Conclusion
Throughout this investigation I have argued that a combination of external and internal factors including the country's political project of Mestizaje, changing relationship with the US, influence of Western powers, and the role of Jewish organizations within Mexico shaped Mexico’s response to the global Jewish refugee crisis between 1933 and 1945. Photographic evidence combined with secondary scholarship reveals the vastly different criteria and treatment Jews faced compared to other types of refugees such as the Spanish Republicans, and the photographs of the projects supposedly aimed at resettling Jewish refugees in Mexico, reveal that said projects were largely unfeasible from the start. Furthermore, the imagery implemented throughout the propaganda posters reflect a coordinated attempt by the Mexican and US government to appeal to Mexican traditions in order to garner support for the Allied Powers. This technique served to reinforce the Mestizaje ideals prevalent in the Mexican public, implicitly entrenching who could or could not partake in Mestizo culture. This served to both shift focus away from the atrocities of the Holocaust beyond Mexico and reinforce the idea that Jews could not be mestizos and therefore had no history and no place in Mexico.
In the decades following the end of WWII, official narratives of the Mexican state have worked hard to reinforce Mexico’s humanitarianism. For example, in a speech given by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2020, he spoke about Mexico's history of offering refuge to persecuted peoples, including “exiles from the Spanish Civil War, Jews fleeing the horrors of World War II, and Central American migrants fleeing violence and poverty,” (Declaratoria de la Secretaría, January 2021). However, as this exhibit has illustrated, in practice such humanitarianism was limited to those that could, according to the Mexican state, easily assimilate into the population.