Transnational Communism across the Americas offers an innovative approach to the study of Latin American communism. It convincingly illustrates that communist parties were both deeply rooted in their own local realities and maintained significant relationships with other communists across the region and around the world. The essays in this collection use a transnational lens to examine the relationships of the region’s communist parties with each other, their international counterparts, and non-communist groups dedicated to anti-imperialism, women’s rights, and other causes. The essays in Part One explore the era from the Bolshevik Revolution through the mid-1940s. Topics include the shifting relationship between Mexican communists and the Comintern, Black migrant workers and the Caribbean labor movement, race relations in Cuba, Latin American communists in the USSR, Luís Carlos Prestes and the Brazilian Communist Party, and the triangular relationships between the Puerto Rican Communist Party, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, and the Communist Party USA. Part Two turns to the Cold War years to look at Soviet peace activists’ networks in Latin America, communist women in Guatemala before the 1954 coup, transnational student groups, and international influences on guerrillas in El Salvador.
Insightful and expert, Transnational Communism across the Americas illuminates the various Latin American communist parties and their milieus, programs, and policies and relationships with other communist or left forces.
“An important contribution for those interested in studying Latin American politics in the twentieth century and for those who study the global history of communism. These works develop different transnational perspectives that inspire us to think about the exchanges of ideas and people between the communist world and the Latin American left, and the challenges and dilemmas that these experiences faced.”
–Aldo Marchesi, author of Latin America’s Radical Left: Rebellion and Cold War in the Global 1960s
“The edited volume is excellent, representing one of the clearest recent expositions of Communist thinking and action in the early, pioneering decades of interwar and immediate postwar periods.”
–Thomas Field, H-Diplo review
The editorial collective for this project is comprised of Marc Becker (Truman State University), Margaret Power (Illinois Tech), Tony Wood (University of Colorado Boulder), and Jacob Zumoff (New Jersey City University). This edited volume is published with the University of Illinois Press. Use the offer code S23UIP on our website to get 30% off the book. The offer code is good until December 31, 2024. Download a flyer for the book.
Q&A with the editors of our book.
Listen to an interview with contributor Kevin Young on KPFA’s Against the Grain