The New Left in Latin America

Introduction

In the midst of an intensified Cold War during the 1950s, something qualitatively changed within and without the Latin American Old Left. After a brief “democratic spring” immediately after World War II that witnessed the resurgence of labor unions, socialist and Communist parties, and Popular Front–like coalitions across the region, a violently authoritarian conservatism (aided by local militaries and US diplomatic and other actors) reemerged to repress a nascent Latin American social democracy. While the 1947 military coups in Peru and Venezuela marked the beginning of this reactionary process, the US-supported overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 completed a region-wide turn to authoritarian governance. Even exceptions such as Mexico experienced an intensified anti-Communism melded to one-party political rule and an inequitable political economy favorable to capital. Across the region, socialist and Communist parties, along with labor unions, faced persecution and, depending on the locale, adopted an underground, semiclandestine, and/or co-opted existence. Internal conflict and turmoil afflicted these Old Left organizations as they debated ideological orthodoxy and strategy. As the internal debates regarding reform or revolution continued throughout the 1950s, state violence and persecution—along with US intervention in Latin America—radicalized an entire generation of people (young and old) regardless of whether they were connected to Old Left institutions and politics. The 1959 Cuban Revolution politically evinced for some that the manifestation of utopian revolution (the impossible) via direct action and armed struggle proved possible. For others the utopian impulses emerged culturally in the realms of gender, sexuality, race, education, religion, fashion, family, economics, music, film, literature, and countercultural practices. Rather than articulate an argument for immediate mimesis, the Cuban Revolution helped crystallize the beginnings of an elastic, diverse, and tension-filled New Left that generally advocated direct action, confrontation with state power, antiauthoritarianism, direct democracy, and/or the undermining of traditional patriarchal norms. Such emergent New Left demands found expression through a variety of means—from guerrilla warfare to Cinema Novo and rocanrol—a variety that suggests the contradictory yet interrelated composition of the Latin American New Left. Overall, the corpus of literature reviewed here suggests the need to formulate a wide-ranging and transnational definition of the Latin American New Left that emerged during the early Cold War decades. As a relatively new and bourgeoning field of study, this intervention is timely in order to promote a research agenda that captures the historical heterogeneity of the New Left.

General Overviews

There are few, if any, works of synthesis that define the Latin American New Left as more than its armed wing. Unlike established historiographical fields in US or European history that associate the 1960s with a broadly defined New Left, the term is more readily used for Latin America to refer to the recent “pink tide” of democratically elected, left-leaning governments in Central and South America or as a descriptive label for the assortment of rural and urban guerrilla movements that emerged after the Cuban Revolution, seeking to seize state power. Wright 1991 represents a classic work that places Cuba at the historical core of the New Left—a thesis seconded by Sorenson 2007. Carr and Ellner 1993 is an early exception, focusing on persistent Old Left political forms after 1973. General overviews of the guerrilla New Left tend to posit such movements as dramatic and misguided deviations disconnected from Old Left organizations and whose use of violence provoked the consolidation of military dictatorships, Dirty Wars, and the bloody defeat of nascent social democracies. Castañeda 1993 represents the most widely read and sophisticated version of this argument. A more recent extension of the argument that guerrillas provoked the rise of military dictatorships in the late 1960s and 1970s is in Brands 2010. A striking response to such studies is Grandin 2004, which traces the radicalization and militancy of both the armed and nonarmed sections of the New Left to the violent military (and US-aided) repression of a nascent “socialized democracy and democratized socialism” that occurred throughout Latin America beginning in the late 1940s. Early Cold War instances of state terror against reformist popular movements radicalized an entire generation prior to a later adoption of revolutionary violence—as Grandin demonstrates in his case study on Cold War Guatemala. Zolov 2008 presents not only a timely historiographical intervention arguing for a broadly defined New Left to include nonarmed social movements and cultural politics but also a Mexican case study to demonstrate the intimate historical (and transnational) interconnections between the armed and nonarmed New Left. Gould 2009 adopts a transnational approach to the 1968 political mobilizations in Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay to demonstrate the conflicted yet productive relationship between Old and New Left in various arenas of struggle. Both Zolov 2008 and Gould 2009 thus offer productive, innovative models for new research.

Brands, Hal. Latin America’s Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
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Based on multinational archival research, this is a survey of the Cold War in Latin America that puts forth the traditional thesis that the Cuban Revolution in 1959 spawned superpower competition in the region—along with the radicalization of both the political Left and Right. Updated version of the argument first advanced by Castañeda 1993 that posits blame on the armed New Left for provoking state terror and the emergence of dictatorial regimes.
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Carr, Barry, and Steve Ellner, eds. The Latin American Left: From the Fall of Allende to Perestroika. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993.
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An assortment of contributions that trace the performance of the Latin American Left (defined in party, electoral, and union terms) in the last decades of the Cold War. Essays focus on Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela to collectively argue that the Latin American Left emerged ready to engage a democratic, postdictatorship era. Good for undergraduates and scholars.
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Castañeda, Jorge. Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War. New York: Vintage, 1993.
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Foundational text that presents the traditional thesis on the armed New Left: guerrilla groups, largely disconnected from popular support, waged suicidal war against states only to provoke terror and the emergence of military dictatorships. Also presents Cuba as the “crucible” for the vast majority of armed groups. Argues that the armed Left interrupted the emergence of organic social democracies.
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Gould, Jeffrey L. “Solidarity Under Siege: The Latin American Left, 1968.” American Historical Review 114.2 (2009): 348–375.
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.114.2.348Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A transnational analysis of the 1968 protest movements that took place in Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay. Presents the movements as constituted by both the New and Old Left, even as the New Left criticized the reformist, authoritarian tendencies of Communist parties. A utopian ethos of solidarity and egalitarianism fused both the Old and New Left in their struggle against authoritarian regimes.
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Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
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Forceful response to the traditional thesis regarding the armed New Left. Dates the beginning of the Cold War to the late 1940s, when US-aided dictatorships around the region deposed nascent social democracies. Such acts, along with state terror, radicalized an entire generation during the 1950s and 1960s—some choosing armed struggle as a political option. Uses Guatemala as a case study.
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Sorenson, Diana. A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
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Cultural-literary history of Latin America after 1959 that focuses on specific moments—the Cuban Revolution and 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, for example—and their impact on writers and intellectuals. Argues that the politics of the 1960s were defined by a tension that existed between the desire for utopia (unleashed by the Cuban Revolution) and the recovery of past cultural memory.
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Wright, Thomas C. Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991.
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A broad-ranging study based on secondary sources that traces the history of the Cuban Revolution and its effect on US foreign policy in Latin America and on other revolutionary movements in Latin America, including Peru under the revolutionary military officers, Allende’s Chile, and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Useful for undergraduate courses on the subject.
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Zolov, Eric. “Expanding our Conceptual Horizons: The Shift from an Old to a New Left in Latin America.” A Contracorriente 5.2 (2008): 47–73.
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Foundational text that calls for broadening the “conceptual” definition of the Latin American New Left beyond its armed manifestations. Uses historiographical arguments on the US New Left to press for a definition of the Latin American New Left that highlights linkages between armed and nonarmed constituents. Evinces argument by delineating the shift from Old to New Left in 1950s and 1960s Mexico.
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Edited Collections

No edited collections on the broader Latin American New Left—as defined in the introduction—exist. Rather, works tend to approach the New Left indirectly while focusing on related thematic issues in modern Latin America. Castro 1999 provides a long historical perspective on armed guerrilla movements. Bethell and Roxborough 1992 is a key early work that negatively locates the historical prologue of the New Left in the immediate “democratic spring” years after World War II and the bloody defeat of embryonic social democracies. While their indirect definition of the New Left proves inaccurate (as exclusively guerrilla, elitist, and utopian), their chronology of postwar democratic apertures inspired new research questions and historiographical debates (for example see Grandin 2004 in General Overviews). Another early work, one that captures the diversity of the New Left while using the descriptive label of “social movements,” is Eckstein 2001. Drinot 2010 explores the factors that shaped the New Left’s emergence by following Che Guevara throughout his 1950s travels in Latin America. This unique collection covers eight countries visited by the Argentine. Recent overviews of the “long” Cold War in Latin America—a bourgeoning historical field—directly and indirectly engage the new questions and research directions discussed in the introduction. In analyzing the impact of the Cold War on the ground in Latin America, the essays in Spenser 2004 and Joseph and Spenser 2008 provide insight into the historical origins of the New Left. Joseph and Grandin 2010 redefines the chronology of the Latin American Cold War as a century-long struggle characterized by revolutions and counterrevolutions, thus offering new research and perspectives on the emergence of an intertwined Old and New Left within social contexts contoured by political violence. In the realm of cultural studies, Pacini Hernandez, et al. 2004 collectively and indirectly addresses questions on the definitional breadth of the New Left, using a transnational American framework to explore the multiple histories of rock music. The study of rock music enables fascinating interrogations of race, class, gender, and counterculture in post-1940s Latin America and Latino (or Latina) America and thus offers a productive model on how to produce wide-ranging, interconnected studies on the Latin American New Left. In sum, an edited collection specifically on the Latin American New Left remains a pressing objective.

Bethell, Leslie, and Ian Roxborough. Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944–1948. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
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Key collection that argues for the historical significance of the (short-lived) 1944–1948 conjuncture in Latin America that witnessed unprecedented democratization and labor/leftist militancy. Essays cover a broad range of countries. Excellent introduction that explains the significance of the postwar conjuncture and its demise and how these events related to later Cold War developments.
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Castro, Daniel. Revolution and Revolutionaries: Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999.
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A collection that combines historical assessments of guerrilla warfare in Latin America with documents produced by guerrillas themselves. Valuable guerrilla documents include Che Guevara’s writings on guerrilla warfare, the writings of Héctor Béjar and Camilo Torres, and Carlos Marighella on urban guerrilla strategy.
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Drinot, Paulo. Che’s Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
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Innovative collection that explores Latin American politics and societies during the 1950s by retracing Che Guevara’s travels throughout the continent. The essays shed new light on the 1950s as experienced by the countries that Guevara visits. Outlines the immediate pre-history of the New Left, identifying factors that stimulated political radicalization and cultural innovation.
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Eckstein, Susan. Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
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Originally published in 1989. Wide-ranging collection that focuses on different forms of popular protest in contemporary (post-1970) Latin America, including peasant guerrilla insurgencies (Peru and Colombia), antistate terror social movements (Madres de Plaza de Mayo), religious-based movements, and anti-IMF austerity measures. Excellent introductory chapter that critically evaluates social science theories used to explain social movements. Strongest chapters on peasant guerrilla movements are chapters 2 and 3.
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Joseph, Gilbert, and Greg Grandin. A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
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Reinterprets 19th-century Latin American history as a “long Cold War” characterized by a dialectical process of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence. The essays historicize political violence as a constituting factor in subaltern-elite social struggles. Introductory chapter suggests an ambitious research agenda for how to understand violence in Latin America. Chapters 6 and 7 provide new research on the Cuban Revolution.
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Joseph, Gilbert M., and Daniela Spenser. In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
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An approach to studies of the Cold War from Latin American perspectives. Essays demonstrate the often-violent social conflicts that characterized the region’s Cold War. Excellent chapter 5 on the “transnationalizing” of state terror and chapter 7 on the Cuban Revolution’s impact in early 1960s Mexico. New research is presented in chapter 10 on gender and armed resistance in 1968 Brazil.
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Pacini Hernandez, Deborah, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, and Eric Zolov, eds. Rockin’ Las Américas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.
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Explores the proliferation of rock music throughout the Americas beginning in the late 1950s. Challenges the notion that rock was an imported commodity from the United States and Europe. Rather, it traces the music’s histories, from its controversial (and at times, criminalized) beginnings in Latin America to a currently accepted musical form maintaining subversive potential. Chapters pertaining to New Left studies include chapters 2, 3, 6, and 14.
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Spenser, Daniela. Espejos de la Guerra Fría: México, América Central y el Caribe. Mexico City: CIESAS, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores and Porrúa, 2004.
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An early attempt to redefine studies of the Cold War by introducing Latin American perspectives to a literature dominated by studies of US-Soviet ideological competition and diplomacy. Exciting chapters by Zolov and Armony provide, respectively, new perspectives on how the Cuban Revolution was experienced in provincial Mexico and Argentina as the right-wing counterpoint to Cuba as regional promoter of Dirty War methodologies.
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Primary Sources and Translation

The majority of primary document collections compiled and published since the late 1960s deal directly with the guerrilla insurgency and the political radicalism of the New Left. These collections focus mainly on revolutions, insurgent/political leadership, influential theorists, and praxes of resistance. Guevara 1962 represents the classic text on rural guerrilla warfare in Latin America, gleaned from his experiences in the Cuban Revolution. Marighella 1971 presents a theory of urban guerrilla warfare developed in a Brazilian context. Until the recent opening of some official state document collections, the military and civil authoritarianism that characterized much of Cold War Latin America forced scholars to seek alternative historical sources. Oral history thus emerged as a valuable historical text. The Argentine Universidad Nacional de la Plata and Universidad de Buenos Aires house invaluable (broadly defined) New Left oral history archives. The Centro de Documentación de Movimientos Armados (CEDEMA) offers numerous primary sources on a vast array of Cold War and contemporary armed New Left organizations. The end of military dictatorships and the electoral fall of the PRI in Mexico have led to the formation of various truth commission reports and the declassification of archival documents in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Mexico. Archivo Chile provides important documents on the past and current Chilean Left. In a boon for researchers, Blanton 2008 discusses, locates, and evaluates such newly (re)discovered archival sources. The National Security Archive, Latin America Electronic Briefing Books produces valuable electronic briefing books that use such newly declassified material in conjunction with US documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Access to primary sources and materials is rapidly increasing for scholars and general readers. Another important archival collection is the New School for Social Research’s North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) Archive of Latin Americana, which facilitates research on transnational links within the Latin American New Left and with sections of the US New Left.

Archivo Chile, Centro de Estudios “Miguel Enríquez” (CEME).
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Important online archive that contains primary sources relating to a broadly defined Chilean Left, including social movements, Salvador Allende and Popular Unity, and resistance movements that challenged the Pinochet dictatorship—including the armed Left. Additional themes covered in the archive: human rights, indigenous movements, political parties, and current political debates in contemporary Chile.
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Acontecimientos, Actores y Discursos de la Nueva Izquierda Argentina (1955–1976). Archivo de Historia Oral, Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Argentina.
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A collection of assorted oral interviews of Argentine New Leftists, dated 1955–1976. Includes interviews with Montonero guerrillas, Maoist militants, politically active working-class priests, and an assortment of Marxist party militants. Short descriptions of some interviews available online via Word document format.
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Archivo de Historia Oral de la Argentina Contemporánea. Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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Over two hundred oral interviews with a cross-section of society involved in contemporary Argentine history, organized into five categories: political violence, human rights and the armed forces, political economy, institutions, and political parties and government. Each category is organized chronologically in three historical periods, covering the major periods of recent Argentine history: 1958–1976, 1976–1983, and 1983–2003.
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Blanton, Thomas. “Recovering the Memory of the Cold War: Forensic History and Latin America.” In In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War. Edited by Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser, 47–73. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
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An outstanding discussion, written by the director of the National Security Archive, of new archival resources available in Latin America (some made available through the work of truth commissions) and the United States. These will help in (re)writing the history of the Latin American Cold War. Particularly useful for graduate and advanced scholar-researchers.
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Centro de Documentación de Movimientos Armados, CEDEMA. Mexico, DF.
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A key online database that contains hundreds of primary documents, interviews, transcribed speeches, and communiqués produced by past (Cold War) and present guerrilla organizations in Latin America. The earliest documents date back to the 1950s with the revolutionary efforts in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. A valuable source of primary documents for undergraduate students and advanced scholars. Documents in Spanish and Portuguese.
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Guevara, Che. Guerrilla Warfare. New York: Praeger, 1962.
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Foundational text on how to wage rural guerrilla warfare in Latin America—based on Guevara’s experiences in the Cuban Revolution. A programmatic definition of the subsequent armed New Left’s strategic approach to revolution, at some level based on Guevara’s three lessons: popular forces can defeat the army, the insurrection itself creates the necessary conditions needed for revolution, and the countryside is the primary arena of struggle in Latin America.
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Marighella, Carlos. Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1971.
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This work, articulating an argument for cities (not the countryside) constituting the primary venues of guerrilla warfare, emerged after the death of Guevara in 1967. Exposes the erroneous nature of the Argentine’s rural foco theories. After breaking with the Brazilian Communist Party in 1967, Marighella organized an urban guerrilla organization. He created this minimanual in the midst of revolutionary struggle against the Brazilian military regime.
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National Security Archive, Latin America Electronic Briefing Books.
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Collection of declassified US government documents organized into electronic briefing books. Such documents and analyses shed new light on the role of the United States to engineer military coups and support state terror in Latin America. Thematic topics include state terror and violence, human rights violations, and Dirty War. Historical scope of the documents includes the Cold War and contemporary eras.
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North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) Archive of Latin Americana. New School for Social Research.
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Wide-ranging, invaluable archival collection of primary documents (in microform) that covers Latin American social and political movements from the 1960s to the late 1980s. Archive index is available online, and the entire archive is available for purchase by university libraries. This archive is currently available at a number of US universities. Key source for transnational studies and research.
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A Diverse New Left

New research on the Latin American New Left generally (and at times implicitly) takes up the call in Zolov 2008 (cited under General Overviews) to define it as a constellation of broadly defined social movements that, in a variety of ways, challenged political and cultural authoritarianism. A survey of the New Left is sorely lacking. Yet, studies focusing on specific aspects of the New Left, whether student mobilizations during the late 1960s or Brazilian tropicsear music, when compiled offer a broad historical vision of what Zolov, quoting Van Gosse in Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), called the “movement of movements,” its constitution, and its heterogeneous ideologies. Such an approach strikingly reminds historians that the creation of categories to understand historical phenomena such as the New Left often proves solely heuristic in nature. Newer studies demonstrate the intimate linkages—cultural, political, and/or personal—that existed between the different constitutive aspects of the Latin American New Left. Historical linkages also existed, prompting the question: how new was the Latin American New Left?

Student Movements and Youth Culture Before and After 1968

Historically significant student movements are nothing new in Latin America. Indeed, the regional wave of student mobilization propelled by the 1918 student movement for university reform in Córdoba, Argentina, testifies to the important historical position occupied by student activism in shaping modern Latin American history. In 1918, as during the 1960s, students rebelled against various forms of authority. What was that authority? Recent works on student activism during the 1960s and 1970s shed light on the gendered aspects of state authority while also emphasizing the transnational connections between student movements and youth culture. Carey 2005 constitutes a key work that successfully combines both approaches in its look at the 1968 student movement in Mexico. Youth culture, as a space of political and cultural resistance—at times unified through consumption—to dictatorship and state authoritarianism, figured prominently in Cold War Latin America. In Nicaragua, youth culture during the 1960s and 1970s helped facilitate the emergence of the Sandinista Revolution, as covered in Barbosa 2006. Barr-Melej 2006 provides an alternate example in the Chilean radical youth during the early 1970s who rejected all authority, irrespective of ideology and politics. For an innovative work on Argentine youth culture and the relationship between the consumption of blue jeans and gender and sexuality, see Manzano 2009. Markarian 2010 analyzes Communist youth identity in 1960s Uruguay in critical conversation with circulating global ideas on youth culture and identity. Studies on 1968 have provided new insights into youth culture and student movements for contemporary Mexican history. In addition to Carey 2005 (cited above), Zermeño 1987 represents one of the first key academic studies on the internal dynamics and politics of the ’68 student movement. Aguayo Quezada 1998 marks the first effort to use recently declassified Mexican state documents to produce a history of the ’68 student movement and massacre. Conversely, Pensado 2008 offers an important study on the politics and culture of those students used by the Mexican government as violent “shock troops” against rival dissident students. Important studies on other Latin American student movements in 1968 are beginning to emerge. An important work on Brazil’s 1968 can be found in Langland 2004.

Aguayo Quezada, Sergio. 1968: Los archivos de la violencia. Mexico City: Grijalbo/Reforma, 1998.
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First archival-based history on the 1968 Mexican student movement and October massacre. Uses recently declassified Mexican state documents along with declassified US documents to contextualize the massacre within a broader structure of political violence shaped by the ruling party (PRI) and various repressive apparatuses. Argues that the massacre was a result of interparty miscommunication and out-of-control paramilitary groups.
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Barbosa, Francisco. “Insurgent Youth: Culture and Memory in the Sandinista Student Movement.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 2006.
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Innovative work that reveals the determinant role of students, their activism, and their culture within the broader Sandinista Revolution. As Barbosa demonstrates, middle- and working-class students proved key in the development and consolidation of the Sandinista Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s. A rich history of activism, combined with politicized youth culture, enabled students to assume an important revolutionary role.
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Barr-Melej, Patrick. “Siloísmo and the Self in Allende’s Chile: Youth, ‘Total Revolution,’ and the Roots of the Humanist Movement.” Hispanic American Historical Review 86.4 (2006): 747–784.
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2006-049Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Chronicles the 1970s history of countercultural Siloístas and “Joven Poder” (Youth Power) in Chile: a movement of young radicals who rejected all forms of authority and trappings of contemporary society and antagonized both Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government and the Chilean right wing. An important look into the generational challenge posed to both the traditional Left and radical Right by the New Left.
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Carey, Elaine. Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
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Pioneering English-language study that reveals the gendered and generational challenges embodied by the 1968 Mexican student movement in their struggle against the PRI regime. Cogently presents international (in tactics and culture) influences in the movement while emphasizing its roots in national popular protests after 1940. Good for undergraduates and advanced scholars.
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Langland, Victoria. “Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and Collective Memory in Authoritarian Brazil.” PhD diss., Yale University, 2004.
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Explores the historical (and memory) impact of 1968 student movements in Brazil, locating the national roots of Brazilian student activism to the 1964 coup d’état while also emphasizing the transnational impact of international student mobilizations. Also focuses on the gender “troubles” and social anxiety provoked by the mass participation of women in student activism and clandestine armed organizations.
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Manzano, Valeria. “The Blue Jean Generation: Youth, Gender, and Sexuality in Buenos Aires, 1958–1975.” Journal of Social History 42.3 (2009): 657–676.
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Explores the blue jeans “invasion” of Argentina and how the commodity transformed into a marker of youth identity loaded with specific definitions of gender and sexuality. Young women adopting blue jeans during the 1960s sparked public debates on both the “over-sexed” and “uni-sex” qualities of the pants. By the early 1970s the wearing of blue jeans by radically politicized young men and women endowed this clothing commodity with a subversive quality.
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Markarian, Vania. “‘Ese héroe es el joven comunista’: Violencia, heroísmo y cultura juvenil entre los comunistas uruguayos de los sesenta.” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 21.2 (2010): 7–32.
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Innovative study on Communist youth identity and militancy in 1960s Uruguay. Focuses on the Union of Communist Youth (UJC), part of the Uruguayan Communist Party (PCU), to discern whether the ideas and practices of the armed New Left influenced Communist youth. UJC members rejected guerrilla praxis while challenging the PCU by creating cultural spaces in which they exalted armed resistance through artistic expressions.
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Pensado, Jaime. “Political Violence and Student Culture in Mexico: The Consolidation of Porrismo during the 1950s and 1960s.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008.
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Focuses on the contrapuntal aspect of Mexican student activism during the 1950s and 1960s: the state-sponsored student “porros” that violently countered student mobilizations. Porro activities allowed the PRI regime to control student dissent at the preparatory schools and university levels through violence and surveillance. Provides new insight into how the PRI managed and quelled popular dissent during its “Golden Age.”
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Zermeño, Sergio. Mexico: Una democracia utópica. El movimiento estudiantil del 68. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1987.
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A sociological perspective on the 1968 student movement that emphasizes the internal contradictions between movement leaders and radical rank-and-file participants. Contextualizes the student movement within a longer history of Mexican state (PRI) formation and a post-1940 national arena marked by an imminent economic and political crisis. For advanced scholars.
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Countercultural New Left in Music, Film, and Literature

If the armed New Left represented a strategic turn away from Old Left political practices, the countercultural New Left constituted a rejection of Old Left cultural aesthetics. A direct, democratic definition of socialism: antiauthoritarian, less paternalistic, and more cosmopolitan in cultural terms, combined with consumption practices and intergenerational conflicts form a broadly defined aesthetic that permeated the countercultural New Left. As Zolov posits in pioneering fashion, the countercultural New Left emerged inextricably intertwined with the armed New Left; the “we” of the iron-disciplined “heroic guerrilla” combined with the “I” of the undisciplined hippie and rock musician to form “twin facets of the New Left sensibility” (see Zolov 2008 under General Overviews). Key studies have used music to analyze the culture of the countercultural New Left. Agustín 1996 offers one of the first histories of the Mexican counterculture, tracing a variety of largely music-related countercultural identities. Zolov 1999 outlines the history of the Mexican counterculture via rock music. Agustín 1996 and Zolov 1999 are indispensable studies on the topic. Reyes Matta 1988 focuses on the so-called New Song movement to highlight a transnational Latin American counterculture of resistance against state authoritarianism. In Brazil, countercultural music manifested itself in the form of tropicália—a wide-ranging cultural movement that also included cinema and art. Dunn 2001 represents the major study on tropicália. Moore 2006 explores the role of music and musicians in Cuba after the 1959 revolution. In addition to countercultural music, “Third Cinema” (or “Cinema Novo”) vividly demonstrates the internal tension-filled struggle between “we” and “I” (the social and the self) within the broader New Left (for example, see Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film, Memorias del Subdesarrollo/Memories of Underdevelopment). Solanas and Getino 1969 represents the foundational manifesto of Third Cinema, which called for film to participate in revolutionary struggles. While an exhaustive historical study of Third Cinema remains lacking, Martin 1997 contains key writings produced by the leading militants of Third Cinema and Cinema Novo. Del Sarto 2005 critically compares Third Cinema and the Brazilian Cinema Novo to discern key political differences. Moving to literature, Franco 2002 offers the major work on Latin American literary intellectuals and artists during and after the Cold War.

Agustín, José. La contracultura en México: La historia y el significado de los rebeldes sin causa, los jipitecas, los punks y las bandas. Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1996.
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A wide-ranging, sensitive study on Mexican countercultural youth identities related primarily to different forms of rock music from the late 1950s to the 1980s. Focuses on the history of a broad range of countercultural identities, from the pachucos to los punks that emerged during the 1980s. Useful for undergraduate students who possess Spanish-language skills.
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del Sarto, Ana. “Cinema Novo and New/Third Cinema Revisited: Aesthetics, Culture, and Politics.” Chasqui 34.1 (2005): 78–89.
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A critical comparison of Brazilian Cinema Novo and Argentine New/Third Cinema that analyzes the differences and commonalities shared by the cinematic waves in political, aesthetic, and cultural terms. Emphasizes how national contexts fundamentally shaped Cinema Novo and New/Third Cinema despite the articulation of leftist ideas possessing hemispheric horizons. Valuable critical analysis of the internally complex “nationalisms” espoused by New Left guerrillas and artists.
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Dunn, Christopher. Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
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Ambitious, rich, and pioneering study on the emergence of tropicália—an eclectic, carnivalesque mix of Brazilian pop music, rock, avant-garde music, and traditional Brazilian music—as a countercultural movement that greatly influenced Brazilian music, cinema, and theater in the late 1960s. Written in accessible manner and good for undergraduate and advanced scholars.
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Franco, Jean. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
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Focusing on the role of Latin American intellectuals, the study charts a cultural history of the region during the Cold War. Explores US and Soviet clandestine efforts to define values and ideas in Latin American cultural productions. Ultimately, the “cultural revolution” in Latin America was produced not by armed struggle but by the onset of neoliberal capitalism and commodification of culture.
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Martin, Michael T. New Latin American Cinema. Vol. 1, Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.
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An important contribution to one aspect of the Latin American New Left largely unexplored by historians: cinema. Contains valuable primary sources from (and interviews with) leading filmmakers of New Latin American Cinema, including Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (Third Cinema/Cine Liberación), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Cuban Third Cinema), and Glauber Rocha (Cinema Novo). Its primary-source section is ideal for undergraduate students.
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Moore, Robin. Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
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Essential history of Cuban music from the 1950s to the contemporary era. Examines the major genres of music since the 1950s and provides valuable information on musicians’ organizations and their dealings with state institutions. Fascinating discussions on how the socialist Cuban state confronted and negotiated with emergent genres of music such as Nueva Trova and salsa.
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Reyes Matta, Fernando. “The ‘New Song’ and its Confrontation in Latin America.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
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Looks at the New Song movement as part of an alternate, popular (and confrontational-revolutionary) Latin American culture that is at once transnational and local but also enjoys widespread popular support—despite its exclusion from the commodity circuitry of transnational capitalism. Views New Song as a fluid cultural product capable of forging a transnational Latin American culture.
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Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. “Hacia un tercer cinema.” Tricontinental 13 (1969).
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Foundational and theoretical manifesto that called for the formation of a revolutionary Third Cinema in Latin America (written after they finished their masterpiece film, La hora de los hornos). Suggested the productive and revolutionary role radical film could play in political struggles that confronted repressive regimes. Film, they argued, could play an integral role in the process of political resistance and liberation.
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Zolov, Eric. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
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A pioneering, innovative history of rock music and its development into an oppositional, countercultural force against the patriarchal “Revolutionary Family” of the PRI regime by the late 1960s. Deploys a creative approach in understanding rock as a transnational musical form amenable to reinterpretation at the national level while subject to capitalist consumption practices. Good for advanced undergraduates and scholars.
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Armed (Guerrilla) New Left

US academic studies on guerrilla movements exploded during the 1960s, propelled by the Cuban Revolution, the Vietnam War, and the emergence of anticolonial, national liberation movements throughout the so-called Third World. Yet the vast majority of academic studies focused on Vietnam. Latin American guerrillas remained consigned to the field of journalism and military studies (see Wickham-Crowley 1992). Many of these early works were framed within an anti-Communist political framework fundamentally motivated by the need to prevent future guerrilla insurgencies that threatened US interests (for example, see Horowitz, et al. 1969). Gott 2008 is a critical early exception. Studies and personal testimonies produced in the 1980s and 1990s, as persuasively argued in Beverley 2009, generally viewed Cold War guerrilla movements as erroneous and cast in disillusioned “coming of age narratives” that viewed armed struggle as an adolescent, reflexive outburst. Gross 1995 implicitly articulates a version of that thesis while claiming to provide “no analysis.” In contrast, some recent works tend to adopt a historical approach that views the emergence of guerrilla movements as one phase of a broader social struggle in which state repression potentially initiates processes of radicalization that may lead to violent insurgencies. Melgar Boa 2006 offers an innovative and incisive analysis of the armed New Left’s adoption of political violence and its mythological symbols of death and rebirth. Wickham-Crowley 1992 represents the key work that comparatively analyzes why Cold War guerrilla organizations emerged (and why so few were victorious in taking state power). As outlined in Wickham-Crowley 1992, Cold War guerrilla movements are usually categorized by “waves”: the 1959 Cuban Revolution serves as the referent for “first wave” movements, while the 1979 Sandinista Revolution fulfills a similar function for “second wave” movements. Yet such categorization exaggerates the transnational impact of the Cuban Revolution to the detriment of analyzing local and national factors. Thus, I have divided this section according to the primary geographical arena of struggle adopted by different guerrilla organizations: urban or rural. (A few organizations, such as the FALN in Venezuela, attempted to bridge the rural-urban divide.) The “waves” categorization also fails to account for groups that bridge both “waves” or simply fail to occupy a strictly defined place within the heuristic framework—a situation that vividly applies to both Colombia and Peru.

Beverley, John. “Rethinking the Armed Struggle in Latin America.” Boundary 2 36.1 (2009): 47–59.
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An important call for a reassessment of Cold War armed struggle in Latin America that emphasizes not a “melancholia of defeat” but its productive qualities in forging brave, creative, and egalitarian ideals risked in life-and-death struggles. Challenges traditional and ahistorical representations of armed struggle as doomed to defeat from inception and responsible for provoking massive state terror.
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Gott, Richard. Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. Calcutta: Seagull, 2008.
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Originally published in 1970 (London: Nelson). Classic, comprehensive text on rural guerrilla movements in Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela. Casts a critical look at the emergence of rural guerrillas (in part attributed to factionalism and ideological sectarianism within the Old Left) and their failure to take power. The generous inclusion of primary documents—guerrilla manifestoes and writings—makes this work a valuable and accessible resource for undergraduate scholars.
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Gross, Liza. Handbook of Leftist Guerrilla Groups in Latin America and the Caribbean. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995.
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A valuable reference book that includes information on Latin American guerrilla organizations since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Provides succinct details on guerrilla organizations from almost every Latin American and Caribbean nation: on leadership, tactics, ideological orientation, and history of operation. Good for undergraduate and advanced scholars conducting research on Latin American guerrilla organizations.
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Horowitz, Irving Louis, Josué de Castro, and John Gerassi. Latin American Radicalism: A Documentary Report on Left and Nationalist Movements. New York: Random House, 1969.
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A collection of primary documents related to various aspects of Latin American “radicalism” as manifested in the categories of economics and politics. Includes writings by Fidel Castro, Regis Debray, Eduardo Frei, Che Guevara, and Camilo Torres. Interestingly, the book also provides representative essays by the most prominent of Latin American economists during the 1950s and 1960s (Raúl Prebisch and Rodolfo Stavenhagen, for example).
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Melgar Boa, Ricardo. “La memoria sumergida. Martirologio y sacralización de la violencia en las guerrillas latinoamericanas.” In Movimientos armados en México, siglo xx. Vol. 1. Edited by Verónica Oikión Solano and Marta Eugenia García Ugarte, 29-67. Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán/CIESAS, 2006.
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A wide-ranging theoretical work that explores the ritualized (and carnivalesque) glorification of violence, martyrdom, and death by New Left guerrilla movements. Based on a broad sample of interviews with individual guerrillas from across the region. An important and unique work that looks at the cultural-symbolic worlds of guerrilla groups. Provides a broad definition of the Latin American New Left that includes an armed guerrilla wing and a cultural wing “not seduced by the guerrilla path.”
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Wickham-Crowley, Timothy. Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
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A comparative historical and sociological treatment of Latin American guerrilla groups, both rural and urban, from 1956 to the 1980s. The question of why only Cuba and Nicaragua experienced successful revolution prompts the study to elucidate various factors that contribute to victorious revolutions. The broad scope of the study makes it ideal for undergraduate and graduate students.
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Rural Guerrillas

Firsthand accounts and journalistic works dominated the early works on rural guerrilla movements beginning with the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Guevara 2006 provides the classic witness-participant description of the Cuban Revolution. For Peruvian movements of the mid-1960s, Béjar 1970 provides the experiences of a guerrilla leader. The success of the Fidel Castro–led “barbudos” subsequently cast the Caribbean revolution as a limited, contingent source of indirect inspiration for the emerging continental armed New Left. For US counterinsurgency experts, Latin American governments, and some scholars, Cuba became the material and ideological nexus for any type of rural guerrilla movement (or “subversion” in counterinsurgency speak). De Lamberg 1971, for instance, provides an early, useful annotated bibliography on guerrilla movements she collectively described as “Castroist.” Campbell 1973 takes a different approach in a valuable historiographical account of Peruvian guerrillas situated within a longer history of national radical movements. New works on Mexico—long neglected in accounts of Cold War guerrilla struggles until the 1994 EZLN uprising stimulated new research—focus on the impact of state repression and terror in radicalizing previously reformist popular movements into armed insurgencies. Bellingeri 2003 represents one of the first academic studies to use recently declassified state documents to outline Mexican guerrilla movements after 1940. An essential, richly edited collection, Oikión Solano and García Ugarte 2006 compiles exciting research produced by both academics and ex-guerrilla militants. Padilla 2008 marks the definitive, innovative study of the Jaramillista movement in the state of Morelos and spurred research beyond the 1940 threshold for Mexican history. Aviña 2009 offers a similar regional history of rural guerrilla insurgencies in the Guerrero state. An excellent general overview of Mexican guerrilla movements is Castellanos 2007.

Aviña, Alexander. “Insurgent Guerrero: Genaro Vázquez, Lucio Cabañas, and the Guerrilla Challenge to the Postrevolutionary Mexican State, 1960–1996.” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2009.
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Chronicles two important rural guerrilla movements in post-1940 Mexico: National Revolutionary Civic Association (ACNR) and Party of the Poor (PDLP). Both groups emerged in the state of Guerrero from long histories of boss politics, economic exploitation, and a 1960s conjuncture characterized by state terror. Demonstrates how Old and New Left politics and tactics contoured ACNR and PDLP guerrilla imaginaries.
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Béjar, Héctor. Peru 1965: Notes on a Guerrilla Experience. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.
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A firsthand account of the Peruvian Army of National Liberation’s (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN) attempt to foment revolution and seize state power in 1965: the author was an ELN commander. Fascinating discussion on why the author broke from the Peruvian Communist Party in the 1950s and opted to organize a rural guerrilla organization. Good for undergraduate scholars.
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Bellingeri, Marco. Del agrarismo armado a la guerra de los pobres: Ensayos de guerrilla rural en el México contemporáneo, 1940–1974. Mexico City: Casa Juan Pablos–Secretaría de Cultura del Gobierno del DF, 2003.
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An academic starting point for the study of post-1940 rural guerrillas in Mexico. One of the first historical studies to use recently declassified state intelligence records. Covers the development of rural guerrillas, beginning with Rubén Jaramillo’s groups in Morelos during the 1940s and ending with Lucio Cabañas’s Party of the Poor in the mid-1970s. Important contribution to an understudied section of modern Mexican history.
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Campbell, Leon. “The Historiography of the Peruvian Guerrilla Movement, 1960–1965.” Latin American Research Review 8.1 (1973): 45–70.
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A dated yet valuable historiographical essay on an understudied component of the Latin American guerrilla New Left: Peruvian guerrillas (e.g., ELN and MIR) that predated the emergence of the Shining Path in 1979–1980. Critically situates Peruvian guerrillas within a longer history of vibrant leftist-popular political struggle.
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Castellanos, Laura. México armado, 1943–1981. Mexico City: Era, 2007.
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Broad historical overview of Mexican guerrilla groups by a veteran investigator (and journalist) of armed popular movements. Covers rural guerrilla movements in the states of Morelos, Chihuahua, and Guerrero. Also includes sections on urban guerrilla groups and on the Dirty War waged by the Mexican state against armed groups. An accessible work good for undergraduate scholars with Spanish-language skills (and a valuable reference book for advanced scholars).
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de Lamberg, Vera B. “La guerrilla castrista en América Latina: Bibliografía Selecta, 1960–1970.” Foro Internacional 12.1 (1971): 95–111.
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A useful yet dated bibliographic survey on Latin American guerrilla organizations, organized by country. Assumes that the guerrilla groups surveyed all possessed tactics and political ideologies mimetic of the Cuban Revolution (or just Fidel Castro). Contains important Spanish-language works on guerrilla groups.
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Guevara, Che. Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War. Melbourne, Australia: Ocean, 2006.
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Classic work on the Cuban Revolution written by prominent participant Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Also an autobiographical account of how the Argentine doctor transformed himself into the “heroic guerrilla” in the course of struggle against the Batista regime: it was a physical, mental, and political transformation. Provides key insight into the everyday unfolding of the revolution against the Batista regime.
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Oikión Solano, Verónica, and Marta Eugenia García Ugarte, eds. Movimientos armados en México, siglo xx. Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán/CIESAS, 2006.
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A foundational edited volume that combines the scholarly efforts of academics and ex-guerrilla militants. Comprehensive collection of studies on 20th-century Mexican armed movements and guerrilla organizations. Focuses mainly on the most-significant rural and urban guerrillas that emerged after 1940 up to the 1970s. Also includes important essays on the Mexican Army and its counter-guerrilla strategy. A valuable work for post-1940 Mexican history.
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Padilla, Tanalís. Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of Pax Priísta, 1940–1962. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
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A pioneering study in the field of post-1940 Mexican history that chronicles the rural popular movements (alternating between rural guerrilla warfare and electoral politics) led by ex-Zapatista Rubén Jaramillo in the state of Morelos. Demonstrates how repression, economic exploitation, and political authoritarianism combined to produce rural guerrilla movements that bridged the Mexican Old and New Lefts. Good for undergraduate and advanced scholars.
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Urban Guerrillas and Armed Resistance

With the failure of numerous rural guerrilla movements by the late 1960s, the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967, and the relatively successful rise of the Uruguayan Tupamaro guerrillas, scholars began to focus on the emergence of urban guerrilla movements. Many of these early works intervened in theoretical (at times polemical) arguments regarding the failure of the rural guerrilla model within a rapidly urbanizing Latin American setting. Others highlighted the military and tactical aspects of urban guerrilla warfare. Russell 1974 offers an early, incisive introduction to the debates surrounding Latin American urban guerrilla movements and a useful bibliography (with valuable Spanish-language sources). Kohl and Litt 1974 includes valuable primary documents produced by urban guerrillas in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Subsequent studies tend to focus on Argentina and Uruguay, rightfully so for the latter considering the longevity and popular support obtained by the Tupamaros. Moyano 1995 represents the most exhaustive English-language study of Argentine urban guerrilla organizations. In contrast, the focus on Argentine guerrillas as violent and “psychotic” in Lewis 2002 makes the study more a polemic than historical work. Rey Tristán 2005 is the definitive academic work on the Tupamaros, contextualizing the urban guerrilla organization within a Uruguayan constellation of political activism, radicalism, and other armed organizations. Other studies shift the focus to other Latin American contexts and in the process fill gaps in research. Sweig 2004 convincingly demonstrates the determinant role played by the urban underground organizations in the Cuban Revolution, hence undermining the rural mythology of the revolution. Nercesian 2005 outlines the major armed organizations that emerged in Brazil during the 1960s. García Naranjo 1997 chronicles the history of the Chilean MIR. Overall, this field is ripe for new research, considering the significant participation of urban guerrillas in countries such as Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela.

García Naranjo, Franciso. Historias derrotadas: Opción y obstinación de la guerrilla chilena (1965–1988). Michoacán, Mexico: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicólas de Hidalgo, 1997.
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Details the history of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) in Chile that emerged during the mid-1960s, which tensely collaborated with Allende and the Popular Unity coalition and succeeded in infiltrating select units of the Chilean military that prepared to launch a coup in 1973. Valuable study on the MIR that also chronicles the heavy repression the organization suffered during the Pinochet dictatorship.
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Kohl, James, and John Litt, eds. Urban Guerrilla Warfare in Latin America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974.
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Primarily a collection of primary readings associated with urban guerrilla warfare in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay—combined with brief introductory essays for each section and a list of urban guerrilla organizations for each country. Useful for undergraduate scholars and courses.
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Lewis, Paul. Guerrillas and Generals: The Dirty War in Argentina. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
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Historical study of the Argentine Dirty War. Documents guerrilla organizations that first appeared in the late 1950s. Presents guerrillas and the military generals that seized power in 1976 (and waged state terror against civil society) as equally ruthless counterparts, thereby deploying the “Two Devils” thesis that equates the radical Right and radical Left—a thesis contradicted by historical record and chronology.
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Moyano, María José. Argentina’s Lost Patrol: Armed Struggle, 1969–1979. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
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The most complete historical study of Cold War Argentine guerrilla movements. Convincingly demonstrates how state and paramilitary terror radicalized large numbers of youth to organize guerrilla organizations. Also explains how internal factors—extreme militarism, dogmatic rejection of potential alliances with nonarmed political groups, for example—led to the guerrillas’ demise. Good for undergraduate and advanced scholars.
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Nercesian, Inés. “Una aproximación a la izquierda brasileña de los años sesenta: Partidos y organizaciones armadas.” Revista Electrónica de Estudios Latinoamericanos 3.10 (2005): 27–40.
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Traces the historical emergence and fragmentation of the Brazilian Left, including the urban guerrillas that emerged during the late 1960s. Posits the 1964 coup d’état launched by the military as a moment of rupture that signaled the need for the Brazilian left wing to assume new tactical and political perspectives—one of which resulted in urban guerrilla warfare. Valuable introductory essay to an understudied history text.
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Rey Tristán, Eduardo. La izquierda revolucionaria uruguaya, 1955–1973. Seville, Spain: CSIC/Universidad de Sevilla, 2005.
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The most complete and well-researched historical study of the Uruguayan guerrilla New Left, focusing on both the MLN-Tupamaros and the insurrectionist Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAI). Extensive analysis of the groups’ historical emergence, political-ideological orientations, adoption of armed strategies, and choice of tactics. Also includes sections on minor guerrilla organizations and explores guerrilla mass (popular) organization links. A major historiographical contribution.
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Russell, Charles A. “The Urban Guerrilla in Latin America: A Select Bibliography.” Latin American Research Review 9.1 (1974): 37–79.
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An important and extensive (though dated) annotated bibliography organized thematically and by country. Contains a useful introduction that analyzes the shift in Latin America after the death of Che Guevara in 1967 from rural to urban warfare by guerrilla organizations. The “urban guerrilla by country” section is both extensive and detailed. A valuable reference guide for undergraduate and advanced scholars doing research on Latin American guerrilla groups.
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Sweig, Julia. Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
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The first extensive history of the urban wing of the July 26th movement—a history that undermines the myth of the Cuban Revolution as a solely rural guerrilla affair. Focuses on the urban movement’s attempts to wage insurrection. Reveals the important roles played by urban leaders such as Frank País and Armando Hart. Good for undergraduate courses and advanced scholars.
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Colombia

The historical emergence of armed guerrilla struggle in Colombia follows a unique trajectory in contrast to the rest of Latin America. First, the political violence that characterized the country during La Violencia of the late 1940s to the early 1960s emerged from within the framework of a political democracy dominated historically by two political parties and not a military dictatorship. Second, the appearance of rural guerrillas in 1964 with the creation of the FARC owed more to the rural paramilitary violence unleashed by La Violencia than to the Cuban Revolution—as Brittain 2010 demonstrates in his exhaustive (though somewhat partisan) study of the FARC. Moreover, in the creation of the FARC, the Colombian Communist Party participated prominently. The ELN, while directly influenced by Cuba with its integration of Colombian students who studied in that island nation, also displayed stronger political roots in liberation theology. Indeed, the priest Camilo Torres fought and died for the ELN, while the group’s leader was the defrocked Spanish priest Manuel Pérez. And finally, both the FARC and ELN continue to exist even into the early 21st century. The presence of other rural-urban groups from the late 1960s to 1980s, including the Maoist Army of Popular Liberation (EPL) and the April 19th Movement (M-19), further disrupts the first-wave/second-wave categorization of Latin American guerrilla organizations. The most-important academic works on the Colombian guerrillas and the nonarmed Left have been published in Colombia. Prominent labor historian Mauricio Archila Neira provides a valuable account of social protest in the last half of the 20th century in Archila Neira 2005. Archila Neira, et al. 2009 represents the key work on the Colombian Left during the Cold War. Pizarro Leongómez 1991 and Pizarro Leongómez 1996 constitute key histories and sociological analyses of the FARC. Molano 1992 demonstrates why frontier settlers in south-central Colombia comprised the social base of the FARC. Brittain 2010 represents a recent key work in English on the FARC. A recent dissertation, Karl 2009, focuses on the key years during which both the FARC and ELN emerged. Finally, the intersection of gender and revolutionary militancy emerges vividly in autobiographical fashion in Vázquez Perdomo 2005.

Archila Neira, Mauricio. Idas y venidas, vueltas y revueltas: Protestas sociales en Colombia, 1958–1990. Bogotá, Colombia: Instituto Colombiano de Antropolog de Historia/CINEP, 2005.
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Wide-ranging study of social protest and protest modalities in Colombia from 1958 to 1990. Explores the types of demands articulated by a range of different social actors and traces the emergence of new gender and indigenous social identities. Conceptualizes such forms of social protest and social identities as part of a broader Colombian Left.
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Archila Neira, Mauricio, Jorge Cote, Álvaro Delgado, Martha Cecilia García, Patricia Madarriaga, and Oscar Humberto Pedraza. Una historia inconclusa: Izquierdas políticas y sociales en Colombia. Bogotá, Colombia: CINEP, 2009.
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Indispensable text that comprehensively and critically analyzes both the Old and New Left and a multitude of political radicalisms from 1958 to 2006. Includes sections on the Colombian Communist Party, socialists, the influence of Maoism and Trotskyism, labor unions, and emergent indigenous, women’s, and student movements. Excellent contributions on the guerrilla organizations ELN and M-19. For advanced scholars.
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Brittain, James J. Revolutionary Social Change in Colombia: The Origin and Direction of the FARC-EP. London: Pluto, 2010.
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A complete, comprehensive, and academic historical study of the FARC. Contextualizes the guerrilla organization’s emergence within a history characterized by political violence and economic injustice and inequity in the Colombian countryside; also explains its continued existence after five decades of struggle. Well researched and documented, the study analyzes the FARC as an armed social and political movement.
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Karl, Robert Alexander. “State Formation, Violence and Cold War in Colombia, 1957–1966.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2009.
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Pioneering work that pays specific attention to US involvement in Colombia, through the Alliance for Progress and sharing of counterinsurgency knowledge that managed to end La Violencia—while setting the foundations for a longer struggle.
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Molano, Alfredo. “Violence and Land Colonization.” In Violence in Colombia: The Contemporary Crisis in Historical Perspective. Edited by Charles Bergquist, Ricardo Peñaranda, and Gonzalo Sánchez, 195–216. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1992.
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Contexuatizes a bastion of rural popular support for the FARC within a longer history of land colonization, frontier settlers, and land dispossession. Argues that frontier settlers in Meta and Caqueta during the 1960s and 1970s proved receptive to the FARC in the face of land loss to ranchers and commercial agriculture estates. Key text for understanding the FARC’s social base.
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Pécaut, Daniel. Las FARC: Una guerrilla sin fin o fines? Bogotá, Colombia: Groupo Editorial Norma, 2008.
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First published in France, this Spanish translation examines the history of the FARC and provides critical commentary intended to stimulate a resolution to the ongoing military conflict between the organization and the Colombian state. Provides excellent analysis on the FARC’s evolving relationship with its rural base of support from its inception to the 21st century.
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Pizarro Leongómez, Eduardo. Las FARC (1949–1966): De la autodefensa a la combinación de todas las formas de lucha. Bogotá, Colombia: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1991.
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One of the first scholarly treatments of the FARC that focuses on its development as a politico-military guerrilla organization in 1966 from an earlier armed self-defense phase that originated during La Violencia. Combines historical and sociological perspectives to understand why the FARC adopted a politico-military strategy that embraced a combination of “all forms of struggle.”
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Pizarro Leongómez, Eduardo. Insurgencia sin revolución: La guerrilla en Colombia en una perspectiva comparada. Bogotá, Colombia: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1996.
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An ambitious sociological and theoretical analysis of revolution and guerrilla insurgencies that explores the unique manifestations of both factors in post-1949 Colombia. While the country experienced a seemingly anachronistic explosion of first-wave and second-wave guerrilla activity during the 1980s, the author argues that their failure to take power resulted in a state of chronic insurgency.
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Vázquez Perdomo, Maria Eugenia. My Life as a Revolutionary: Reflections of a Former Guerrillera. Translated by Lorena Terando. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005.
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An important memoir written by a former M-19 guerrilla. Provides insight into the participation of women in guerrilla organizations: specifically, how such participation led to the disruption of traditional gender norms while simultaneously fortifying others. A valuable resource for undergraduate students.
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Peru and the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso)

Like the groups in Colombia, the Peruvian Shining Path disrupts the guerrilla wave categorization described in detail above. The group’s use of systematic terror against peasants and rural populations unwilling to support their insurgency also distinguished Shining Path from the vast majority of Latin American guerrilla organizations. Since 1980 this Maoist organization has inspired a considerably large number of important studies. The extent of research on the Shining Path is perhaps rivaled only by the literature on the Chiapan Zapatistas (EZLN). Initial studies tended to romanticize the organization, prompting a forceful critique of the political-ideological presuppositions that underscored the early literature produced by US scholars in Poole and Rénique 1991. A first generation of Peruvian studies, the most prominent including Degregori 1989 and Degregori 1990, combined personal experience and serious research to severely question earlier assessments of the Shining Path as a peasant rebellion or Andean millenarian movement. Gorriti 1999 (originally published in Spanish in 1990) also represents an important text within that first generation. Recent scholarship, enabled by the end of the civil war in Peru and oral history, tends to provide a more accurate and even-handed portrayal of the Shining Path. They also contextualize the group within a longer history of radical politics, organizations, and social conflict. The essays in Stern 1998 represent a key initial effort in historically understanding the Shining Path as more than an “enigma.” Regional studies also elucidate the historical factors that gave rise to the insurgency and initially enabled the group to obtain rural popular support. Seligmann 1995 posits the failure of agrarian reform during the Velasco regime in a Cuzco district as a key explanatory factor for the later rise of the Shining Path. Taylor 2006 focuses on the northern Peruvian highlands as an initial base of support that resisted the Shining Path guerrillas. Heilman 2010 takes a longue durée approach to understanding the Shining Path within a broader history of radical politics in the region of Ayacucho. Rénique 2004 offers a fascinating look at the organization’s use of prisons containing Shining Path militants as a site of political struggle.

Degregori, Carlos Iván. Qué Difícil es ser Dios: Ideología y violencia política en Sendero Luminoso. Lima, Peru: El zorro de abajo ediciones, 1989.
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An important early work on the Shining Path. Presents the thesis that provincial students beginning university studies in Ayacucho fell under the seduction of a “scientifically true” Marxism-Leninism espoused by the Shining Path. The guerrilla organization also offered a pathway for the students to attain social mobility in a future Shining Path–controlled state.
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Degregori, Carlos Iván. Ayacucho 1969–1979: El surgimiento de Sendero Luminoso. Lima, Peru: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1990.
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Key contribution to understanding the historical development of the Shining Path in Ayacucho. Traces structural factors (poverty, migration, decline of landed elite, for example) and internal political divisions within the Peruvian Left caused by the Sino-Soviet split to explain the rise of this guerrilla organization. The struggle over education—in particular the cost for poorer students—constituted another important factor.
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Gorriti, Gustavo. The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
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Published years earlier in Spanish, this important work chronicles the first years of the Shining Path insurgency during the early 1980s. Focuses on Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmae, the Shining Path’s use of mass violence, and its political culture. Written in a journalistic style, this work represents a valuable introductory resource for undergraduate students.
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Heilman, Jaymie Patricia. Before the Shining Path: Politics in Rural Ayacucho, 1895–1980. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
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Valuable contribution that demystifies the Shining Path by historicizing its violent brand of revolutionary politics within a longer history of Peruvian radical political movements. Focuses on Ayacucho and traces radical movements from the late 19th century to 1980. Also explores local divisions within Ayacucho to discern why certain communities chose to support or resist the Shining Path. Good for undergraduates and advanced scholars.
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Poole, Deborah, and Gerardo Rénique. “The New Chroniclers of Peru: US Scholars and their ‘Shining Path’ of Peasant Resistance.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 10.2 (1991): 133–191.
DOI: 10.2307/3338175Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A critical review of early US literature on the Shining Path. Argues that such literature generally exaggerated the level of peasant support for the Shining Path, neglected other significant leftist popular movements, and lacked a comprehensive base of evidence. A necessary introduction to the historiography of the Shining Path.
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Rénique, José Luis. La Voluntad Encarcelada: Las “Luminosas Trincheras de Combate” del Sendero Luminoso. Lima, Peru: SUR/IEP, CEPES, 2004.
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A novel approach to the Shining Path by focusing on its strategy of using prisons as another battle “front” in the struggle against capitalism and the state. Provides a succinct history of the guerrilla organization while contextualizing it within a longer history of Andean political radicalism. A valuable text for undergraduate students and teachers.
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Seligmann, Linda J. Between Reform and Revolution: Political Struggle in the Peruvian Andes, 1969–1991. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
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Innovative anthropological study that posits the failure of agrarian reform under the regime of General Juan Velasco (1968–1975) as directly contributing to the subsequent Shining Path insurgency. The failure of the state and local leaders to deliver agrarian promises prepared the terrain for Shining Path “recruiters.” A district-level analysis permits the highlighting of divisions within communities in Huanoquite.
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Stern, Steve J., ed. Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
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An edited volume that represents a comprehensive effort to understand the Shining Path and contemporary Peruvian history. Essays collectively move beyond facile demonization of the organization. An attempt is made to understand how this movement procured popular support, despite Shining Path militants’ use of violence and terror against peasant communities, and how these militants nearly toppled the Peruvian state.
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Taylor, Lewis. Shining Path: Guerrilla War in Peru’s Northern Highlands, 1980–1997. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2006.
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A regional look at the Shining Path that focuses on the group’s front in the northern Peruvian highlands. An extensive, well-researched history that explores how the guerrilla organization was able to obtain, and later repel, popular support in the mountains of the Peruvian north. Provides a telling historical analysis of internal factors that undermined the Shining Path in the north.
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Central America

Nicaragua and the Sandinista Revolution serve as the historical-ideological referent for second-wave guerrilla organizations, partly because they represent the revolutionary model generally utilized by groups in other Central American nations. The Sandinistas represented a negotiated conglomerate of differing political tendencies within one insurgent guerrilla group: they also possessed long histories of resistance, fused rural and urban settings to create a truly national revolution, and included women in combat and leadership positions. In addition, liberation theology played key ideological, political, and organizational roles in the struggle. With important exceptions, groups such as the FMLN in El Salvador and the Guatemalan URNG displayed characteristics similar to those of the Sandinistas. Yet, in contrast to other revolutions of the region, the Sandinistas achieved military and political victory in 1979. The Sandinista Revolution thus occupies the most prominent position within the historiography on Central American revolutions. For an important introductory overview on the origins of the Nicaraguan Revolution, including the role played by the US government in contributing to the Sandinista movement, Cabezas 1985 provides an autobiographical account of the revolution. More recently, Zimmermann 2000 focuses on one of the founders of the Sandinistas, Carlos Fonseca, and traces the decades-long political development of both Fonseca and the revolution. A longer history of 20th-century peasant protest and politics up to 1979 is found in Gould 1990. Horton 1998 provides a different key perspective, focusing on northern peasants who turned against the Sandinistas to support the infamous Contras. For El Salvador, Wood 2003 presents an innovative revisionist argument on the nonmaterialist factors that lead to peasant revolution. A broader historical perspective of the Salvadoran conflict is found in Kincaid 1987. Chávez 2010 represents the key contribution to understanding the rural-urban historical dynamics of the FMLN guerrilla struggle. The history of the civil war in Guatemala has recently become an ideological battleground. The controversial thesis expounded in Stoll 1993—along with his later attacks on Rigoberta Menchú—spurred debates regarding peasant politics and radicalization, the role of the left-wing guerrillas within the broader Latin American Left, and violence more generally. Le Bot 1995 offers an important, judicious study on guerrilla-Mayan relationships in the Guatemalan highlands.

Cabezas, Omar. Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista. New York: New American Library, 1985.
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An autobiography by a Sandinista leader that describes his development from university student to guerrilla fighter during the 1970s as a masculine coming-of-age story. Provides interesting details on Sandinista efforts during the mid-1970s to recruit peasant support for the revolution. Good for undergraduate students, particularly if paired with Randall 1981 (see Gender, Sexuality, and the New Left).
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Chávez, Joaquín. “The Pedagogy of Revolution: Popular Intellectuals and the Origins of the Salvadoran Insurgency, 1960–1980.” PhD diss., New York University, 2010.
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An important (and much-needed) popular history of the origins of the Salvadoran guerrilla insurgencies during the 1980s and early 1990s. Traces the decades-long interactions and exchanges between peasant leaders and urban intellectuals—the two social groups heavily persecuted by the ruling military regimes and subsequently radicalized—that later helped solidify a rural-urban alliance during the guerrilla insurgency.
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Gould, Jeffrey L. To Lead As Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
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A major history of peasant protest and popular politics in northwestern Nicaragua that facilitates an understanding of how Sandinistas procured peasant support. Key sections on the 1970s highlight the processes of political negotiation between Sandinistas and peasant communities and organizations that possessed a long history (and memory) of political mobilization.
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Horton, Lynn. Peasants in Arms: War and Peace in the Mountains of Nicaragua, 1979–1994. Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1998.
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Explores the role played by northern anti-FSLN peasants in the Contras insurgency against the Sandinista government. Focuses on the mountainous northern municipality of Quilalí to understand why this region became a stronghold of Contra activity only a few years after supporting the initial Sandinista revolt against the Somoza dictatorship. An important study that delves beneath traditional assessments of rank-and-file Contras.
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Kincaid, Douglas A. “Peasants in Rebels: Community and Class in Rural El Salvador.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29.3 (1987): 466–494.
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417500014687Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A comparative analysis of three episodes of mass peasant revolution in El Salvador—the Nonualco Rebellion of 1833, the Communist uprising of 1932, and the FMLN insurgency of the 1960s–1980s—that explores the role (or nonrole) of community solidarity as a trigger of peasant revolution. Argues that revolutionary mobilization fundamentally depended upon preexisting networks of community solidarity in all three historical case studies.
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Le Bot, Yvon. La guerra en las tierras mayas: Comunidad, violencia y modernidad en Guatemala (1970–1992). Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995.
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An important study of the Guatemalan civil war that takes a critical look at the relationship between highland indigenous communities and the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP). Analyzes the conflicted and failed relationship between competing ideologies in the highlands: Marxism-Leninism, liberation theology, and Mayan cosmovision. Also chronicles the brutal counterinsurgency waged against Mayan communities by the Guatemalan military from 1981 to 1984.
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Stoll, David. Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
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Regional study of the Guatemalan civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. Argues that Mayan peasants in Ixil communities found themselves “between two fires”: the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and the Guatemalan military. Controversially contends that peasant support for the EGP proved coerced and fleeting—a reaction to the terror unleashed by the Guatemalan military.
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Wood, Elisabeth Jean. Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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Fascinating study on Salvadoran peasants who chose to support the guerrilla FMLN (and those who did not). Argues that peasant support for the FMLN largely emanated from intangible sources: the politics of dignity, outrage, respect, honor, and defiance (for example). Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the town of Tenancingo and the Usulután province.
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Zimmermann, Matilde. Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
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The strongest political biography of Carlos Fonseca, founder and ideologue of the Frente Sandinista, which emerged victorious during the 1979 overthrow of longtime dictator Anastasio Somoza. Traces Fonseca’s radicalization as an anti-Somoza high school student, to a militant of the pro-Moscow Nicaraguan Socialist Party, and finally as prominent participant of two failed guerrilla insurrections during the 1960s. Good for undergraduate courses and scholars.
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Gender, Sexuality, and the New Left

Some early works on gender focused on the participation of women in revolutions. The extensive and very public participation of women guerrillas in second-wave revolutions—particularly in Central America—prompted a series of important studies. Randall 1981, with its vivid oral histories of Sandinista women, represents a classic work in the field. Reif 1986 presents an early comparative study of women’s participation in revolutions in five countries. Kampwirth 2002 follows with a comparative approach that yields rich information on why women participated in revolutionary movements. In different methodological fashion, Rodríguez 1996 investigates the formation of gender and sexual norms within the cultural imaginaries of insurgent guerrilla movements. An emerging group of studies takes gender and sexuality as “entry points” (see Zolov 2008 in General Overviews) for new histories of the Latin American New Left. These studies also demonstrate how the forms of New Left challenges (armed and nonarmed) and the political and cultural structures of domination they sought to overthrow displayed specific gender and sexuality ideological constructs. New studies of gender, for instance, revealed the persistence of inequalities and repression within broader revolutionary or social movements that posited egalitarianism as a core value. Chase 2010 uncovers such persistent inequality in the Cuban Revolution. Similarly, Frazier and Cohen 2003 analyzes the deep, gendered divide that existed between male leaders and rank-and-file militants in the 1968 Mexican student movement—a divide that persisted in their memories of the struggle. The use of gender and sexuality as analytical categories permits new historical analyses of the “subversive” element as the threat imagined within the National Security Doctrine (NSD) thinking that dominated the authoritarian regimes of Cold War Latin America. Cowan 2007 uses such an approach in his deeply layered analysis of the national security discourses first elaborated in early 1960s Brazil, thus obtaining new insight into the self-defined raison d’être of military and nonmilitary dictatorships. Such “subversive” elements as guerrilla women and student activists represented revolutionary challenges to patriarchal regimes, as innovatively discussed in Langland 2008. Green 2001 posits another such “subversive” element in Brazil: the emerging gay liberation movements. In sum, this subfield of the Latin American New Left represents an exciting direction for new and emerging research.

Chase, Michelle. “A Contradictory Liberation: The Politics of Gender in the Cuban Revolution, 1952–1962.” PhD diss., New York University, 2010.
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An innovative historical interpretation of the Cuban Revolution, using gender as the primary analytic lens. Demonstrates the major role played by women urban militants against the Batista regime from as early as 1952. Chronicles the liberatory limits of the Cuban Revolution and how the mass mobilization of women after 1959 forced the postrevolutionary state to negotiate their support.
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Cowan, Benjamin. “Sex and the Security State: Gender, Sexuality, and ‘Subversion’ at Brazil’s Escola Superior de Guerra, 1964–1985.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16.3 (2007): 459–481.
DOI: 10.1353/sex.2007.0073Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Innovative work that analyzes how military theorists at Brazil’s Higher War College (ESG) defined “national security” and “subversion” in gendered terms that equated the former with masculinist anti-Communism and the latter with sexual “perversion” and “degeneration” that targeted Brazil’s youth. As such, “subversion” in the minds of the ruling military included armed organizations, youth movements, and countercultural practices that collectively threatened national security by corrupting the nation’s youth.
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Frazier, Lessie Jo, and Deborah Cohen. “Defining the Space of Mexico ’68: Heroic Masculinity in the Prison and ‘Women’ in the Streets.” Hispanic American Historical Review 83.4 (2003): 617–660.
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-83-4-617Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
One of the first studies on the 1968 Mexican student movement that uses gender as the main analytical perspective. Reveals the gendered divergence between public memories of 1968 narrated by male movement leaders and the rank-and-file participants—particularly women. Shows how participant women challenged two authoritarianisms: that of the PRI regime and the type that existed in the domestic/household sphere.
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Green, James Naylor “‘Down with Repression: More Love and Desire,’ 1969–1980.” In Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil. By James Naylor Green. Worlds of desire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
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A pioneering contribution to the historical study of masculinity and homosexuality in Latin America. Traces the social histories of gay men in 20th-century Brazil, the methods of social control they continually resisted, and the development of identity categories used to describe male same-sex attraction. Chapter 6 chronicles the emergence of the gay liberation social movement in the midst of dictatorial military rule.
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Kampwirth, Karen. Women and Guerrilla Movements: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Cuba. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.
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Uses gender as the central analytical category to analyze revolutions in Central America, southern Mexico, and the Caribbean. Explains why women joined revolutionary movements and how their prominent participation changed the course and face of those revolutions. Research based on extensive oral histories reveals how “personal factors” (e.g., family networks of resistance) motivated participation. Good for undergraduate and advanced scholars.
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Langland, Victoria. “Birth Control Pills and Molotov Cocktails: Reading Sex and Revolution in 1968 Brazil.” In In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War. Edited by Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser, 308–349. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
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Innovative essay that analyzes how Brazil’s military regime conceptually linked emergent (white, middle-class) feminist and sexual liberation ideas and movements with subversion and international Communism. Such a link led to the brutal repression of female university students who participated in student movements and the “armed underground.” A model for how to understand the sexualized “reading” of radical women activists by authoritarian regimes.
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Randall, Margaret. Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle. Vancouver, BC: New Star, 1981.
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Collection of twelve interviews with leadership and rank-and-file Sandinista women who participated in the revolution. Shows the prominence of Sandinista women in the revolution. Women often assumed roles that transgressed normative gender roles: women became military combatants and military officers, for example. Also provides insight into how the revolution has (or has not) changed traditional gender roles.
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Reif, Linda. “Women in Latin American Guerrilla Movements: A Comparative Perspective.” Comparative Politics 18.2 (1986): 147–169.
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An early, important study on the roles of guerrilla women in Latin American insurgencies, based on five case studies: Cuba, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Uruguay. Highlights the structural and cultural barriers that would seemingly limit the participation of women in revolutionary movements and how guerrilleras overcame such barriers to play prominent insurgent roles.
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Rodríguez, Ileana. Women, Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
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A work of literary criticism that analyzes the role of gender and sexuality in literature produced amidst the broader processes of revolution and national revolution. Interrogates both the hypermasculinist gender ideal that underscores the identity of the “heroic guerrilla” and the place of women. Provides a fascinating discussion on testimonios produced by women as texts capable of engendering intimate links of female solidarity.
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Race, Ethnicity, and the New Left

New studies are emerging that focus on issues of race within the Latin American New Left. Too often, studies replicated New Left discourses that emphasized class and anti-imperialism to the detriment of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Race and ethnicity are usually treated as analytical and identity categories that arose only in the late 1970s and 1980s with a continental resurgence of indigenous movements. Yet Becker 2008, for instance, demonstrates that indigenous movements since the early 1920s in Ecuador developed a social identity that fused class with ethnicity and campesino with indigenous. Rivera Cusicanqui 1987 and Albó 1987 identified a similar process for Bolivia beginning in the 1960s. In contrast, Troyan 2008 demonstrates how rural indigenous communities in violence-wracked Colombia strategically affirmed an ethnic Indian identity to seek an advantage in their dealings with the Colombian state. Both Becker 2008 and Troyan 2008 thus highlight the fluid and historically contingent features of racial identities—features usually disavowed by some New Left organizations and subsequent studies. Revisionist works on post-1950s Cuba and Brazil challenge the myths of racial democracy or egalitarianism. For Cuba, both de la Fuente 2001 and Sawyer 2006 analyze the persistence of racial discrimination in postrevolutionary society while also presenting important instances of progress. De la Fuente 2001 offers a longer history of racial inequality and Afro-Cuban political agency. As a memoir, Moore 2008 offers personal experiences with the failure of the Cuban Revolution to eliminate racism. Hanchard 1998 provides an important study on Afro-Brazilian politics by focusing on the Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU): an organizational attempt to fuse diverse political tendencies within a broader Afro-Brazilian identity during the late 1970s. This study forms part of a broader historiographical (and transnational) field that undermined myths associated with Brazil’s “racial democracy”—scholarly efforts undertaken with great risks (especially by Brazilians) during that country’s military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. Focusing on young Japanese Brazilians in São Paulo, Lesser 2007 demonstrates how they fought to challenge stereotypes through cinema and armed struggle as “ethnic militants” redefining what it meant to be Brazilian.

Albó, Xavier. “From MNRistas to Kataristas to Katari.” In Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries. Edited by Steve Stern, 379–419. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
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Traces the historical development of a simultaneous peasant and Aymara-Quechua social movement during the 1960s and 1970s. With the failure of the 1952 Agrarian Reform and the later consolidation of repressive military regimes, the katarista movement emerged during the early 1970s with a critical political vision that identified capitalism and cultural (mestizaje) homogeneity as roadblocks to popular liberation.
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Becker, Marc. Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
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A study that traces the 20th-century history of strategic alliances between rural indigenous laborers and urban leftist militants. Shows that such alliances continually addressed issues of ethnic identity and gender before the “identity politics” of the 1960s and 1970s. A marked paternalism that characterized leftist intellectuals’ exchanges with indigenous groups in the 1950s led to indigenous groups such as CONAIE, with strictly defined ethnic identities.
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de la Fuente, Alejandro. A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
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A broad, sweeping history of race and nation building in Cuba that reveals the important political roles played by Afro-Cubans and their political creativity—even during moments of violent repression (as in 1912). Afro-Cuban political action and creativity continued after 1959 as the Cuban Revolution failed to eradicate structural racism or racist practices. Chapters 7 and 8 cover the post-1959 era.
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Hanchard, Michael George. Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945–1988. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
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Chronicles the history of the MNU in São Paulo within a broader historical context that questions the failure of Afro-Brazilians to politically challenge racial discrimination. The author cites state repression and the existence of a “racial hegemony” as factors that worked against the organizing of Afro-Brazilian political movements. Argues that the MNU represented such an effort beginning in the late 1970s.
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Lesser, Jeffrey. A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1968–1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
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A fascinating study that explores how young Japanese Brazilians in São Paulo during the 1960s and 1970s sought to “prove” their Brazilian identity. Yet in those very efforts, the author argues, they reified their status as ethnic minorities. Uses Japanese Brazilian participation in film and guerrilla movements as vantage points to explore the interplay between ethnic and national identities.
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Moore, Carlos. Pichón: Race and Revolution in Castro’s Cuba. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2008.
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An autobiographical account that focuses on the centrality of race and racism in Cuban society before and after 1959, as experienced by the son of Jamaican immigrants raised in Cuba. After his family fled Cuba, the author returned in 1961 to participate in the young revolution—only to leave once again after he continually challenged the endurance of racism.
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Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. Oppressed but Not Defeated: Peasant Struggles among the Aymara and Qhechwa in Bolivia, 1900–1980. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1987.
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Originally published in Spanish in 1984, this long history of indigenous peasant movements in Bolivia highlights the importance of historical consciousness and memory in political mobilizations. An indispensable text for understanding the contours of indigenous struggles in 20th-century Bolivia.
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Sawyer, Mark Q. Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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Innovative historical treatment of racial politics in post-1959 Cuba that reveals the persistence of racial inequality alongside instances of progress. For the author, an “inclusionary discrimination” characterizes racial life in postrevolutionary Cuba. Rather than present a linear model to explain racial progress or regression, this study effectively demonstrates a “cyclical” movement shaped by factors such as economic crisis and boom.
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Troyan, Brett. “Ethnic Citizenship in Colombia: The Experience of the Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca in Southwestern Colombia from 1970 to 1990.” Latin American Research Review 43.3 (2008): 166–191.
DOI: 10.1353/lar.0.0046Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Traces the elaboration of an indigenous ethnic citizenship in the Colombian southwest, forged by the Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca (CRCI) as a successful (though limited) attempt to obtain reciprocity from the Colombian state. In a context characterized by the repression of class-based (i.e., peasant) organizations and guerrilla movements, ethnic citizenship proved more effective in obtaining agrarian reform and popular political power.
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Liberation Theology

Liberation theology, as both a diverse and radical reinterpretation of Christian theology by theologians and a grassroots Christian movement fueled by popular notions of religiosity, forms a major component of the Latin American New Left. As an intellectual and popular movement, it encapsulated many of the same ideas on egalitarianism, social justice, and direct democracy advocated by other sectors of the New Left. The physical expression of liberation theology found a variety of outlets, including armed struggle, the formation of center-left political parties, social movements of the urban poor, and everyday forms of protest against the military dictatorships that ruled most of Latin America. The writings of prominent liberation theologians and active participants in social movements inspired by the radical theology emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. De Kadt 1970 represents an important early academic study of radical Catholicism in Brazil, which focused on the Movement of Base Education (MEB) (in which Paolo Freire was a prominent participant). Held in 1972, the Primer Encuentro Latinoamericano de Cristianos por el Socialismo (PELCS) 1972 produced a valuable archive of materials related to radical Christianity. Lernoux 1980 is a classic journalistic work that pitted a progressive Latin American Catholic Church focused on human rights against US support of state terror. For a valuable historical overview see Berryman 1987. Some of the best research focuses on a region in which liberation theology played a prominent role in popular movements and uprisings: Central America. Lancaster 1988 traces the fundamental role played by liberation theology in the Sandinista Revolution. At a microhistorical level, Montoya 1995 examines religion in the midst of the Sandinista Revolution by detailing a shoemaker’s reinterpretation of liberation theology. For El Salvador, Peterson 1997 examines how popular interpretations of progressive Catholicism shaped notions of political resistance to state repression. In addition to Central America, liberation theology proved profoundly influential in Brazil and Peru. For Brazil, French 2007 highlights the enduring impact of liberation-minded church officials in the northeastern state of Sergipe. Behrens 2001 shows how the experience of Maryknoll missionaries in Peru during the 1940s and 1950s transformed the organization into one based on social change and justice.

Behrens, Susan Fitzpatrick. “Of Divine Import: The Maryknoll Missionaries in Peru, 1945–2000.” PhD diss., University of California at San Diego, 2001.
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Traces how a Catholic organization comprising anti-Communist US nationalists was transformed through its missionary missions in Peru. By the late 1960s, two decades after arriving in Peru, the organization had become advocates of social justice and change, as well as critics of US government policies in Latin America.
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Berryman, Philip. Liberation Theology. New York: Pantheon, 1987.
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A useful and valuable introductory work on liberation theology in Latin America: its historical emergence, theological orientation and biblical justification, political influences, and role in the organization of Christian base communities. Good for undergraduate courses and scholars.
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de Kadt, Emanuel. Catholic Radicals in Brazil. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
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Classic study on the Movement of Base Education (MEB) in northeastern Brazil, which details the participation of university students, Catholic clergy, and laypersons during the late 1950s and 1960s in adult literary campaigns. During the course of engagement with the rural poor, these literacy campaigns became forums that encouraged critical thinking—or what MEB member Paolo Freire termed conscientização.
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French, Jan Hoffman. “A Tale of Two Priests and Two Struggles: Liberation Theology from Dictatorship to Democracy in the Brazilian Northeast.” The Americas 63.3 (January 2007): 409–433.
DOI: 10.1353/tam.2007.0016Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Focused on the northeast Brazilian state of Sergipe, this study demonstrates how liberation theology profoundly influenced two priests who led separate social movements in the 1970s and 1990s. This is a valuable study that highlights the malleability of liberation theology—as a religious doctrine and praxis—at the local and regional levels.
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Lancaster, Roger. Thanks to God and the Revolution: Popular Religion and Class Consciousness in the New Nicaragua. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
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Posits the centrality of religion—popular religious notions with roots in liberation theology—within Sandinista efforts to forge a revolutionary culture after 1979. Indeed, the author uncovers an intimate relationship between popular religion and the Sandinista Revolution: namely, that the legitimacy of the latter is largely grounded in the myths and traditions of the former. Good for advanced scholars.
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Lernoux, Penny. Cry of the People: The Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America—The Catholic Church in Conflict with US Policy. New York: Penguin, 1980.
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An impassioned journalistic account that places radicalized sectors of the Latin American Catholic Church at the forefront of social struggles against state terror and economic exploitation during the 1960s and 1970s. Good for undergraduate students.
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Montoya, Ricardo. “Liberation Theology and the Socialist Utopia of a Nicaraguan Shoemaker.” Social History 20.1 (1995): 23–43.
DOI: 10.1080/03071029508567923Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Innovative study on a Nicaraguan shoemaker’s reinterpretation and use of liberation theology to elaborate his definition of a peasant utopia: an independent, self-sufficient peasant community. Francisco Berroterán, the shoemaker, produced an unpublished manuscript in the early 1980s. In the process of writing the manuscript, Berroterán critically engages liberation theology to fashion his utopia in the midst of revolution.
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Peterson, Anna Lisa. Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador’s Civil War. Albany: State University of New York, 1997.
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This anthropological study examines the decades-long armed conflict in El Salvador, focusing on the links between popular definitions of progressive Catholicism and political mobilization. The author argues that popular involvement in Christian Base Communities (CEB) shaped later participation in broader pacific social movements and revolutionary struggle against a repressive state.
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Primer Encuentro Latinoamericano de Cristianos for el Socialismo (PELCS), Santiago, Chile, 1972. The Burke Library Archives, Union Theological Seminary, New York.
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Key archival collection that contains essays, papers, articles, and reports presented by Christian socialists during the PELCS in Santiago, Chile, in 1972. Necessary archive for research on liberation theology, Christian base communities, and the role played by the radical Christian grassroots influence in social and political movements during the 1960s and early 1970s.
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A Transnational New Left and the Global Sixties

Transnational works on Cold War Latin America generally (and quite importantly) focus on the borderless networks of repression and terror organized by dictatorial regimes and the US government. Operation Condor and the School of the Americas are well represented in a series of valuable studies. Yet, the robust existence and operation of transnational networks—cultural and political—also defined the New Left. Revolutionary groups such as the Tupamaros greatly influenced leftists and radicals in the United States and in western Europe. Latin American guerrilla movements are thus interpreted as productive sites of political originality emulated in the so-called First World. The year 1968 and the associated student and social movements proved global in nature (see Gould 2009 in General Overviews). Countercultural rock music and New Song emerged through a series of international exchanges throughout Latin America. If we posit the Cuban Revolution as one crystallizing starting point of the New Left (one of many, with specific national, regional, and local factors), we can thus argue that the New Left was transnational from its inception. Gosse 1993 represents one of the first transnational studies, linking the formation of the US New Left to the Cuban Revolution. The ambitious study Katsiaficas 1987 contextualizes the “global New Left” within similar past moments of transnational insurgency—specifically 1848. The US New Left–Cuban Revolution link, critically analyzed through the lens of sexuality, is found in the innovative Lekus 2004. That same link, in specific reference to US people of color, their struggles, and their connection to Third World revolutionary movements (Cuba again figures prominently), is the subject of Young 2006. Rothwell 2009 posits an important contribution to an understudied aspect of transnational political radicalism: the exporting of Maoism to Latin America and its subsequent reinterpretation at the national and regional levels. Green 2010 traces a different relationship between US and Latin American activists (both Old and New Left) who collaborated to expose the violation of human rights committed by the ruling military junta in Brazil during the 1970s. Saldaña-Portillo 2003 uses a transnational framework to understand internal contradictions and shortcomings of the New Left and thus their revolutionary failures. “The global sixties” has recently emerged as a prominent historiographical term. Westad 2007 represents a foundational text for the developing field. Dubinsky 2009 contains innovative studies that highlight transnational links and influences among different expressions of revolution and radicalism (broadly defined).

Dubinsky, Karen. New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009.
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A collection of essays that focus on the historical significance and contributions of the globally defined 1960s. The essays that cover Latin America focus on the various manifestations of radicalism and definition of liberation that emerged throughout the continent during the 1960s. Good for undergraduate students and advanced scholars.
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Gosse, Van. Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left. London: Verso, 1993.
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Links the emergence of a US New Left to the Cuban Revolution, specifically from the combat phase of the revolution to the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Demonstrates how the revolution influenced radical and liberal public intellectuals, artists, and student activists in the United States—particularly in their creation of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Good for undergraduate and advanced scholars.
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Green, James N. We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Dictatorship in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
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Pioneering work on the transnational network of Brazilian and US scholars and grassroots activists who opposed the 1964 Brazilian military coup and ensuing military regime. Demonstrates that by the mid-1970s, this network had succeeded in highlighting and exposing the numerous human rights violations committed by the Brazilian military junta. The “mainstreaming” of human rights discourse can thus be traced to the transnational oppositional effort to the Brazilian military regime.
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Katsiaficas, George. The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. New York: South End, 1987.
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An important early work on the global New Left that posited 1968 alongside 1848 and 1905 as historical moments that inaugurated new eras in world history. Also offers a general definition of the “global” New Left that emphasizes its political fight against “statism.”
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Lekus, Ian. “Queer Harvests: Homosexuality, the U.S. New Left, and the Venceremos Brigades to Cuba.” Radical History Review 89 (2004): 57–91.
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2004-89-57Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Chronicles the history of the Venceremos Brigades: the organization of labor brigades in 1969 by the US Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), sent to Cuba to aid the sugar harvest effort. Reveals the extreme homophobia suffered by gay and lesbian brigade members from not only some of their American comrades but also from the revolutionary Cuban regime.
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Rothwell, Matthew. “Transpacific Revolutionaries: The Chinese Revolution in Latin America.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2009.
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Traces the ideological and political transnational networks that took thousands of Latin Americans to China for radical study and the subsequent return of Maoism to Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia. Latin American Maoists returned to their respective countries, reinterpreted Maoism according to national context, and organized political parties, forums, and revolutionary armed groups. Explores why Peru emerged as the most amenable context for Maoism.
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Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
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A transnational and theoretically ambitious work that highlights the shared ideological coordinates by rival historical agents in the Cold War Americas: revolutionary guerrillas (and Malcolm X) and development-modernization theory. Both insisted upon models of subjectivity that posited a “modern” masculinist paragon as the aspiration for national transformation; hence, “pre-modern” peasants and women subjectivities needed transformation. Good for advanced undergraduate students and scholars.
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Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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A key text for emerging studies on the “global sixties,” which recasts the Cold War as a north-south conflict shaped by anticolonial struggles in the Third World and by the competing imperial ambitions of the United States and Soviet Union. The author highlights the significant role played by some Third World elites in facilitating American or Soviet expansionist activities.
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Young, Cynthia. Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of the U.S. Third World Left. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
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Innovative cultural history of the emergence of a US “Third World Left” during the 1960s and 1970s, mainly among American people of color who connected their political struggles to revolutionary, anticolonial movements in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The Cuban Revolution emerges as a revolutionary referent for the emergence of radical black nationalism and politics in the United States.
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