A New Century of Solitude?

Abstract

The 25th anniversary of LAP invites us to consider politics and scholarship from the 1970s to the 1990s as a whole and to ask how we are to understand and confront the legacies of that turbulent period for the 21st century. LAP was born at a time when questions of revolution and counterrevolution, capitalism and socialism, had an immediacy that threw societies into convulsion and, frequently, regimes of violent repression. Other by-products of the era were more salutary; the times challenged scholars to pursue research and writing that focused on the experiences and prospects of the oppressed. As a historian, I see continuities as well as changes in politically engaged writing of Latin American history since the 1970s. Throughout the period, the writers of such history did their research on a terrain between tragedy and promise. The turn toward a history from below that traced the dignity, creativity, aspirations, and agency of common people-as well as their sufferings and subordination-was inspired by the charged mix of discontent, idealism, and hopefulness that redefined so much of political life in Latin America and other world regions in the 1960s and early 1970s. At the same time, too many things went wrong for promise to remain untarnished. Too often, potentials always seemed to remain just that. In Mexico, idealistic protest gave way to massacre in Tlatelolco in 1968. In South America, political polarization culminated in kinds of military regimes in Brazil and the Southern Cone. The new regimes, determined to root out once and for all the dissidents considered to stand in the way of national unity, order, and progress, violently crushed the Vfctor Jaras who had sung of hope and the political activists, workers, peasants, and youth who had dared to find inspiration in the music. At first, perhaps, such nightmares could simply be denounced as outrages. The flame of popular agency could be kept alive and celebrated in solidarity