About Programs Fellowship News Calendar
Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean include all of those states from the Isthmus of Panama north through Mexico, as well as the island states of the Caribbean Sea. Obviously this categorization groups together a wide diversity of countries, but most had very little direct connection to World War II or significant Jewish immigration. Their engagement with Holocaust education has thus been shaped in a roughly similar way.
MEXICO has the only museum devoted specifically to the Holocaust, Memoria y Tolerancia (Memory and Tolerance). Opened in 2010, the museum not only focuses on the Holocaust but also houses exhibits on historical genocides elsewhere in the world, in Darfur, Srebrenica, Rwanda, Guatemala, and Cambodia.
FELLOW UPDATES
Yael Siman and Alejandra Morales Stekel, who attended the USHMM Genocide Prevention Expert Planning Meeting in 2012, have been working on a binational project between Chile and Mexico. They recently launched the "Holocaust and Citizenship" project to create a network for academics, educators, writers, human rights activists, and public servants in their two countries. Salzburg Global Fellow Pablo Martinez-Zarate was one of their panelists at the launch events in both countries. This initiative is named after Dan Napolitano, who previously worked for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He passed away in 2013.
<style media="print" type="text/css">#s3gt_translate_tooltip_mini { display: none !important; } </style>
Remarking on the opening of the museum, a member of the board of directors stated that “there is very little Holocaust education and most Mexicans’ knowledge of the Holocaust comes from Hollywood movies.” Thus, the museum is an important educational resource for those Mexicans who might otherwise not learn about the Holocaust. In the first year, almost 200,000 visitors from 230 schools visited the center. In addition to the exhibits, the museum offers educational programs. Currently, the museum provides speakers and discussion forums on issues of local and regional interest like migration and refugees.
The Mexican NGO Nenemi-Paxia has also worked to further Holocaust awareness in Mexico. For instance, Nenemi-Paxia developed a program called “Moments and Decisions” in which high school students create a traveling exhibition about the Holocaust. Nenemi-Paxia has also partnered with the American organization Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO) to begin a “pioneer educational project” with the Mexican Jesuit school Prepa Ibero to “create a model that will incorporate Holocaust education in the Mexican schools.” The program attempts to connect the recent history of escalating violence in Mexico to the Holocaust in order to help students learn about “those forms of civic action that can strengthen our weak Mexican democracy.”
RESOURCES
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON HOLOCAUST EDUCATION: Trends, Patterns, and Practices, a publication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Salzburg Global Seminar, 2013
Download PDF
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM HOLOCAUST Encyclopedia Articles
LINKS
UNESCO: Why Teach About the Holocaust?, 2013
Museo Memoria y Tolerancia
http://www.myt.org.mx/