In order to understand the Latin American Cold War through a cultural historical lens, it is helpful to look at how historians have come to (re)understand the period in the last ten to fifteen years. If we are to move beyond an easy reading of the Latin American Cold War as being where East-West/Left-Right politics played out and that countries merely served as the battlegrounds for Soviet and American tensions, then we need to excavate old sources with new cultural historical approaches and search for new sources and approaches that tell us the story of how people lived in their specific context amidst the backdrop of larger sociopolitical movements. As histories have become more anthro/socio-historical, new understandings of the Cold War in Latin America have emerged. Greg Grandin argues that the Cold War in Latin America was one of “political reaction” or “’history as containment,’ not of communism but of mass democracy.” He suggests then for a re-reading of the Latin American Cold War by considering the broader 20th century democratization movements and the often over reactive counterrevolutionary violence that sought to suppress it. By examining the specifics of people’s motivations and how they often predated the Cold War, we can begin to understand the Latin American Cold War as many interconnected but unique movements where people expressed their own per-existing motivations within a larger conflict. Where local actors exploited Cold War tensions for their own particular motives, counterrevolutionary forces were buoyed by their emotional overreactions to perceived (and at times, real) revolutionary threats. Again, these tensions often pre-date the Cold War but found new, often violent, expressions during this time. Looking at the readings we have done, I see two main historiographical approaches that depart somewhat from each other: reconsidering the Cold War as an extension of local and national movements that predate Cold War by re-reading new and existing archives for voices that complicate simple left/right narratives and reframing the Cold War as a century of revolution, and two: engaging with the new cultural history as a way of excavating lives, experiences, and motivations that have previously been ignored.

In A Century of Revolution, Grandin lays out five “suggestions” for how we might re-approach the Latin American Cold War: we need to historicize political violence, we need to explore the active relation between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence, we need to acknowledge the dynamic nature of counterrevolution, we need examine how the dynamics of conflict outlined above played out on in an international field of power, we need to define Latin America’s revolutionary twentieth century as a distinct historical period. Grandin and the contributors to this book do lay out significant evidence for how both right and left local and national interests capitalized on popular movements as a way of achieving there own ends, mostly by examining the politics of containment. What is missing however from the discussion in this book is some closure on Grandin’s desire to explain what it was like to live in Revolutionary times. A Century of Revolution seeks to set up a periodization in which new projects may be taken up, essentially arguing that to be focusing on the Cold War, we will continually fall into the narrative of East-West/left-right narratives, missing the longer threads that complicate 20th century narratives of specificity. Similarly, in Spectres of Revolution, Alexander Aviña links corruption and state violence as the driving factors behind rural resistance, mostly through the re-invigoration of revolutionaries as ghosts. However, Aviña’s project is far more one of trying to understand specific local pressures that drove the desire for political change, and also explains how those local motivations were at times misread as communist. Moving beyond the totalizing power of the United States’ influence in the Latin Americana Cold War has meant that historians writing about the period since roughly 2008, have begun to re-examine the specifics of agency of local politics combined with movements that predate the Cold War. Joseph and Spenser’s In From The Cold as well as Virginia Garrard’s Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow both seek to move beyond the familiar narrative of the United States’ influence and interference in Latin America by examining local and national actors (on both sides) who sought to exploit Cold War narratives and anxieties to further their own political agenda as does Patrick Iber’s Neither Peace Nor Freedom. These works dwell rather heavily in the larger political realm, however, and aside from Grandin and Aviña, tend to stay comfortable to re-examine pre-exisiting histories, rather than look for new cultural historical approaches. Kristen Weld calls for expanded understandings of timelines in Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala by suggesting that we must expand the conventional chronology by which we define the Cold War, because in various parts of Latin America, such as Chile and Argentina, electoral politics and judicial cultures remain strongly colored by that period’s legacies.” Similarly, Grandin’s The Last Colonial Massacre, attempts to reconstruct how disproportionate counterrevolutionary anxiety and violence predates the Cold War as responses to popular movements for land reform and worker rights in Guatemala, tracing a much longer thread that neatly fits into his later work A Century of Revolution.