Refuge in Mexico: Twentieth-century Memories for a World on the Move
About a decade ago, when I began working on Unexpected Routes: Refugee Writers in Mexico, I had a chance to visit the personal library of German writer Anna Seghers (1900, Mainz-1983, East Berlin), one of my book’s protagonists. The collection includes several books by Max Aub (1903, Paris-1972, Mexico City), another author who, like Seghers, found refuge in Mexico, and whose escape route from Spain to Mexico, via France, Algeria, and Morocco I chronicle in the book. I had noticed that Aub had dedicated his books to Seghers and her husband, László Rádvanyi, and I expected that the works would feature underlined passages, annotations, coffee stains, or folded pages.
I was disappointed: while Aub’s books carried his signature and a few words about his friendship with Seghers and Rádvanyi, no one had ever read the books. Like those in Gatsby’s library, they had not been cut open. Whatever was shared between these writers who received asylum in Mexico in the 1940s was to stay theirs; not for a researcher to find out or to take from them. Unexpected Routes lives on the tension between what individuals fleeing from fascist-occupied Europe openly shared – including stereotypical and even racist assumptions about the colonial and postcolonial geographies they crossed – and what they kept for themselves.
My book is about five writers who found refuge in Mexico between 1939 and 1941: that is, in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and once the Nazis marched into France, the country where many anti-fascists and Jews found a short-lived safe haven after 1933. The already mentioned Aub and the Cuba-born Spanish writer Silvia Mistral (1914, Havana- 2004, Mexico City) had to flee Franco-ruled Spain. Seghers, the Swiss-born activist Gertrude Duby (1901, Innertkirchen -1993, San Cristobal de las Casas), and Czech writer Egon Erwin Kisch (1885, Prague-1948, Prague) escaped fascist-occupied Europe. All eventually made it to Mexico along complicated and labyrinthine escape routes. A sixth protagonist, Ruth Rewald (1901, Berlin-1942, Auschwitz-Birkenau) was not able to escape. She was arrested in France, deported to the East, and put to death at Auschwitz. Rewald, however, still reached Mexico in her imagination when she published Janko. The Boy from Mexico in 1934, while exiled in France. Rewald wrote the novel for young readers, and she hoped to help them understand statelessness, a condition that the author and her young daughter were enduring. The book also foreshadowed how those who were able to escape would write about Mexico.
Rewald shared her fate with all those who lost their lives in the camps; among them were loved ones of my book’s five other protagonists, all of them writers who produced compelling accounts about their journey to and their time in Mexico. These raw documents of displacement and loss, written before the Second World War was over, exist only because their authors became refugees. Their works show that the lives of the forcibly displaced are lived in uncanny lands shared with the ghosts of loved ones, languages, homes, and the everyday that was left behind.
Today, Mexico often comes to mind whenever migration – forced, voluntary, and everything in between– is invoked. Even though numbers have decreased in recent years, Mexicans remain the largest groups of immigrants in the United States. Moreover, displaced individuals from across the world find themselves stuck in transit south of Mexico’s border with the United States. Coming from countries that include Venezuela and Colombia, as well as Haiti, India, or China, they had no choice but to leave their homes, often fleeing from, in Alexander Betts’s vocabulary, “rights deprivations in fragile and failed states.” Like Janko, the stateless protagonist of Rewald’s 1934 novel, twenty-first century migrants often find themselves trapped in places of transit where they are used as bargaining chips in fights for political capital, with their well-being becoming a very low priority, if it is one at all. All this corresponds to an increasingly interconnected and simultaneously unequal world that may look different from the one in which my book’s six protagonists came of age and were forced to flee to what for them was a distant, exotic, utterly strange, and nevertheless hospitable country. There, they had to re-imagine a world where they suddenly were torn from everything that was known and familiar.
Today, the numbers of displaced people exceed those of the Second World War, and the geographies and directions of refugees’ flight routes have shifted. Yet contemporary refugee law, as well as a more general understanding of the term ‘refugee’ are drawn from massive displacements in the 1930s and 40s, making the narratives and the contradictions from this period all the more relevant to understand the plight of the displaced in the present-day world. Transit, the novel that Seghers completed while fleeing from Europe, and that was first published in Mexico and in Spanish translation, masterfully depicts the cruel bureaucracy, the anxiety, and the vulnerability that migrants endure in countries of transit, that is, where individuals have received permission to travel through – as long as they don’t intend to stay there. The experiences of refugees in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during the Second World War and those of today are by no means identical, yet forced displacement in the twentieth century provides numerous lessons for current events. Grasping the history of refugees is about more than understanding a particularity with its diverse manifestations in different decades, instead, it implies understanding as Lyndsey Stonebridge puts it, that “refugee history is everybody’s history” and that “the politics of moving people are central to modern history.”
Rather than providing a comprehensive account of all possible outcomes that the escape from fascism across the Atlantic may have had, my book examines individual moments in refugee history, with all their idiosyncrasies and paradoxes. None of these stories can or should take the place of the entirety of the refugee experience, but each part illuminates a whole that can never be fully grasped.
For further reading
Betts, Alexander, Survival Migration (Cornell UP, 2013)
Gatrell, Peter, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford UP, 2013)
Kaplan, Marion, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (Harvard UP, 2020)
Linhard, Tabea, Unexpected Routes: Refugee Writers in Mexico (Stanford UP, 2023)
Seghers, Anna. Visado de tránsito, transl. Angela Selke (Editorial Nuevo Mundo, 1944)
Seghers, Anna. Transit, transl. Margot B. Dembo (Random House, 2013).
Stonebridge, Lyndsey, with Agnes Woolley, Emma Cox, David Farrier, and Sam Durant, Refugee Imaginaries. Research Across the Humanities (Edinburgh UP, 2019).
Stonebridge, Lyndsey, Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (Oxford UP, 2018).
Rewald, Ruth, Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko (Sebastian Brandt Verlag, 1934)
