Devi Mays (University of Michigan): "Smack, Silk, and Siblings: Transnational Sephardic Smuggling Networks in and beyond 1930s Mexico"
Department: Jewish Studies
Date and Time: November 17, 2014 | 5:00 PM-6:30 PMEvent Location: Humanities Instructional Building 135
Event Details
Devi Mays (University of Michigan)
Monday, November 17, 2014 at 5pm
Humanities Instructional Building (HIB) 135
Smack, Silk, and Siblings: Transnational Sephardic Smuggling Networks in and beyond 1930s Mexico
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.
Devi Mays is an assistant professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. After receiving her Ph.D. in Jewish History from Indiana University in 2013, she was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Modern Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She is currently revising a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora, which traces the itineraries and connections of Sephardic migrants from the Ottoman Empire and its successor states to and through Mexico and beyond as a lens into the transnational Sephardic familial, commercial, and patronage networks that created a transoceanic modern Sephardic diaspora. Her publications include, among others, “‘I Killed Her Because I Loved Her Too Much’: Gender and Violence in the 20th-Century Sephardi Diaspora” (Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East Migration Studies, 2014), and numerous translations from Ladino, Spanish, and French in Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950 (Stanford University Press, 2014). She is currently a Fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies.