Mestizaje, Internationalism, and the Racial Politics of Exile in Revolutionary Mexico

Amidst the collapse of the Spanish Popular Front and the ascension of the fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in April 1939, Mexican state officials granted political asylum for thousands of Spaniards fleeing the ravages of the Spanish Civil War. In total, over 20,000 Spaniards received asylum in Mexico. Over the subsequent months hundreds of Mexican citizens and organizations wrote to the administration of Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas regarding the racial and class implications of the initiative. Namely, proponents of the refugee program heralded the humanitarian initiative, with many rural Indigenous communities requesting that Spanish exiles be relocated to their villages and to gain access to ejido land (collectively-held properties). Critics of the initiative, most of whom emanated from the upper echelons of Mexico’s mestizo and white residents, articulated their concerns based on the purported racial “superiority” of Spaniards and demanded the state protect the country’s “humble Indians” from foreign exploitation. In this paper, Aguilar scrutinizes the racial logics deployed by petitioners to express their visions of progress, modernization, and assimilability from distinct ideological positionalities. Such debates, Aguilar argues, exposes the multiplicity of interpretations of “mestizaje” among Mexican citizens and its subsequent implications for the reception of refugees emanating from the country’s former imperial metropole. This paper thus analyzes how discourses of racial mixture speaks to broader questions of racial desirability and whiteness among state officials and Mexican citizens of various racial and class backgrounds.