Latin America as an Arena

The rise of international relations as a discrete field of study in the twentieth century popularized the notion of a power struggle occurring in the global system. Within this theoretical framework, great powers or superpowers compete to exert significant influence on the international arena while smaller powers are relegated to a peripheral status. Latin America’s geopolitical relevance, in this context, is analyzed within the scholarship largely in relation to the foreign policies of more powerful nations, particularly its northern neighbor, the United States. This first thematic cluster therefore includes those works where the region appears largely as an arena for great power rivalry (primarily between Britain, Germany, and the United States) during the first half of the twentieth century. It comprises nine articles, all of which were written before 2000. Geographically, the authors analyze Argentina, Central America, and Mexico with a thematic focus on the Monroe Doctrine and major early twentieth-century wars.

Inspired by Friedrich Katz’s groundbreaking study of German relations with Mexico from 1870 to 1920, for example, various historians in the late 1960s and early 1970s began examining this transatlantic relationship in greater detail.Footnote ⁵ Three articles in this collection take up the topic, looking specifically at economic and military relations during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Warren Schiff, in his article “he Germans in Mexican Trade and Industry during the Díaz Period” (1967), gives an overview of the different German industries in Mexico during the Porfiriato—the 35-year dictatorship of authoritarian leader General Porfirio Díaz.Footnote ⁶ Thomas Becker’s piece “The Arms of the Ypiranga: The German Side” (1973) proffered a German perspective on the Ypiranga affair, when a German ship was used to carry weapons for the Mexican revolutionary leader Victoriano Huerta in 1914, thus violating a US-imposed arms embargo.Footnote ⁷ Along the same lines, in “The Mexican-German Conspiracy of 1915” (1966), Michael Meyer explores the German imperial government’s provision of financial and moral support to a group of Mexican exiles who had fled to the United States following the overthrow of Victoriano Huerta and were planning to launch a rebellion against the new revolutionary leader Venustiano Carranza.Footnote ⁸ Throughout Katz’s book, Mexico emerges as a key battleground for the competing interests of Britain, Germany, and the United States. Equally, the authors in The Americas who trace Mexican–German relations during the early twentieth century largely use these as a proxy to interrogate the wider power struggle between Germany and the United States.

Expanding the so-called German threat beyond Mexico, Melvin Small, in his article “The United States and the German ‘Threat’ to the Hemisphere, 1905–1914” (1972), charts US–German relations in the context of their competing designs for Latin America in the run-up to the First World War.Footnote ⁹ Also taking this conflict as a starting point but making hemispheric relations the object of analysis, Emily Rosenberg’s essay on “World War I and ‘Continental Solidarity’” (1975) surveys the inter-American negotiations to form a cohesive stance toward the First World War.Footnote ¹⁰ Stanley Hilton is likewise concerned with regional diplomacy, this time in the context of the Second World War, in “Argentine Neutrality, September, 1939-June, 1940: A Re-Examination” (1966). Here, the author studies Argentina’s attempts to get American nations to change their policy of neutrality to one of “non-belligerence” favorable to the Allies.Footnote ¹¹ These articles were produced during the high point of the global Cold War when many in the United States were increasingly questioning their country’s foreign policy and scholars sought to explain the origins of the contemporary geopolitical situation. Against this backdrop, the authors provide alternative perspectives on and useful sources to study both intra- and extra-hemispheric affairs, even as the assumption of US superiority as regards its southerly neighbors remains largely unchallenged.

The final three essays in this thematic cluster examine British incursions into Central America during the 1910s and 1920s. Published in the 1990s, the works formed part of a major current in the historiography of twentieth-century international relations that located Britain’s replacement by the United States as the predominant global power in those two crucial decades.Footnote ¹² This renewed interest in Central America and the origins of contemporary regional power relations was clearly driven by the conflicts occurring there during the 1980s and 1990s in which US intervention played no small part. Richard Salisbury, in his first article “Revolution and Recognition: A British Perspective on Isthmian Affairs during the 1920s” (1992), follows British–US relations throughout various political crises in Central America during the 1920s, including the civil uprising that overthrew Guatemalan president Manuel Estrada Cabrera and the civil wars in Honduras and Nicaragua.Footnote ¹³ The “special relationship” also constituted the main subject of analysis in Salisbury’s second piece for The Americas, “Great Britain, the United States, and the 1909–1910 Nicaraguan Crisis” (1997). The setting for Salisbury’s renewed examination of this relationship was now Nicaragua in 1909–1910 when members of the Conservative opposition, backed by the US, launched a rebellion against the Liberal government.Footnote ¹⁴ In his contribution “Gunboat Diplomacy’s Last Fling in the New World: The British Seizure of San Quintin, April 1911” (1996), Lawrence Taylor assesses the background to and consequences of Britain’s decision to land a gunboat in the Mexican city of San Quintín during the early revolutionary years.Footnote ¹⁵ Both authors pinpoint the early 1910s as the moment in which Britain decided that the United States would be the predominant power in the Caribbean, thus demonstrating how Central America was a key arena for the reconfiguring of the international system. However, by viewing the region’s events solely through the lens of British–US struggles to assert their control of certain territories, they largely obscure the agency of local actors.

Despite reinforcing the sense that Latin America remained peripheral on the international stage, these articles nonetheless underscore the importance of understanding the region through more than just its relations with the United States. In examining German documents, for instance, Baeker challenged the contemporary notion that the arms on the Ypiranga were part of broader Mexican–German machinations against the United States in the run-up to the First World War. Moreover, despite seeing Latin American interests as secondary to those of Britain, Germany, and the United States, the works nonetheless hint at the important ways in which various political groups attempted to leverage international power struggles for their own benefit. In particular, Meyer contends that the famous Zimmermann telegram that supposedly paved the way for US intervention in the First World War grew out of Mexican exiles’ designs to recover territory lost to the United States during the previous century as part of a broader program to overthrow the US-backed Carranza regime. Finally, Hilton’s article shows how Latin Americans did not just accept their subordinated position to the United States. Although Argentina was ultimately unsuccessful in its endeavor to influence regional policy because of opposition from the United States, Hilton sheds light on an instance in which leading Argentinian politicians proposed that the region pursue their own course in international affairs.

Global International Relations

In the past two decades, historians of Latin America have embraced global history as a means to overturn previous assumptions of the region’s peripherality. Building on the work of postcolonial thinkers who have argued that Latin America and the Caribbean played a crucial role in the emergence of the modern world, these recent histories have sought to emphasize the diverse ways in which regional actors engaged with and shaped global developments at different historical moments.Footnote ¹⁶ This has also meant a move away from analyzing Latin American international relations through the lens of US imperialism to illuminate a wider variety of diplomatic and transnational networks, including with Europe. Recent academic production in The Americas has been particularly dynamic in this regard.

The journal also published important works that challenged Latin America’s relegation to the sidelines of international affairs before the twenty-first-century “global turn,” three of which deal with the continent’s relations with Europe. These important precursors to what has only recently been formalized in a distinct historiographical approach hint at the enduring importance of efforts to place Latin American relations in a global context. The earliest example in The Americas was Joe Robert Juárez’s “Argentine Neutrality, Mediation, and Asylum during the Spanish Civil War” (1963). Arguing that the various countries of the Hispanophone Atlantic were linked to Spain by “the force of history, race, religion, and language,” Juárez shows how these nations (but especially Argentina) were active participants in the international effort to end the conflict on the peninsula even if their attempts were largely unsuccessful.Footnote ¹⁷ The author’s emphasis on historical cultural ties exemplifies why it is important to study transatlantic relations in the twentieth century; even though the United States was doubtless the foreign nation with the largest material impact in Latin America, Europe (and Spain in particular) still held significant emotional import for many in the region. Juárez’s article thus prefigured a recent wave of interest in Spanish–Latin American relations during the twentieth century that serves to complement existing studies of US intervention.Footnote ¹⁸

Douglas Richmond’s article “Confrontation and Reconciliation: Mexicans and Spaniards during the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920” (1984) suggests another reason why Europe remained relevant long after independence: the presence of large immigrant communities in many Latin American countries. He contends that the growing cooperation between these two countries during the late 1910s was largely the result of Carranza’s crackdown on anti-Spanish sentiment and policies in Mexico.Footnote ¹⁹ Frank McCann takes a similar approach in his piece “Vargas and the Destruction of the Brazilian Integralista and Nazi Parties” (1969). Almost in a mirror image of the Mexican case, McCann finds that Vargas’s relations with Germany deteriorated as a result of his measures to curb Nazi influence among Brazil’s prominent German population.Footnote ²⁰ By grounding their analysis of these transatlantic relationships in the context of Latin American politics, both authors underline the need to comprehend the local conditions that shape international diplomacy. In so doing, they also make significant contributions to our understanding of Latin America’s place in the global political system. Richmond suggests significant moments in which Mexican revolutionary politics inspired movements and policies in Spain, while McCann demonstrates Vargas’s independence at a time in which Brazil was accused of being both subservient to the Axis powers and a puppet of the United States.

Over the past 5 years, authors publishing in The Americas have explicitly engaged with the methods and concepts of global history to provide a fuller view of Latin America’s relationship with the wider world. Four articles in this cluster use this approach to unveil wider transnational and diplomatic ties with Europe than had hitherto been recognized. Pedro Cameselle-Pesce’s article “Italian-Uruguayans for Free Italy: Serafino Romualdi’s Quest for Transnational Anti-Fascist Networks during World War II” (2020) follows the figure of Serafino Romualdi, a prominent Italian anti-fascist who traveled through the Southern Cone in the early 1940s to drum up support for the antifascist cause. Cameselle-Pesce argues that Romualdi’s connections in Latin America made him a key figure for the US government, which was seeking to gather intelligence on Axis influence in the region, thus revealing how the superpower acknowledged the part transatlantic connections could play in fostering support for foreign policy across a region where many were wary of US imperialism.Footnote ²¹ This opportunism ran both ways, with Latin Americans also exploiting the global political system to further their own national, regional, and international aims. In “‘El Principal Enemigo Nacional’: Revolutionary Guatemala’s Response to Allied Policy toward German Presence in Latin America (1944–1952)” (2024), Rodrigo Veliz Estrada explores how Guatemala’s reformist president Juan José Arévalo used Allied policy to counter the “Nazi threat” in Latin America as a means to expropriate lands from German-Guatemalans who had been forced to leave the country during the Second World War.Footnote ²² By portraying Latin American countries as important and purposeful international actors, these accounts serve as a vital corrective to prior narratives of the region as a mere arena for or passive recipient of US foreign policy.

Moving into the Cold War period, new research in The Americas reveals how Latin American leaders cultivated closer ties with European nations to counterbalance superpower influence during the second half of the twentieth century. These articles are representative of a recent body of work that is revisiting this period using a very different approach to that employed during the Cold War itself. In this way, we can see the interaction of two distinct temporal currents: the chronology of history (from the Spanish Civil War to the Cold War) and the chronology of historiography (traditional diplomatic histories to new global histories). As this thematic cluster suggests, the field has moved away from the interest in the balance of power that characterized both the politics and the scholarship of the Cold War era and toward a more nuanced understanding of the various ways in which different international actors worked outside the bipolar system, sometimes in unexpected ways, to exert influence in specific historical moments. For example, Daniel Kressel’s essay “The ‘Argentine Franco’?: The Regime of Juan Carlos Onganía and Its Ideological Dialogue with Francoist Spain (1966–1970)” (2021) shows how officials in the two countries worked together in the 1960s to conjure a new version of “modernity” for the Spanish speaking world that offered a “third path” between capitalism and communism.Footnote ²³ Such exchanges were not limited to right-wing regimes. Eline van Ommen, in her article “The Nicaraguan Revolution’s Challenge to the Monroe Doctrine: Sandinistas and Western Europe, 1979–1990” (2021), investigates the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s pursuit of alliances with Western European governments to undermine US power in the region and avoid financial dependency on the Soviet Union.Footnote ²⁴ Crucially, these two authors depict a more egalitarian relationship between Latin America and Europe, with actors on both continents working together toward shared goals in ways that saw influence flowing both ways across the Atlantic, albeit sometimes unevenly. Van Ommen’s work also illustrates how new international histories of twentieth-century Latin America can shed light on European countries that are not traditionally covered in accounts of transnational relations, in this case Holland, Scandinavia, and Greece. Scholars have only recently begun to analyze Latin America’s Cold War connections with central and eastern Europe, and this could be a fruitful avenue for further research in The Americas.Footnote ²⁵

Flows of People

Though the aforementioned articles have done important work in recentering Latin America in the history of global international relations, their firm location within that field reproduces a tendency to focus on those directly involved in statecraft who were largely elite and middle-class men. From the 1990s, prompted by the end of the Cold War and the perceived rise of globalization, historians increasingly embraced transnationalism as a concept to understand the multiple and pluridirectional cross-border flows that have helped shape not only individual nations, but also the wider world. These connections include non-state as well as state actors, meaning that a broader array of historical subjects can be brought to the fore, including those normally ignored in diplomatic histories. The Americas has made significant contributions to our knowledge about Latin America’s transnational entanglements, publishing a wealth of original research on the wider political, social, and cultural linkages between the region and Europe in the twentieth century. The following three thematic clusters therefore consider the transatlantic flow of people, ideas, and practices during this period.

The most common way in which historians have sought to understand Latin America’s twentieth-century relationship with Europe is by analyzing the large groups of migrants who, particularly during the early decades, crossed the Atlantic to settle in the “New World,” often encouraged by national governments. At the structural level, the interest in studying European migrants who came to Latin America can reinforce a vision of one-way transfer of influence across the Atlantic. However, the four works in this cluster aptly demonstrate how immigration can be used as a lens to interrogate Latin American state-building projects during the first half of the twentieth century. The articles focus on Brazil (three) and Mexico (one), whose national policies of mestizaje and “racial democracy” are the best-known of Latin America’s attempts to grapple with its mixed population in an era of racial determinism.Footnote ²⁶ In his article “Some Views on Race and Immigration during the Old Republic” (1971), Robert Levine analyses the results of a 1926 poll on attitudes toward immigration in Brazil. He finds that respondents expressed an overwhelming preference for European migrants, demonstrating that the wider public shared the government’s view that so-called racial democracy should serve to “whiten” the national population.Footnote ²⁷ Newer works nuance the idea of what was understood by elites as “desirable” European immigration by exploring groups from Europe who were not necessarily welcome in Latin America under strict “whitening” initiatives. For example, Jeffrey Lesser’s essay “The Immigration and Integration of Polish Jews in Brazil, 1924–1934” (1994) looks at the rise in immigration of a group that was often rejected by Brazilian policymakers but who proved remarkably effective at integrating into national life.Footnote ²⁸ Conversely, in “‘Immigrants with Money Are No Use to Us’ Race and Ethnicity in the Zona Portuária of Rio de Janeiro, 1903–1912” (2006), Kit McPhee examines the Rio de Janeiro government’s attempts to import “undesirable” poor immigrants from southern Europe as a way to marginalize the city’s Afro-Brazilian populations.Footnote ²⁹ Together, these later articles show that, even as Europe remained the main target for Latin American immigration policies, the “desirable immigrant” was a slippery concept that applied varying combinations of social, ethnic, and cultural criteria in different geographical and temporal contexts. They also allow for an appreciation of the early twentieth century as a period that marked a new and contradictory phase in Brazil’s (and, more broadly, Latin America’s) history of immigration.

In addition to transatlantic migrants, several groups and individuals also undertook the journey without the intention of settling in their final destination. Here, five articles focus on the cross-border ties forged by those who took these more temporary transatlantic voyages. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of these focus on Europeans who traveled to Latin America. Yet, whereas earlier texts tend not to question why this was the case, more recent works published in The Americas recognize structural factors that made it easier for Europeans to travel across, comment on, and intervene in Latin America than vice versa.Footnote ³⁰ In particular, Jaime Pensado’s article “A History of the ‘Pernicious Foreigner’: Jean Meyer and the Re-writing of the Mexican Revolution During the Global Sixties” (2024) follows French historian Jean Meyer’s trajectory in Mexico during the Global Sixties as a way to illuminate the role that foreign academics played in the shaping of the Global Sixties in Mexico. However, Pensado situates this account within the context of Latin America and the Caribbean’s symbolic ascendence among European intellectuals of the New Left during the second half of the twentieth century and recognizes that Meyer was only able to achieve the influence he did because of the “Francophile character” of Mexican academia and the fact that he was a white man.Footnote ³¹

Ericka Kim Verba’s pioneering article “To Paris and Back: Violeta Parra’s Transnational Performance of Authenticity” (2013) reverses the direction of travel by zooming in on Chilean folk musician Violeta Parra’s trip to and reception in Paris during the 1960s. As with Jean Meyer, it was the growth of an anti-colonial movement during the Cold War that facilitated this transatlantic exchange. Here, however, the subject is a Chilean woman who, against this backdrop, gained significant recognition in European artistic circles precisely because her performances displayed a distinctly non-cosmopolitan authenticity.Footnote ³² Indeed, by employing an explicitly transnational framework, Verba aptly illustrates how cosmopolitanism and modernity flowed in all directions, thus challenging simplistic binaries of traditional/modern. The article also exemplifies how transnational histories can shed light on the important role that women played in constructing and forging Latin American–European relations.

Flows of Ideas

In addition to human mobility, seven articles published in The Americas take transatlantic ideological currents as their subject of analysis. While articulated, and sometimes carried, by groups and individuals, these ideas often experienced different trajectories from those of their creators. The emphasis on less tangible connections also helps illuminate the transnational entanglements of Latin American countries that are not normally covered in histories of twentieth-century diplomatic relations with or immigration from Europe, such as Venezuela. The majority of the articles (7/8) in this cluster focus on political ideologies and racial thought, although one early article explores Spanish novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán’s promotion of Hispanismo in the aftermath of the “Disaster of 1898.”Footnote ³³ While they still overwhelmingly assume that ideas circulated from Europe to Latin America and not the other way round, the authors do place increasing importance on understanding how groups and individuals within Latin America interpreted ideas from Europe and adapted them to their local and national contexts. In this way, academic production in The Americas displays an early interest in what has more recently been conceptualized as “localising the global.”Footnote ³⁴

Two articles foreground the local conditions that made different sectors of Latin America society more receptive to European influence in specific historical moments. For instance, Ronald Newton’s “Ducini, Prominenti, Antifascisti: Italian Fascism and the Italo-Argentine Collectivity, 1922–1945” (1994) explains the relative strength and longevity of fascism in Argentina in terms of the large Italian community there (the third largest in the world during the interwar period).Footnote ³⁵ In a similar fashion, in his essay “Populist Anxiety: Race and Social Change in the Thought of Romulo Gallegos,” Doug Yarrington contends that Venezuelan president Rómulo Gallegos’s propagation of European cultural ideals in his literary works responded to elite anxieties about the democratic transformation promised by his populist rhetoric.Footnote ³⁶ Into the twenty-first century, authors publishing in The Americas have paid closer attention to the agency of Latin Americans across the political and economic spectrum in choosing which foreign ideas to adopt and which to reject. Kirwan Shaffer’s article “Freedom Teaching: Anarchism and Education in Early Republican Cuba, 1898–1925” (2003) surveys anarchist educational initiatives in Cuba during the first three decades after independence from Spain. He contends that, though these Cuban anarchists imported the ideas, materials, and personnel of the Spanish Escuela Moderna to establish schools that would challenge the religious dogma of Catholic schools and the blind patriotism of the public education system, they adapted these to the realities of Cuba’s working-class communities.Footnote ³⁷ In “The Chilean Movimiento Nacional Socialista, the German-Chilean Community, and the Third Reich, 1932–1939: Myth and Reality” (2004), Marcus Klein examines the development of this group, established in 1932 by middle-class men from Santiago. He illustrates how the MNS fused fascist ideology with themes from Chile’s own authoritarian tradition, concluding that the group’s ultimate objective of strengthening the Chilean nation rather than preserving a distinctly German identity led to it breaking with the organization of German–Chilean associations in the late 1930s.Footnote ³⁸ By understanding how the global intersects with the local, these articles provide insights into phenomena that do not make sense if we only see Latin America as a passive recipient of foreign influence. In particular, why fascism remained influential in Latin America long after the defeat of Italy and Germany in the Second World War or why the MNS backed the Popular Front in Chile over a year before the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939.

Finally, works published in The Americas have gone a long way toward highlighting the significant contributions that Latin Americans have made to global intellectuals currents as a result of their innovative adaptations of European thought. In his article “Importing Freud and Lamarck to the Tropics: Arthur Ramos and the Transformation of Brazilian Racial Thought, 1926–1939” (2003), Brad Lange uncovers how the Brazilian psychiatrist melded the ideas of three prominent European scholars—Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Sigmund Freud—to create a distinct methodology that challenged the myth of racial degeneracy.Footnote ³⁹ This school of thought, while still equating progress and modernity to whiteness and European culture, played a significant role in facilitating the spread of “cultural uplift” across Latin America in the mid-twentieth century, which distinguished the continent’s social policies from those of the United States and parts of Europe.Footnote ⁴⁰ Also seeking to understand how prominent Latin Americans transformed European thought into tangible action, Max Paul Friedman’s piece “A Latin American Third Way? Juan José Arévalo’s Spiritual Socialism, 1916–1963” (2024) recounts how Arévalo became familiar with the ideas of German philosopher Karl Kristian Frederich Krause during his time in Argentina and attempted to put them into practice in the form of “spiritual socialism” during his presidential term in Guatemala.Footnote ⁴¹ In uncovering the various ways in which Latin American thinkers and leaders converted the philosophical and scientific musings of sometimes obscure European thinkers into tangible political and social initiatives, these articles invert narratives about “one-way transfer of ideas from Europe to the developing world.”Footnote ⁴²

Flows of Practices

From the transnational circulation of people and ideas emerge certain practices that, either purposefully or unwittingly, cultivate a sense of belonging to a larger, global community. The final nine articles in this collection pick up this theme. In interrogating this aspect of the transnational relationship between Latin America and Europe in the twentieth century, the authors of these works introduce a wider variety of connections than the largely political and social entanglements explored in the previous thematic clusters.

In terms of cross-border military relations, Frederick Nunn’s overview of the “Latin American Military Establishment” (1971) suggests that to understand the development of the Latin American military and its contemporary sociopolitical role, we have to look at the Europeans who trained them.Footnote ⁴³ Given the preponderance of military regimes in twentieth-century Latin America, particularly during the Cold War, probing these transatlantic connections and their complex afterlives may help those who are seeking to decenter the United States in the region’s international history.Footnote ⁴⁴ Turning to commercial relations, Donna Guy revisits the topic of British informal empire in Latin America with her published CLAH lecture “Harrods Buenos Aires. The Case of the Unwanted Dresses, 1912–1940” (2020). Unlike earlier works that presented Latin America as an empty stage for British commercial imperialism, Guy illustrates how the owners’ failure to account for local preferences when opening the Argentinian store meant Harrods Buenos Aires, instead of cultivating a clientele of upper-class women as intended, became a store for the middle classes.Footnote ⁴⁵ In this, she joins a wave of new work that is uncovering how Latin American consumers shaped international business practices.Footnote ⁴⁶

Argentina is the setting for three more works in this cluster. Firstly, in his essay “The Socialist Press in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina” (1980), Richard Walter analyzes the contributions of Argentina’s socialist press to public and political debates around socioeconomic conditions of the working classes in the period before the Mexican and Russian revolutions. This particular collection of newspapers, he suggests, was largely driven by European immigrants who established periodicals to apply the Marxist ideals with which they were familiar to their new surroundings.Footnote ⁴⁷ Also looking at the press industry, Mariano Ben Plotkin’s article “Tell Me Your Dreams: Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture in Buenos Aires, 1930–1950” (1999) recounts how cultural magazines in Buenos Aires adapted and popularized Freudian techniques psychoanalysis in the mid-twentieth century. Rather than seeing the process as a mere transplantation of European practices in Argentina, Plotkin makes clear that psychoanalysis was picked up by magazine editors because it melded seamlessly with long-established features, such as dream interpretation, and was enthusiastically received by audiences because it dovetailed with changing cultural norms that facilitated more open discourse on previously taboo topics.Footnote ⁴⁸ Finally, Sandra McGee Deutsch surveys the activities of various communist-led women’s solidarity movements that operated in Argentina during the mid-twentieth century in her “The New School Lecture ‘An Army of Women’” (2018). These organizations brought together Argentinians and European immigrants from various social strata to raise money and propagandize for the Spanish Republican and Allied cause.Footnote ⁴⁹ Deutsch therefore brings a welcome gendered perspective to the burgeoning subfield of transnational solidarity that is recentering Latin America as a way to challenge the notion that aid has historically flowed from north to south.Footnote ⁵⁰ In regard to why Argentina is so often the setting for scholars wishing to draw out transnational connections, these three articles suggest that this preference is a result of the country’s relatively high population of European immigrants.

Given the global reach of different faiths and the cross-border mobility of their proselytizers, religion is one of the most studied transnational practices among historians. As Catholicism was the predominant religion in twentieth-century Latin America, the remaining three articles in this cluster look at the emergence and development of different Catholic movements throughout the region. Written in the late 1980s, just after the Vatican launched a formal inquiry into the orthodoxy of Liberation Theology, Jeffrey Klaiber’s “Prophets and Populists: Liberation Theology, 1968–1988” (1989) assessed its emergence and development. Klaiber contends that, though the first stage of the movement was closely linked to European intellectual and spiritual traditions, the second stage grew out of Latin American realities and therefore challenged the Eurocentrism of religious thinking and practice, hence the inquiry.Footnote ⁵¹ In the article “‘Restoring Christian Social Order’: The Mexican Catholic Youth Association (1913–1932)” (2003), David Espinosa explores an earlier example of Catholic attempts to promote social justice. According to Espinosa, the organization, which was established by French Jesuit priest Bernardo Bergöend, played a fundamental role in revitalizing the Catholic Church after the Mexican Revolution until it was marginalized by the centralizing efforts of Acción Católica in the aftermath of the Cristero wars.Footnote ⁵² In some ways, Stephen Andes picks up where Espinosa left off in “A Catholic Alternative to Revolution: The Survival of Social Catholicism in Postrevolutionary Mexico” (2012). This piece looks at the broader Catholic social action movement introduced by Jesuit priest Alfredo Méndez Medina following his interactions with L’Acción Populaire in France. Andes asserts that the movement was not extinguished by Acción Católica but rather was kept alive by Catholic women who traveled to Europe for propaganda and fundraising.Footnote ⁵³ The article is therefore a relatively early contribution to a recent body of scholarship that seeks to bring out the political dimension of women’s religious activism.Footnote ⁵⁴ These accounts suggest that women’s perceived apoliticism made them particularly effective in keeping marginalized Catholic movements alive, making them key actors in maintaining relations between regions with reduced diplomatic and economic ties. More broadly, all these articles illustrate how ostensibly European Catholic practices took on new life and meaning when adapted to Latin American realities, having significant national and even global impact as a result.