Ethnicity, Belief and Status: An Arab Evangelical Identity in Santiago del Estero, Northwest Argentina

Abstract

During the first decades of the 20th century, an English missionary promoted the creation of evangelical assemblies in Santiago del Estero, a province in northwestern Argentina, a country in which the discourse of a nation modeled by a white, European and Catholic pattern was still clear. Although the social bases of these assemblies varied, the collective imaginary emphasizes that it was the incorporation of Arab immigrants that strengthened the missionary project in the region. The article approaches this imaginary from an exhaustive review of the testimonies of descendants of those first Syrian and Creole families that adopted the evangelical proposal in Santiago del Estero. In the process of identity re-elaboration of the Syrian and Lebanese collective in the northern province, the elements for an understanding of the socio-religious change of these immigrants and the configuration of an evangelical identity whose Arab sign was conspicuous appear.