Fraternally Americans: The New Solidarity Movement and the Rise of a Counterculture in the Early 1960s
In February of 1964 the New Solidarity Movement held its first and only encounter in Mexico City, whose honorary presidents were Henry Miller and Thomas Merton. The Movement joined a number of writers, poets, and visual artists from all over the Americas, with the Argentinean Miguel Grinberg, the Mexican Sergio Mondragón, and his American wife, Margaret Randall, at the forefront of the organization of the network of people and ideas that made New Solidarity—and the encounter—possible. Scarcely explored in the histories of the Latin American sixties, that network illuminates some of the interconnections of the (counter) culture and politics in the era.
Based on a systematic reading of countercultural magazines, correspondence, memoirs, and oral interviews, this presentation will reconstruct the making of New Solidarity by pointing out two key dimensions. First, it will show that New Solidarity—and the Encounter—aimed at the creation of a space for the intersection of countercultures in the Americas. The Encounter stood as the central event for the dissemination of “Inter-American” cultural materials, ideas, and sensibilities that, in a practical way, questioned the “anti-Americanism” that swept across the political new left at the time. Second, the New Solidarity Movement advocated for the shaping of aesthetic and cultural interventions articulated through the ideas of “liberation”—individual and collective—and of “total revolution”. Sharing a common lexicon dominated by the keywords of “liberation” and “revolution,” the New Solidarity Movement nonetheless engaged in a tumultuous relationship with other cultural and political perspectives in the early 1960s, as I will show through the discussion of the participation of some of its members in the Casa de las Américas awards of 1965.
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