Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Resistance (review)

This is an impressive piece of scholarship, which combines admirable bibliographical and archival research with clear, engaging prose. Throughout the book's five main chapters, Schreiber painstakingly reconstructs the biographical and artistic trajectories of a talented and diverse group of progressive cultural workers who, in the heat of the Cold War-induced witchhunts, sought political and creative refuge in Mexico.

The first chapter offers an overview of the establishment of communities of US exiles in Mexico in the late 40s and early 50s. Chapter Two tells the fascinating story of a group of left-wing African American artists who were drawn to Mexico by the prominence and excellence of that country's public art, in particular its printmaking and muralism. The third chapter analyzes the collaboration of blacklisted screenwriter Hugo Butler and Spanish Civil War exile Luis Buñuel on a film version of Robinson Crusoe, and the Gordon Kahn bildungsroman, A Long Way from Home, which tells the story of a young Mexican-American who dodges the Korean War draft by fleeing to Mexico. Chapter Four looks at three films written by Hollywood blacklistees exiled in Mexico: two bullfighting films—Hugo Butler's ¡Torero! (also produced in collaboration with Spanish exiles for a Mexican audience) and Dalton Trumbo's The Brave One (produced in and for the US)—as well as Butler's Los pequeños gigantes, which explores racism in Mexico and the US by telling the story of Little League baseball team from Mexico that won the Little League World Series of 1957. Chapter Five focuses on the writings of the African American exile Willard Motley, in particular his explorations of the intersection of racism, imperialism and tourism in Mexico in late 50s and early 60s.

The readings of individual texts may be, on occasion, somewhat disappointing, particularly when Schreiber falls back on more or less predictable observations of how the author or text in question subverts or challenges the conventions of this or that genre or cultural formation (e.g., "tourism writing," or the "Hollywood screenplay" or "Mexico's Golden Age of Cinema.") But this possible shortcoming is more than made up for in the truly admirable reconstruction of the conditions of production and circulation (or, in many cases, non-circulation) of the texts in question. Perhaps another way to say the same thing: for this reader at least, the reconstruction of the drama of these real-life victims of the racial and ideological strife of the Cold War can at times seem more compelling—and maybe even more instructive—than the analyses of the cultural production of those victims.

Over the last decade or so, a good deal of lip service has been paid to the need to internationalize the fields of American Studies and American History. Cold War Exiles strikes me as an exemplary and "normalized" contribution to that worthy effort. This is pathbreaking work, based on a vast amount of archival and library research, which adopts interdisciplinary and international perspectives not to call attention to the author's credentials or cleverness, but rather because the object of study—US culture during the Cold War—demands such an approach.