Latin American Jewish Cultural Production

9. Mexican Women, Jewish Women: Novia que te vea from Book to Screen and Back Again

157 u 9 Mexican Women, Jewish Women: Novia que te vea from Book to Screen and Back Again Ilene S. Goldman The first Jews arrived in Mexico during the time of the Spanish Conquest.1 Many Jewish immigrants to the New World were fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and sought religious freedom. Others, evidence demonstrates, were officially “New Christians,” Jews who had converted to Catholicism in order to survive the Inquisition, although some continued secretly to practice Judaism. Howard R. Sachar, a historian of the Jewish Diaspora in the modern world, estimates that “as many as half of the Spanish inhabitants of Mexico City in the sixteenth century may have been of Jewish origin” (231). When the Spanish Inquisition eventually came to rule the extended Spanish and Portuguese empire, Jews in the New World were forced, again, to convert, to repent, or to be condemned to death. For at least two centuries, fear of the Inquisition prevented further growth of Jewish communities in Mexico. Sachar tells us that in the latter part of the nineteenth century European emigration patterns changed and Jews once again looked to Mexico as a possible place to resettle: When the connection finally was revived, Mexico was the initial port of call. Ladino -speaking Sephardim characteristically were the first to venture to return. Arriving from Turkey and the Balkans in 1863, and numbering less than two hundred, these turcos began as peddlers of household and farm goods.2 158 ILENE S. GOLDMAN For the Sephardim, who spoke a medieval version of Spanish called Ladino , Mexico offered refuge from hostility in Turkey and elsewhere. Ladino aided their acclimation to the new land. Still, Sephardic Jews chose to isolate themselves from greater Mexico, to maintain, as it were, a nation within a nation . They continued, for example, to speak Ladino, a language similar to yet markedly different from Mexican Spanish, and to wear the clothing of their heritage. These choices, plus the contempt or indifference of Mexico’s white aristocracy, meant that the Sephardim remained on the margins of Mexican society , due to both choice and external pressure. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Mexican Jewish community grew by several hundred immigrants from Central Europe. However, as Sachar notes, it was not until the 1920s, “when the United States imposed restrictions on East European immigration, that large numbers of Polish and Romanian Jews altered their route southward. Some 25,000 immigrated to Mexico before World War I” (233). It is estimated that today Mexico is home to about 53,000 Jews, comprising only .05% of Mexico’s total population. While this seems a relatively small number, the Mexican Jewish population is Latin America’s third largest, following only Argentina and Brazil (Sachar 233). David William Foster, among others, has noted that despite their minority representation within the national population, Mexican Jews have contributed markedly to Mexican arts and industry, lending a strong cultural mark in Mexico City and in other urban areas (Foster 15). At the same time, like Diasporic Jews the world over, they have struggled to hammer out a place within the nation without losing sight of their Jewishness —both in its religious and ethnic senses. While recognizing the Jewish subject as marginal and Other, Mexican writers have sought also to understand their mexicanidad (Mexicanness). Jewish artists’ attempts to structure their identity within the Mexican nation serves as a telling example of the building of a contemporary Mexican national identity. As Paul Willemen asserts in his seminal essay on Third Cinema, “The issue of national-cultural identity arises only in response to a challenge posed by the other, so that any discourse of national-cultural identity is always and from the outset oppositional” (239). It follows then, as Edward Friedman has written of Latin American Jewish literature that: “Jewish characters—like social and political ‘outsiders’ in other texts—are means, devices, through which to explore the structures of a culture and to examine the self through art” (25). Along with intellectuals like Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz, Mexican Jewish authors have pondered the role and identity of the Mexican Jew. MEXICAN WOMEN, JEWISH WOMEN 159 Through their writing they have begun to inscribe the Jew into Mexican history . Friedman comments: The Jewish subject in Latin American literature is the product of a commitment to historical process . . . There is a panorama of vantage points: ties with the Old World, the encounter with the New...