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  • The Composite Identities of Jewish Mexicans in Mexican Documentary Films
  • Shelley Garrigan (bio)

A campy advertisement for the 2007 International Jewish Film Festival of Mexico (FICJM), a cultural non-governmental organization (NGO) that was established in 2004 to share Jewish topics with Mexican audiences through film, depicts a young couple trapped in busy Mexico City traffic. They are in need of a "miracle" to get to a screening on time.1 Suddenly, a ray of light pierces the vehicle, and as the camera switches from close-up to long shot, Moses appears in the background, standing atop a parked car, nearly silhouetted against the blinding light pouring in from the upper right corner of the screen. Accompanied by musical catharsis and punctuated by the exaggerated gasps of policemen and pedestrian onlookers, the iconic Jewish prophet parts the "sea" of cars, allowing the couple to navigate their way through traffic to get to the "promised land"/film festival.

What calls our attention about this clip is not simply the slapstick irony with which the Mexican—Jewish intersection is treated, but the slippage between territorial frontiers that such humor permits. Viewers are initially unaware that they are stepping into a new and different experience of Mexico. While at the beginning the scene belongs specifically to Mexico City, the utterance of the word milagro (miracle) by the female passenger ("We need a miracle!") launches an unexpected grafting of the foundational Jewish story onto that context, subsuming the local urban landscape into a Jewish meta-narrative. The viewer's experience is, thus, paradoxical. There is, on the one hand, the disorientation that stems from the incongruity of the scene in which the edges of the two main pieces do not fit readily together: Is this a Jewish or a Mexican story? On the other hand, the humor of the situation as expressed through the campy costume and gestures of Moses, and the melodramatic epic music in the background, creates space for a synthesis between the two. As spectators of the advertisement, we step into a question that has persistently resurfaced in Mexican cultural productions since Margo Glantz's well-known Las Geneaologías (Genealogies)2: what are the meeting places between Mexican and Jewish identities?3

In the broadest of terms, Jewish immigration to Mexico can be described as occurring in three waves. The first consists of those European Jews who were [End Page 155] forced to convert to Christianity and then fled to Nueva España (New Spain) to avoid persecution in the early sixteenth century. The implementation of the Inquisition in 1571 marked the end of that trend, and there was a large gap until the nineteenth century, at the beginning of which the first German Jews arrived in Mexico. Mexican President Porfirio Díaz (1877–1911) maintained an open-door policy with respect to European immigration, encouraging Jewish bankers to immigrate to Mexico and contribute to the surge in national economic growth. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, Mexico became the homeland for many displaced Sephardic Jews, followed by Ashkenazi groups leaving the political upheaval of the moribund empire in Russia. More rigid immigration rules were implemented in Mexico in 1927, restricting the influx of immigrants and setting the tone for the restrictive immigration policies that followed under the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940).4

While the intersections of Jewishness and Mexicanness have been probed through a variety of cultural productions, the focus of this investigation will be four independently made documentary films produced in the 1990s and 2000s: Daniel Goldberg's Un beso a esta tierra (A Kiss To This Land),5 Gold-berg's En los pasos de Abraham (In the Footsteps of Abraham),6 Sandro Halphen's Ocho candelas (Eight Candles),7 and Isaac Artenstein's Tijuana Jews.8 These films overlap in their portrayal of Mexican Jews navigating the boundaries of nationality and religion, and each film explores Jewish Mexican (and Jewish Mexican-American) encounters through a unique kind of immigrant experience.9

An important yet understated component to immigration tales is the medium through which they become publicly accessible. As a retrospective construction, argues Meryl J. Irwin...

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