The lecture shed light on the fact that the largest communities of Palestinians outside of the Arab World are located in Latin America. In his lecture, Dr. Bawalsa asked how that came to be. He examined the emergence in Latin America of a Palestinian diaspora throughout the early twentieth century, specifically, in 1920s Chile.

Dr. Bawalsa's research is the first of its kind, taking the historical analysis of the formation of Palestinian national consciousness outside of geographic Palestine to the farthest reaches of the Americas. It also projects the narrative of a Palestinian struggle for a right of return to Palestine 23 years back from 1948 to 1925.