Las representaciones del Holocausto en el horizonte sociocultural mexicano de los años cincuenta y sesenta: El caso particular del noticiario fílmico Cine Verdad
Authors
Alexis Barbosa Vargas
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Azcapotzalco), México
This article is divided into three parts: First, I will start from the transnational dimension of the Holocaust in Latin America and Mexico during the forties, fifties, and sixties. Secondly, I am going to contextualize the Mexico of the fifties and sixties in order to understand the horizon of a film newsreel like Cine Verdad. Here I am going to take as an example the representation of the Holocaust in Mexican literature based on two novels: “Morirás lejos” by José Emilio Pacheco and “Cambio de piel” by Carlos Fuentes. Finally, I am going to analyze the different Cine Verdad capsules around the Second World War, Nazism and the Holocaust. This analysis is based on the categories of anti-fascism, cultural memory, and historical consciousness. Although the commemorative practices of the Holocaust began in Mexico in the forties, we can situate these film representations as part of mnemonic practices around this genocide. In these cultural representations we have a rhythm of recollection as we progressively move from relative silence in the early 1950s to a reactivation of Holocaust memory in the late 1950s and 1960s. However, in these representations we find a tension between the local character and the European and international character of the Jewish genocide. Therefore, the hypothesis of this work is that the representations of the cultural-filmic space of the fifties and sixties focus more on international than national themes and processes. There is no appropriation of the Holocaust to talk about national problems. Rather, Cine Verdad is located in an intermediate place between the omission and the representation of the Holocaust based on certain European and universal tropes, as well as by certain anti-fascist actors in Mexico.
Keywords:
Holocaust, film newsreels, literature, anti-fascism, cultural memory and historical consciousness
Barbosa Vargas, A. (2023). Las representaciones del Holocausto en el horizonte sociocultural mexicano de los años cincuenta y sesenta: El caso particular del noticiario fílmico Cine Verdad. Cuadernos Judaicos, (41), pp. 111–144. https://doi.org/10.5354/0718-8749.2023.73261
