“Undesirable” Travelers: U.S. Radicals, Mexican Security, and the Cold War Summer of 1968

Abstract

ABSTRACT Two groups of U.S. travelers attempted but failed to reach Cuba in the summer of 1968. Traveling via Mexico City during the height of the Mexican student movement and in anticipation of the Olympics, both groups were detained by Mexican authorities and eventually deported back to the United States. Using oral histories and archival sources, this article explores the interaction between the New Left radicals and intelligence agencies in the U.S. and Mexico. Both sides sought to interpret and contextualize the other to fit and shape their own expectations of Cold War politics during the global Sixties. While there is a vast scholarship on 1968, at both a national and international scale, this story contributes to our understanding of the formulation of radical imaginaries of Cold War international surveillance and solidarity, as well as the construction of the transnational “outside agitator” narratives at the end of the decade.