Identity, discourse and representation: Arab migrations in Latin America

The emigration of Mediterranean Arabs to South America occurred consistently from the second half of the 19th century. For the most part, it has been a successful integration, and some migrants have even gained access to the economic and political elite. This evolution has entailed the loss of features of the original identity, but also hybridizations with the culture of the country of arrival, which preserve signs and representations of Mediterraneanness. This paper proposes an approach to identity and memory by examining discursive productions, strategies, and symbolic structures that construct the group's self-perception. In this way, the positions and contexts of identity discourses are observed, taking as a theoretical-methodological perspective the semiotics of culture and the reflections on the generation of meaning formulated by Lotman about the semiosphere understood as a great system in which the migrant is constructed as a social being (1979, p. 41).