In a 1949 letter to an old family acquaintance in Istanbul, a man called Mauricio Fresco described his latest book project, a work titled Forge Your Own Passport, in which he sought to “prove the stupidity of passports, visas, nationalities, races, etc.” It was an odd project, particularly for a man who had spent eighteen years in the Mexican diplomatic corps, stationed in places as far afield as Shanghai, Bordeaux, Lisbon, and Nazi-occupied Paris. But it was precisely these experiences advocati

In 1961, a Polish-Jewish woman opened a small gallery in Polanco, a middle-class neighborhood in Mexico City. Over the following decade, the space became a cultural force, hosting solo and collective exhibitions by artists like Mathias Goeritz, Sebastián, and José Luis Cuevas.

That woman, Merl Kuper, immigrated to Mexico from Poland in the 1930s. She was my great-grandmother. Her daughter, my grandmother Alinka, worked in the gallery as well. After they died, our home, my mother’s studio, and m

In 1916, as war raged in the city of Aguascalientes, eleven-year-old Anita Brenner and her family got into a car and sped towards the train station. They had escaped Mexico before, but this time it was for good: Anita’s father had sold all of their belongings, including the furniture, to pay for the train ticket.

Every Monday morning, in elementary school in Mexico City, I would line up next to my classmates in the main yard. As we looked up the red, white, and green flag we would sing a hymn to the Mexican flag, with our hands to our chests. The ritual was, and still is, repeated across Mexico. Atop the flag is a ubiquitous Mexican emblem: an image of an eagle, standing on top of a cactus, devouring a snake. The story behind this image is known to everyone in Mexico but to me, as a Mexican Jew, the

In 1944, a young girl from Brooklyn fell in love with a Mexican Jew and decided to leave it all to go to Mexico City. Little did she know her strong Yiddish upbringing would change the Mexican community for decades to come.

The Vele Zabludowsky I got know was a small woman, imposing in character, who would smoke a pack of cigarettes a day and curse freely when given a chance. She was sarcastic, her dry humor always backed by a yiddish sense for the absurd. Despite her smoking habits, she defied

An architectural rendering is not a neutral artifact: as an image it always wants something, and its production, distribution and circulation are conditioned by the social context. Renderings that have circulated of the “Cultural Corridor Chapultepec” [Mexico City] are imbued with specific conceptions about what city life is, ideas about what could and should be an “ideal” public space.