Empire in Exile: Transnationalizing the Cultural Production of Resistance

Abstract

When I lived in Mexico City in 1998, my Mexican flat-mate asked me what, exactly, “Yankee” meant apart from gringo. I dutifully (and in the age before ready Internet access in Mexico) performed a little etymological sleuthing and reported back the word's suspected origins and different contextual meanings. He nodded and then explained, “I've just never heard it used alone—I thought yanqui imperialista was a compound word.” I laughed, then, when reading Rebecca Schreiber's engaging and insightful book I came across the observation by the protagonist of a 1950s Mexican-American bildungsroman that the phrase imperialismo yanqui arose as often in the Mexican press as “communism” did in the United States (p. 93). Through such observations, Schreiber acquaints her readers with the ways that Joe McCarthy and Jim Crow unwittingly conspired to incubate what she dubs a critical, transnationalist, resistant cultural production among the exiled artists, writers, and filmmakers living in Mexico City during the Cold War's first decades.