What's up with all the horrifying Nazi gear in Mexico City's markets?

Ignorance, whether real or forced, is so common that when we asked many of the dealers in La Lagunilla, admittedly in broken Spanish, why they were carrying such culturally- loaded goods, we often got a shrug.

“They’re for ‘war games’ or reenactments,” one said. Another admitted he didn’t know much, or even care, about the politics. “I don’t know why people like them [the medals and armbands],” he admitted. “But they’re good sellers for us. I try to stay out of the politics.”

It seems that Swastika imagery is on the rise throughout Latin America. In 2014, Michael Kaminer of the Jewish web publication The Forward, then an ex-pat living in Caracas, Venezuela, came across several instances of swastika-use in public and often bizarre situations, from a run-of-the-mill smattering of Mein Kampfs in local book stores, to a “Hello Kitty Hitler” shirt emblazoned with an anthropomorphic feline Fuhrer, which he saw both in person and in a local fashion magazine. Kaminer posits that the rise of casual anti-Semitism in Venezuela might be tied to Chavez’s anti-Israel policies (anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are often conflated both in LatAm as well as the world-at-large these days). But, in the end, he seemed just as baffled as we were.

Ulie Haro, a journalist and fixer who grew up in Mexico City creates documentaries with his wife (and fellow journalist), Deborah Bonello. He’s seen the swastika pop up in and around the area for decades. “When I was a child I saw the swastika and thought it was just a cool sign. German airfare [without context] seemed cool. For others, it seemed like [an extension] of the Camisas Rojas.” (The Camisas Rojas were a radical communist group in the 30s, intent on tearing down the government and burning churches. They were mostly male, and with few members over 30. With their black and red shock-troop uniforms and don’t fuck-with-me-attitude, they were something of Mexico’s proto-punks.) “Nationalism in Mexican society runs very deeply. I don’t know at what point they [Nazism ideals] meet. It’s this cult.”

A purely sartorial interest in fascism shouldn’t overshadow Mexico’s very real involvement with Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism. Ilan Stavans, a native of Mexico City with relatives who perished in the holocaust, is a professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, and has written several books and articles on Mexico’s fraught relationship to fascism, anti-Semitism and “Aryan culture.”

According to Stavans, anti-Semitism in Mexico can be traced back 500 years to the Spanish Inquisition, when many Jews expelled from Spain arrived in Mexico, assimilating into the population and even into the ruling Catholic Church. “Mexico was a safe haven for crypto-Jews and ‘new Christians’ who kept their Jewish identity and religion hidden. So where there was a public face in Mexico of anti-Jewish propaganda from the church in the colonial period—1492 to1810, when Mexico became independent—there was also a tacit, hidden Jewish presence that you can see in a number of different ways: on tombstones, in letters and records and diaries that you have of that era.”

Despite the pivotal role Jews played in the region, particularly in the development of Mexico City as a center of power and culture, the average public school curriculum makes little or no mention of this Jewish heritage and the Inquisition, let alone the Holocaust. “There is an ‘ambivalence of the duality’ in [Mexican] society,” explains Stavans. “Though there are things that are very open, there are also things that are very hidden.”

According to Stavans, in the early 20^th century there was a more populist, let’s say “Henry Ford-esque,” approach to anti-Semitism. Rather than labeling Jews as Christ-killers, they were accused of controlling the nation’s banking industry and leading the country into ruin. In the 1920s and 30s, Aryan theories that were gaining steam in Germany and Austria “mutated” in Latin America, given credence by many of the day’s prominent ideologists and thinkers. This included Jose Vasconcelos (1882-1959), one of the founders of Mexico City’s National Autonomous University of Mexico, the largest university in Latin America.

The European concept of “Aryan”—blonde, blue eyed—wouldn’t have absorbed the average Mexican person into its racial narrative. But Vasconcelos admired Hitler’s ability to rally the population behind a nationalist cause, knowing full well that the man himself would have considered Mexicans an “inferior people.” So he created a nomenclature, which gained steam in the 1960s, called the “la raza de bronce” (“the bronze race”) or La Raza Cósmica. He argued that it wouldn’t be pureblooded Northern and Central Europeans that would dominate but, ironically, the “master race” would come as a mix of races, the mestizos, who would conquer the world and “achieve what the Aryans failed to.” Trying to follow this logic could give you a stroke, but yes, it appears that it is possible to be both Mexican and a Nazi.

Stavans doesn’t deny that neo-Nazis most likely do exist in Mexico City today, as they may almost anywhere over the world, but believes what we saw at La Lagunilla to be a rather benign version of anti-Semitism, if that exists. “What you saw was purely at the pop level,” he says, a by-product of video games and movies that feature Nazis as macho men soldiers—in a recreation of a sort of twisted play on “cowboys and Indians”. “It is not connected with the larger vision of neo-Nazism that you have in, say, Austria or Germany or in Scandinavia, or even in certain parts of Argentina. In Mexico it’s mostly theologically empty. It is just images of these ‘warriors’. I wouldn’t say that this is an orchestrated movement.”

In countries such as Brazil, Argentina or Paraguay, with complex histories of harboring former Nazis, and even occasionally rehousing them in the same neighborhoods as Holocaust survivors, the presence of swastikas and Nazi paraphernalia might foretell a more sinister force at work. But here, in Mexico City, their abundance seems to be either a byproduct of curiosity, a lack of historical education or even the aesthetics of machismo gone haywire.

This begs the question: Can a city strewn with copies of hate books and propaganda, even empty propaganda, really be a safe place for Jews, or gays, or communists, or almost any group persecuted by a far right ideology?

We reached out to several local synagogues for comment. Monica Unikel-Fasja, a rep for Synagogue Justo Sierra, who has also given Jewish-themed walking tours of Mexico City for over two decades says, well, basically the area isn’t any worse than any other for Jews: “Yes, there are groups that follow the Nazi ideas, but they are not strong.” In Mexico, “there have always been anti-Semitic ideas, but Jews [here] have never experienced direct violence. Though threats, yes, there have been some.” As a result, most Jewish organizations, schools and synagogues in the community have a security system in place. But at the end of the day, “the Mexican Jewish community does not feel unsafe.”

And, apparently, despite the presence of oh so many terrifying swastikas, neither should we?

Laura Feinstein is the Head of Social Stories at Fusion. Formerly, she held staff roles as the East Coast Editor of GOOD Magazine and the EIC of The Creators Project at VICE, and has contributed to The Guardian, T/The New York Times, Paper Magazine and many others. She specializes in the niche, the esoteric and the un-boring.