11 In 2019, El Salvador elected as president Nayib Bukele, a 38-year-old for- mer mayor and business owner of Palestinian heritage. Bukele became El Salvador’s first ever millennial president, but not its first Palestinian presi- dent; that milestone went to Tony Saca, president from 2004 to 2009. The 2004 election which brought Saca to office, in fact, was notable, in that both of the major party candidates, Saca and his leftist opponent Schafik Handal, were Palestinian. Bukele’s landslide victory in 2019—he won with a first round majority in a three-way race— put to rest doubts about his electability as an outsider. This identity, which he conspicuously cultivated with his relentless social media presence, had three parts. First, as a political outsider: as mayor of first Nuevo Cuscatlán and later San Salvador, he ran with the left-wing FMLN, but later broke with the party’s leadership, was expelled, and ran with a smaller right-wing party. His victory was the first for a third-party candidate in the country’s postwar period marked by a deeply institutionalized two-party system. Second, an economic outsider: Bukele was a successful business owner, running a Yamaha dealership in the exclusive San Salvador neighbor- hood of Escalon, among other properties. However, he did not come from las catorce, El Salvador’s famous fourteen families which made up the historical business oligarchy, to whom business owners, such as Bukele, were viewed with suspicion as new money upstarts. Third, a cultural outsider: despite the history of Palestinian Salvadoran participation in the country’s politics at the highest level, rumors abounded of Bukele’s religious identity. Although Bukele is a self-professed Catholic (reflecting the vast majority of Palestinian Salvadorans—indeed Latin Americans of Arab descent generally—who are Chapter 1 Turcos and Chilestinos Latin American Palestinian Diaspora Nationalism in a Comparative Context Michael Ahn Paarlberg RL_01_ARAF_C001_docbook_new_indd.indd 11 19-04-2021 22:03:22