The Socialist Intermediary in Latin America: José Mancisidor

• In Event: Negotiating Socialist Internationalism: Latin America, the Soviet Union, and the Socialist Bloc

Abstract

This paper addresses the complex position of the Third World intellectual within the transnational network of global socialism by examining the case of the Mexican writer José Mancisidor. Now largely forgotten, Mancisidor became a literary celebrity outside of his homeland in the Soviet Union, where he was considered one of the leading representatives of Mexican culture beginning in the 1930s. As the most ardent proponent of socialist realism in Latin America, Mancisidor offered a leftist vision of the Mexican Revolution in his novels. As I argue, however, he served as a privileged mediator of the Soviet reception of his country’s culture and history, and he played a crucial role in organizing Latin American participation in transnational leftist networks As such, Mancisidor was, in many ways, an exemplary “socialist intermediary” (to use Shaw and Iordachi’s helpful formulation), bridging the distance between two revolutions and two cultures until his death in 1956, a year that heralded a reconfiguration of the old order.

Author

• Michael Lavery, U of Maryland, College Park