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Matthew Butler, Jaime M. Pensado. Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 367–368, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae497
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To use a countercultural metaphor, Jaime M. Pensado’s Love and Despair is a wonderfully mind-expanding book. It shows how progressive Catholic ideas and actors were central to the development of a Mexican counterculture—or, perhaps, to the development of a Catholic Mexican counterculture. Readers may not agree with all the book’s conclusions; yet they will thank the author for taking them on what can only be called a deeply researched and fascinating historiographical “trip” through Catholic (or Catholic-inflected) 1960s journalism, cinema, sexual politics, campus politics, ecclesial base communities, and urban guerrilla warfare.
The book has a somewhat unconventional organization, slipping, within chapters, from wide-angle period discussions—of Tlatelolco and 1971’s halconazo, say—to brief, personalized snapshots of its countercultural protagonists. The juxtaposition of manifesto-length inserts and broader contextual frames gives the book an occasional but entirely appropriate zine-like feel. And, if some protagonists are well known, such as Catholic novelist Vicente Leñero (famed as the Mexican Graham Greene [229]), most are resolutely obscure. Indeed, Pensado offers vivid and memorable portraits of student activists such as Jorge Bermeo; of urban guerrilleros such as Eufemia Almaraz and Héctor Torres (a kind of Mexican Catholic Baader-Meinhof); and of progressive clergymen such as French Dominican Alex Morelli, himself a survivor of the Nazi camps and founder of a cinder-block church in 1960s Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl.
