This special seriesbrings together seven papers that use the genre of life history to explore cultures of militancy during Latin America’s Cold War. Instead of treating militancy as simply a means to a (political or ideological) end, contributors will approach the experience of militancy – the adventure it promised, the stress and joy it created, the dilemmas it presented – as a dynamic cultural field. The life-history approach allows researchers to describe that field from the inside. Writing about militants from Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, Brazil, and Chile, and active between the 1950s and early 2000s, contributors pay special attention to how militants made sense of a tension that characterized their experience across different national and transnational contexts.

On the one hand, Latin American militants were driven by a sense of vanguardism that isolated them from the social world on whose behalf they were claiming to act. This isolation was often heightened by the necessity to operate clandestinely, creating closed spaces in which hierarchies could form along axes of gender, class, ethnicity, and ideology. On the other hand, however, militants were driven by a search for new forms of belonging and solidarity. Some militants were inspired by emancipatory understandings of Christianity, others by the writings of Che Guevara, but in each case militants attempted to remake their personal relations in the image of a world that would express their fraternal values. It was from the interaction of those two imperatives, and from the contradictions between them, that a militant culture emerged in Cold-War Latin America. 

Publication date: From April - October 2023. 

Guest Editors

Dr Jacob Blanc, Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University, Canada.
Dr Timo Schaefer, School of of History, Classics & Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, UK.

Article list 

Research article

Martians in the favela: religion and revolution in Rio de Janeiro

Michael Rom

2023-03-22 Volume 8 • Issue 1 • 2023

Also a part of:

Collection: Life History and Cultures of Militancy in Latin America’s Cold War

Radicalisation and political crisis: the personal transitions of a Guatemalan social Christian militant, 1942–1981

Rodrigo Véliz Estrada

2023-04-26 Volume 8 • Issue 1 • 2023

Also a part of:

Collection: Life History and Cultures of Militancy in Latin America’s Cold War

Student colectivos in the USSR during the Cold War 1960s: shaping Cuba’s ‘New Man’ from abroad

Rafael Pedemonte

2023-05-10 Volume 8 • Issue 1 • 2023

Also a part of:

Collection: Life History and Cultures of Militancy in Latin America’s Cold War