The large-scale displacement crises of the early twenty-first century have steered a renewed interest in the study of exiles, refugees and return-migrants of the twentieth century. As part of this burgeoning domain of research, this collection put together by Ludger Pries and Pablo Yankelevich highlights the fundamental role that displaced individuals have played in institution-building, the transfer of knowledge and the dissemination of culture in the Americas.
This book focuses on the experiences of two institutions of high learning that emerged and consolidated in the 1930s by incorporating some of the academics fleeing the Franco and Nazi dictatorships. Its various essays provide portrayals of the Central European émigrés who joined the University in Exile – later known as the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School for Social Research – and the Spanish republican exiles who found relief in the Casa de España, created in 1938 and the kernel of the Colegio de México.
While offering a collective portrait of these exiles and their contribution to academia and spheres of knowledge, this volume illuminates the effects of transnational displacement, modules of transfer of knowledge (what the editors call ‘travelling theories’), and institutional innovation. Six chapters are devoted to the Casa de España/Colegio de México, including institutional analyses by Clara Lida and Yankelevich, studies by Andrés Lira and Arturo Alvarado on life in exile and contributions from, among others, philosopher José Gaos, sociologist José Medina Echavarría and anthropologist Rodolfo Stavenhagen, the latter part of a later wave of refugees. Five chapters focus on the New School for Social Research, among them a study by Claus-Dieter Krohn on intellectual transfer and impact, reflections by Ira Katznelson on the school's founding moments in 1919 and 1933 and a study by Enzo Traverso on the German-Jewish culture in exile. Together, these 11 studies give detailed accounts of the waves of translocated Spanish and Central European academics, intellectuals and artists moving to the Americas. Specifically, readers can find much information on the émigré scholars who contributed to institution-building and various disciplines, as well as the ambiguities of their reception, including the limits of the shelter policies, and the unleashing of opposition to European migrants in both Mexico and the United States.
Overall, these are stories of institutional success, led foremost by enterprising individuals who brought together political or financial powers to support the two initiatives. While those willing to escape repression in Europe were looking for places of refuge in both the United States and Mexico, strategically placed individuals recognised a window of opportunity and mobilised to receive some of the displaced academics and intellectuals. Alvin Johnson, the director of the New School for Social Research (an institution of adult and workers’ education, founded in 1919, that failed to sustain a permanent faculty after 1922), mobilised the support of private foundations, such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations and the Oberlaender Trust, to support the integration of academics fleeing Nazism. In Mexico, a country that had politically supported the failing Spanish Republic, Daniel Cosío Villegas garnered the support of President Lázaro Cárdenas in order to receive state funds while identifying and inviting key refugees to move to Mexico. Cosío Villegas’ initiative was rooted in the Mexican connection between intellectuals and political power, in a country then interested in improving its tarnished image in the United States following the nationalisation of the oil industry. The initiative led to the arrival of between 100 and 200 scholars and intellectuals who would, according to Cosío Villegas and Cárdenas, promote scientific knowledge and train responsible public servants.
The essays give prominence to the relevance of exiles in terms of transferring academic and scientific knowledge. In the United States, while the early New School for Social Research had been under attack for advancing radical and subversive modernist ideas, the arrival of leading academics created an institution aimed at reforming higher education through an emphasis on education, arts and social science, as well as a commitment to Enlightenment ideals. As Ira Katznelson indicates, ‘the newcomers called into question what they perceived to be the innocence of American liberalism as it then existed, even in its most progressive form’ (p. 78). They did so by broadening learning in a cosmopolitan direction and taking a critical look at the fragility of modern Western democracies under the onslaught of totalitarian dictatorships.
Likewise, the Spanish republican intellectuals and academics settling in Mexico impacted the fields of science and culture (only indirectly politics) by disseminating knowledge, training generations of Mexican disciples and translating classical and contemporary authors’ works. These individuals broadened the disciplinary horizons of the social sciences and humanities, contributing to philosophy, law, history, classical and medieval studies, literary criticism, sociology and anthropology. Their impact on culture and the arts was equally significant, due to the influence of dozens of prominent individuals, among them Luis Buñuel, Max Aub, León Felipe and Francisco Giner de los Ríos. The Mexican publishing industry flourished as well, with publications in almost all fields of knowledge.
This book also points out the institutional problems the Mexican initiative faced in securing state resources once President Cárdenas ended his term and Manuel Ávila Camacho assumed the presidency. Yet, even under Cárdenas, and more so after the end of his mandate, there were numerous bureaucratic challenges due to the prevailing ethos of nationalism and xenophobia, as well as the need for government connections and familiarity within the intricate channels of clientelism and corruption that could define success or failure. In her contribution, Daniela Gleizer shows that from 1934 the Mexican government confidentially prohibited Jewish immigration on the grounds that Jews were ‘undesirable foreigners’ since they would not be ‘assimilated’. On the one hand, Mexico almost completely closed its gates to Jews, even those with remarkable academic credentials. On the other hand, while the United States would not allow individuals with leftist leanings to enter the country, Mexico claimed to be on higher moral grounds, giving asylum to political refugees and accepting communists and social democrats as well as Leon Trotsky escaping from Stalinism. It has been estimated that over 20,000 Spanish refugees, tourists, visitors or stowaways who stayed arrived in Mexico between 1936 and 1948, whereas uprooted Jews ‘arrived in dribs and drabs’, as Gleizer puts it (p. 187). Even a policy of selective reception, geared towards Spanish republican exiles, was not forthcoming in Mexico for Jews as they looked desperately for a place of refuge overseas.
The chapters document many personal situations, varied strategies of assimilation, return migration and the transnational lives of the émigrés. Yet, their main contribution is drawing attention to the transformative collective impact of these waves of intellectual and academic forced migration. Even though the book focuses mainly on the era of the 1930s and 1940s, with some reference to Mexico's tradition of political asylum in the 1970s, its significance lies in the suggestion that countries may derive immense benefit from providing safe passage and asylum to individuals fleeing or being forcibly removed from their countries of origin. As the editors claim in their closing argument, this book ‘is an invitation to learn from the situation of forced migration during the twentieth century in order to cope with the challenges of our days’ (p. 294).
