Just look at the mix of origins: the Brazilian team Atlético-MG will have an Argentine coach nicknamed “Turco” who is actually the grandson of Lebanese. The hiring was announced by the team on Thursday (12), formalizing the exchange of Cuca – who left the club by his own decision – for Antonio Mohamed.
Mohamed, 51, was born in Buenos Aires. In Argentina, as in the rest of Latin America, descendants of Arabs ended up being called Turks. That’s because, when they started to immigrate to the mainland in the late 19th century, they were officially subjects of the Ottoman Empire. That empire, which had its capital in Istanbul, controlled the territory of what is now Syria and Lebanon.
Arabs left en masse for the Americas around 1870. Among the reasons for their departure are the various crises that ravaged the eastern Mediterranean in those decades – for example, the collapse of the silk market and the two world wars. Brazil, Argentina and the United States received most of this population, in part because all three were seen as very promising countries.
Most of the Arabs had come from the territories that later became Syria and Lebanon. The nickname “Turks”, which they received especially in Latin America, had a pejorative tone. Especially since many of them resented the centuries of Ottoman presence in their homelands. The Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade captures these contradictions well in his poem “Turcos”, in which he writes:
the turks,
my teacher corrects: The Turks
they are not Turks. are oppressed syrians
by the cruel Turks. But Jorge Turco
there you are answering by name,
and Turks are all, in that picture
taken away forever… Or are they miners
of living together, selling, exchanging and being
in Minas: the balance
on the counter, and in the open canasta
the mirror, the perfume, the bracelet, the silk,
the sight of Paris for a few milreis?
The Arabs and their descendants stood out in several sectors in the countries where they settled. In Brazil, they became famous for popular commerce. They also had prominence in Brazilian politics, as the surnames of Michel Temer, Paulo Maluf, Fernando Haddad, Jandira Feghali and Guilherme Boulos attest. The Arabs also entered the field of Brazilian football. This was the case of Athiê Jorge Curi, president of Santos, and Nabih Abi Chedid, of Bragantino, among others.
The same happened in Argentina. Former President Carlos Menem was of Syrian descent, to name an emblematic case. Interestingly, Argentina also had another football “Turk”: Omar Asad, who even had the same nickname as Antonio Mohamed.
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