Revolutionary Exile in Postrevolutionary Mexico City

This chapter follows the alignment of Anna Sokolow’s choreography with postrevolutionary Mexican political values within transnational communist and Jewish discourses during her early years in Mexico City. First, this chapter engages how The Exile (1939), Sokolow’s indictment of the Third Reich’s treatment of Jews, reflected the precarious position of Holocaust refugees in Mexico. It explains how Sokolow’s dance highlighted contemporary persecution of Jews that recalled a longer history of Jewish exile that connected Europe, North America, and South America. Second, the chapter argues that Mexican modernism’s reliance on indigenous elements fed Sokolow’s revolutionary modernism in the choreography she made there with the collaborative company La Paloma Azul, including Don Lindo de Almería (1940) and El renacuajo paseador [The Fable of the Wandering Frog] (1940).