Smack, Silk, and Siblings: Transnational Sephardic Smuggling Networks In and Beyond 1930's Mexico
Department: History
Date and Time: November 17, 2014 | 5:00 PM-6:30 PMEvent Location: HIB 135
Event Details
Lecture by Devi Mays, Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at University of Michigan
Over the course of the late 1920s and into the 1930s, states tightened their borders, cracking down on migration and on transnational trade as a response to global economic turmoil. In Mexico, popular discourse increasingly attributed economic decline to the presence of immigrants whose nationality, race, and religion marked them as undesirable. Sephardic Jewish migrants hailing from Ottoman successor states, who had made a place for themselves in Mexico earlier in the century by capitalizing on their connections to the United States and Europe, now found their livelihoods and even lives threatened. This talk uses Sephardic networks of smuggling heroin, silk, and people into Mexico into 1930s- networks often embedded within licit trade routes- as a lens into how Sephardic individuals mobilized commercial, familial, and patronage networks that traversed the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Caribbean in order to circumvent state prohibitions on trade and migration.
Hosted by UCI Program in Jewish Studies.