ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the ways in which Jewish immigrants to Latin America dealt with the exigencies of their new homelands. To some degree, generalizations about the immigrant experience pose problems, because the conditions faced by newcomers to Euro-American countries such as Chile, Argentina, or Uruguay differed significantly from conditions in Indo-American countries such as Mexico or Peru. Eight strategies have been most commonly employed by Jews arriving in Latin America after the first World War: ghettoization, resistance to full assimilation, caution and conservatism, borrowing from the host society, isolation within a Jewish infrastructure, outmigration, occupational alienation and creativity, and an emphasis on education. Most Jewish immigrants to the New World lacked marketable skills and, as a result, like other immigrants they were forced to take the least desirable jobs in their new society. For the Jews themselves, Latin America was far more like postwar Europe than the United States or Canada were.
