“Turcos” in 20th-Century Latin American Literature: Representations of the Lebanese in Gallegos’ “Los Inmigrantes,” García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Fayad’s La Caída de los Puntos Cardinales

Abstract

This thesis examines the literary representations of Lebanese immigrants in Latin American literature, focusing on how their complex identities are shaped, contested, and reconstructed in different narrative forms. As I analyze Rómulo Gallegos’ short story Los Inmigrantes (1922), Gabriel García Márquez’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), and Luis Fayad’s novel La Caída de los Puntos Cardinales (2000), I aim to explore the complexities of the Turco figure—a term historically used in Latin America to refer to Syrian and Lebanese immigrants. Drawing on theories of Orientalism, self-identity, and exile, this research introduces the concept of Turco Orientalism to investigate how these representations interact with national discourses of belonging and exclusion. Through a close reading of formal elements such as narrative structure and language used by the narrator and the characters, this thesis argues that while early depictions of Lebanese immigrants often relied on reductive stereotypes, later narratives offer a more nuanced portrayal of their struggles with assimilation, cultural hybridity, and displacement. In doing so, this study contributes to the broader discourse on migration, identity formation, and the evolving literary history of Arab-Latin American communities.