The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties

In The Last Good Neighbor, Eric Zolov proposes a revisionist interpretation of Mexican history during the 1960s.  He shows how Mexico's political leadership simultaneously leveraged the nation's strategic partnership with the United States and harnessed the left's revolutionary passions, in pursuit of a grand strategy: to broaden Mexico's international relations and break free of economic subordination to Washington.  Zolov looks beyond the impact of the Cuban revolution to reveal the initial attraction of alternative geopolitical currents, such as the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as the potential weight of diplomatic "balancers," including Western Europe and the Soviet Union, during a pivotal moment in the Global Cold War (c. 1959-1966).  Zolov examines the intersection of diplomatic, political, and cultural history to show how Mexico's pursuit of a "global pivot" transformed political subjectivities and laid the foundation for a renewed internationalism during the 1970s.

Eric Zolov is Professor of History and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Stony Brook University.  He was a Fulbright Scholar in Santiago, Chile (2019).  A graduate of Colby College (1987) and the University of Chicago (1990; 1995), he has published widely on popular culture, twentieth-century Mexico, and U.S.-Latin American relations.  In addition to several edited and co-edited collections, he is the author of Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (1999) and co-author of the forthcoming, The Walls of Santiago: Social Revolution and Political Aesthetics in Contemporary Chile (2022). 

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.