Los Pueblos de Dios: The Politics of Christian Nationalism among Palestinians in 20th-Century El Salvador

Religion was at the center of El Salvador’s controversial presidential election in 2019. For the first time since the negotiated settlement of the country’s traumatic civil war in 1992, Nayib Bukele, a young candidate of Palestinian descent unaffiliated with either the main conservative or leftist political party, was the favorite to win. In the weeks leading up to the election, rumors spread in the culturally Catholic country about the religious affiliation of the 37-year-old mayor of San Salvador. Was he a Christian? An atheist? A Muslim, like his father? The widespread rumors did more to expose latent Islamophobia in Salvadoran society than resistance to the candidate’s purported policies but overall, it also revealed a more entrenched and longstanding aspect about Salvadoran political and social life: the expectation to be and uphold national values that were explicitly Roman Catholic.

This paper assesses this recent phenomenon within the late nineteenth and early twentieth century context of Salvadoran perceptions of Palestinian migration to El Salvador. During this period, racialized dimensions of religious identity were mapped onto these Middle Eastern Orthodox Christian migrants largely from Bethlehem–the land of Jesus’ birth– that associated Palestinians with an ‘Islamic’ or ‘Arab’ other that led to the community’s marginalization and exclusion despite their Christian roots. In response, many of these migrants engaged in strategic performances of Christian identity by appealing to their Bethlehem roots—and a connection to the historical Jesus—in order to distance themselves from other ‘pernicious’ associations that contributed to their discrimination. Based on archival research and oral history interviews with descendants, I argue that features of Salvadoran Christian Nationalism played a central role in how Palestinian migrant communities articulated their identity and claimed belonging within the small Central American country of El Salvador.