Mauricio Fresco: Uncovering the Jewishness of a Mexican Diplomat

"He speaks seven languages—holy smokes!—and is more Mexican than the nopal," wrote the Mexican periodical Jueves de Excelsior in 1936 of Mauricio Fresco, Mexico's cónsul honorario in Shanghai, comparing the diplomat to the prickly pear cactus that graces Mexico's flag.¹ Fresco had drawn attention in Shanghai in 1931 for alerting Mexican officials to Mexican women, who, by virtue of their marriages to Chinese men, had lost their Mexican nationality and been deported from Mexico after large-scale pogroms targeted Chinese migrants. Fresco quickly transformed this notoriety into a career in Mexican diplomacy, beginning as Mexico's honorary consul to Shanghai in 1932. Before he retired from diplomatic service in 1946, Fresco served as the first chancellor in Mexico's legations in Bordeaux and St. Nazaire in France and turned down an offer to be the honorary consul in Beirut. During World War II, he was in charge of the migration office in Paris as that city succumbed to Nazi occupation, then was stationed in Marseille before serving as the first chancellor in Lisbon—a post he would later hold in Paris following that city's liberation. His personnel file noted that he was a proponent of democracy in general and of Mexican revolutionary ideology specifically. He received numerous commendations over his career, beginning in 1937 "for his incessant protection of Mexican women married to Chinese men and abandoned by them in different parts of that country, in the form of […] arranging for their repatriation."²

Fresco's background in photography and journalism aided him in his diplomatic work. He published articles in Mexico's Jueves de Excelsior magazine, France's L'Illustration newspaper, Italy's Illustrazione magazine, and several German newspapers. He wrote numerous books in several languages that reflected his travels, activities, and political leanings. Shanghai, The Paradise of Adventurers (1937), published under the pseudonym "G. E. Miller, Diplomat," was highly critical of the sale of passports in Shanghai, the League of Nations' reliance on Japanese military sources for information on the 1931 Mukden (or Manchurian) Incident, and the manifold ways that extraterritoriality permitted the exploitation of Shanghai's Chinese population. Synthèse du conflit de pétrole au Mexique (1938) defended Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas's controversial nationalization of petroleum. Yo he estado en París con los Alemanes (1944) recounted Fresco's experiences as the Mexican consulate's last representative as the French capital came under Nazi occupation; he sharply criticized the Nazis' racialization of Mexican citizens as "non-Aryan" by virtue of their indigenous blood, attempts to commandeer Mexican-owned properties in Paris, and the internment of Mexican Jewish citizens in Drancy. La emigración republicana Española: Una victoria de México (1950) defended Mexico's patriation of 25,000 refugees from the Spanish Civil War, a policy that Fresco had been integral in implementing.³ In a letter Fresco wrote in 1937 to President Cárdenas, he quoted Chinese reviews of his work that described Fresco as "the first white man who has had the courage to defend Chinese people […] and of course he was a Mexican citizen, whose country, whether in the case of Manchuria, Ethiopia, or Spain, has always been the one to raise its voice."⁴ Fresco cast himself as a patriotic advocate of Mexico's interests even as his own activities molded and publicized an image of Mexico as proudly mestizo and a defender of the world's downtrodden.

Yet Mauricio Fresco—this man more Mexican than the nopal, who both promoted and shaped images of Mexico's activities to a national and international audience—was not precisely who he said he was. Although his birth certificate attested to his birth in Mérida, Yucatán, in 1900, he was in fact born in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, the youngest of nine children born to David and Rebecca Fresco. His father was the editor of that city's longest-running Ladino periodical, El Tiempo. When Mauricio entered Mexico in 1924, he did so as a Turkish national, and when he applied for...