On Palestinian Latin Americanism: Reading Walter Garib and Mahfud Massís

In this article, we direct our analysis to the political, literary, and aesthetic reflections on the Palestinian question in the work of two Chilean Palestinian literary intellectuals, Mahfud Massís (1916–1990) and Walter Garib (1933–). Analyzing a selection of their work spanning from the 1960s to the 1990s, the article shows particular interest in the formation of a modernist and Third Worldist discourse that combines Latin American and Palestinian revolutionary timelines. This highlights the presence of various counterhegemonic political discourses within the literary history of the Palestinian diaspora that literary criticism has not yet addressed. For this purpose, we initially seek to develop a concept of identity that allows us to approach these authors’ work beyond the traditional integrationist approaches of literary criticism. Subsequently, this article demonstrates, through a direct reading of the discursive aspects analyzed, that El Viajero de la Alfombra Mágica by Walter Garib and a collection of Mahfud Massís’s poems together open a gateway to new perspectives on Palestinian diaspora identity in Chile, and on our idea of identity in diaspora itself. At the end, the article proposes a new category for the discursive study of the politicization of Palestinian identity during the twentieth century in Latin America: Palestinian Latin Americanism.