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Tens of thousands of Palestinians migrated to the Americas in the final decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. By 1936, an estimated 40,000 Palestinians lived outside geographic Palestine. Nadim Bawalsa explores the history of Palestinian immigration to Latin America, the struggles Palestinian migrants faced to secure Palestinian citizenship in the interwar period, and how these challenges contributed to the formation of a Palestinian diaspora. As Bawalsa shows, Palestinian national consciousness emerged as a thoroughly transnational process in the first half of the twentieth century, and the first articulation of a Palestinian right of return emerged well before 1948.

Nadim Bawalsa is a historian of modern Palestine and author of Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (°®åú´«Ã½ Press, 2022), winner of the 2023 Nikkie Keddie book award by the Middle East Studies Association and the 2023 Palestine Book Award by Middle East Monitor. His other writings have appeared in the Jerusalem Quarterly, NACLA Report on the Americas, the Journal of Palestine Studies, al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, and in two edited volumes by Routledge on the Middle East mandates and diaspora/migration studies. Bawalsa earned a PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University in 2017 and an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University in 2010. He currently serves as the associate editor for the Journal of Palestine Studies and resides in Amman, Jordan.