This chapter examines the migration of nearly 200,000 Caribbean immigrants – from Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Grenada, Aruba, and Curaçao – to Cuba in the 1920s and early 1930s. Jamaicans and Haitians, more than others, were perceived as threats to Cuban culture and national security, and between 1925 and 1933 the Gerardo Machado government encouraged the expulsion of Antillean workers and the nationalization of labor. Caribbean immigrants played a surprisingly important role in the organization of workers in the sugar industry and had a significant role in the sugar worker mobilizations of the early 1930s that culminated in the 1933 Revolution. The young Cuban Communist Party made great efforts to recruit and address Haitian and Jamaican workers, and West Indian immigrants were strikingly visible in labor agitation and resistance as well as in the strikes and mill occupations that accompanied the Revolution of 1933.

Many of Latin America’s twentieth-century leftists struggled against class exploitation and imperialism while also confronting racism, patriarchy, and other oppressions, and while seeking to build more democratic organizations and societies. Revolution, for them, meant not just the seizure of state power or a change in property relations, but a whole series of transformations in social life. These practices and visions did not merely emanate from formal leaders. This volume understands the formation of the left as a contested historical process in which rank-and-file actors, not simply top party leaders, played vital roles. Oppressed groups within the left, or whom the left sought to organize, often exercised important influences on left ideology and practice. Leftist women and indigenous people, in particular, helped reshape leftist politics in a number of the cases examined here. Uncovering the negotiations over power, platforms, and everyday practices on the left is essential to an accurate understanding of past revolutionaries’ successes and failures. Those stories, in turn, hold important lessons for peoples struggling for emancipation in the twenty-first century.

This chapter explores the popular organizing that arose in Mexico’s southwest state of Guerrero during the Cold War. It concludes that the movement’s identification with the language of nationalism and economic and social expectations that arose with the revolution of 1910 distinguishes it from many of the contemporary Marxist-inspired movements in Latin America. Following a series of government assaults on peaceful protesters demanding democratic inclusion, the teacher-activists who had led the initial opposition – Genaro Vázquez Rojas and Lucio Cabañas – each founded an armed guerrilla movement. While these both remained small, the chapter argues that they enjoyed the support of a broader base that hid them, fed them, and suffered the consequences of unrestrained government violence. Guerrero was, ultimately, the site of Mexico’s guerra sucia. This history also helps us understand the disappearance of Ayotzinapa’s teachers-in-training in 2014. Those students attended a school distinguished for producing radical opposition leaders since its post-revolutionary inception, including, during the Cold War, Lucio Cabañas.

This study examines how Salvadoran women shaped revolutionary praxis, thus challenging prior academic accounts that have situated armed struggle and socialism in opposition to feminism. The Association of Salvadoran Women (AMES), an organization composed of combatants, peasants, and exiles, redefined revolution to mean the overthrow of both capitalism and patriarchy. The sites of feminist praxis included guerrilla territories in El Salvador, refugee camps in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and solidarity networks in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the United States. Within the guerrilla territories, AMES members actively participated in community councils, an experiment in popular democracy, and generated a feminist praxis that linked the exigencies of wartime survival to the long-term liberation of women. At the international level, Salvadoran women collaborated with other radical women from Latin America and the United States in order to push their organizations in more feminist directions. This study is the first detailed analysis of AMES and offers a novel interpretation of the rise of Salvadoran feminism.

This paper aims to recover the history of the Congress of Latin American Women held in Santiago de Chile in November 1959, using it as a snapshot to illuminate the various political currents within the Cuban delegation. At a time of rapid polarization and shifting alliances, the ideal of transnational, Latin American solidarity appealed to women activists from both Cuba’s “Old,” Marxist Left and the “New,” insurgent Left, despite their many differences. This common ground helped establish elements of cooperation between some women of the 26th of July Movement and women affiliated with the pre-revolutionary Communist Party. Although the well-known Federation of Cuban Women was established as a result of the alliances developed through participation in the Congress, these transnational, “Latin Americanist” origins of the FMC have largely been forgotten.

In the late-sixteenth century, a spate of violent incidents brought disrepute upon the mission enterprise in New Spain.Spanish churchmen lamented that some of their peers were inciting natives to disobey, resist, and even burn the churches of their ecclesiastical rivals.Spaniards spilled much ink in reporting these unseemly clashes in their correspondence and chronicles.Less reported are the many similar confrontations that occurred simultaneously in indigenous communities.Such was the worldly power of the mission enterprise that those Spanish churchmen and native rulers who did not have access to it jostled, often violently, to possess it.This chapter situates these curious episodes in the broader context of a series of political crises that shook the mendicant-indigenous mission enterprise to its very foundations in the 1570s and 1580s.It examines the politics of secularization, conflicts among indigenous jurisdictions for control of the mission Church, and the many points of cross-influence between Spanish and indigenous rivalries.As a result this chapter finds a mission enterprise that began to decline not solely due to Spanish political changes that undercut mendicant power, but rather because this weakening of mendicant power in the Spanish realm interacted with the on-going fragmentation and atomization of indigenous polities.