This article provides an intellectual history of Jean Meyer as an effort to shed light on the role that foreign historians played in the shaping of the Global Sixties in Mexico. His three-volume text composing La Cristiada (1972–74) has endured as one of the most cited and reprinted books in Mexican history, and to this day, its author has remained a hegemonic voice in Mexican academia. Yet little is known about the making of this groundbreaking book. In this effort, this article situates its methodology, revisionist arguments, and immediate perception in the political context of the era. It brings attention to Meyer’s rise in Mexican academia and examines the intellectual impact that three culminating events—the Cuban Revolution (1959), the progressive Catholicism of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), and the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968—had on his generation and in the shaping of the Global Sixties in Mexico.
