Marking the Contours of a Mexican “New Left” in the 1960s: Mexico and the Southern Cone in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

More than a decade after the proposal to “broaden our conceptual understanding” to incorporate cultural practices and transnational approaches to interpretations of the New Left, Mexican historians continue to stake out diverging positions with respect to what constitutes a New Left framework. By comparison to Southern Cone scholarship, a palpable disconnect has existed within Mexican literature between those focusing on a narrower interpretation of political history and those focusing on a more expansive one. This article reviews the literature on New Left scholarship in comparative perspective and proposes several interpretations for why Southern Cone research has achieved more integration of cultural and political history than Mexican scholarship has. The article concludes with a discussion of recent research that points in the direction of a potential convergence both within Mexican historiography and between Mexican and Southern Cone historians investigating the Long 1960s.