Ráfagas de un exilio: Argentinos en México, 1974-1983 (review)

This book is a comprehensive study of the thousands of Argentines who migrated to Mexico starting in the mid-1970s, fleeing the criminal violence of the last Peronist government and the state terror of the military juntas that ruled until 1983. The topic is too close for the usual comforts of historical perspective. Earlier treatments of the subject, notes Yankelevich, oscillated between the disregard for "los de afuera," the outsiders of national politics, and the "explosión de la memoria" that highlighted the experience of victims and the pursuit of justice, leading to the eventual acknowledgment of the particular place of exiles in recent Argentine history. Literary fiction and a robust oral tradition kept their experience and cultural contributions relevant, while publications that combined journalism and memory reconstructed the politics of Argentine exile in Mexico.

Yet Ráfagas de un exilio is the first work of academic history to build a comprehensive view of the phenomenon that situates it in the two countries. The first word of the title can be translated as 'wind gusts,' suggesting the evasive nature of the topic. Yankelevich balances the internal history of the expatriate community in Mexico, its divisions, and its isolation from those who stayed on in Argentina with an assessment of the contributions of its members to Mexican academia, arts, journalism, and the very debates about violence, revolution, and justice that defined the era in Latin America. The author has built a careful study, based on interviews, printed sources, and archives, in which the search for objectivity does not prevent a substantive engagement with the personal and political dimension of exile.

The first chapter measures the migration (4,608 Argentines arrived between 1974 and 1983 and applied for residency) and breaks down the composition of the group. Comparing migrants who arrived in Mexico from Argentina before and after the mid-1970s, Yankelevich finds more professionals in the second period, most of them coming to work in public universities and the federal government. The Argentines benefitted from the flexible enforcement of rigid Mexican immigration laws, as they—unlike the Chileans and Uruguayans who began arriving in 1973, pushed by their own military dictatorships—seldom received official asylum. All these groups, unlike the more numerous contemporaneous Central American refugees, enjoyed, as they settled in Mexico, the short-lived oil- and debt-based prosperity of the second half of the decade. Yankelevich documents an important aspect of the migratory flow from Argentina: working-class men and women were barely there, while middle- and upper-class professionals, with skills valued by an expanding Mexican bureaucracy and public university system, were overrepresented relative to their numbers among the victims of repression at home. Mexico, in other words, was a "territorio de esperanzas" for those who had the means and connections to get there.

The second chapter provides dramatic examples of the importance of connections through the diplomatic saga of those who sought refuge on the grounds of the Mexican embassy in Buenos Aires, like Rodolfo Puigróss and former president Héctor J. Cámpora. While the former soon found his way to Mexico where his academic and political connections would make him an anchor for those who followed, the latter had to remain in the embassy for years until his departure was authorized by the general— and then only after confirmation that he suffered from cancer. The chapter documents the ambivalence of Mexican ambassadors and foreign policy makers intent on maintaining diplomatic relations with a brutal dictatorship, even as Mexico had severed relations with Chile in 1973, while defending (at times reluctantly, at others with great courage) the right of asylum of those who had gained access to the embassy.

The following chapter is a careful reconstruction of the political divides within an exile community that was united across those very divides by solidarity against persecution and at the same time prone to enjoy the ironic benefits of...