Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico

by Jaime M. Pensado

Overview

Love and Despair explores the multiple and mostly unknown ways progressive and conservative Catholic actors, such as priests, lay activists, journalists, intellectuals, and filmmakers, responded to the significant social and cultural shifts that formed competing notions of modernity in Cold War Mexico. Jaime M. Pensado demonstrates how the Catholic Church as a heterogeneous institution—with key transnational networks in Latin America and Western Europe—was invested in youth activism, state repression, and the counterculture from the postwar period to the more radical Sixties. Similar to their secular counterparts, progressive Catholics often saw themselves as revolutionary actors and nearly always framed their activism as an act of love. When their movements were repressed and their ideas were co-opted, marginalized, and commercialized at the end of the Sixties, the liberating hope of love often turned into a sense of despair.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520392953
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	06/06/2023
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	374
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jaime M. Pensado is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture During the Long Sixties and coeditor of México Beyond 1968: Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression During the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations 
List of Abbreviations 
Acknowledgments

Introduction 

PART ONE
MODERNITY AND YOUTH

1 • Beauty, Cinema, and Female Youth Rebellion 
2 • Student Activism during the Cold War 

PART TWO
STATE VIOLENCE, PROGRESSIVE CATHOLICISM, AND RADICALIZATION

3 • Combative Journalism and Divisions within the Church 
4 • Responses to the Tlatelolco and Corpus Christi Massacres 
5 • The Thorny Questions of Armed Struggle and Socialism 

PART THREE Part 
THE COUNTERCULTURE, LIBERATION, AND THE ARTS

6 • La Onda as Liberation and the Making of La contracultura como protesta 
7 • Dialogue as Love and Countercultural Cinema at UNAM 
8 • Sexual Liberation and the Redemption of Homosexuality 
9 • Competing Interpretations of Los Cristeros and Violent Reactions to the Counterculture 

Conclusion 

Appendix 1. Cinematic Representations of Youth Rebellion (1941–ca. 1964) 
Appendix 2. Cinematic Representations of Youth, Liberation,the Counterculture, and Progressive 
Catholicism (ca. 1961–ca. 1978) 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index 

Editorial Reviews

"An indispensable study of the Cold War in Latin America, for Pensado treats Catholicism (and religion, more generally) seriously, not simply as a reactionary or declining force."

Journal of Latin American Studies

"This is one of the most original works of scholarship about Mexican political history for a generation, and fills a large gap in knowledge about the growing pains of modernity in a country where the confrontation between restless youth and an oppressive regime was bloody and unforgiving. . . This book is a tour de force—or perhaps we should say, a labour of love—and the author has made an important contribution to the history of an insurgent period that is both misunderstood and sidelined."

Latin American Review of Books

"The historian Jaime Pensado offers an ambitious work and sources on Mexican Catholics in the 1940s-1970s... Love and Despair will undoubtedly become an essential reference for the religious and political history of Mexico."

Cahiers des Amériques latines

"Pensado offers an innovative cultural history of Mexico’s long 1960s (1956-1976) through a religious lens. Each of his nine chapters places Catholic individuals like Marroquín at the center of his narrative. Together, these figures amount to a collective biography of Catholicism’s multiple responses—rejection, acceptance, tolerance, participation—to a world and a country undergoing profound cultural, political, and social change."

NACLA

"Pensado does path-breaking work to reveal why and how Catholics of all ideological stripes became a formidable opposition to Mexico’s PRI dictatorship—both important questions to explore as Mexico’s democratic transition (2000-present) comes under greater scrutiny."

The Journal of Social History

"The book is certainly a welcome addition to the literature, not only to the political, social, and cultural history of modern Mexico, but to Cold War and Catholic Mexico as well."

A Contracorriente

"[R]equired reading for scholars and graduate students of midcentury Mexico and Mexican political, religious, and media history. Scholars of any regional focus with an interest in Catholicism, the global sixties, culture during the Cold War, youth culture, and cinema should also add this book to their reading list."

Hispanic American Historical Review