Coordinated by Pablo Yankelevich, this collection constitutes a significant step in the scholarship of immigrant communities in Mexico and Latin America. The volume presents a myriad of contributions with wide variations in focus, disciplinary field, and scope. The first two essays analyze immigration laws, institutional racism, eugenics and Pan-American ideologies in Latin America. David Scott-Fitzgerald and David Cook-Martin provide a detailed view of the legal context for the arrival of immigrant waves into the region, while Andrés Reggiani focuses on the ideological debates and policies shaping the intersections of eugenics, immigration, and population growth. Both essays contribute to the general understanding of immigration policies that implementing racial and ethnic hierarchies among European and non-European immigrants, as well as between Christians and non-Christians. By “choosing” to interpret policies to privilege one group above another, countries in the region ultimately shaped their immigration laws on universal principles, at the same time implementing their policies with selective enforcement according to racial hierarchies and ideals of the nation-state.
The second half of the volume presents case studies on three distinct immigrant communities in the national territory during the first decades of the revolutionary regimes in Mexico. Elizabeth Cunin's essay analyzes the intersections between labor, race, border, and political pragmatism in the Quintana Roo territory during the first decades of the Revolutionary regimes in Mexico. Her detailed study questions the ways in which the Mexican state has been characterized as a racist institution. The colonial structures of local society in Quintana Roo and the labor demands for an economic model sustained by the exploitation of rainforest wood and gum allowed for the emergence of fluid structures in which race and immigration played a role, but not a central one, in the implementation of programs, regulations, and policies crafted by national and state authorities. Reflecting the experience of other non-European immigrant groups in Central America and the Caribbean, Cunin aptly shows the processes by which Afro-Belizean immigrants and laborers were deemed needed but not wanted, all the while continuing be indispensable to the exploitation of the Quintana Roo's natural resources. The permanent dialogue with studies on Afro-Caribbean immigrant communities makes the chapter's conclusions strong and subtle.
In a similar vein, Kif Augustine-Adams presents a complex analysis of race, nationality and Chinese ancestry/kinship in Sonora, viewed from a sharp lens trained on the implementation of the 1930 “race-less” national census. Augustine-Adams illustrates the wide distance between national policies, local bureaucracies, and ideas of race, nation and kinship surrounding the spouses, children and Mexican-born relatives of Chinese immigrants during the climax of anti-foreign violence in northern Mexico. The study presents ample evidence indicating the multiple layers through which nationality, citizenship, and Mexicanness were contested, questioned, and challenged by local resentment and prejudice against Chinese communities in Sonora and Northern Mexico. Building upon recent but solid scholarship on the subject, the study features a landscape in which state officials shifted away from national policies to institute a notion of nationality that was not applicable to those Mexican citizens connected to Chinese immigrants via marriage or blood line. This “otherization” process presented unique characteristics and was implemented by local officials in various communities regardless of the legal status of these families. Yankelevich's own chapter in the volume focuses on the evolution of anti-Semitism in revolutionary Mexico between 1920 and 1940. The essay introduces the readers to the layers of prejudice and their evolution as the presence of Jewish immigrant families became subject to private complaints, proclamations of political groups, media libels, and finally, national policies preventing the arrival of additional immigrants.
Yankelevich's article features a society where anti-Semitism is cast almost as a synonym for undesirable foreigners, while the real and recent presence of Jewish immigrant families from Europe and the Middle East is not a source of concern, beyond the complaints by rival peddler merchants and small local businesses. Unlike the lower classes that easily identify Jews with foreigners and diablos, elites in both the conservative and revolutionary factions had more elaborated views of the group, mostly based in modern prejudices that defined Jews as incompatible with the nation-state. Political elites in Mexico clearly identified Jews as communists, anarchists, criminals, traitors, and exploiters, unfit to become citizens on many levels. An insightful analysis on the transformations of the government policies regarding Jewish immigration draws the narrative across two decades to culminate in the special case by which the Mexican state decided not to accept more families from Europe, to exempt Jews from the United States, and crash on anti-Semitic acts of violence perpetrated by rightwing conservatives and Nazi sympathizers. The complex and ultimately ambivalent connection between Mexican society, the federal government, and Jewish immigrant families is presented from a rich variety of perspectives and sources.
In sum, this volume represents a bright example of new scholarship on the history of immigration and racism in the Western Hemisphere. The reader will find it refreshing that, for once, immigration to Latin America is not showcased against the backdrop of the immigrant experiences in the United States. Moreover, the days when immigrant communities in Latin America were merely the objects of celebration, rather than analysis, seem to be numbered.
