Local Brawls and Global Confrontation: Transnational Political Violence among the Exiled Left in Mexico City during 1943

Abstract

This article traces the local and global context of two incidents of political violence among the transnational community of left-wing political exiles in Mexico City during March and April 1943. On both occasions, violent clashes resulted from attempts to commemorate two Polish-Jewish socialists who had been convicted and executed in the Soviet Union as supposed fifth columnist spies. A close reading of locations and chronological context relies on primary materials from Mexican, U.S.-American, German, Austrian and Russian archives as well as the contemporary local press. The local logic of political practice (including violence) on the geographic and political periphery of world politics can be deciphered as an urban choreography of larger ideological conflicts among the Left and contributes to our understanding of the political meaning of the conflict as much as the overarching ideological debate that contributed to the global confrontation of the Cold War.