"The Only Correct Line": A Transnational History of French Maoism in Catholic Mexico During the Late Sixties

My dissertation analyzes the links between French radicalism, post-Vatican II Catholic activism, and Mexican protest movements to provide the first transnational history of Política Popular (People’s Politics). This was the most influential Maoist group in Mexico with roots in the intellectual upbringing of Adolfo Orive Bellinger, a student of the economist Charles Bettelheim who spent four years in Paris during the sixties.

While scholars have studied this era of radicalism in Latin America, focusing on the impact of the Cuban Revolution and the imperialist presence of the US in the region, they have failed to look at the role of Western Europe, Maoist China, and religion. To fill the gap, I rely on oral history sources and official and private archives from five countries to build a multilayered narrative of French Maoism and situate the Mexican case and its activists in the broader global context of the leftwing militancy of the “Global Sixties” (c.1956—c.1976).

In complicating this narrative, I argue that the idea of mass line politics that largely defined the era overlapped with progressive aspects of Catholicism. Coming out of Parisian universities, Beijing schools, and Catholic circles, the French Revolutionary ideas of the era played a fundamental role in the emergence of a transnational Left that identified with the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Leaders of both movements enabled political coalitions and shared similar understandings of economic patterns of development that allowed for the emergence of a Maoist “script” of activism in rural communities, insertion in the metal industry unionism, and mobilization of new urban migrants.

In addition to bringing together the scholarships of the radical New Left and progressive Catholicism in the transnational context of the Global Sixties, I decenter the history of student radicalism in Mexico from both the nation’s capital and the year 1968. In this effort, I answer a set of questions that have not received enough attention from historians: How did Mexican students and priests get involved in transnational networks of radical thinking? How did they bring those ideas to their communities? And how did their interactions shape the radicalism of the Global Sixties?