According to traditional Eastern tales, a red thread connects those who are destined to meet. Rather than invoking romantic love, El Hilo Rojo uses this metaphor to connect people and ideas across time, reopening the debate on modes of production in Latin America that began more than 50 years ago. However, this book functions not only as an exercise in historical memory, but also as a re-examination in the light of current issues of the themes and approaches that shaped a generation of Latin Americanists in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout Latin America, important intellectual exchanges were cut short not because they had run their course, but rather because censorship, political persecution and exile interrupted them. Recovering them therefore becomes a historical imperative that inevitably leads to reflection at a moment when the spectre of intolerance once again looms over ideas and, even more dangerously, over the questions that may be asked.

El Hilo Rojo, edited by Mariano Schlez, Manuel Chust and Justo Cuño, brings together 14 contributions by 11 scholars of Latin American history who have been working on these questions for several decades. Following in the footsteps of their mentor Juan Marchena Fernández, the editors set out to reunite participants and witnesses to the debate on modes of production in American colonial history: a discussion crystallised around, and at the same time relaunched by, the publication of volume 40 of the Pasado y Presente book series, which appeared in Buenos Aires in 1973 (hereinafter T40). Edited and introduced by the then young Juan Carlos Garavaglia, the issue brought together seminal works by those who would later establish themselves as leading theoretical and historiographical figures, such as Ernesto Laclau, Carlos Sempat Assadourian, Horacio Ciafardini, Garavaglia himself and, perhaps the best known at the time, Ciro Cardoso.

This volume not only seeks to reconstruct this ‘historiographical event’ – as Óscar Almario García has aptly characterised it, given the multiple layers it encompasses – but is hybrid in both form and purpose. Whilst the first section, written by Schlez and Chust, consists of a detailed analysis of the academic, political and social contexts surrounding the publication of T40, in the rest of the book the reader will encounter testimonies, analyses and reflections from intellectuals who, with the benefit of hindsight and looking back from the twenty-first century, reflect on the controversy, its impacts and outcomes. The following 11 contributions, therefore, comprise the reflections of a group of participants, witnesses and heirs to the debate, who were brought together by the editors at the International Seminar ‘Fifty Years on from the Debate on Modes of Production in Latin America’, held in 2023 in Seville and organised by the University of Olavide and Jaume I University of Castellón. The dialogue was structured around two themes: firstly, the influence of the publication of T40 on their intellectual formation; and secondly, its central elements, conclusions and its impact on society.

What initially appears to be a relatively homogeneous collection of essays instead demonstrates the continuing vitality of a debate whose diversity of interpretations makes it impossible to regard as settled. Thus, whilst José Carlos Chiaramonte reaffirmed his early criticism regarding the inconsistency of the theory of modes of production, considering it an expression of political dogmatism rather than a useful historiographical framework, for others, such as Heraclio Bonilla, it served as a tool to challenge the way history had been written up to that point. Within this diversity, we also find different types of contributions. Detailed analyses of the reception of the T40 in different regions such as Mexico (Yovana Celaya Nández), Central America (María Eugenia López) and Colombia (Oscar Almario García), alongside an examination of Assadourain’s intellectual trajectory (Antonio Ibarra), sit alongside essays that reflects on the ways in which the controversy shaped historiographical and revolutionary practice (Ana María Presta), highlighted the limitations of the modes of production framework (Héctor Pérez-Brignoli), shaped political thought and encouraged long-term analysis (Carlos Illades), and engaged with the issue of Latin American development (Marcello Carmagnani). Assadourain’s remarks deserve special mention; they are transcribed here to shed light on the relationship between theory and empirical research in the context of the 1970s.

Broadly speaking, the contributors agree that T40 reshaped both structuralist Marxism and dependency theory (particularly the work of André Gunder Frank, whose thesis that Latin America had been capitalist since the sixteenth century is explicitly debated in many of the essays). Rather than relying primarily on theoretical argument, the volume grounds these reassessments in systematic archival research, introducing new sources, new questions and new historical actors. The impact of the T40 extended beyond Argentina, spreading throughout Latin America with Mexico becoming one of its principal centres, as it served as a destination for political exiles and, furthermore, had its own developing debate on modes of production.

The penultimate section turns to the seminar itself and captures the dynamics of questions and answers through the transcripts of some of the contributions. In this sense, the T40 serves as a prism through which past and present ontological and epistemological debates within the discipline of history are articulated, such as the relationship between politics and history, the social role of intellectuals, the role of theory in historical analysis, the importance of historical sources and the purpose of history, among others, as expressed by leading historians.

The book concludes with an epilogue by Justo Cuño, which summarises the historiographical legacies of T40: the primacy of archival work (which the author summarises in the curious notion of ‘horas-nalga’, i.e. butt-in-seat hours), the commitment to a ‘total history’ that can be approached through a theory of totality such as historical materialism, and the region as the privileged unit of analysis.

Its hybrid character allows the book to weave together, sometimes in contradictory ways, historical analysis and the memory of this historiographical event. Thanks to the first chapter, we can identify the turbulent and traumatic context surrounding the publication and reception of the T40 in Argentina and other Latin American countries, an issue curiously (or perhaps not) omitted from several of the contributions and personal recollections. This approach highlights not only the necessary complementarity between history and memory, but also some of the reasons why the debate remained ‘frozen’, as Ana María Presta pointed out. Ultimately, the book represents a major step forward in the process of re-examination and thawing, because whilst the T40 represented a moment of intense historiographical creativity abruptly interrupted by dictatorships and exile, El Hilo Rojo demonstrates that many of those questions remain open, inviting readers to revisit it through new research agendas and fresh archival evidence.