Although Latin America has often remained at the margins of Holocaust historiography, the region played a significant—if understudied—role in the broader historical landscape of World War II and its aftermath. Patterns of migration, settlement, and memory reveal deep interconnections between Europe and the Americas during and after the Holocaust. Local communities, families, international aid organizations, and state actors all played crucial roles in the rescue and support of Jews fleeing or surviving Nazi persecution. Within distinct national contexts across the region, refugees and survivors developed their own strategies to adapt, confront challenges, and reckon with the legacies of violence. In this talk, Siman explores the complex web of Holocaust-related experiences, actors, and memory across a diverse Latin American landscape.

Yael Siman holds a doctoral degree in political science from the University of Chicago, where she was a Fulbright International Fellow. She is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers and, in 2024–2025, and was a fellow of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (MFJC). She is currently Distinguished Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Department of Politics in Juniata College, Huntingdon Pennsylvania. She is now a full-time Research Professor in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at IBERO, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the Holocaust, genocide, memory, and qualitative research methods. She is co-author of Victim Activists in Mexico: Social and Political Mobilization amid Extreme Violence and Disappearances (Lexington Books, 2024), co-author of the article “From Europe to Mexico: The Unexpected Journey of Thirty Jewish Families Escaping Nazism” (Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2024), and co-editor of Holocaust and Latin America: Migration, Settlement and Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Her current research focuses on the memory and migration narratives of Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors in Mexico.