In the histories of societies as racially and culturally heterogeneous as most of those in Latin America, the story of immigration and immigrants has, from the beginning, commanded a fundamental place. From precolumbian migration through the arrival of millions of Europeans, Africans, Asians, and other groups since the fifteenth century, the study of the push-pull factors that drove so many peoples into what is now Latin America, and the historical impact of each group of arrivals, appears as intriguing as it is inexhaustible. Lois Roberts’s meticulous and informative study of the Lebanese experience in Ecuador provides another important piece in this vast jigsaw puzzle.
Inadequate sources, Roberts indicates, do not permit an “all-encompassing” history of the Lebanese in Ecuador. She therefore focused her research on Lebanese families who rank among the nation’s economic and political leaders, and upon coastal Guayaquil, in which the Lebanese immigrants and their descendants have been...
