Book Review

Caribbean and Latin American

The Lebanese must surely rank among our planet's most peripatetic denizens. Although their country of origin has only 3.5 million inhabitants, one can find these footloose Levantines throughout West Africa, Western Europe, Australasia, and the Western Hemisphere. The breadth of the exodus is even more impressive if we take into account that the Christian minority, which made up half of the country's population in the nineteenth century and constitutes a quarter today, accounted for most of it. This book by Lois J. Roberts tells the story of a small group within that wide-ranging diaspora: not the Lebanese in Ecuador in general, but the immigrant elite and their descendants, mainly in Guayaquil.

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Although some isolated Lebanese merchants had settled in Guayaquil as early as the 1860s, they only began to arrive in significant numbers during the cacao boom of the early twentieth century. Ecuador became then the world's leading exporter of chocolate beans. The newcomers did not engage in either production or export. The Ecuadorian elite owned most of the plantations and, along with European merchants, controlled the export sector; and Indian and mestizo migrants from the highlands provided most of the labor. The Lebanese, however, took advantage of the increased purchasing power generated by the cacao export economy and engaged, almost universally it seems, in retail, wholesale, and import trade. Many of the pioneers whose stories Roberts tells brought enough capital with them to open a store almost upon arrival. But the majority probably followed a trajectory common among Lebanese immigrants elsewhere in the Americas: to begin by peddling merchandise on credit or barter in rural areas poorly served by distribution systems, to open later a general store in a small town, and eventually to set up a bigger establishment or import house in a city.

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