Nación y extranjería: La exclusión racial en las políticas migratorias de Argentina, Brasil, Cuba, y México

Resumen

Nativism, the idea of intense opposition to an internal minority because it is foreign, is a major theme in US immigration scholarship, and Nación y extranjería reveals its significance in case studies throughout Latin America. In this eight-essay compilation, Pablo Yankelevich coordinates the work of an international group of scholars who examine how nativism influenced emerging Latin American nation-states in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He builds on his work concerning exiles and deportations in the early twentieth century to explore how Mexican immigration policies are part of a larger Latin American trajectory of immigrant exclusion. Through an analysis of Argentine, Brazilian, Cuban, and Mexican immigration policies, the authors explain how some immigrants were evaluated by Latin American officials to be “desirable, suitable, or assimilable” (or not) in these nation-states.Yankelevich sets out to understand specifically the problems of national identity with respect to modern nations and what are the collective myths that sustain the emergence of such national sentiments. By drawing on the works of Benedict Anderson, John Armstrong, John Breuilly, Ernst Gellner, Anthony Smith, and others, he aims to look at the Mexican idea of mestizaje and how it applies to immigration policies and Mexican functionaries’ ideals. Yankelevich argues that despite a relatively insignificant number of immigrants coming to Mexico, Mexico implemented policies that were the most restrictive in the continent (p. 14). He asserts that policies prohibiting immigrants were intended to protect labor markets from foreign competition and prevent the politically and biologically “unfit” from entering the nation-state.In the case of Argentina, Daniel Lvovich argues that although the figurative doors were open to immigration, only desirable immigrants were welcomed, such as those from developed European countries. In 1938, Argentina limited Jewish refugees; yet between 33,000 and 45,000 (presumably Jewish) Central Europeans clandestinely entered the country from 1933 to 1945, illustrating that despite restrictions against “undesirables,” a significant number of immigrants and refugees entered Argentina (pp. 47, 55). In the case of Brazil, Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro explores how nineteenth-century Brazilian policies sought to find Asian workers to replace former slaves, subsequently leading to intellectual debates about the ideal immigrant to construct the Brazilian nation (p. 65). The Brazilian Constitution of 1934 established a quota system to ensure the desired ethnic integration, favoring white Europeans, thereby fostering a type of Brazilian nationalism that exacerbated xenophobia (p. 71). The chapter examines various Brazilian intellectuals, several with eugenicist leanings, who concluded that Brazil needed to find suitable immigrants and to exclude blacks, mestizos, and Asians as “racially inferior,” as well as those immigrants with subversive ideas (p. 81). With parallels to the Brazilian case, Consuelo Naranjo Orovio and Vanni Pettinà address Cuban exclusionary policies from 1900 to 1930. The Cuban case is complicated by a Cuban-Spanish rivalry in which the large number of Spanish immigrants in Cuba (59 percent of all foreigners in 1931) tended to instill xenophobic and racist policies to exclude populations of color (pp. 115, 139). The growth in sugar production created a demand for immigrants; however, concerns over health and assimilability plagued nationalist discourses (pp. 101, 108).The remaining chapters situate the Mexican nation-state as negotiating its place as a recipient country, which is a productive challenge to traditional conceptions of Mexican history. Tomas Pérez Vejo begins the second half of the volume by describing Mexico as an ethnic nation, with Mexican independence intensifying the Spanish presence that became part of the white elite. By 1917, however, Spanish prominence becomes sublimated to mestizaje and determining desirable versus undesirable immigrants (p. 182). Building on a Mexican notion of undesirability among immigrant groups, Yankelevich and Paola Chenillo Alazraki trace the intersections between restrictionist Mexican immigration policies and functionaries such as Gilberto Loyo, Jorge Ferretis, Andrés Landa y Piña (and others) to illustrate the complexities in developing immigration policies. This chapter and the following one by Marta Saade Granados are pioneering in their use of sources from the Mexican Archivo Migratorio del Instituto Nacional de Migración (among other sources). Saade Granados’s work analyzes African Americans seeking to migrate to Mexico and how their presence called into question racial questions of mestizaje, which promoted an Indo-Latino paradigm to the exclusion of those of color (p. 272). The compilation ends with Daniela Gleizer’s study of Jewish refugees, suggesting that the Nazi’s “final solution” began in June 1941, not 1942, and calling for a reexamination of Mexican refugee policies. She concludes that Mexican immigration policies were generally restrictive toward Jews and others.This compilation’s exploration of Latin American nativism and its impact on blacks, Asians, Jews, and immigrants from the Middle East, who were deemed undesirable in Argentine, Brazilian, Cuban, and Mexican nation-state formation, will be much appreciated by Latin American scholars in reframing immigration histories in the Americas.