Much of the most engaging scholarship on the Cold War in recent years has explored the ways in which US government agencies viewed culture – whether jazz, visual art or literature – as a key battleground in the campaign to win over the hearts and minds of individuals across the globe. While scholars including Tim Borstelmann (The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (2003)) and Mary Dudziak (Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of Democracy (2000)) have convincingly linked US racism during this period to imperialism, the transnational slant of recent criticism rarely extends beyond the boundaries of the US, Africa and Western Europe. Rebecca Schreiber's first book, Cold War Exiles in Mexico, examines the ways in which the political and cultural climate of the 1940s and 1950s forced large numbers of US writers, artists and filmmakers into exile, examining how and why so many settled in Mexico. Although Schreiber explores the migration and impact of a disparate group of individuals, she convincingly argues that the work of US exiles in Mexico during the early Cold War era “was characterized by a distinctly transnational mode of cultural production” (xii), countering the dominant ideology of “American nationalist globalism” (xiv). Shreiber charts the arrival of three main groups of exiles: visual artists (including Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White) after World War II; blacklisted individuals from the Hollywood film industry in the early 1950s (Hugo Butler, Dalton Trumbo); and poets, writers and literary agents (including Willard Motley).

Cold War Exiles is characterized by attentive archival research and a largely well-written blend of literary and filmic history and analyses of Cold War cultural production. For Schreiber, the work produced by Cold War exiles “constitutes a form of critical transnationalism that challenged the official versions of U.S. national culture from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s” (202). In her most illuminating chapter, Schreiber explores the impact of the African American artist Elizabeth Catlett, whose work, including the Negro Woman series (1946–47), championed African American resistance to racism, later highlighting the global perspective of injustice by connecting US racism and imperialism to Latin America, Asia and Africa. Though she was refused a visa to return to the US for many years, Catlett was a seminal influence on the Black Arts movement.

Schreiber's book is keenly attuned to the different experiences (cultural, political and economic) of the US exiles that stayed in Mexico. (Some, as Schreiber notes, were “both resident imperialists and political refugees” (58).) In an insightful chapter on tourism, for example, Schreiber examines two unpublished works by the African American writer Willard Motley that explore the theme of tourism as a thinly veiled critique of US racism and imperialism. Here Schreiber's invaluable archival work on Motley's unpublished work contributes to an understanding of how exiled writers gained insights into the iniquities of racial injustice from afar, but also how they faced censure and isolation from the cautious publishing industry in the US (one of Motley's works on Mexico was published posthumously as Let Noon Be Fair in 1966).

Cold War Exiles in Mexico adds much to recent work on Cold War production, as well as presenting some nuanced readings of film, literature and art produced in exile. Innovative in its location of Mexico as a site of oppositional creativity, the book's broader themes of exile, Cold War culture and transnationalism give the book a wide appeal to Cold War scholars.