be reconstructed.
While many Lebanese in Rio return back to Lebanon for periodic vacations, he said, they often stay in Beirut and do not experience all the richness the county has to offer.
Moussallem, who lives in Rio, said that any authentic notion of Lebanon had disappeared in the intervening generations. “What I know of Lebanon is from the eyes of my father.”
Copyright The Daily Star 2014.
