Just as the Nazi destruction of European Jewry during World War II led to the dramatic dissemination of the realities of genocide in the 1940s, so a painful corollary to the more recent breakdown of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia has been the all too familiar newsworthiness of the concept of ethnic cleansing, i.e., the forcible and unheroic eviction of undesired groups. The practice of applying varying degrees of coercion and/or violence to purge national, religious and other minorities, though, is far older than the inception of either of the aforementioned multiethnic states, let alone their disintegration, and it is not limited to these particular countries. Such a dilemma—the presence of implacable competitors for political supremacy over the same territory—is a position with certain similarities to that of Palestine and early Israel in the first half of this century, especially after binational and other minimalist solutions were deemed irrelevant by the respective mainstreams of the Jewish and Palestinian national movements.

In Brazil hyphenated identities are very real in spite of the fact that elite culture aggressively rejects such social constructions. Thus, while there are no linguistic categories that acknowledge hyphenated ethnicity (a third generation Brazilian of Japanese descent remains “Japanese” while a fourth generation Brazilian of Lebanese descent may become a “turco,” an “árabe,” a “sírio” or a “sírio-libanese”), in fact immigrant communities aggressively tried to negotiate a status that allowed for both Brazilian nationality and ethnic difference. Immigrant groups in Brazil often did this by claiming a more “original” or “authentic” Brazilianess than members of the European descended elite, often via active constructions of social myths specific to the Brazilian milieu (see “The Legend of the Town of Marataize” above). This is possible since immigrant ethnicity is not some “immutable primordial indentit(ies)” but rather, as Anthony Cohen and others have suggested, a self-conscious and symbolic means by which boundaries were built.

In March 1995, a tragic incident understandably evoked public displays of Muslim religiosity in Buenos Aires. The incident—the death of the head of state's son—provoked the irruption of ritual and religious aspects of Islam, unknown to most Argentines, on the country's radio and television. The demise of president Carlos Menem's first-born brought into the public arena with a vengeance the issue of ethnoreligious identity that had been kept under wraps since the end of the nineteenth century as a matter for the intimacy of family and community.

“In Ecuador, the streets are paved with money. All you have to do is go there and pick it up.”

It was this rumor that lured Gabriel Manzur and Juan Adum into trying their luck in such a far-away, unknown land. Little did it matter that this meant a month-and-half journey by sea from Beirut with a stopover in Marseilles, then a train ride across Panama to get from the Caribbean to the Pacific because the Panama Canal did not yet exist. A sailor took pity on them and bought them a pineapple in one of the ports of call, and to Manzur and Adum, this strange fruit tasted like an orange.

The “Armenian renaissance” in Brazil is a process of the simultaneous establishment of a network of community entities, the diffusion of the Armenian language and religion, and the creation of a nucleus of entrepreneurs of Armenian origin in the shoe industry in São Paulo. My central argument is that not one of these three processes can be understood in isolation, since the economic activities only exist when rooted in a cultural substrate which gives them meaning. The production of Armenian identity on Brazilian soil is a collective project, where each individual included in the identification of “Armenian” has an interest in being included—an interest inextricably emotive, cultural, religious and economic—in the collectivity of the Brazilian Armenian community. The convergence of the individual interests of the “average” Armenian with those of the diverse leadership of the community, who extract their strength precisely from their position as spokesmen, provides the elements for the “production of identities.”