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“we shall always b e Palestinians, never admit change of nationality.”1 On 2 January 1927, Jesus Talamas, a Palestinian migrant in Saltillo, Mexico, ended a petition he wrote to Herbert Plumer, second British high commissioner for Palestine, with these words.2 Talamas sent the petition on behalf of the Comité Hijos de Palestina in Saltillo, whose members represented a growing number of Palestinian migrants who were being denied Palestinian citizenship by the Government of Palestine in Jerusalem following the promulgation of the Palestinian Citizenship Order- in- Council in July 1925, legislation enacted as part of the new British mandate over Palestine. Weeks later, on 5 February 1927, members of the Centro Social Palestino in Monterrey, Mexico, wrote a six- page petition to the high commissioner following the rejection of their applications for Palestinian citizenship. In their petition, members of the Centro declared: “Our fi rm conviction is that neither the authority of England’s Mandate on Palestine, nor you personally, Lord High Commissioner, nor lastly the League of Nations would ever reduce us to such an ignominious extremity.”3 With the Government of Jerusalem’s refusal to grant them citizenship and with their Ott oman citizenship documents defunct following the collapse of the Ott oman Empire in 1918, these Palestinian migrants were rendered stateless. Without citizenship in the new interwar world order, they lacked consular and legal representation while abroad; they could not request travel permits; and, most disastrously, they lost any claim to inheritance and owner ship in Palestine. Th ey refused this undignifi ed status and expressed their steadfastness in the face of what they considered a grave injustice against the rightful heirs of Palestinian citizenship. By 1930, the citizenship ordinance aff ected roughly thirty thousand Palestinian migrants throughout the Americas. Th is book explores the history of Palestinian immigration to Latin America starting in the late nineteenth century, the struggles of Palestinian migrants to secure a legal and permanent means to remain connected to geographic Palestine through citizenship in the interwar period, and the ways in which these challenges contributed to the formation of a Palestinian diaspora that was intimately connected to the emergence of Palestinian national consciousness. In other words, the book argues that Palestinian national consciousness developed transnationally throughout the interwar period in spite of and in response to exclusionary British policies. It thus expands the study of modern Palestinian history to embrace transnational analysis through the lenses of migration and diaspora; it demonstrates how the governance of Palestine during the so- called liberal interwar period was thoroughly lopsided in favor of the Zionists; and it repositions the start of the narrative of a Palestinian struggle to secure a right of return to Palestine from 1948, the year of the permanent dispossession of over 750,000 Palestinians upon the creation of the state of Israel, to 1925, the year of the promulgation of the Palestinian Citizenship Order- in- Council. Th e book examines sources from archives, libraries, and private collections in England, Palestine, Israel, Mexico, and Chile to chart a new kind of history of Palestine and Palestinians. It uses the themes of migration and diaspora to investigate the ways in which migrants across Latin America who came from geographic Palestine began to speak of themselves more and more as Palestinians in petitions and periodicals as a result of exclusionary British citizenship policies. Whereas migrants from Palestine had identifi ed more readily as Syrians, Ott omans, or Arabs in the years prior to the dissolution of the Ott oman Empire, the radical transformations in the geopolitics of Greater Syria following World War I saw the emergence and consolidation of new categories of national identifi cation among migrants from the region, including “Lebanese,” “Syrian,” and “Palestinian.” Th e emergence of “Palestinian” as a political identifi er, although not alien to a community that had long known Palestine to be the southern region of Greater Syria, was thus inextricably connected to British colonial practices in Palestine, which started in the midst of the war and which favored Zionists and Jewish immigrants at the expense of Palestinians in Palestine and the diaspora, or the mahjar.