Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico is Jaime Pensado’s latest book, published in June 2023 by University of California Press. Pensado, who teaches history at the University of Notre Dame, recently corresponded with Julia G. Young (Catholic University of America) about what prompted the book, the rich ground it covers, Pensado’s “maximalist” approach to sources including film and interviews, and where his research may take him next.
Julia Young: Your first book, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture During the Long Sixties (2013), was about student politics and youth culture in Mexico. In Love and Despair, you examine the ways that a variety of Mexican Catholic individuals, movements, and organizations responded to the social turmoil of the sixties in Mexico. What caused you to turn your gaze to Catholic culture, and what drove your curiosity on the topic?
Jaime Pensado: When I was doing research for Rebel Mexico, I began to realize that a lot of the Catholic responses to youth turmoil of the sixties were just not included in the scholarship. At first, what really surprised me was the overwhelming support that Mexican President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz received from conservative Catholics for his repression of students, even in the aftermath of the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968. This sentiment was reflected in the media, particularly newspaper and magazine editorials, and in letters that the president received, which I found in the Mexican National Archives, and it really came from a conservative Catholic perspective. A significant proportion of the Mexican public felt that the students had lost respect for authority. People used this moralistic language, complaining that the students had insulted the president in such a way that it was degrading to the nation. Voters perceived that, thanks to Díaz Ordaz, the student movement had ended, and Mexico could now celebrate the Olympic games of 1968.
At the same time, I was looking at the archival sources and I realized that the Mexican government tended to lump together all these different Catholic movements as though they were all the same. And the secular Left shared the same sentiment. In fact, both the state and the Left described the Catholic perspective as monolithic and completely reactionary, without any real agency—and without any description of how Catholics made sense of things that happened in the sixties or how they participated in a variety of movements on the right and the left.
So I started asking questions about Mexican Catholic perspectives in the sixties, but I knew I couldn’t write about it in the first book—it was too complicated a story and there were too many different perspectives. I began putting sources aside in order to return to them later.
JY: How did the project develop, then, after you published Rebel Mexico and returned to the topic of Mexican Catholic culture full-time?
JP: Initially, I had wanted to write about the Catholic conservative movement. The first article I published after Rebel Mexico, on the Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación (MURO), really investigated the ultra-conservative movement and the way it was trying to make sense of the radicalism of the sixties, not only in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution but also in the aftermath of Vatican II. Then I wrote an article on the radical left-wing Catholic youth group Movimiento Estudiantil Profesional (MEP), so I had two articles getting at the Right and the Left, and they both have to do with what I know best—student movements and youth activism in the sixties.
Increasingly, though, I realized that Catholics were more complicated, and that even those categories (Right and Left) were too simplistic. My research began to tell me that we can’t write about the global sixties if we don’t take into consideration Catholic movements, which were incredibly complex and which needed to be evaluated on their own terms. And to do that, we need to look at the spaces that they created, not only in response to politics, but also culture, spirituality, and modernity. So I would say that looking at Catholic movements helped me better understand the complexity of the sixties.
JY: When you and I were graduate students studying Mexican history, we read very little about Catholicism in Mexico during the 20th century. Since then, we’ve seen a striking change in the sense that more and more historians of Mexico—in both Mexico and the United States—are working on that topic. Why do you think Catholicism got left out of prevailing narratives of 20th-century Mexico for so long?
JP: I think it’s no accident! In Mexico after the Revolution, there was a very clear separation between Church and state, and the state was promoting the idea of a secular Mexican identity (mexicanidad). The state was also involved in the production of knowledge, incorporating artists and intellectuals. Diego Rivera was a member of the Communist party, but he was also an agent of the state. And the same was true with historians. Historians working in the History Department at the Colegio de Mexico were all coming from a leftist perspective, and so the language that emerged from that narrative was secular. Scholars questioned the authoritarianism of the state, but within the boundaries of the Revolution, and so the role of the Church and Catholicism was left out.
In the 1970s, a new generation of historians, such as Alicia Sedano and Jean Meyer, wanted to create a revisionist history of the Mexican Revolution, in which Catholicism was included. Yet this happened in a way that didn’t quite change the national story. If you look at history textbooks in Mexico, even most of the important books on Mexican history written in the United States, the Church is present only in the colonial period and during the Cristero rebellion, but disappears after 1940. That is not accurate, but we didn’t really know what happened with Catholics and the Church between the 1940s and 1970s. We knew a little bit in terms of a left wing of the Church that becomes sympathetic in terms of liberation theology, but we don’t really know about how various representatives of the Church made sense of the changes that were happening in the 1960s.
JY: In your work to fill that gap in historical knowledge and to capture the varieties of Catholic movements and perspectives of the sixties, you consulted a tremendous number of archival sources (from archives and libraries in nine countries), analyzed more than 80 films, and conducted 27 oral interviews. Could you talk a little bit about your research process? Why did this project involve so many types of historical sources, in so many places?
JP: I’m kind of a maximalist. I love finding materials. I did this with my first book—I wanted to say, here are many windows into materials that we can explore. In addition, I’m less interested in institutional history, or history from above. I was more interested in learning what was brewing from below, politically and counterculturally.
Ultimately what I argue in the book is that the real changes that you see in Mexico, if you look at the 1940s to the 1970s, are cultural. Mexico did not become more democratic politically speaking during that period. It did not overcome its high poverty index. But it did become more democratic culturally speaking, and it became more secularized, especially with regard to gender, sexuality, and consumption. But how do we tell that story? It requires a variety of sources. The typical archival sources can tell us about descriptive changes, but other kinds of sources are very important too.
I’ve always loved films. Historians have not really taken advantage of these as sources. And I wanted to do that. And you can really see the changes in Mexico if you look at films from the early 50s to the early 70s. You really get to see a different Mexico. A lot of the films that I ended up watching talked about Catholicism—not as a marginal thing, but as a central part of the nation’s identity. And I watched many films that have not received attention from historians. If we look at all the scholarship on Mexican films, it’s always the same well-regarded celebratory films that come out of the tradition of mexicanidad and were made by leftist film directors. But what about all these commercial films, B movies, that people actually went to see? I wanted to see what they were saying about Catholicism. I don’t care if they’re not amazing films. The film director found a need to tell a story and found an audience.
I was also surprised that not many historians have taken advantage of magazines written for a Catholic readership, like Señal, which was a national weekly magazine, or La Nación, the weekly magazine by the PAN, which has a lot to say about the authoritarianism of the PRI, and in so doing they are writing to an audience that identifies with the PAN but also with the Catholic nation. Or in another case, Vicente Leñero—the most important Catholic novelist in the second half of the 20th century—became director of Claudia, a feminist magazine, and ironically under his leadership the magazine becomes even more feminist, so that’s surprising. And then there was the Jesuit Enrique Maza, who was the founder of Proceso, the most important left-wing journal of the 1970s. What does that say about Catholic Mexico? It says that Catholics were present everywhere, and we shouldn’t be surprised. Yet these Catholics were not only marginalized in the scholarship but also even in the spaces that they created. They had to be creative and savvy to reclaim their identity and their voices as influential figures of the sixties.
JY: Speaking of recovering the voices of Catholic actors who were marginalized, you also conducted a number of interviews for this book. Could you talk a bit about the interviews you included? How did you find your subjects, and what was their response when you found them?
JP: The interviews I did ended up shaping my research profoundly. One was with Jesús García, a Jesuit priest who passed away a few years ago. He was socially committed and lived in one of the worst neighborhoods in Mexico City, and he really told me the history of 1960s Mexico from the perspective of the Church and Catholics. After giving me a crash course on Mexican history, he told me I had to talk to other people. He connected me to Manuel Velázquez, leader of the Mexican Social Secretariat, and Miguel Concha, the Dominican who led the human rights movement from the Centro Universitario Cultural, the Dominican student center adjacent to the campus of the UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico).
Then they started identifying other people for me to interview. One of these was Jorge Bermeo, one of the leaders of the Corporación de Estudiantes Mexicanos (CEM), a youth group for Catholic students. The founders of CEM still met once a month, and they invited me for a couple of those dinners. I think they let me in because they felt that finally someone was going to tell their story—although I remember there was one guy in that group who was always very concerned that I was some kind of infiltrator. But in general, most of them wanted to share their story—because they felt like it hadn’t been told. They’ve been so left out of national narratives and archives that when you knock on the door they’re like, finally! And several of them have since died, so their stories were really important to capture.
JY: Your book is full of fascinating and surprising characters: Catholic writers and journalists, priest jipitecas (a term coined for Mexican hippies), anticommunists, ultraconservatives, feminists, filmmakers—a real constellation of Mexican Catholics who responded to modernity, politics, and cultural change in a variety of ways. What did you come across in the book that was most surprising to you?
JP: I was surprised by how much Catholics, and especially priests, engaged in the bohemian culture of the era. They were really involved in questions related to sexuality and gender—things that concerned Mexico’s youth in the 1960s. They also created spaces to discuss ideas that were controversial at times—ideas about the pill, about sex outside marriage. They didn’t shy away from these issues, but really wanted to have a conversation about them, and in so doing they shaped the story. The best example of this in Love and Despair is the bohemian priest Enrique Marroquin. He was present at the Festival Rock y Ruedas de Avándaro, which was Mexico’s Woodstock. He was a writer for the Mexican edition of Rolling Stone Magazine, Piedra Rodante. He was everywhere! And he would go on to publish the best account of la onda (the sixties counterculture), La Contracultura como Protesta (1975).
JY: Turning towards the present moment, can Love and Despair tell us anything about contemporary Catholic culture in Mexico? Is there still a strong “left” Catholic culture in Mexico, for example, or has it largely disappeared? How do your interviewees relate to the Catholic Church today?
JP: One way that this movement evolved beyond the sixties is the Zapatista movement of 1994. In the case of bohemian priest Enrique Marroquin, he eventually got active in Christian Base Communities in the 1980s, and a lot of other leftist priests did the same thing. No one really writes about Christian Base Communities in Chiapas, but they were created in the 1980s and 1990s and were very active there. Most people assume that the Zapatista movement only emerged from the leadership of Subcomandante Marcos, as if it wasn’t impacted by Catholicism at all.
Some of my interviewees still remained in the Church, and others left it altogether. People within the Church continue to fight about whether it can change, and how. I allude briefly in the book to Vicente Leñero, who was critical of those who leave the Church for more radical paths and remained convinced that change can happen from within. This is what divides Catholic intellectuals as well as Catholic priests. Some remain very active within the apparatus of the Church, and others say that nothing can happen within hierarchical structures of the Church, and so they leave.
JY: Was there anything in the book you wished you could have written more about?
JP: I really don’t know how historians who do Catholic history are going to read this book. It’s a different kind of a book—it’s not your typical revisionist Catholic book. It’s almost an experimental book because of the variety of sources and the variety of stories that I tell. I don’t know if people are going to welcome it, necessarily. My readers on the left are going to wonder why I am paying attention to Catholicism, and say it’s because I found God. But are the Catholic historians going to think I’m only interested in the sixties, youth, and not really telling a story of the Church? I wonder.
JY: Well, I think people are already responding very positively to the book and finding much to engage with. So I don’t think that will be an issue. If it’s not too early, can I ask if you have any thoughts on your third project?
JP: I’m thinking of working more on film in Latin America in the sixties and writing a book about how youth has been discussed and portrayed across Latin America. So I’m looking at some interesting films and have been reading about cinematic movements in Latin America. Stay tuned!
This interview appears in the spring 2024 issue of the Cushwa Center’s American Catholic Studies Newsletter.