Daniela Gleizer, El exilio incómodo: México y los refugiados judíos, 1933–1945 (Review)

employed against war criminals. While defense councils resorted to technicalities, prosecutors exposed the hypocrisy behind not guilty pleas. Nevertheless, trials are best understood as limited tools that cannot inoculate any society against a future radicalism. The contributors to this volume testify to the sustained determination to couple justice with democratic jurisprudence in Germany. Notes

2. Patricia Heberer and Jürgen Matthäus, eds., Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2008). 3. Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer, Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, ed. Raffaele Laudani (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 4. See also Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

David A. Meier Dickinson State University

doi:10.1093/hgs/dcu032

El exilio incómodo: México y los refugiados judíos, 1933–1945, Daniela Gleizer (México City: El Colegio de México—Universidad Autónoma MetropolitanaCuajimalpa, 2011), 321 pp., $28.00 paperback.

With few exceptions, Latin American governments were unwilling to accept significant numbers of Jewish refugees escaping the persecution and the Holocaust. Historian Daniela Gleizer explains the reasons why politicians and immigration officers hindered their entry into Mexico. Those Jews who did manage to live in exile in Mexico became “uncomfortable refugees.” A professor at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, Gleizer analyzes how the state, non-governmental actors, and the local Jewish community shaped official policy and practice. Gleizer observes that after the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910– 1920), the emerging state lacked both a consistent legal framework to deal with refugees, and competent bureaucrats to handle their arrival. Although the administrations in power were elected, and generally expressed sympathy toward the victims of authoritarian regimes, Mexico would accept only about 2,000 Jewish refugees. The modesty of this number, Gleizer convincingly argues, reflected both ideological and political considerations. Mexican authorities believed that Jews could not easily assimilate into

Book Reviews

359

Downloaded from http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/ at Virginia Commonwealth Universtiy on August 20, 2015

1. Nathan Stoltzfus and Henry Friedlander, eds., Nazi Crimes and the Law. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich: Beck, 1997).

360

Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Downloaded from http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/ at Virginia Commonwealth Universtiy on August 20, 2015

a nation with predominantly indigenous and Spanish roots. At the same time, despite their marginal relevance in national politics, local right-wing organizations successfully pressed the federal government into not accepting larger numbers. Based on primary sources in Mexican and U.S. archives, Gleizer’s study is a valuable contribution to understanding the role of Latin American countries during the Holocaust and World War II, and on the formation of the post-revolutionary Mexican immigration and asylum policies and practices. After its founding in 1929, the National Revolutionary Party (PRN) controlled Mexican politics for more than seventy years, though it did face serious challenges during the 1930s. The latter included the world economic depression, political polarization, and internal power struggles. President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) implemented redistributive and nationalist measures such as agrarian reform and the expropriation of oil fields managed by foreign companies. These actions partially satisfied lower- and middle-class demands, but they alienated some elite factions and upset relations with the U.S. and Britain. From the beginning, the Mexican president declared that his government would gladly receive those persecuted for political reasons. Cárdenas welcomed more than 20,000 exiles escaping the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Although Cárdenas criticized antisemitism and his administration abrogated earlier regulations forbidding the immigration of Jews, the president showed no determination to help Jewish refugees. Cárdenas kept the issue one of immigration rather than political exile, and his regime set reduced quotas for Jewish immigrants. Gleizer speculates that Cárdenas wanted to avoid further antagonizing conservative elements within and outside the PRN. Cárdenas’ successor, President Manuel Avila Camacho (1940–1946), sought to decrease internal political polarization and improve foreign relations; he would be a close ally of the U.S. during World War II. His administration did grant asylum to virtually all foreigners who had entered Mexico during the 1930s, including the legal right to work; the administration promised that all aliens who had escaped political or religious persecution would be considered refugees. However, once Mexico declared war on the Axis powers in 1942, its frontiers were closed to all immigrants from outside the Americas. Gleizer demonstrates that the doctrine of Mestizaje served as an official rationale to restricting entry of Jewish refugees. According to Mestizaje, the historical foundations of Mexico were indigenous and Spanish, and the nation was destined to become ever more racially and culturally melded. For reasons Gleizer does not explore, some local politicians and bureaucrats thought that Jews were “undesirable foreigners” who could not assimilate easily into Mexican society, and hence a potentially divisive element. Although some opponents to Jewish immigration framed their position within the rhetoric of Mestizaje, Gleizer does not make explicit to what extent recourse to this ideology served as a justification for racial prejudice. In fact, the information presented here shows that not only marginal political groups used the language of antisemitism, but that merchants and entrepreneurs deployed it too. In

G. Antonio Espinoza Virginia Commonwealth University

Book Reviews

doi:10.1093/hgs/dcu026

361

Downloaded from http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/ at Virginia Commonwealth Universtiy on August 20, 2015

the 1930s, the Jewish community of Mexico was relatively small (about 10,000), culturally diverse, and politically heterogeneous. Many Jews were petty traders, while a few owned stores or manufacturing workshops. A more detailed examination of their position within the social hierarchy of Mexico, and not only of their occupations, might have illuminated reasons that antisemitic sentiments gained currency. As in other Latin American countries, antisemitism may have originated in traditional Catholic teachings about Judaism and Jewry, and it may also have stemmed from local economic conditions and rivalries. Still, as Gleizer proves, the local Jewish community, grouped in the Central Israelite Committee of Mexico, was able to gain support from left-wing intellectuals and labor unions in confronting antisemitism, publicizing Holocaust atrocities, and helping some Jewish (and non-Jewish) refugees. The acceptance of some Jewish refugees into Mexico illustrates the discretionary and selective nature of this country’s immigration and asylum policies. It also demonstrates that the Mexican post-revolutionary state, like contemporary Latin American governments, was subject to foreign pressure, internal political deals, social hierarchies, and corruption. In 1943, the Mexican government accepted Polish refugees— none of them Jews—who were living in British-occupied Iran. Other individual exiles or small groups of refugees were accepted into Mexico because of their histories in the European left, personal or family connections with Jews already living in Mexico, or their ability to bribe the appropriate officials. Rather than reflecting only the limitations of the governmental apparatus, as Gleizer argues, its response to the Jewish refugees reveals the nature of the state itself. In fact, it was an effective but not a humanitarian response, one that reduced Jewish immigration as much as possible in accord with the ideological assumptions and political calculus of particular Mexican authorities and several of their constituencies.