American Studies

“Highly original and innovative, Cold War Exiles in Mexico is an invaluable contribution to the scholarship on Cold War cultural production.” —Penny Von Eschen, author of Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War

“Rebecca M. Schreiber’s groundbreaking study interweaves archival historical research with insightful formal analyses of visual art, movies, and literature produced by U.S. Cold War exiles in Mexico during the 1940s and 1950s. Exploring the exiles’ relation to their host culture in all of its complexity, Schreiber illuminates the collaborative, inter-American dimensions of their innovative aesthetic projects.” —Claire F. Fox, University of Iowa

The onset of the Cold War in the 1940s and 1950s precipitated the exile of many U.S. writers, artists, and filmmakers to Mexico. Rebecca M. Schreiber illuminates the work of these cultural exiles in Mexico City and Cuernavaca and reveals how their artistic collaborations formed a vital and effective culture of resistance.

As Schreiber recounts, the first exiles to arrive in Mexico after World War II were visual artists, many of them African-American, including Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, and John Wilson. Individuals who were blacklisted from the Hollywood film industry, such as Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler, followed these artists, as did writers, including Willard Motley. Schreiber examines the artists’ work and their influence on artistic and political movements, revealing how the Cold War culture of political exile challenged American exceptionalist ideology and demonstrated the resilience of oppositional art, literature, and film in response to state repression.

Rebecca M. Schreiber is assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico.

University of Minnesota Press
Printed in U.S.A.
Cover design by Susan Walsh
Cover photograph: “Bullfight,” by Jane Yeomans