Making the Revolution

Kevin A. Young is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia (2017).

• List of figures; List of contributors; List of abbreviations; Introduction: revolutionary actors, encounters, and transformations Kevin A. Young; 1. Common ground: Caciques, artisans, and radical intellectuals in the Chayanta rebellion of 1927 Forrest Hylton; 2. Identity, class, and nation: Black immigrant workers, Cuban communism, and the sugar insurgency, 1925–34 Barry Carr; 3. Indigenous movements in the eye of the hurricane Marc Becker; 4. Friends and comrades: political and personal relationships between members of the Communist Party USA and the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, 1930s–40s Margaret Power; 5. Total subversion: interethnic radicalism in La Paz, Bolivia, 1946–7 Kevin A. Young; 6. 'Sisters in exploitation': the 1959 Congress of Latin American women and the transnational origins of Cuban state feminism Michelle Chase; 7. Revolutionaries without revolution: regional experiences in the forging of a radical political culture in the Southern Cone of South America (1966–76) Aldo Marchesi; 8. Nationalism and Marxism in rural Cold War Mexico: Guerrero, 1959–74 O'Neill Blacker-Hanson; 9. The ethnic question in Guatemala's armed conflict: insights from the detention and 'rescue' of Emeterio Toj Medrano Betsy Konefal; 10. 'For our total emancipation': the making of revolutionary feminism in insurgent El Salvador, 1977–87 Diana Carolina Sierra Becerra; Index.

'This powerful collection of essays compels us to rethink the relationship of the Latin American Left to indigenous and African descendant communities. For decades, scholars have sharply criticized the Left's unconscious and conscious racism and sexism. These finely wrought and well-researched essays reveal the grassroots dynamics that pushed back against the ideological rigidity that promoted such tendencies. From Bolivian anarchists to peasant insurrecionists in Guerrero to Cuban feminists, this volume presents a variegated, often anti-authoritarian Left that cannot be pigeonholed into the inherited categories of sectarian Stalinists and middle-class guerrilleros.' Jeffrey Gould, Rudy Professor of History, Indiana University and author of Solidarity Under Siege: The Salvadoran Class Struggle, 1970–1990