New Approaches to Ethnicity and Diaspora in Twentieth Century Latin America: Using Jews as a Lens.

Abstract

Scholarly interest in Jews as a subject of Latin American Studies has grown markedly in recent decades, especially when compared to research on other Latin Americans who trace their ancestry to the Middle East, Asia or Eastern Europe. It is within this context that we propose the use of the term “Jewish-Latin American”, rather than “Latin American Jewry”, in order to shift the dominant paradigm about ethnicity in Latin America by returning the ‘nation’ to a prominent position. Our essay advances a series of propositions that might be useful to all students of ethnicity in the region, particularly to scholars working on minorities whose ancestors were characterized religiously as non-Catholic.