Editors' Note

The coupling of the terms "Jew" and "Latino," or "Jewish" and "Latin American" still elicits surprise, especially among those who grew accustomed to identifying "Jewish" with "Eastern European," and those who imagine Latin America as a homogeneous Catholic region. In the United States this tends to be the trend, in a move that simultaneously downplays the experience of non-Ashkenazi Jews in the country and the heterogeneous Jewish presence in the Americas. But a growing corpus of Jewish and Latin American works increasingly demands that we acknowledge and confront both the Jewish contribution to the make-up of the Latin American cultural fabric, and the relevance of Latin American realities in shaping a distinctive Jewish identity.

Both terms, "Jew" and "Latin American," have represented the "Other," the "strange" or "exotic." We have many examples of the Jew, but Latin America, which is still unknown, is here the close "other," or as Saúl Sosnowski puts it, the "foreign yet near," tainted by clichés and simplistic views.1 Latin America is multicultural, multilingual, and multiracial, and even as we speak of "Latin American Jews," one single definition will not account for the variety of Latin American countries, the variety of experiences of Judaism or Jewishness, and for the many ways in which writers have expressed their sense of identity as a Latin American Jew. It is crucial that we acknowledge the specificity of unique national formations and the immigrant stories that shaped these.

This volume is part of our continued dual attempt to bring the discussion of Latin American realities to the field of Jewish Studies, and to recognize the Jewish contribution to the cultural, political, and social formation of Latin America. In the last decades Latin American Jewish Studies have made important inroads into both the fields of Jewish and Latin American Studies, but it has certainly been a slow process. Until a few decades ago, Latin America only entered into the focus of Jewish scholars as the place where some Sephardim escaped from the watchful eye of the Office of the Inquisition, and as the site where xenophobic policies were enacted by anti-Semitic regimes in more modern times. For those interested in the study of ethnicity in Latin America, on the other hand, Jews did not seem to merit their attention given the relatively small numbers who settled in the region when compared to other European migratory groups and the native local populations (the "true" ethnics).

To those of us who have studied this topic for many years now, the reasons for such an uphill battle for acceptance puzzled us, but that initial "segregation" has, thankfully, changed. The creation of several professional organizations (AMILAT in Israel in 1974; LAJSA in the United States in 1982; and research centers in individual Latin American countries) contributed to encourage those interested in this field, and for many years now, academic papers on Latin American Jewish topics have figured prominently at conferences held by Jewish and Latin American Studies Associations. Special issues of Jewish Studies journals were dedicated to this theme, and although few volumes on Latin American Jewish Studies have appeared to date in a Latin American Studies journal, vast numbers of articles feature regularly alongside other topics.2 It has become quite clear now that the study of such a minority in Latin America contributes to the current critical and theoretical discourse on hybridity, diaspora, ethnicity, national identity, minority languages, and minor literatures. Latin America thus came to provide a fruitful locus for grappling with important issues of interest to both—and other—fields, and has therefore lost some of its "exotic" veneer in the eyes of Jewish Studies scholars, while Jews and Jewishness have become, if not ubiquitous, at least recurrent figures in Latin American Studies.

This introduction is not meant to detail the process by which this new field has become more "mainstream." Others have done this before us.3 Rather, we wish to present the articles of this special issue by highlighting what methodological and or theoretical developments in the field they illustrate. Immersed in the Latin American context, the articles confirm the strong and essential...