An important shift is under way in the scholarship on Latin America during the Cold War. This special issue on the Global Sixties presents many of the leading academic voices of that historiographical movement. In part, today's shift is influenced by a new generation of historians unencumbered by the ideological baggage carried by those who witnessed and participated in the political struggles and artistic exuberance of the 1960s as they occurred. With this shift, we are finally reaching a point where more historia than memoria. is being written. Without question, the numerous memoirbased narratives written by participants have helped to inform our understanding of the epoch, providing rich primary-source narratives of personal recollection and witness. The new historical investigations build on these memoirs, yet are firmly grounded in archival research. In turn, this archival research has fleshed out old historical questions and brought to the forefront many new ones. The results have often been fundamentally revisionist interpretations of the prevailing assumptions of the period.

In the 1960s, a generation of Latin American youth entered political life inspired by a heroic view of activism tiiat coincided, often contentiously, with the spread of new cultural trends from youth movements in Europe and the United States. This study focuses on how the notions of “being young” in circulation at the time affected the construction of political identities in Uruguay, particularly among the different branches of the Uruguayan left. I am especially interested in analyzing the relationship between the cultural representations of youth and the requirements for activism as conceived by these Uruguayan leftist groups.

On March 30, 1973, three weeks after Hctor Cmpora won the first presidential elections in which candidates on a Peronist ticket could run since 1955, rock producer Jorge lvarez, himself a sympathizer of left-wing Peronism, carried out a peculiar celebration. Convinced that Cmpora's triumph had been propelled by young people's zeal—as expressed in their increasing affiliation with the Juventud Peronista (Peronist Youth, or JP), an organization linked to the Montoneros—he convened a rock festival, at which the most prominent bands and singers of what journalists had begun to dub rock nacional went onstage. Among them were La Pesada del Rock- 'n'Roll, the duo Sui Gneris, and Luis Alberto Spinetta with Pescado Rabioso. In spite of the rain, 20,000 people attended the Festival of Liberation, mostly muchachos from every working- and middle-class corner of Buenos Aires, as one journalist depicted them, also noting that while the JP tried to raise chants from the audience, the boys acted as if they were untouched by the political overtones of the festival.

“For my generation,” writes Alex Polari, “our option was precisely this: either pirar [flip out], trip out on drugs, or join the armed struggle. Heroism vs. alienation, as we who joined the armed struggle saw it; caretice [conformity] vs. liberation, as they saw it.” Born in 1951, Polari was a teen during the cultural effervescence and political struggle of mid-to-late 1960s Brazil but reached adulthood during a period of severe repression—the so-called sufoco (suffocation)—between late 1968 and 1974, when public protest and left-wing cultural expression were suppressed and censored. Polari opted for the “heroic” option of armed struggle, as he recounted in his memoirs published in 1982 during the abertura, a period of political opening leading up to the restoration of formal democracy in 1985. Yet he also expressed a deep affinity for those who “flipped out” and embraced attitudes and practices associated with the counterculture.

In 1958, Roque Dalton, a young poet affiliated with the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS), won the first prize in a poetry contest at the University of El Salvador. A few days later, members of Salvadoran Catholic University Action, a student organization known as ACUS or simply Catholic Action, published a demolishing but carelessly written critique of Dalton. The anonymous writer of an article titled Under the Empire of Vulgarity turned his disgust with the poem written by Dalton into a diatribe against Dalton's political persona. Dalton's raw allusions to double standards in the sexual morality of priests and his remarks about the Catholic practice of fasting seem to have especially upset the leaders of ACUS. A month later, ACUS published a rejoinder written by Dalton, along with excerpts of the controversial poem. In his retort, Dalton stated that ACUS dodged debates on substantial political and aesthetic issues by engaging in insults, quick and facile judgments, and rude pigeon-holing that closes all means of intellectual comprehension.

On July 26, 1961, a mob of approximately 500 students affiliated with an anti-castrista group called “Mariano” gathered at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. After splashing the Cuban and Soviet embassies with red paint, they headed toward the School of Economics with the intent to burn an effigy of Fidel Castro. The activists timed their act to coincide with the inaugural celebration of the Mexican- Cuban Institute of Cultural Relations José Martí; the event itself was scheduled on the eighth anniversary of the Moncada Barracks attack that sparked the Cuban Revolution. The anti-Castro protestors denounced the proceedings with chants and signs that read “A direct threat to Mexico.” Warning other students about the “the red hand” manipulated by the “despot Fidel,” the group condemned the entire July 26 Revolutionary Movement, calling it a continental menace that, if allowed to succeed, would introduce “communist tyranny to all Latin America.”

In July 1967, while Che Guevara was trying to create—with limited success— a rural foco (guerrilla cell) in Bolivia, the first conference of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS) was taking place in Havana. The conference was presented as the application of the decisions made at the Tricontinental Conference, which had taken place in January 1966. For the first time, members of different organizations on the Latin American left met to agree on a collective response to the question of how to develop solidarity among countries such as Cuba that had defeated imperialism and those that had embarked upon but not yet won a definitive battle.