Many recent studies of the Latin American Left have focused on the years of the Communist International, or Comintern (1919–1943). Increasingly, the old picture of a Left dominated by sectarianism and Moscow-dictated orthodoxy has been challenged by new findings about the interwar Left’s theory and praxis regarding race, class, gender, nation, and imperialism. Tony Wood’s study is an impressive addition to this literature. It shows that the Latin American Left’s debates about oppression and liberation were both more complex and more consequential than we have appreciated.

The book proceeds chronologically in three parts. Part one examines leftist exiles in Mexico City in the 1920s. Against the backdrop of the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, they formulated new analyses of US imperialism and how to counter it. Key points of contention were the proper role of the middle classes and whether non-socialist states like Mexico’s could be bulwarks against empire. These conflicts crystallized in the late 1920s, most visibly in the clash between Marxists, like the Cubans Julio Antonio Mella and Sandalio Junco, and populists, like Peru’s Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, all three of whom lived in Mexican exile.

Ideological conflicts sharpened further during the Third Period of Comintern policy (1928–1935), when Communist parties rejected alliances with bourgeois and middle-class forces. Part two of the book looks at the first four years. While the sectarian excesses of the Third Period are well known, Wood shows that it also featured innovative discussions about race. These happened at the Comintern’s Sixth Congress in 1928, which endorsed Black and Indigenous “self-determination.” At sites across Latin America, Communists interpreted what that idea meant.

The third section traces that process in Cuba and Mexico during the period 1932–1940. The arguments here are especially original, in part because Wood uses new sources from the Comintern archives. For Cuba, he offers an important reappraisal of Communists’ thinking on race. In 1932, the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) endorsed racial equality on the island as well as Black self-determination, including territorial autonomy, in Oriente province. Three years later it dropped the territorial plank but retained the one related to racial equality. Most observers attribute these shifts to changing Comintern orders or the realization by 1935 that the territorial demand was misguided and impractical. Wood demonstrates that the PCC’s adoption of Black self-determination was shaped as much by Cubans as by Comintern officials. It was a conscious response to local conditions, including the party’s sense of political weakness in late 1932. Adoption also involved adaptation. The self-determination policy “was debated extensively among the rank and file as well as the leadership,” Wood writes (176). Its most detailed elaboration came in a 1934 PCC resolution written by Black Communist physician Martín Castellanos. The document was not a crude plan for secession, much less segregation, but rather an assertion of, as Wood says, Black people’s right “to decide their own destiny” (204). After 1935 the PCC continued to defend that principle in different forms.

Wood finds that the Left’s interwar debates had important impacts, direct and indirect. The PCC’s embrace of antiracism transformed it internally and gave it new political weight. Between 1932 and 1939 the party grew from under 500 members, most of them white, to over 23,000 members, perhaps a majority of African descent. Its rising popularity influenced the 1940 constitutional convention, where PCC delegates won an article barring “discrimination on grounds of sex, race, color, or class” (quoted, 202). A variation of this process occurred in 1930s Mexico, with Communist advocacy of Indigenous self-determination indirectly influencing later policies of the Cárdenas administration. An important contribution of leftists in both countries was to show that autonomy for oppressed groups within the nation-state was not only compatible with anti-imperialist unity but perhaps essential for achieving it. That argument would resurface decades later within Latin American social movements.

Future studies of the Latin American Left may find similar impacts on law, policy, and political culture long after leftist organizations’ formal decline. This book is an exemplary model for that research.