Migrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers in Latin America: (12 Jewish Latin America)

Scholarship on ethnicity in modern Latin America has traditionally understood the region’s various societies as fusions of people of European, indigenous, and/or African descent. These are often deployed as stable categories, with European or “white” as a monolith against which studies of indigeneity or blackness are set. The role of post-independence immigration from eastern and western Europe—as well as from Asia, Africa, and Latin-American countries—in constructing the national ethnic landscape remains understudied. The contributors of this volume focus their attention on Jewish, Arab, non-Latin European, Asian, and Latin American immigrants and their experiences in their “new” homes. Rejecting exceptionalist and homogenizing tendencies within immigration history, contributors advocate instead an approach that emphasizes the locally- and nationally-embedded nature of ethnic identification.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments List of Contributors 1 Introduction  Raanan Rein, Stefan Rinke, and David M.K. Sheinin 2 In Search of Wandering Husbands: Jewish Migration, Desertion, and Divorce between Poland and Argentina, 1919–1939  Lelia Stadler 3 Indifference, Hostility, and Pragmatism: an X-Ray of Chilean Right-Wing Attitudes toward Jews, 1932–1940  Gustavo Guzmán 4 Diplomacy and Ethnicity: Germans in Brazil (1933–1938)  Vinícius Bivar 5 Constructing a Transnational Identity: the Three Phases of Palestinian Immigration to Chile, 1900–1950  Hagai Rubinstein 6 Political Immigrants: the “Chileanization” of Arabs and Jews and Their Class Subjectivities, 1930–1970  Claudia Stern 7 Over the Rainbow: Costa Rica as a “Geography of Meaning” for U.S. American Immigrants, 1945–1980  Atalia Shragai 8 Unsafe Havens for Jewish-Argentine Migrants: the Rise and Fall of the Third Peronist Government and the Traumatic Effects of the 1973 Yom Kippur War  Adrián Krupnik 9 Missing Jews: the Memory of Dictatorship in Argentina and the Jewish Identity Diplomacy of José Siderman  David M.K. Sheinin 10 Crisscrossing the Oyapock River: Entangled Histories and Fluid Identities in the French-Brazilian Borderland  Fabio Santos 11 Together Un-united: Muslims in the Triple Frontier on the Defensive against Accusations of Terrorism  Omri Elmaleh 12 Los muchachos Peronistas Japoneses: the Peronist Movement and the Nikkei  Raanan Rein, Aya Udagawa, and Pablo Adrián Vázquez 13 Identity Diversity among Chinese Immigrants and Their Descendants in Buenos Aires  Susana Brauner and Rayén Torres 14 “We Colombian Women Are Damned No Matter What We Do”: an Analysis of Police Officers’ Perceptions and Colombian Women’s Experiences during Their Arrest in Ecuador  Andrea Romo-Pérez 15 Concluding Essay: Rethinking Latin America in the New Ethnic Studies  Jurgen Buchenau and Jerry Dávila Index

About the Author :
Raanan Rein, Ph.D. (1991), Tel Aviv University, is the Sourasky Professor of History, Head of the S. Daniel Abraham Center and Vice President of Tel Aviv University. His most recent book is Populism and Ethnicity: Peronism and the Jews of Argentina (2020).

Stefan Rinke, Dr. phil. (1995), Dr. habil. (2003), Catholic University of Eichstätt, is Professor of Latin American History at the Institute of Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and was an Einstein Research Fellow 2013-2015. Amongst his most recent publications is Conquistadoren und Azteken: Hernán Cortés und die Eroberung Mexikos (2019).

David M.K. Sheinin (Trent University) is Académico Correspondiente of the Academia Nacional de la Historia de la República Argentina. In 2013, he was the recipient of the Arthur P. Whitaker Prize for Consent of the Damned: Ordinary Argentinians in the Dirty War.

Review :
"This edited volume presents a useful contribution to the migration history of Latin America, situated squarely in the transdisciplinary field of migration studies and following the equally interesting 2017 volume by two of the coeditors. (...) Among the most fascinating chapters are the three that focus on inter-American migratory flows by addressing US immigrants in Costa Rica, Colombian women in Ecuador (many of whom received asylum), and the Franco-Brazilian borderlands."
- Edward Blumenthal, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, HAHR November 2021.