Love and Despair - by Jaime M Pensado (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

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 M. Pensado demonstrates how the Catholic Church as a heterogeneous 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.

From the Back Cover

"Love and Despair reveals an entirely unexamined side of the Mexican Global Sixties, one that has been hiding in plain sight. In bringing to light Catholic responses to countercultural practices and youth politics, Jaime M. Pensado highlights the central role of religious thought and actors in the democratization of Mexican culture and society."--Eric Zolov, author of The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties

"A magnificent, much-needed analysis of Mexico's Catholic youth movements during the tumultuous Sixties and their relationship to Catholic transnational mobilizations and to the wider Mexican Left."--Mary Kay Vaughan, Professor Emerita of History, University of Maryland, College Park

"Pensado's book is a brilliant historical palimpsest. Where once well-engraved stories of secular youth rebellion had been deeply etched in conventional memory, Pensado has recast the era as one crafted also by progressive journalists, university students, intellectuals, and filmmakers--all Catholic--who left indelible marks on Mexico in the Global Sixties. With an expansive border-crossing vision and a creative eye, Pensado defies anyone to make the now outdated claim that Mexico's counterculture was not equal parts Catholic in its making."--Stephen J. C. Andes, author of The Mysterious Sofía: One Woman's Mission to Save Catholicism in Twentieth-Century Mexico

"Vivid, incisive, and innovative, Love and Despair reinterprets the Sixties in Mexico. Through an astute analysis of film, oral interviews, and textual material, Pensado opens a window into the lives, fears, views, and hopes of a wide cast of Mexican Catholics as they confronted and interpreted the startling cultural and moral changes of their times."--Julia G. Young, author of Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War

Review Quotes

"An essential dark-side-of-the-moon history that should be read by anyone wanting a sophisticated cultural and political take on 1960s Mexico, Catholic youth, and the input of Catholics into Mexico's counterculture(s). Readers are guaranteed to put it down with more feelings of love."-- "American Historical Review"

"In a thoughtful exploration of Catholic participants in Cold-War-era Mexican politics and counterculture, Jaime Pensado lays bare many historiographic misconceptions. Rejecting notions of a religious worldview marked by its homogeneity, institutional rigidity, and reactionary politics, Pensado instead persuasively demonstrates the dynamic roles of Catholic thinkers. Using comprehensive evidence, he offers a vision of a sophisticated countercultural moment."-- "The Americas"

"Pensado has written a book that presents a unique perspective because he was able to locate films that were long censored in Mexico, and other documents that were not widely distributed. This book deserves a place in university libraries, particularly those with a focus on Latin American religion and politics."-- "Catholic Library World"

"Pensado narrates Mexico's October 2, 1968 protest and government repression from a unique vantage point: the inside of a church. . . .In narrating this iconic moment from the interior of a church, Pensado underscores the centrality of the Catholic Church, its cultural, intellectual, and political traditions, to twentieth-century Mexico. . . .[A] deep history of a crucial but understudied element of modern Mexico."-- "Pacific Historical Review"

"Pensado offers an innovative cultural history of Mexico's long 1960s (1956-1976) through a religious lens. Each of his nine chapters places Catholic individuals like Marroquín at the center of his narrative. Together, these figures amount to a collective biography of Catholicism's multiple responses--rejection, acceptance, tolerance, participation--to a world and a country undergoing profound cultural, political, and social change."

-- "NACLA"

"An indispensable study of the Cold War in Latin America, for Pensado treats Catholicism (and religion, more generally) seriously, not simply as a reactionary or declining force."-- "Journal of Latin American Studies"

"Pensado does path-breaking work to reveal why and how Catholics of all ideological stripes became a formidable opposition to Mexico's PRI dictatorship--both important questions to explore as Mexico's democratic transition (2000-present) comes under greater scrutiny."-- "The Journal of Social History"

"The book is certainly a welcome addition to the literature, not only to the political, social, and cultural history of modern Mexico, but to Cold War and Catholic Mexico as well."-- "A Contracorriente"

"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"

"[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"

About the Author

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.