The best books on Latin American culture & politics in the 1960s-70s

Lincoln Cushing was born in pre-revolutionary Cuba to a State Department official with the U.S. Information Agency. I first met Lincoln at a conference on the Global Sixties and he later introduced me to his extensive poster and political graphics collection. This book, one of several by Cushing on political posters, documents Cuba’s extraordinary post-revolutionary poster art, which became renowned the world over in left-wing circles. Cushing has in-depth knowledge of the printing processes involved and was granted direct access to many of the most well-known graphic artists who stayed in Cuba to collaborate with the regime. If you’re looking for the best book discussing Cuba’s revolutionary poster art tradition, this is it.

What I appreciated most about this book is the clarity of the images and the close attention to historical detail that Cushing provides. He organizes the book thematically, focusing especially on the posters produced by OSPAAAL (Organization in Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America). Despite the overtly political nature of the subject, Cushing retains a proper objectivity, focusing on the artistic and technical aspects of the posters rather than invoking their anti-imperialist content per se. We also learn a good deal about the historical context and biographies of individual artists. This is especially insightful since virtually none of the posters is signed (the spirit of collective action and solidarity being a prevailing principle at the time).

Tanya Harmer is a noted diplomatic historian who focuses on the left-wing presidency of Salvador Allende in Chile during the early 1970s. Allende, as most people know, was violently overthrown in a CIA-backed coup d’etat in 1973. That event ushered in 15 years of brutal dictatorship and transformed Chile’s experiment with democratic socialism into the first example of neoliberalism in Latin America and the world. Harmer’s biography of Allende’s youngest daughter, Beatriz, is a brilliant, intimate portrait of a young activist torn between loyalty to her Socialist (and non-violent) father and the appeal of Cuba’s revolutionary fervor, with its emphasis on violent insurrection against the old order. It is a tragedy, much like the 1960s itself.

Vibrant countercultural scenes grounded in local rock movements transpired across virtually every country in Latin America during the 1960s-70s. There are now several important books that examine various facets of these countercultural movements, and Barr-Melej’s is one of the best in that respect. Focusing on the brief period of Socialist President Salvador Allende (1970-73), his discussion of Chilean jipis and the political battles waged by the Left to contain this so-called foreign import is fascinating. The book falls short in providing an earlier context to the rise of Chile’s countercultural movement and ends abruptly with the rise of dictatorship—a period that transformed rock music into a site of active political protest. But its merits outweigh its shortcomings, especially the lively narration about the Piedra Roja rock festival, Chile’s equivalent of Woodstock. 

I’ve known Barr-Melej for many years and eagerly awaited the publication of this book, which was one of only a handful at the time taking Latin American countercultures seriously. The title alone, Psychedelic Chile, is brilliant as it neatly encapsulates the juxtaposition of youth counterculture in an “unexpected” place, at the southern end of the hemisphere. The book is amply illustrated and thus provides a number of impressive photographs of youth engaged in rock and other countercultural practices.

There is no U.S. equivalent to the comic strip “Mafalda,” a strip centered around a young, middle-class girl and her entourage of neighborhood friends set in mid-1960s Buenos Aires. The strip itself only lasted a decade but its afterlives continue to reverberate across Latin America and throughout other parts of the world. Today, the face of Mafalda—the strip’s namesake—can be found with a speech bubble protesting any number of injustices. It is probably no exaggeration to say that this is the most important comic strip ever written, and one whose appeal lies both in its simplicity and the subtle depth of its political humor. Published here in translation, Cosse, a noted scholar of cultural and social history, has written a biography of the strip and its characters as a way not only of understanding the crisis of Argentina’s middle classes, but the ways in which the mass media transform objects of popular culture and place them into global circulation.

Among the books on this list, Gosse’s Where the Boys Are is truly a classic. I first encountered this book a few years after I finished my dissertation and found it to be one of the most original works I had ever read. I still find that to be true. Gosse (with whom I was later a colleague at Franklin & Marshall College) weaves together cultural, intellectual, political, and diplomatic history to show how the Cuban revolution inspired youth in late 1950s America and subsequently helped launch a “New Left” in the United States. Gosse reminds us of how popular Fidel Castro was across the United States in the brief period before he became Enemy #1. But his methodological approach, combining novels, films, and diplomatic records, is truly a model for later interdisciplinary scholarship as well.