JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

2011] MEXICO IN A REGION UNDER CHANGE 29
countries in the region. Its current Jewish population totals 39,500. 2 In a
country with a population of 112, 336,538 people, the Jewish community
has a visible presence that outreaches its numbers. 3
When analyzing antisemitism, one has to take into account that concern
has been voiced about an excessive focus on it as the primary characteristic
of the region, warning against a simplistic and reductionist
identification of Latin America with intolerance and anti-Jewish expression.
This concern has led to calls for balance, demanding more nuanced distinctions
between different times, places, and modalities of expression.
Certainly, the interfacing between national, regional, and global
antisemitism, its inner differentiation, and contemporary expressions have
to be considered. Diffuse and latent prejudices, veiled and structural, as
well as those rejected in the official semantics but evident in the rhetoric of
individuals and of collective sectors are part of new, complex societies both
in Latin America and elsewhere. The historical course of this rhetoric,
which does not necessarily translate into discriminatory practices, needs to
be contextualized within each country’s political culture and status of
human rights. Understanding its manifestations emerges as a sine qua non
when attempting to account for the actual extent of antisemitic danger as
opposed to the symbolic violence of its expressions in the media.
Antisemitism can be seen as a phenomenon that to a large extent is produced
and reproduced discursively. 4
Both at the level of attitudes, stereotypes, and prejudices on the one
hand, and at the behavioral level manifest in acts, practices, and actual normative
arrangement on the other, antisemitism had and has a broad impact
on the representation of the “other.” It is precisely this dimension that
acquires new relevance amid the changing trends of cultures that historically
had expressed serious difficulties facing heterogeneity. This question
is directly related to the dimension of the public sphere as the space for
constructing shared civic-national foundations for the legitimate expression
of difference.
2. Sergio DellaPergola, “¿Cuántos somos hoy? Investigación y narrativa sobre
población judía en América Latina,” Ibid.:305-340.
3. 2010 Total Population, “México en Cifras” (Mexico in Numbers). INEGI
(Mexican National Institute for Statistics and Geography), http://
www.inegi.org.mx/sistemas/mexicocifras/MexicoCifras.aspx?e=0&m=0&sec=M.
4. See Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetoric
of Racism and Antisemitism (New York: Routledge), 2001.