Forging Ties, Forging Passports

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"Forging Ties, Forging Passports explores the history of Ottoman Sephardic Jews who emigrated to the Americas-and especially, to Mexico-in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the complex relationships they maintained to legal documentation during their migration and as they settled in new homes. Through the stories of individual women, men, and families who navigated these transitions, Devi Mays considers broader questions of belonging, nationality, and citizenship. In the aftermath of World War I and the Mexican Revolution, migrants navigated new layers of bureaucracy and authority, as borders and political regimes changed around them. In this period of upheaval and possibility, the meanings ascribed to nationality, class, race, and gender were in flux. Mays argues that Ottoman Sephardi migrants in Mexico were caught up in a process of defining citizenship and national belonging: they resisted classification as either Ottoman expatriates or unequivocal Mexicans by maintaining a diasporic consciousness linking them with Sephardim in formerly Ottoman lands, France, Cuba, and the United States. Drawing on these transnational commercial and family networks, Sephardic migrants maintained a geographic and social mobility that challenged the physical borders of the state and the conceptual boundaries of the nation"--