Events

Presented by Renata Keller, Assistant Professor, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University.

Renata Keller’s research and teaching interests focus on Latin American history, particularly the connections between foreign and domestic politics, the dynamics of the Cold War, and U.S. relations with Latin America. She has special expertise in Mexican, Cuban, Chilean, and Argentine history.

Keller is the author of Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution, from Cambridge University Press. In it, she uses declassified Mexican and U.S. intelligence sources and Cuban diplomatic records to challenge the ideas that Mexico was a peaceful haven or a weak neighbor forced to submit to U.S. pressure. She argues instead that Mexico did in fact suffer from the political and social turbulence that characterized the Cold War era in general, but by maintaining relations with Cuba it played a unique, and heretofore overlooked, role in the hemispheric Cold War.