Mexico’s Canal Once (Channel 11) has a short video on the history of the Lebanese in Mexico.
Posted on YouTube: February 2, 2012
It is in Spanish, but you should be able to auto-translate it.
The numbers for Arab-Mexicans are all over the place, but the video (above) (in the description) makes an estimate at around 400,000 for the Lebanese in Mexico. Given other patterns of immigration that are common in Latin America, this probably means a guess-timate of 600,000 for Arabs of other backgrounds that went to Mexico. Again, this is only an estimate. Almost certainly, almost all of the Arab-Mexicans are Christian, now.
Given the common Christian Lebanese tendency – especially among the Maronite Catholics – to refuse to identify themselves as Arabs, but rather as simply Lebanese or Phoenician Westerners, one can only make an educated guess at best. The numbers in Wikipedia are all over the place. And one can find many cases where Wikipedia shows more Lebanese in a country than Arabs overall, which is an impossibility.
Source Islamic Renewal in Iberia and Latin America: Its Needs and Preconditions
a lecture delivered at the University of Brasilia
T.B. Irving
1981Frankly it has been hard to gather much data on this subject. … [T]he Christian Lebanese immigrants to South America… owe much to their over‑all Arab heritage, even though many of them try to call themselves “Phoenicians”.
Well, Professor Irving (above) noticed the same problem that I do.
The Maronite Catholics were almost genocided by the Muslims, more than once throughout history, which is why so many immigrated early on. Hence, they will often only identify as Lebanese, or as descendants of the Phoenicians.
The Lebanese-Christians do this to distinguish themselves from the Muslims. Muslim Lebanese will readily identify as Arab. This ethnic tension led to the Lebanese Civil War.
So demographers and historians have to guess; and the number of Lebanese in any Western population, and almost certainly the total number of Arabs in any country, is undercounted as a result.
So my educated guess (and that is all that it is) is that there are about 1 million-plus Arab-Mexicans.