The historiography of Cold War Latin America is one predicated on a bifurcation. Before the Cold War even ended, scholars were focused on political regimes, be it the Cuban Revolution and the rise of right-wing authoritarianism on the global stage, or the internal politics, repression, and transformations effected by those regimes. More recently, scholarship has taken a more social and cultural approach that has incorporated both the early Cold War and explored social movements and transitional politics as authoritarian regimes fell and the Cold War gave way to the rise of neoliberalism. While such approaches have been highly illuminating in our collective understanding of the domestic and international politics of Latin American political actors in the Cold War, and of social movements and cultural transformations, such scholarship has rarely merged the two to consider the interactions between social actors and states both domestically and internationally as political agents in the Cold War.

This panel seeks to address that lacuna by reconsidering the relationship between everyday social actors, political leaders, national identities, and international relations. Seeking to politicize the social and socialize the political, the papers on this panel highlight the political projects of groups historiography has traditionally overlooked, be it gay rights movements or white collar labor, even while reconsidering the role of political leaders in attempting to transform society through domestic and foreign policy. Drawing on examples from Brazil and Mexico, these papers will collectively reconsider the intersection of politics, international relations, and social movements in the 1970s and 1980s, a period where scholarship has traditionally focused either on the US-backed civil wars in Central America or the transitions to democracy in South America. In the process, these papers will bring in new actors to our understanding of late-Cold War politics even while reconsidering the role of political elites both in the international arena and in their relation to the public.