This book offers major contributions to several interconnected fields, most prominently Latin American history, transnational history, social movement studies, and solidarity studies. Decades in development, the project began as an idea Stites Mor had as an undergraduate student. It evolved through graduate studies and several monographs and collaborative projects before taking full shape during years of archival research. Indeed, Stites Mor's extensive research serves as a model of best practices for transnational historical methods: she delved into physical and digital collections in at least a dozen cities around the world. Notably, most of these cities are in the Global South, including Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Havana, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Mexico City, and Tel Aviv.
Stites Mor's close attention to primary and secondary sources from multiple regions and in multiple languages allows her to expand existing notions and theories of solidarity movements. For instance, she posits that Latin American revolutionary states have been key players in building and maintaining solidarity both within their nations’ borders and beyond, linking to other spaces in the Global South. The first half of the book develops this claim through case studies in Mexico and Cuba. Stites Mor first traces how, in the decades following the Mexican Revolution, Mexican state leaders welcomed exiles from Chile (and other select locales) to demonstrate their revolutionary credentials, while also leading resistance to US hegemony in the region. She then explores how Fidel Castro's revolutionary state engaged with the Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina (OSPAAAL) in the 1960s and 1970s, “render[ing] a vision of anticolonial conflict that facilitated Cuba's internationalism [and] helped shape the agenda of the United Nations” (52). In Cuba's case, Stites Mor pays special attention to how leaders encouraged art—including photographs, posters, and even comics—to construct “an idealized Cuban revolutionary posture” (82) and “offer . . . practical strategies of ideological resistance” (95).
The second half of the book turns attention to two other institutions through which Latin American leftists acted: political parties and the Catholic Church. Although these institutions certainly have connections with Latin American states, Stites Mor forefronts non-state actors. Chapter 3 examines how narrative constructions of solidarity with Palestine allowed Argentina's left—fractured by the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s—“to fashion a critical lifeboat,” create new bonds of unity, and, ultimately, “rebuild itself” (100, 102). Chapter 4 traces Latin American Liberation Theology's influence on anti-apartheid and anticolonial movements in South Africa, especially through the work of justice and peace commissions.
The book has many strengths. Stites Mor blends ground-level and broad-gauge analysis in unique ways, and she knits together struggles in distant locales, countering Western scholarly traditions that treat Africa, Asia, and Latin America as separate and distinct. She also engages with the complex, layered, sometimes paradoxical, and always evolving nature of each case study, and even though the usual cold war characters are present, players of the Global South take center stage. She demonstrates the importance of local context, highlighting how the Mexican and Cuban states promoted their revolutionary interests in very distinct ways. For instance, many leftist groups in Argentina allied with the Palestine Liberation Organization, while their neighbors in Chile—despite sharing much in common—did not.
Although the book's brevity and broad view are strengths, they also can be problematic. At times, the author omits basic information, making assumptions about readers’ background knowledge. Thus, a specialist in one site's history may find it difficult to fully grasp the story Stites Mor tells about other sites. Many students will find the text particularly challenging for this reason.
Yet, this critique may be less about Stites Mor's book and more about “Western” academia's patterns of creating silos and hyper-specialization. In sum, with this book Stites Mor joins the best of transnational historians in pushing traditional boundaries and expanding our understanding of the complex realities in our interconnected world. Moreover, she challenges scholars of transnational solidarity to expand our definitions of “activist,” to attend to the long term of solidarity work (beyond the protest marches and other public flares), and to uncover precisely how ideas of solidarity and partnership are communicated, received, and acted upon.
