By Michael Kec
The success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 brought with it a new interpretation of Left-wing politics. The revolution inspired the emergence of New Left sensibilities that reverberated throughout Latin and Southern America, and made its impact felt worldwide. However, it was far from the only movement to have a global effect on societies and their socioeconomic and political climates. In 1950s America and Western Europe, counterculture movements first came into existence and evolved into “various forms of cultural, social, and political radicalization” in the late 1960s and 1970s.[1] In a period in Latin and South America that was “enamored with love,” many of Latin and South America’s youth embarked on quests to redefine their identity in their homelands’ evolving political and cultural climate.[2] However, as these countercultural movements emerged, new conservative movements, better understood as the “New Right,” also appeared, entering an evolutionary arms race with New Left sensibilities in opposition to them and the other countercultural movements in their countries.
These new cultural and political movements coincided with a new wave of exploration of gender roles, adherence to traditional values, and sexuality. Within the militant revolutionary factions of the New Left, visions of the “heroic guerilla” and the “New man” defined what it meant to be a true revolutionary and, consequently, their beliefs about gender and traditional values. The masculine nature of these terms is deliberate and represents the revolution as a male-dominated ambition. Subsequently, the New Left overlapped with the New Right in their shared view of female participation within revolutionary struggles. In both movements, newly adopted gender roles were the byproduct of reactionary developments in response to the other political entity. These developments led both political entities to pursue some degree of women’s empowerment to gain greater political and social influence. However, these ambitions also came at the cost of systematically rendering women as second-rate contributors in political parties across the spectrum.
Both the New Left and New Right upheld traditional gender roles. However, they were adopted in such a way that both factions could make minor changes to them in response to radicalization and developments in opposition without completely overhauling Latin American society’s gender norms. Outside of politics, women were often more restricted in exercising their romantic and sexual desires than men. María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo highlights the struggles of women who participated in the revolution in Colombia. She describes how women had to maintain greater control over their sexual relations, and that their maternity made them a target for “social censure” both inside and outside the organization.[3] This disapproval of women’s pursuit of sexual and romantic liberty was further instilled by the stigma of promiscuous relationships between men and women being “applied almost exclusively to women.”[4] Perdomo also recalls an anecdote from her time in prison when men only had until noon on Saturday to visit prisoners, whereas women had all of the time on Sundays to visit prisoners so they could “‘attend to their compañeros’” which Perdomo viewed as a rule clearly in favor of men.[5] The phrasing of the purpose of their visits, along with the use of “compañero” as a masculine term, implies that female visitors had a responsibility to support their male counterparts, as the nuclear-family structure trope similarly portrays. In contrast, the reverse dynamic was deemed less important and perhaps counterproductive.
The New Left first sought to capture the essence of youthful romance and incorporate it into their political culture to create organization and establish hierarchy within their respective movements. Young Communists in Chile, for example, took their understanding of romantic relationships from conservative Communist ideas of romantic fulfillment which “hailed the nuclear, male-headed family.”[6] Elsewhere, this affection “generated strength” for New Left revolutionaries.[7] However, what makes the Chilean New Left’s understanding of love and sexual romance unique is that “female virtue was dissociated from virginity.”[8] With this view on the value of female virginity, young Communist parties encouraged women to explore as many sexual relationships as possible if it meant finding someone who could provide them enough fulfillment to settle into a traditional romantic life. The adherence to traditional lives, with men at the helm, and romances between members were those that the young Communist party “encouraged and sought to control”.[9] Within young Chilean Communist organizations, reaffirming a traditional sense of order between men and women through sexuality provided a framework in which further systems of hierarchy and leadership could develop. However, the consequence was the restrictions placed on women romantically and sexually within the revolution they sought to achieve.
This ultimately manifested itself in the young Chilean communist world as women occupying the “lower echelons” of leadership. Men, on the other hand, acted upon their personal and party’s emphasis on “personal sacrifice” and largely remained away from home for long periods of time.[10] The women were therefore usually left behind in those homes to take care of “domestic burdens.”[11] Thus, a repeated theme emerged in the New Left: while women were not explicitly barred from contributing to the revolution, New Left revolutionary organizations did not actively elevate women to positions of great importance. Furthermore, some Communist men increasingly believed that women should not be “interfering” with their political action.[12] Revolutionary organizations and their overwhelmingly male-dominated leaderships recognized that maintaining some sense of order, reminiscent of the conservative societies they had previously lived in, would either serve as a starting point for transitioning to a fully liberated New Left society or provide the bare foundation for that society to survive.
Exemplary of this is the New Left’s vision of the ‘New Man’ that shared commonalities with that of the New Right. They shared similar ideas about youth empowerment and the quest men must undertake to overcome their personal shortcomings, often brought about by a larger, immoral society. Che Guevara himself described it as competing “very hard with the past.”[13] Guevara further elaborated on the idea as he states that as man strives to become a newer and improved version of himself, he must “forge his revolutionary spirit” daily.[14] The New Left’s ‘New Man’ adopts traditionally masculine characteristics and language that hint at the revolution itself being largely male-dominated and male-inspired. Therefore, while the New Left did not explicitly prohibit women from being leaders of the revolution, they were often given less public praise for their revolutionary heroism than their male counterparts and were typically subordinated. One example is how the Communist magazine Miranda downplayed the role of the legendary female revolutionary Haydée Santamaria’s participation in the Cuban Revolution by noting that she often cried thinking about the dead combatants and their families. The magazine went so far as to suggest that she even cried for “families of the enemy.”[15]
María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo’s writings on her experience as a Colombian revolutionary also suggest a soft form of female subordination to male colleagues. In her writings, she describes her marriage to Ramiro, a friend of one of Perdomo’s comrades dubbed ‘El Mono’ who served alongside Perdomo in the student takeover of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.[16][17] Perdomo would end up in a committed relationship with Ramiro, living with him and eventually having a child with him.[18] Afterward, Perdomo recalled how Ramiro would bring his friend to his and Perdomo’s house to discuss and study. During these meetings, Perdomo would serve the men food and coffee and offer her opinions on their discussions as a passionate supporter of the revolution herself. However, she received little acknowledgment from the men for any of those things, with Perdomo writing that, to them, she was “just Ramiro’s wife.”[19] The New Left’s conceptualization of the ‘New Man’ evidently empowered sexist beliefs that women were too emotional or domestic to embark on the quest to become the revolution’s ‘New Man’. Thus, albeit to a lesser extent, the caricature of the ‘New Man’ restricts the participation of women in the revolution under similar grounds as the New Right’s ‘New Man’.
Aside from the growth of the New Left in Chile, another political entity emerged in Chilean youth society – the Christian Democrats, who found considerable support among both students in private and public school systems due to their connections to the Catholic Church as they sought to capitalize on Chilean society’s “rich social fabric.”[20] Their emergence primed them to be inheritors of centrist representation following the diminishing influence of the previous secularist Radical Youth of Chile, who eventually made the “turn to the left. ”[21] The Christian Democrats, with their adherence to religion and their widespread presence, interposed themselves between the New Left and New Right. Their presence, along with the radicalization of the young New Left, placed the New Right in a difficult position that forced it to undergo ‘its own metamorphosis” in a now “highly politicized environment,” characterized by an ever-shifting political scene.[22]
This prompted a metamorphosis of the New Right, first evidenced by its version of the ‘New Man’ image, akin to the ideas previously discussed. Developed in response to the New Left. Their vision of the “New Man” strongly emphasized men serving as leaders, while relegating women to a predominantly supporting role. In Mexico, the rise of radicalism in the New Left was first characterized by the student-led 1968 protests against police brutality in the Mexican state, which involved mass demonstrations and takeovers of public spaces.[23] The Mexican government subdued the protests with the controversial Tlatelolco Massacre on October 2, just a mere 10 days before the start of the 1968 Olympic Games that Mexico was hosting.[24] This political destabilization, among other developments during the period of the Cold War, prompted Mexican derechas, or right-wing supporters, to propose “alternative conceptions of Mexican identity” to counter the radicalism on the Mexican New Left and to consolidate the stability and apparatus of the post-revolutionary Mexican state.[25] In this pursuit, one of these groups, Conciencia Joven, developed its idea of the “New Man” that found itself pitted against that of Che Guevara.[26]
Conciencia Joven envisioned their ‘New Man’ as one who held family and tradition dear to his heart, describing tradition as an “arcane treasure” that would serve as a weapon against the “decadence” of the New Left and its Socialist visions.[27] Becoming this “New Man” required the empowerment of the youth to bring about changes the Mexican right deemed necessary, which involved encouraging derechas to come to terms with their inadequacies and fight the “inner old man.”[28] It was through this process that the then reborn and invigorated man could fix the post-revolutionary Mexican state, which they believed had become “anti-catholic and antinational.”[29] This point illustrates how the right’s ‘New Man’ embraced the traditional Catholic past as the heart and soul of the Mexican nation. The ‘New Man’s’ Catholicism was then envisioned as a weapon against modernization and the subsequent degeneracy they deemed characteristic of the rise of the radical New Left. The Mexican New Right sought to counter the New Left’s efforts to overhaul the state’s entire political and social fabric, aiming to achieve total liberation within a broader international movement. With this Catholic nationalistic ideology, adherence to family, tradition, and the overall male-dominated language of the ‘New Man,’ women were explicitly excluded from this revolutionary fight. The Mexican New Right believed Feminism placed women in positions they were not meant to occupy, such as those that challenged their traditional role as “mothers, lovers, and companions.”[30] Furthermore, they believed feminism undermined the roles of men and women, such that women would become ‘a caricature’ of men, and men would consequently be feminized.[31] The right’s centering of the ‘New Man’ rendered women as those who would nurture the future of their society, while men would fight to create it.
The ‘New Man’ of the right was a reactionary development to reaffirm their traditional and social beliefs on gender in the face of a rapidly changing society characterized by greater freedom of expression. Despite their progressive goals, it was nonetheless apparent that the New Left held similar traditional attitudes that sought to limit women’s political involvement. Consequently, as the New Left consolidated its position on women’s role in politics, the New Right sought to capitalize on women’s dissatisfaction with New Left beliefs to sway their support in its favor. Chile serves as a pronounced example, as before the presidency of the Socialist leader Salvador Allende, women were primarily viewed as apolitical due to either a lack of interest or politics’ relationship to armed conflict, which female participation within would “sully their nature.”[32] Due to this traditional understanding of women’s role in politics, Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity Party largely ignored the idea of women as a united force on the political stage and merely “sublimated gender to class,” such that there was little discussion of their involvement. Coupled with the party’s more significant focus on class divisions, and an understanding of apoliticism dominating female demographics, women’s specific needs and concerns were also erased.[33] This approach convinced Allende’s party to assume that working-class women shared the same beliefs as their male family members, and by that logic, focusing on the needs of the working-class man as the “revolutionary subject” would naturally trickle down to working-class women.[34]
However, as opposition to Salvador Allende’s presidency grew in Chile, anti-Allende factions adopted a different approach to understanding women’s presumed apolitical nature. Instead of using women’s apoliticism to cultivate a male-centric movement, right-wing opposition weaponized their apoliticism as a political tool to undermine Allende’s presidency. In a reactionary manner, the anti-Allende factions propped up an image of women as “apolitical housewives and mothers” as a message that transcended women across financial classes to take down Allende’s party, as the majority of anti-Allende women were from the middle and upper classes.[35] Here, the role of women in the political landscape was not challenged. Instead, anti-Allende political opponents utilized the traditional role of women, in part maintained by Allende, and their supposed apoliticism to undermine the ideological focus of Allende’s socialist policies. Interestingly enough, these factions described women in a similar context to the New Left’s masculine sense of “personal sacrifice” by elaborating on the “sacrifice” women felt for their children.[36] This right-wing observation suggested that women possessed a particular skill set and emotional makeup that made them best suited for roles as housewives and supporters, but also limited them from transcending those roles.
When comparing interpretations of female participation in Chilean politics, the leftist Popular Unity coalition and the conservative anti-Allende factions share striking similarities. Both political movements maintained that women were apolitical figures who best remained in supporting roles to their male counterparts. However, while the leftist coalitions never explicitly stated this to be women’s concrete role in their vision of an utopian society, they still largely ignored women-specific concerns. Ultimately, women could still participate in the revolution, but were expected to take a political backseat to men. In contrast, anti-Allende coalitions explicitly defined women’s role in society as mothers and caretakers of the home, yet accorded them considerably more attention. This included uplifting them for the role they played in the traditional household framework, as a means of undermining Allende’s Socialist government. Anti-Allende political actors’ weaponization of women can best be demonstrated by their focus on how women would be forced to wait in long lines outside of the home due to food and resource shortages caused by Allende’s policies, preventing them from attending to their “primary roles” as mothers, wives, and housekeepers.[37]
In the context of 1960s Latin America, both the emerging New Left and New Right entered an ideological evolutionary arms race to consolidate their power and influence across several nations. Permeating as transnational influences on the youth, this arms race led to varying ideals that ultimately disenfranchised women. Within the New Left, its patriarchal hierarchy effectively relegated the matter of women’s rights and participation, concerning the advancement of their political platforms, to a complete afterthought. On the other hand, the similar patriarchal hierarchy of the New Right sought to restrict the political empowerment of women explicitly, rather than embracing it, to uphold traditional conservative ideas. Nonetheless, both political entities saw women’s empowerment as a tool to maintain order within their movements and to reaffirm a hierarchy of power that placed men at the top and women as their subordinates, often deriving such positions from similar tropes on traditional gender roles.
The struggle for political influence among the youth of Latin America during this time serves as a uniquely compelling example of the importance of understanding the evolution of political ideologies with acute nuance. Historical conflicts between opposing political ideologies are often understood in mainstream discourse as concrete dichotomies. Retrospective views portray them as battles between diametrically opposed factions, both seeking to impose their worldview on the people who serve as the conflict’s premise. However, throughout these conflicts, adherence to and practice of these ideologies can often depart from their stated ideals, leading to the preferential treatment of some groups at the expense of others. The fragility that comes with adherence to ideological doctrines manifests in the implications of their practice for ordinary people at the time, with particular emphasis on their varying intersectionalities and how each is affected by politics. These ideas can be applied to discussions of racial policies during the Reconstruction era, the late 1860s in the United States following the Civil War, or later during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, which caused shifts within both the Democratic and Republican parties. Additionally, these themes could be used to compare & contrast the ethnic policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) from the early 1900s until the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. In short, whether historian or not, the responsibility falls on our shoulders to be conscious and aware of the distinctions between the language of an ideology and its implementation, whether retrospectively or prospectively. Furthermore, it is more crucial to objectively determine how this distinction affects every aspect of society, from its economy and government to the everyday person whose life is more heavily impacted by this distinction of words and contrivance.
Bibliography
Dunn, Christopher. “Desbunde and its Discontents: Counterculture and Authoritarian Modernization in Brazil, 1968-1974,” The Americas 70:3, January 2014.
Guevara, Ernesto “Che” “Socialism and Man in Cuba” (1965) in David Deutschmann and María del Carmen Ariet, eds., Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics and Revolution. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003.
Herrán, Luis. “‘The Other New Man’: Conservative Nationalism and Right-Wing Youth in 1970s Monterrey” in Mexico Beyond 1968: Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression During the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies, edited by Jaime Pensado and Enrique Ochoa. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018.
Perdomo, María Eugenia Vásquez. My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary: Reflections of a Former Guerrillera, trans. by Lorena Terando. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005.
Power, Margaret. “Class and Gender in the Anti-Allende Women’s Movement: Chile 1970-1973,” Social Politics, Fall 2000.
Salgado, Alfonso. “Making Friends & Making Out: The Romantic Lives of Young Communists in Chile (1958-1973),” The Americas 76:2, March 2019.
Zolov, Eric. “Mexico 1968” Lecture from HIS 379: Rebels & Revolutionaries: 1960s Latin America, Stony Brook University, New York, 2024.
Endnotes
[1] Christopher Dunn, “Desbunde and its Discontents: Counterculture and Authoritarian Modernization in Brazil, 1968-1974,” The Americas 70:3 (January 2014): 432.
[2] Alfonso Salgado, “Making Friends & Making Out: The Romantic Lives of Young Communists in Chile (1958-1973),” The Americas 76:2 (March 2019): 302.
[3] María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo, My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary: Reflections of a Former Guerrillera, trans. by Lorena Terando (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 76.
[4] María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo, My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary, 76.
[5] María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo, My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary, 161.
[6] Alfonso Salgado, “Making Friends & Making Out,” 302.
[7] María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo, My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary, 117.
[8] Alfonso Salgado, “Making Friends & Making Out,” 302.
[9] Alfonso Salgado, “Making Friends & Making Out,” 302.
[10] Alfonso Salgado, “Making Friends & Making Out,” 303.
[11] Alfonso Salgado, “Making Friends & Making Out,” 303.
[12] Alfonso Salgado, “Making Friends & Making Out,” 325.
[13] Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba” (1965) in David Deutschmann and María del Carmen Ariet, eds., Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics and Revolution (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003), 5.
[14] Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” 15.
[15] Alfonso Salgado, “Making Friends & Making Out,” 318.
[16] María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo, My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary, 63.
[17] María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo, My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary, 52.
[18] María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo, My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary, 55.
[19] María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo, My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary, 64.
[20] Alfonso Salgado, “Making Friends & Making Out,” 304.
[21] Alfonso Salgado, “Making Friends & Making Out,” 305.
[22] Alfonso Salgado, “Making Friends & Making Out,” 305.
[23] Eric Zolov, Mexico 1968 Lecture, slide 29.
[24] Eric Zolov, Mexico 1968 Lecture, slide 42.
[25] Luis Herrán, “‘The Other New Man’: Conservative Nationalism and Right-Wing Youth in 1970s Monterrey” in Mexico Beyond 1968: Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression During the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies, edited by Jaime Pensado and Enrique Ochoa (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018), pp. 196.
[26] Luis Herrán, “The Other New Man,” 202.
[27] Luis Herrán, “The Other New Man,” 201.
[28] Luis Herrán, “The Other New Man,” 201.
[29] Luis Herrán, “The Other New Man,” 201.
[30] Luis Herrán, “The Other New Man,” 203.
[31] Luis Herrán, “The Other New Man,” 204Afterward.
[32] Margaret Power, “Class and Gender in the Anti-Allende Women’s Movement: Chile 1970-1973,” Social Politics (Fall 2000): 291.
[33] Margaret Power, “Class and Gender in the Anti-Allende Womanti-Allende factions adopted a different approach to understanding women’s presumeden’s Movement,” 304.
[34] Margaret Power, “Class and Gender in the Anti-Allende anti-Allende factions adopted a different approach to understanding women’s presumedWomen’s Movement,” 304.
[35] Margaret Power, “Class and Gender in the Anti-Allende Women’s Movement,” 297.
[36] Margaret Power, “Class and Gender in the Anti-Allende Women’s Movement,” 297.
[37] Margaret Power, “Class and Gender in the Anti-Allende Women’s Movement,” 302.