Unwelcome Exiles. Mexico and the Jewish Refugees from Nazism, 1933–1945 reconstructs a largely unknown history: during the Second World War, the Mexican government closed its doors to Jewish refugees expelled by the Nazis. In this comprehensive investigation, based on archives in Mexico and the United States, Daniela Gleizer emphasizes the selectiveness and discretionary implementation of post-revolutionary Mexican immigration policy, which sought to preserve mestizaje—the country’s blend of Spanish and Indigenous people and the ideological basis of national identity—by turning away foreigners considered “inassimilable” and therefore “undesirable.” Through her analysis of Mexico’s role in the rescue of refugees in the 1930s and 40s, Gleizer challenges the country’s traditional image of itself as a nation that welcomes the persecuted. This book is a revised and expanded translation of the Spanish El exilio incómodo. México y los refugiados judíos, 1933-1945, which received an Honorable Mention in the LAJSA Book Prize Award 2013.
The fifteenth volume in the Lessons & Legacies series, featuring multidisciplinary research in the Holocaust and Jewish cultural history on the theme of Global Perspectives and National Narratives. The fourteen chapters included in this volume manifest three broad categories: history, literature, and memory. These chapters continue the recent trend in Holocaust Studies of a focus on local history, integrating specific regional and national narratives into a more global approach to the event. Newer studies have continued to incorporate what was once termed the periphery into a more global examination of the experiences of Jewish refugees in flight to Latin America, Africa, and the Soviet Union. At the same time, very specific local studies deepen our knowledge of the mechanics of genocide, along with the experiences of refugees in flight, and the subsequent dimensions of Holocaust memory and representation. New research on Holocaust literature continues to unearth unexamined texts from the period of the war itself, which can shed light on Jewish responses to persecution and strategies for survival. The study of Holocaust testimonies continues to grapple with the challenge of language: how to convey through the limits of human language the depths of barbarity to an audience that could never fully understand what they had not personally experienced. Likewise, literary studies continue to incorporate texts that were once considered outside the standard canon of Holocaust literature, such as science fiction and children’s literature. The tension between local and global perspectives can also be seen quite clearly in what the volume's editors understand by the term “memory studies,” or new approaches to research on museums and memorials. The very specific nature of collective memory on the national level continues to be the site of the contested “politics of memory.” A number of the chapters in this volume engage with the conflict of monuments and memorials, museums’ attempts to resolve provenance issues, questions around the ethics of Holocaust tourism, and the inclusion of new technologies and digital survivors into the memorial landscape.
Unwelcome Exiles. Mexico and the Jewish Refugees from Nazism, 1933–1945 reconstructs a largely unknown history: during the Second World War, the Mexican government closed its doors to Jewish refugees expelled by the Nazis. In this comprehensive investigation, based on archives in Mexico and the United States, Daniela Gleizer emphasizes the selectiveness and discretionary implementation of post-revolutionary Mexican immigration policy, which sought to preserve mestizaje—the country’s blend of Spanish and Indigenous people and the ideological basis of national identity—by turning away foreigners considered “inassimilable” and therefore “undesirable.” Through her analysis of Mexico’s role in the rescue of refugees in the 1930s and 40s, Gleizer challenges the country’s traditional image of itself as a nation that welcomes the persecuted. This book is a revised and expanded translation of the Spanish El exilio incómodo. México y los refugiados judíos, 1933-1945, which received an Honorable Mention in the LAJSA Book Prize Award 2013.
In a rigorously researched biography and through graceful prose, Daniela Spenser narrates the life of Vicente Lombardo Toledano, a man who reflects the complexity of post-revolutionary Mexico, the hopes it awoke as much as the failed projects it left behind.
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