“An Unstoppable Wave of Shamelessness”: The Catholic Right and the Anticommunist “Culture Wars” in Cold War Mexico

Conservative forces shaped Mexico’s Cold War experience in ways that remain understudied by scholars. This paper addresses how competing groups within Mexico’s Catholic Right integrated discourses about youth, sexuality, gender, and family into their anticommunist platforms and disseminated them through printed media. The paper focuses on three publications from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s: the magazine Réplica, published in Guadalajara; the bulletin of the Regional Anticommunist Crusade, from Monterrey; and the journal La Hoja de Combate, from Mexico City. Aside from commenting on national and international politics, these publications reflected on and warned against the destructive effects of modern fashion, women’s magazines, rock music, and hippie counterculture, crafting a vision of Cold War Mexico in which concerns about public morality, gender roles and youth sexuality undergirded their defense of the traditional family as a key target of communist subversion. These groups understood the intersections of the public and the private as a Cold War frontline, leading to the articulation of an anti-subversive discourse (which is most often attributed to state actors) focused on the moral, social, and “psychological” dimensions of communism. Despite their differences over matters of Catholic doctrine and their interpretation of the post-conciliar Church, these moral crusaders found common ground in the “culture wars” and used them to mobilize diverse sectors of Mexican society.