Introduction: Branching Out: New Research on the History of U.S.-Latin American Relations

Critical or not of the United States, this scholarship has generally cast non-state actors, extra-hemispheric concerns (apart from Soviet ones), and even non-Cold War issues as secondary.1 Since the end of the Cold War, historians have begun to de-center the role of Washington and to consider alternative actors, timelines, and issues.2 One of the richest veins of research in the last generation has turned out to be in non-state actors' impact on international relations, and interAmerican relations has been no exception.3 Graydon Dennison most explicitly mines this non-state ore with his research on U.S.-based non-state actors and the Alliance for Progress, arguably the most prominent ever U.S. aid program to Latin America. Cambridge University Press, 2015);Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba's Revolutionary World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017);Vanessa Walker, Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of Human Rights Diplomacy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2020);Thomas C. Field, Stella Krepp, and Vanni Pettina, eds., Latin America and the Global Cold War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020);and Eriz Zolov, The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020). 3 Jason Colby, The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2011);Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015);Teishan Latner, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968-1992 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018);Alan McPherson, "Letelier Diplomacy: Non-State Actors and U.S.Chilean Relations," Diplomatic History 43: 3 (June 2019): 445-468;and James P. Woodward, Brazil's Revolution in Commerce: Creating Consumer Capitalism in the American Century (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020).