This month we’ll continue to take a look at the cooking of the immigrants who contributed to the modern Mexican culinary repertoire. Unlike other groups discussed previously — including the Mennonites of Chihuahua, the Italians of Chipilo and the Lebanese of Puebla — this group undoubtedly did not come willingly. Their arrival was a product […]
Continue ReadingIn recent years, immigration has become a topic of intense focus, not only in the United States and Mexico, but worldwide. Although generally seen as a political question, there is no doubt that the movement of immigrants also falls into the cultural realm, of which cuisine is a significant part. Much of the history of […]
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Cogan’s Reviews This isn’t a book about Mexico. Rather, it’s about Mexicans in California right now. It explores the issue of illegal immigration by examining the lives of four characters – two very well-off Californians, Delaney Mossbacher, a nature writer, and his real estate agent wife, Kyra, and a Mexican couple, Cándido Rincón, and his […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews “Mexifornia,” to quote the author, “is about the nature of a new California and what it means for America – a reflection upon the strange society that is emerging as the result of a demographic and a cultural revolution like no other in our times.” Thus Victor Davis Hanson opens his close examination […]
Continue ReadingCROSSING OVER: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail, by Rubén Martínez. Metropolitan, 330 p., $26. (October 2001) Amazon Books Great books are the hardest kind to review. There’s just too much temptation to toss out the usual lauds and accolades which make for fine back cover blurbs. And then there’s the trap of comparison […]
Continue ReadingMexico is a country of color, diversity, grand differences in geography, climate and perspective. The same is true of her people. From the mysterious origins and fates of her earliest inhabitants; the current indigenous peoples; to the history and influence of immigrants from Spain and other areas of the world, Mexico has developed an intricate […]
Continue ReadingThe very word has connotations of persecution, repression, hardship and escape. It also describes people with courage, stamina, the ability to adapt and almost always a moral strength and conviction that sets them apart from those who succumbed. Perhaps 90 % of all Mexican Jews are the descendants of ancestors who came to the New […]
Continue ReadingThe vast majority of the approximately 50,000 Mexican citizens who practice Judaism via organized congregations are descendents of people who, from 1881 to 1939, found life-saving refuge in this country. Unlike the ancestors of many who migrated to the U.S. to avoid military service or seek better economic opportunity, most who came to Mexico were […]
Continue ReadingThe survival of Judaism in Mexico is a tale of tenacity and tolerance. The story begins in Spain with the “Conversos”, Jews who had converted to Christianity, always under duress. It starts in 600 AD, the Visigoth king, Reccard, forcibly baptized 90,000 of his Jewish subjects and expelled those who would not accept Christianity. Some […]
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Jews have lived in Mexico since the fourteenth century. In 1492, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain ordered the conversion or exile of all Muslim and Jewish subjects. Jews who had converted to Catholicism were called New Christians, or Conversos. Also known as marranos, they often continued practicing Judaism in secret after they had […]
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