"Reelizing" Arab and Jewish Ethnicity in Mexican Film

"Reelizing" Arab and Jewish Ethnicity in Mexican Film*

Introduction

As a historian of Mexican history who studies Middle Eastern immigrants to Mexico in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I have approached the topic of ethnic film with both trepidation and great interest. Attuned to the historiography of what and who is Mexican, I view the films El baisano Jalil and Novia que te vea for their representations of ethnic difference and suggestions of a multicultural Mexico. Here, I wish to explore how these films not only show the presence of immigrant groups in the cultural fabric of Mexico, but also how the films demonstrate that public discourses (via film) can enhance scholarly understanding of multiculturalism. My purpose is to make a discrete intervention in Mexican historiography by underscoring the importance of film in conceptualizing the dimensions of ethnic identity. I suggest that these films are rooted in a particular Mexican social context in which both Arab and Jewish immigrants² have been able to manipulate the ambiguities of what it means to be Mexican.

Drawing on these two films and Mexican history, this paper will argue that mexicanidad is a flexible, dynamic concept that allows ethnically "other" individuals to join the Mexican nation. Arab and Jewish immigrants who migrated from the Middle East and from Eastern Europe to Mexico exemplify such individuals.

Locating Ethnic Identity

Discourses on Mexican ethnicity tend to point to a tripartite scheme that refers to constructions of the indigenous, the Spanish, and the mestizo. Recently, however, social scientists have begun to challenge these constructions by describing the role of immigrants and other ethnic groups settling in Mexico. This new scholarship on ethnicity not only complements traditional historiographies, but also expands the monolithic notion of mexicanidad and who comprises the Mexican nation. Yet, prior to this inclusion of immigrants in Mexican historiography, Mexican cinema—through the pioneering efforts of producers and directors—opened questions of ethnicity and belonging to the public discourse in Mexico. Through the medium of film, Mexicans appear to explore what contemporary scholars regard as "ethnic consciousness" and its relationship to mexicanidad.

As John and Jean Comaroff describe it, "ethnic consciousness . . . has its origins in encounters between peoples who signify their differences and inequalities—in power, economic position, political ambitions, and historical imaginings—by cultural means. Typically, it is the subordinate, not the dominant, who are first marked and named."³ Ethnic identity, similar to other social identities, is relational, distinguishing "us" and "them," and rooted in complex historical processes.

Arabs and Jews who came to Mexico in the late nineteenth century were marked as "others," yet later joined the Mexican nation as citizens. After the Mexican Revolution in the 1920s and 1930s, Arabs and Jews were seen as "foreigners," threatening new constructions of indigenismo⁴ and mexicanidad. By the 1940s, however, as with Hollywood's interest in Latin America and immigrant groups more generally, Mexican cinema began to incorporate immigrant themes though on a comparatively smaller scale. Through well-known actors such as Joaquin Pardavé, Sara García, Emilio Tuero (in El baisano Jalil), and Claudette Maille and Maya Mishalska (in Novia que te vea), producer Gregorio Wallerstein (in El baisano Jalil) and filmmaker Guita Schyfter (in Novia que te vea) cast culturally familiar Mexicans to play characters of other ethnicities.⁵ These actors drew Mexican audiences to sympathize with immigrant characters on-screen, and perhaps with immigrants in Mexico as well. The immigrant themes of these films may suggest tolerance and even acceptance of "otherness" in Mexican society decades before scholarly work began to critique the tripartite notion of mexicanidad. Although both Arab and Jewish ethnic groups faced discrimination and inequality of opportunity during twentieth-century Mexico, they prevail in these two discrete films as idealized Mexicans in the first and as Jewish-Mexican women maintaining their cultural ties to Judaism in the second.

In 1942, Joaquín Pardavé and Gregorio Wallerstein produced...