Lately, I’ve been hearing more and more Russian spoken on the multicultural streets of Mexico City. As the American-born daughter of Soviet immigrants, my ears are particularly attuned to the cadence of Russian mingling with Spanish. These newcomers are not tourists, and their presence piques my curiosity.
What are they doing here? What are they like? And what has their experience in Mexico been? There’s an unexpected and somewhat humorous connection between Mexican culture and post-Soviet media. During my childhood, I spent a significant amount of time with my Babushka Maya on weekends and after school. Together, we avidly watched “Гваделупе” (Guadalupe), a Mexican telenovela dubbed into Russian and broadcast on Eastern European TV networks.
It turns out that during the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, underfunded Russian television studios struggling to meet the public’s rapidly growing demand for entertainment began buying licenses for many Latin American telenovelas and dubbing them into Russian as a quick solution. The Russian-speaking public loved it. The drama of the Mexican telenovela resonated with post-Soviet viewers all too familiar with their own domestic trials and tribulations.
Beyond this, there are many other fascinating connections between Eastern European and Mexican history. Statistics up to 2020 show only a modest number of Russian-speaking immigrants in the area. It was only after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukrai.