NUESTRA AMÉRICA

The noted anthropologist and historian takes his rich family history and builds a narrative of universal significance.

“Like the medieval Jew,” writes Lomnitz, “today’s migrant is at once a demeaned witness and a key economic player. Necessary, but always made to feel dispensable.” Born in Chile in 1957, the author, a professor at Columbia University, understands the plight of migrants: His maternal grandparents, seeing the terrors of rising anti-Semitism across Europe (and especially in Romania, where the peasantry and the government alike mounted murderous pogroms), brought his mother to Colombia in 1936. As if enacting a scene from a Gabriel García Márquez novel, having been brought up speaking four languages, the imposition of a fifth, Spanish, caused her to abandon “trying to find any consistency between all these languages, and [she] just stopped talking altogether.” In a whirl of new lands—Peru, Israel, the U.S., and Mexico among them—Lomnitz’s ancestors were observers and actors alike. Selling goods door to door on first arriving, they became masters of local geography and political organizing, with one busily turning from journalism to teaching to activism, daring to invoke Trotsky in a time when Stalin’s oppression was at its apex. Along his skillfully constructed narrative path, Lomnitz pauses to ponder such matters as the meaning of his name. “Names, like passports, often contain a trace of fear,” he writes, with his own first name chosen so that he might blend into a Chile that was not altogether innocent of anti-Semitism, his middle name honoring a dead uncle, and a secret Hebrew name added in for good measure. There is no end of intriguing anecdotes in these pages, and in a world of chaos, Lomnitz builds deep meaning from a comparatively small community of blood kin and friends. “We are no longer governed by tradition,” he writes, “so we can’t simply rely on a collective past. For this reason family history is again relevant.”

A masterpiece of historical and personal investigation, perfect for anyone trying to uncover their family’s past.