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 Pensado demonstrates how the Catholic Church as a heterogenous 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.

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9780520392953

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"""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 * ""[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 * ""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 *"

"""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 * ""[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 *"

"""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 *"

Author Information

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.

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