El exilio incómodo

Two passenger vessels docked at the port of Veracruz, Mexico, in the third week of June 1939. On board of one, the SS Sinaia, were some 1,600 Spanish republican refugees; on board the other, the SS Flandres, were 98 Jewish refugees. The government of President Lázaro Cárdenas accepted the Spanish asylum seekers and turned away the persecuted Jewish refugees. Daniela Gleizer has chosen the latter as the subject of her research.In her introduction, the author promises to explore three interlocked arenas in order to reveal Mexico’s policies regarding the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust: Mexico’s laws and officialdom, from Presidents Cárdenas and Manuel Ávila Camacho down to their ministers and the various official agencies; the political parties and associations, public opinion, and the press; and the Jewish community in Mexico, including its activities and impact on the final balance of the rescue. The author also shares nine hypotheses that emerged during the preliminary stage of her work and that guided her research, one being that Mexico’s acceptance of many thousands of Spanish republican refugees exhausted the country’s ability to receive Jewish refugees. Based on all the relevant official archives in Mexico and the United States, the Mexican Jewish community’s papers, and an extensive bibliography, the author describes and analyzes in the following chapters the role of each of the actors in the three arenas.Reviewing the Mexican legislation regarding immigration, Gleizer found that already in 1934 Jews were marked as undesirables whose entrance to Mexico should be prevented. Later legal dispositions erected a wall against Jewish immigrants even before a real demand for asylum was raised by Jewish refugees. Mexican laws did not recognize refugee as a category apart from immigrant, so there was no judicial basis for accepting the asylum claims of Jewish refugees. Both the ideology and politics of mestizaje, which were intended to create the Mexican race, and anti-Semitic stereotypes allowed Mexicans to avoid any emphatic consideration of the plight of Jewish immigrants. Right-wing pro-fascist associations, the press, legislators, and public opinion shared these views, as did many government officials. The Secretary for the Interior, Ignacio García Téllez, was among them, and he was in charge of immigration.Nevertheless, Gleizer identifies more than one voice among officialdom regarding the Jews. For instance, a large project for an agricultural settlement of 1,500 Jewish immigrant families was elaborated. It was to be financed by the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee and supported by other American organizations. It was intended to include an equal number of Mexican settlers, mostly from those repatriated from the United States. The Jewish settlers were to be selected very carefully, and their farms were to be located among the Mexicans to stimulate both their assimilation and mestizaje. Guided by his own reasons, the governor of Tabasco, the Mexican state hosting the project, was an enthusiastic supporter, and President Cárdenas offered his approval. But on November 17, 1939, the news leaked to the press, and there arose a vehement, almost violent reaction. This caused Cárdenas to retreat, and the project was laid to rest.The analysis of activities in the third arena — the Jewish community’s efforts on behalf of the refugees — forms one of the great merits of this study. According to estimates, the total number of Jews who lived in Mexico in 1940 was 18,000, with only 2,000 there in 1920. Very few were Mexican citizens, and the community had no political power and very little local connections. Nevertheless, Mexican Jewish organizations, with the help of their American Jewish counterparts, supported many of the refugees who had managed to disembark in Mexican ports. The institutions were also instrumental in helping a certain number of Jewish refugees to be allowed off board. The total number of Jews rescued from the Holocaust due to legal or illegal entry into Mexico was just 2,000 persons, and the Jewish community had a considerable role in preventing the expulsion of many of them.Gleizer declares that her study does not deal with the Spanish refugees. Nevertheless, in her “Final Considerations” she offers only a suggestion that Cárdenas’s activities on behalf of the Spaniards exhausted his abilities to act on behalf of the Jews. The hypothesis in the introduction on this subject is thus left for further investigation. These investigations should be guided by the fact that the Spanish refugees arrived in Mexico together with a considerable part of the Spanish Republic’s treasury, which financed the Servicio de Evacuación de Refugiados Españoles, the fund to support the absorption in Mexico of the Spanish refugees. That, along with Mexico’s political support of the republic from the very beginning of the Spanish Civil War, was the basis for legitimizing the acceptance of Spanish refugees by the Mexican administration and Mexican public opinion. In these circumstances, the 98 Jewish refugees on the SS Flandres were no match for the Spanish immigrants on the SS Sinaia.Gleizer’s work is a most important contribution to the historiography on Mexico and its Jewish community during the Nazi era. I wish it would become a textbook in Mexican universities and in the large network of the Mexican Jewish educational institutions

Deportation · Immigration · Judaism · Legislation · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · The Holocaust · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Public Administration

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