Radical Politics,Radical Procedures

Over the course of the last five decades, two English-language publications have been essential reading for U.S. leftwing scholars and activists interested in Latin America and the Caribbean: Report on the Americas, produced by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) ¹ and Latin American Perspectives. Both emerged in the midst of a growing criticism of U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1960s in the context of a radicalization of large numbers of American youth and were designed to educate the public about the reality of the region. Both profoundly influenced my personal, political, and professional lives.

In 1973, after finishing college, I joined seven other young radical Quaker anti-Vietnam war activists to live in a working-class Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood of Philadelphia and participate in a weekly study group on Latin America and the Caribbean. At the time there were less than twenty-five small Latin American-focused collectives or political groups working to inform a U.S. audience about the political, social, and economic situation in various countries of the region (NACLA: 1992). The number of participants in all of these organizations probably amounted to no more than several hundred people with no more than a handful of full-time staff persons. Dedicated activists engaged in endless after-work or weekend meetings without any compensation, and self-sacrificing dedication to the cause was the culture of this milieu, as was also the case for those participating in the much larger anti-war, peace, civil rights, and social justice movements that were so active throughout the country in the 1960s and 70s.

In our study group, NACLA’s publications, modest newsletters produced by different groups, and informational packets on specific Latin American topics were essential reading to guide us through our weekly discussions. For some reason, I volunteered to lead a session on Brazil, requiring that I track down the Brazilian Information Bulletin (a sixteen-page publication produced by the American Friends of Brazil), different issues of NACLA’s monthly report, and a handful of books available at a local branch of the Philadelphia public library system. That rather arbitrary decision to agree to head the discussion on Brazil changed my life’s course. Becoming increasingly interested in the country, its people, and its politics as a result of preparing for the study group session, I contacted the Committee against Repression in Brazil, located in Washington, D. C. and founded by Marcos Arruda, a political exile. He quickly invited me to become a collaborator in organizing the Second Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Brazil, designed to bring international attention to the on-going torture and assassination of oppositionists. After the September 11, 1973 coup against socialist president Salvador Allende, the Tribunal expanded its attention to Chile and other countries in Latin America. ²

The defeat of the “experiment in socialism” of the Popular Unity government also turned my attention—and that of almost all other activists working on Latin America and the Caribbean—to events in Chile. The day after the coup, I joined a hundred other local activists in a protest in front of the Philadelphia City Hall. Soon thereafter some of us formed the Chile Emergency Committee, choosing a rather quixotic name since we didn’t realize at the time how long the Pinochet dictatorship would stay in power.

That same year, I finally came out and began working with the local Gay Activist Alliance, but felt isolated in Philadelphia, where I found few other gay men who shared my radical political ideas. So, I decided to move to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1974, where I quickly joined the local Chile Solidarity Committee. I also became a member of a gay socialist collective, the June 28^th Union, whose name commemorated the 1969 New York City rebellion in response to the raid of a gay bar, the Stonewall Inn. During the month of activities marking the second anniversary of the coup in Chile, the June 28^th Union organized a public event, “Gay Solidarity with the Chilean Resistance.” Approximately 300 members of the San Francisco LGBT community attended the Saturday evening gathering that including a showing of a Chilean film about the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, poetry readings, speakers, and political music intended to raise awareness about the situation in Chile. It was also designed to offer support for LGBT people there who may have been victims of targeted repression under the Pinochet regime, although we had no firm information to back up our supposition.

In January 1976, I decided to travel to Latin America. When I entered Brazil at the upper reaches of the Amazon River, my intention was to stay in the country for six months. I ended up living in São Paulo for almost six years. There, I was a founding member and the leader of the left-wing of Somos: Grupo de Afirmação Homossexual, Brazil’s first LGBT group, and a participant in the semi-underground opposition to the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. In 1978, I returned to the United States for a brief visit in order to obtain a student visa to be able to enroll in the Master’s program at the University of São Paulo. While passing through New York, I stopped by the offices of NACLA, which for me was an island of interest in Latin America located in a sea of indifference to the region. To my surprise, a NACLA editor asked me to write an article about the recent strike wave among auto and metal workers in the Greater São Paulo region, which catapulted a union leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to national prominence (Green, 1979). It was my first effort as a writer, and I am to this day grateful to NACLA for helping me launch what would many years later become my career as a Latin American specialist.

After three more intensive years living in Brazil, I returned to the United States in 1982. I ended up living in Los Angeles where I worked as a community and labor organizer and a bilingual social worker before deciding in 1990 to pursue a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). Without realizing it, I had stumbled upon a group of professors working with Latin American Perspectives, as I took classes with LAP editors Timothy Harding, Donald Bray, Marjorie Bray, and William Bollinger. They quickly recognized my unique background and experience in Brazil. Even before I received a M.A. degree, they invited me to join the meetings of the monthly LAP editorial collective. When I earned my diploma and continued to pursue a doctorate in Latin American history at UCLA, I was immediately voted onto the editorial board, although I had been attending the monthly multi-hour-long Sunday meetings of the collective and reviewing articles for almost two years prior to my symbolic promotion. My CSULA professors also encouraged me to publish an expanded version of a paper I had written for a class on Latin American politics taught by Donald Bray, which become one of the first articles on the history of the LGBT movement in Latin America (Green, 1994).

Several aspects of my years working with the LAP editorial board are worth mentioning. First, was the willingness of LAP to allow such an academically inexperienced graduate student to have an equal voice in the collective’s editorial decisions. Although Ron Chicote—with the dedicated assistance of Fran Chilcote—oversaw the on-going direction and sustenance of the publication, the equalitarian spirit of the 1960s still permeated the ethos of LAP’s monthly editorial meetings in the 1980s. Moreover, the founding members insisted that the journal have the active participation of editors from Latin America and the Caribbean in the evaluation of articles and in the editing of issues. Given the traditional unequal power relations between the United States and the countries to its south, this principled approach to publishing a journal stood out and remains a radical alternative way of organizing an academic publication. Secondly, the collective insisted that editors sign their evaluations of potential articles rather than repeat the more normal practice of blind peer reviews. Although I later lost an internal discussion to change that practice because I though it left reviewers in the early stages of their careers vulnerable to retaliation by other scholars who might not have appreciated criticism of an article under consideration, the underlying rationale for the procedure—an honest and open evaluation of each other works without hiding behind anonymity—remains a rather unique practice for an academic journal.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the subsequent economic crisis in Cuba, and the wave of neo-liberal governments that emerged among post-dictatorial regimes of the region, I assumed that LAP might not survive this dramatic new political and economic situation, since many U.S. leftwing organizations lost steam during this period. True to form, Ron Chilcote with his persistent optimism about the health and life of the journal pushed for an expansion of the journal from four to six issues a year. It reflected the understanding that despite geopolitical changes in the world, there was still an important place for progressive analyses about Latin America and the Caribbean in academia.

Perhaps because I had been engaged in a long-term (and not always easy) struggle with the Latin America Left about the importance of thinking about the relationship of the new social movements emerging in Latin America to traditional Marxist ideas, I admit I was hesitant to raise the possibility of producing LAP’s first issue on same-sex sexuality. I timidly presented the proposal at a meeting, and the idea was immediately embraced by the collective, which suggested that I reach out to anthropologist and LAP participating editor Florence Babb to join me in co-editing the issue. Although U.S. progressive forces by the early 2000s had largely embraced the demands of the LGBT movement and integrated them into their overall programs, this was still generally not the case in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this regard, the issue was a pioneering publication containing path-breaking articles that significantly contributed to the slowly developing scholarship on LGBT issues (Green and Baab, 2002).

Although I moved away from active participation in LAP when I moved to Brown University in 2005, with the recent exception of co-editing an issue on the Bolsonaro government in Brazil (Green and Ferreira, 2023), I remain eternally grateful for the ways I was so generously incorporated into the ranks of the editorial board when I was such a novice scholar. And I am pleased that the publication retains its tradition of being a such a cutting-edge vehicle, both politically and procedurally, for critically analyzing the reality of Latin America and the Caribbean.