Mexico's Next President's Communist Grandpa
Claudia Sheinbaum's grandfather, Mexican identity, and migrant militants in the age of the Comintern
Social media rumors that have spread since at least 2021 allege that Claudia Sheinbaum, who will most likely be the next president of Mexico, was in fact born in Europe, making her ineligible for the presidency. Former president Vicente Fox, who rode the #Resistance wave to a blip of U.S. relevance early in Donald Trump’s presidency, has gone so far as to attack Sheinbaum as a “Bulgarian Jew” and a “Jewish foreigner.”
Fox himself was himself only able to become president thanks to a 1990 constitutional reform that removed the requirement that presidents have two Mexican-born parents. Sheinbaum’s closest rival in the race for her party’s nomination, former Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard, was also the grandchild of European immigrants, has two French last names, and actually lived in France from 2015 to 2017. So why is it Sheinbaum who is accused of being a foreigner?
Historian Daniela Gleizer writes that the post-revolutionary Mexican state promoted a national identity based on the idea of a “homogeneous population, the product of intermixing between natives and Spaniards.” “In its glorification of a ‘race of bronze,’” Gleizer says, “it excluded anything ‘that did not smell of Latin-Americanness,” classifying foreigners into those who could be assimilated into Mexican mestizaje and those who could not (Gleizer, 2022). Among those who fell into the latter category were Africans, Asians, and Jews. This is likely why Sheinbaum’s campaign emphasizes her Mexicanness and identification with the Mexican nation.
But it’s true that her family did originally come from somewhere else. Though Mexico was not as successful at drawing migration as other Latin American countries were, two people it did attract were Chone and Solomon Sheinbaum, Claudia’s grandfather and great-uncle. The story of these two men— communists who survived imprisonment and deportation and rubbed shoulders with the great personalities of the age of the Comintern —can shed some light both on who Claudia Sheinbaum is and on the past and future of Mexican politics.
Born in Lithuania under the Russian Empire, Chone (1906-1989) and Solomon Sheinbaum (?-1958) grew up in times of great change. They shared a mother but had different fathers: Chone’s father died months before he was born, and their mother remarried. In 1913, searching for opportunity denied to them by tsarism, the boys’ family sailed for the United States. They returned to Europe the next year. After 1914, the family lived in Poland, and in 1920 they went back to Lithuania.
As children, Chone and Solomon lived the aftereffects of the Revolution of 1905; as young men, they saw firsthand the unimaginable political shifts unleashed by the Revolution of 1917, including their own emancipation as Jews. Lithuania was a nerve center of Jewish political and labor activism in the Russian Empire— the Bund, for example, was founded in Vilna in 1897. By 1920, Chone had joined the Communist Party of Lithuania. Following the Lithuanian-Soviet War, the party was outlawed, and he was imprisoned for three years. It would not be the last time he would be marked for punishment as a communist.
Three years later, a free man once more, Chone left home again. His younger brother went with him. Given that they had briefly lived there as children Chone and Solomon may, like most Jews who left Europe, have been heading for the United States. If they were, they found their way blocked: like today’s Central American migrants, many Jews heading for the U.S. in the ‘20s were prevented from entry by laws like the Immigration Act of 1924 and ended up stuck in other countries of the hemisphere. 1925 found the Sheinbaum brothers in Cuba; whether or not the island had been their plan, if they arrived there in 1923 it would have been practically impossible for Chone and Solomon to enter the U.S.
In 1925, the brothers joined the newborn Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), where Solomon became active both in the party’s Jewish section and youth work department, as well as in the National Workers Confederation of Cuba (CNOC). They almost certainly began to use Spanish versions of their names, Juan and Salomón, which they are identified by in most documents, at this time. Though they were newcomers in the Americas and learning Spanish, they would not have been culturally isolated in their organizations: Jews had a strong presence in the PCC, where four of the party’s thirteen founding members were Jewish. Like other Comintern-affiliated parties, the Cuban party had a Jewish section, as well as a Chinese one, given the large Chinese presence in Cuba (Corrales, 2009).1
Both the PCC and CNOC had been outlawed by this point and their members lived under threat of assassination by the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. The PCC had in fact gone underground only 15 days after being founded, with its very first Secretary General was deported to Spain. This was probably the period when the Sheinbaum brothers picked up their recorded aliases: Chone went by “Arturo Ramírez,” while Solomon was “García Blanco.” Their wariness was proven right when both brothers were detained in 1928. As “undesirable foreigners,” they were subject to deportation, and both found themselves on a ship bound for Mexico. Most likely they would have been dropped in the port of Veracruz. The Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky had been through the city three years earlier: "People don't hang around in Veracruz for very long," he wrote. "They buy a knapsack, change some dollars... and off they go to the station, to buy a ticket to Mexico City.”
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When the brothers arrived in the Mexican capital they did what we might expect from them at this point and joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM). Given the close ties between the Cuban and Mexican parties, they may have already known PCM members before their deportation. In terms of safety, Chone and Solomon had jumped from one frying pan into another. Then a decade old, the PCM was frequently targeted for repression, with members regularly surveilled, harassed, assassinated, and jailed. Nevertheless, it was active across the country and is historically notable for the number of foreigners in its ranks in its first years: its founders and early agents included Indian anti-colonial activist M.N. Roy, Japanese journalist Sen Katayama, and American newspaper editor Bertram Wolfe.
The Sheinbaums quickly made themselves useful. Solomon worked alongside exiled PCC founder Julio Antonio Mella in the Association of New Revolutionary Emigrees from Cuba (ANERC) and in the Mexican section of the International Red Aid. Both brothers were members of the Central Committee of the party’s Mexico City branch, where Solomon eventually became head of the Finance and Agitprop sections and editor of El Soviet, a party newspaper. Active in the heart of the PCM’s operations in Mexico City, it is not hard to imagine that the brothers would have known emblematic figures of the age like Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto Sandino or Salvadoran communist leader Farabundo Martí, who were also in the Federal District in the late ‘20s.
Chone and Solomon’s arrival in Mexico happened to coincide with the short-lived golden age of Mexico’s Jewish left. There was a small community of Mexican Jews prior to the Mexican Revolution, but as in Cuba, many Jews put down roots in Mexico after being barred from entering the U.S. As in Cuba, many brought with them the political and cultural traditions of communism, Bundism, and Poaeli-Zionism. The communist-affiliated sections of this left founded the Radical Workers’ Center (Radikaler Arbeter Tzenter) in 1927 to organize Jewish workers and promote communism, and historian Daniel Kersffeld (2013) notes that Solomon's work was of great importance in bringing the PCM and the Radical Center together.
In 1930, repression of the PCM reached terrible new heights. As his interim presidency ended, Emilio Portes Gil broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and arrested the leaders of the PCM and organizations affiliated with it. Taking an inauguration day assassination attempt as its pretext, the incoming government of Pascual Ortíz Rubio began to deport foreign communists like the Italian Tina Modotti and the Jewish-Ukrainian Yuri Rosovski and imprison Mexican ones in the infamous Islas Marías penal colony. Chone and Solomon were caught up in this terror, and both brothers were arrested at a labor action and jailed in December 1930 (among those jailed with them was future literary giant José Revueltas, a teenager at the time). As foreigners, the brother once again faced deportation. But here something almost unbelievable happened: though Solomon was expelled from the country, Chone managed to pass himself off as Mexican to local authorities and escape deportation.
Or maybe not. Although the version of the story above was given to historians Victor and Lazar Jeifets by the brothers’ descendants, an article titled “Our Prisoners” in the late March 1931 issue of PCM newspaper identifies both brothers by their real names. Of the “comrades seized at the United House of Labor,” it says, “only Salomón Shienbaum [sic] remains in prison and under threat of deportation.” The paper calls on party members to protest to the president and attorney general and demand Solomon’s freedom and right to asylum, and it is hard to accept that Chone could have passed himself off as Mexican if his and Solomon’s names were public knowledge.
Whatever really happened, Solomon’s deportation must have been agonizing for both brothers, especially since he remained in jail for two months longer than Chone did. Together they had crossed the Atlantic twice as children and once again as young men. They had seen comrades killed in Cuba and Mexico. More than brothers, they had become mature militants together in the same parties, and it seems likely that they never saw each other in person again. The “Repression” column of El Machete’s May 10, 1931 issue ended with an unembellished line: “Lithuanian comrade Salomón Sheinbaum was expelled from the country; the International Red Aid funded his companion Ana Fagengein’s passage on the same ship.”
Chone remained in Mexico City and became a leading figure in the party. He joined the Central Committee of the PCM’s Mexico City branch in 1933 and took charge of the party’s anti-war work in 1934. Chone was also elected to the Central Committee of the national party three times in the 1930s, becoming Secretary of the Central Committee and a member of the party Politburo at the VII Congress of the PCM in 1939. He also started a family, marrying Emma Yoselevitz, a fellow Lithuanian. Their son Carlos, Claudia Sheinbaum’s father, was born in 1933.
These years, under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, saw the PCM’s return to legality and intense, successful involvement in worker and peasant struggles. They were also years of growing difficulty for the party: all but locked out of the ruling party, the PCM struggled to chart a course independent from Cárdenas’ government and decide on the correct posture towards the moderate-dominated Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). The party was also riven by disagreements over how to handle the presence of Leon Trotsky in Mexico. All of these developments were noted with concern within the Communist International, for whom the PCM was a key player in Latin America.
Probably unbeknownst to Chone and the PCM, in 1933 the Interior Ministry adopted a secret official policy forbidding immigration by Africans, non-Japanese Asians, Soviet citizens, and Roma people (Gleizer, 2014). Several groups from Eastern Europe and the Muslim world were also deemed undesirables. The next year, Jews were added to this list: irrespective of nationality, they were “the most undesirable of all.” Consular staff abroad were instructed to deny entry to Mexico even to Jews who had already been granted visas. In this way Mexico was not unique: the German refugee crisis was beginning, and many western nations were closing their doors.
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Various officially racist and antisemitic far-right groups were also founded during the ‘30s. Daniela Gleizer identifies these as expressions of the anti-Cárdenas middle class’s “rejection of government policies that increased the power of the proletariat to the detriment of the middle and business classes.” Cárdenas himself took a hands-off approach to the Jewish refugee issue, preferring to advocate for Spanish Republican exiles and leave the matter in the hands of outspokenly antisemitic ministers. This was surely a blow to the longevity of the communist Jewish left in Mexico, which faded away almost entirely after the Second World War as the community lurched toward Zionism. For its part, the PCM was outspoken in opposing these groups on an anti-fascist and internationalist basis, famously fighting the fascist Gold Shirts in Mexico City’s main square on Revolution Day in 1935.
By 1939, writes historian of the Mexican left Barry Carr, there was a "widely held belief that the Communist Party had become flabby, formless and without a clear sense of its long term goals” (1996). The September 1939 plenum of the Central Committee decided that the party would hold its first Extraordinary Congress to rectify this situation. To that end, the plenum also appointed a Purging Commission.
In attendance at the Congress in March 1940 was a delegation from the Comintern. Although their influence on the Congress is debated— Trotsky depicted them as running a show trial on Moscow’s behalf; Carr rejects this view —the Comintern envoys pushed the Congress’s mandate toward replacing the party’s entire national leadership.
In January, the Purging Commission’s sights came to rest on Chone Sheinbaum. Something like a faction had coalesced around him and two other leading party members, and they were accused of corruption, opportunism, and links to Trotskyism. Solomon Sheinbaum’s name was brought up during the proceedings— maybe the first time Chone had heard news of his brother in almost ten years.
Solomon, it turned out, had made his way to the Soviet Union, joined the All-Union Communist Party, and put his Cuban and Mexican days to work collaborating in the Latin American section of the Comintern’s Executive Committee.2 But in 1936 he had been expelled from the party, and now Chone was finding out that his younger brother was in exile within the USSR, an accused Trotskyist. Their family connection was used to paint Chone as a Trotskyist spy, and he and his faction were expelled from the PCM on February 2. If we take Trotsky at his word, the party called Chone back to testify against General Secretary Hernán Laborde and Central Committee member Valentin Campa, which he did, venomously. Laborde and Campa were expelled from the party in March.
It seems that Chone relocated to Jalisco, took up work as a jeweler, and spent several years trying to re-enter the PCM. To this end, he submitted a printed self-criticism to the party in August 1954. The text of his letter is remarkable for Sheinbaum’s withering assessment of his own role in the crisis of the 1930s. Beginning with a sunny appraisal of the party’s trajectory prior to the Cárdenas years, he turned to the PCM leadership of the ‘30s: “At the time, the Party was led by Laborde, Campa, Vicente Guerra, Miguel Velasco, Arturo Ramírez [Chone’s alias], and others, who were the most effective instrument and conduct for the application of the bourgeoise’s policy: to destroy the Party and stop it from playing its revolutionary role as the vanguard of the class struggle.”
Instead of relying on the working masses and preserving the party’s independence, he wrote, the leadership of the PCM “unconditionally supported Cárdenas’ policy” and upheld the “unprincipled policy” of “Unity at Any Cost.” The PCM, he wrote, became “a petit-bourgeois, social-democratic-type Party, totally ineffectual at leading the working class.” “For a number of years Arturo Ramírez held the position of Organizational Secretary of the Central Committee,” Chone wrote, “and is thus one of the most responsible for the Party’s deviations in this area.” He accepted “full responsibly for the grave mistakes [he] committed.”
Fourteen years later, this was his assessment of the Extraordinary Congress of 1940: “the healthy elements of the Party rebelled against all the rot and […] swept away all opportunist and traitorous elements.” Ever since, he had lent “unconditional support and defense” to the PCM and done what he could for its “enhancement and prestige.” “I hope,” Chone wrote, “that the next National Party Congress will make a decision that allows me to loyally serve my party and the cause of communism.” His efforts worked. At the XIX Party Congress in September 1954, Chone Sheinbaum was readmitted into the PCM. He re-entered the party alongside none other than Diego Rivera, himself expelled for Trotskyism in 1929.
In the meantime, the Jewish left in Mexico was experiencing a steep decline. Communists and Bundists fought bitterly throughout the 1940s, with their movements weakening and Zionism becoming the community’s dominant expression of ethnic activism by the ‘50s. The fact that Claudia Sheinbaum today appears to be at least a non-Zionist (she condemned Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2009 and follows Los Otros Judíos, a page run by anti-Zionist Chilean Jews, on Twitter) is probably attributable to her paternal family’s influence.
Though he was back in his party, the waves of repression that Chone Sheinbaum had lived through were not over. Throughout the 1950s, the PCM and other communist parties in Mexico endured a new onslaught by the governments of Miguel Alemán and Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, with communists frequently kidnapped, jailed, and purged from labor unions. In 1957, Chone himself became a victim of this violence. At this point a member of the State Committee of the PCM’s Jalisco branch, he was abducted by state agents and interrogated about his own activities and those of his 24-year-old son Carlos, who had been the Organizational Secretary of the Communist Youth (FJCM) since he was 19.
Here the Ruiz Cortines government turned to a particularly sinister tactic. Perhaps inspired by the U.S.’s 1954 demand that Mexico extradite exiled Guatemalans who had fled their country after the coup against Jacobo Árbenz and remembering the fact that Chone was foreign-born, the Mexican government attempted to hand him over to the Guatemalan military dictatorship.3 (There is some irony in the fact that in October his granddaughter will take the reins of the state that did this to him and whose migration apparatus has in recent years done the US the favor of deporting thousands over the Mexico-Guatemala border). Transported to the southern border state of Chiapas, Chone was assigned a guide who would escort him overland to Guatemala and deliver him to the military junta. But again displaying the talent for survival he showed for his whole life, Sheinbaum managed to escape custody on the road and return to the capital of Chiapas. There he was recaptured but managed to get in touch with his wife and a lawyer. Probably given the blatant illegality of his deportation, he was freed, returning to Guadalajara.
Chone Sheinbaum died in Mexico City in 1989. He had outlived his party: the PCM was officially dissolved in 1981. Its last remnants were integrated into the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in 1987. Even if he was no longer an active militant, Chone would have been well aware of these developments— his granddaughter Claudia was married to one of the PRD’s founders, a fellow student leader. With a family history like Claudia Sheinbaum’s, one might well wonder why the presidential candidate of a popular left party would not play up her political pedigree. She’s mentioned her parents’ participation in the 1968 student movement— what stronger way to prove her Mexicanness than to emphasize her generational ties to the nation’s historical left in their entirety?
From Sheinbaum and Morena’s point of view, the answer is probably simple: to emphasize her family background— whether in its recent immigrant, Jewish, or communist dimensions —would likely hurt rather than help her. Anti-communism remains a staple discourse of the Mexican right, and the racial component of the national identity that took shape in the 1930s endures. It does not help that the country’s small Jewish community is widely seen as a cloistered and conservative bourgeoisie. In this sense, neglecting to mention the Sheinbaum family’s Jewish-communist history can be seen as a realistic reading of what the Mexican electorate finds acceptable in 2024.
But that careful treading also raises questions that echo from the time of Chone Sheinbaum’s militancy in the Mexican Communist Party. For anti-communists, a communist is by definition a foreigner: unable to see how class struggle is born out of society’s own contradictions, reactionaries since Edmund Burke have hunted for the external agents and outside agitators who must be manipulating the mob. In this sense, communists, Jews, and migrants are one and the same, all inherently foreign to the national body.
Today, hundreds of thousands of foreigners are traversing Mexico: in 2023, the International Organization for Migration registered the record-setting figure of more than 782 thousand irregular migratory events, up 77% from 2022 and part of a 132% increase since 2021. Most of these people are bound for the U.S., but like Eastern European Jews in the ‘20s, thousands of them will surely settle in Mexico. Historic Afro-Mexican and Asian Mexican communities tend to live in ethnic enclaves— how will national identity handle large numbers of residents who can be spotted as non-Mexican, either nationally or racially, living in places where they were previously invisible? More succinctly: who is a Mexican? Who will be?
Though they may seem like thought exercises, these questions have stakes. Anyone living in Mexico City or passing through the Mexican internet knows that real estate speculation and gentrification are rampaging against the population of the megalopolis’s right to the city. Though these processes are primarily the work of local capitalists, they are often framed in public discussion as being produced by their most visible symptom: North American and European digital nomads. A few weeks ago, chilangos woke to find English-language posters in the Historic Center reading “Gringo Go Back To Your Country, Mexico Is For Mexicans, No One Else.” Many self-identified progressives nodded— it was only later that some posters realized that the same prints were part of a series of posters attacking migrants, Jews, Muslims, abortion, and gays, produced by Mexicans In Defense of the Nation (MDN). Who are they? Their social media shows a neo-Nazi group claiming the mantle of Revolutionary Mexicanist Action (RAM), the Gold Shirt fascists of the ‘30s. Groups like MDN are marginal in Mexico, but if Morena’s answer to problems as critical as the housing question is half-hearted regulations on Airbnb (and in the absence of a popular movement advancing a strong structural analysis of gentrification), fascists posing as anti-gentrification fighters may find more purchase for their ideas— and their answer to “Who is a Mexican?” is very clear.
In the 1930s, as the state shaped immigration policy to favor foreigners it thought would be most easily assimilable, the Mexican Communist Party actively incorporated “undesirable” foreigners into its ranks. It campaigned against fascist groups like the Pro-Race Committee, whose antisemitism the party recognized as a ploy to channel mass discontent away from capitalists and towards Jewish, Chinese, and Arab workers in Mexico. Can the militant potential of the thousands of migrants in Mexico today be activated by any of the country’s progressive forces? With millions of people on the move across the Global South today, the consequences of that question will resonate far beyond Mexico.
As we will see, the PCC’s Jewish and Chinese sections are one of the several points in common in the parallel fates of Jews and Chinese in the Americas.
Solomon had two children (one is still alive), fought in World War II, and was rehabilitated and reinstated as a party member before his death in 1958. In the USSR, he worked alongside Yuri Rosovski, a fellow Eastern European Jew and deported PCM cadre, whose trajectory was similar to Solomon’s: expelled from the VKP(b) in 1936, he requested (but was denied) permission to fight the Nazis and was rehabilitated after the war.
Verónica Oikión Solano writes that that the PCM mobilized around preventing the extradition of these Guatemalans, creating an underground apparatus to hide them from the state.
Works referenced
Carr, Barry. La izquierda mexicana a través del siglo XX. Mexico, DF: Ediciones Era, 1996.
Corrales, Maritza. "Comunistas judíos: Contrapunteo cubano y contrahistoria de una comunidad, 1925-1953," Judaica Latinoamericana VII, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2009.
García Treviño, Rodrigo. La ingerencia rusa en México. Mexico, DF: Editorial América, 1959.
Gleizer, Daniela. “Inmigrantes bundistas, comunistas y sionistas socialistas: utopías de la izquierda judía en el México posrevolucionario.” In Cultura judeo-progresista en las Américas, edited by Nerina Visacovsky. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Imago Mundi, Ediciones Centro de Estudios Históricos de los Trabajadores y las Izquierdas, 2022.
Gleizer, Daniela. Unwelcome Exiles: Mexico and the Jewish Refugees from Nazism, 1933-1945. Brill, 2014.
Jeifets, Lazar and Victor Jeifets. América Latina en la Internacional Comunista (1919- 1943). Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2017.
Kersffeld, Daniel. “El activismo judío en el comunismo de entreguerras,” Nueva Sociedad 247, September-October 2013.
Kersffeld, Daniel. Rusos y rojos: Judíos comunistas en los tiempos de la Comintern. Buenos Aires: Capital Intellectual, 2012.
“La Represión,” El Machete (Mexico, DF), May 10, 1931. “Nuestros Presos,” El Machete (Mexico, DF), second half of March, 1931.
Oikión Solano, Verónica "La impronta solidaria y coyuntural de las izquierdas mexicanas ante el golpe de estado en Guatemala, 1954," Revista de la Red de Intercátedras de Historia de América Latina Contemporánea 7, no. 12, 2020.
“Protestan Desde la Cárcel,” El Machete (Mexico, DF), second half of January, 1931.
Sheinbaum, Claudia. “Salvar al mundo que hoy se llama Gaza,” La Jornada, January 12, 2009.
“ШЕЙНБАУМ ЛИНА СОЛОМОНОВНА (1940 – 2014)” [Sheinbaum Lina Solomonovna]. Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography. https://iea-ras.ru/?p=1355.
Socorro Rojo Internacional, Comité Valle de México. Abajo la campaña antisemita! Poster. Mexican Communist Party Ephemera, Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Trotsky, Leon. “Laborde y Campa condenados.” In Escritos Latinoamericanos. Buenos Aires: Centro de Estudios, Investigaciones y Publicaciones “León Trotsky,” 2007. Available from: CEIP León Trotsky, ceip.org.ar/Laborde-y-Campa-condenados-1