Jesuit Intellectual Networks and Socio-political Renewal in Latin America: About a Magazine, 1949-1959

The essay aims to briefly reconstruct the history of the monthly Jesuit periodical «Latinoamérica. Revista mensual de cultura y orientación», published in Mexico by the Buena Prensa publishing house from January 1949 to December 1958, and then transferred to Cuba, where it was published by the Colegio de Belén in Havana from January 1959 until it was discontinued the following April, against the background of the Cuban regime-change successfully led by Fidel Castro. Particular attention is devoted to the continental vocation of the periodical and its insistence on the social question, in its many facets in the Latin American subcontinent, in order to understand to what extent «Latinoamérica» succeeded in interpreting, or at least intercepting, the anxieties for renewal that spread within the pre-conciliar Church (in America as in Europe) and that affected all levels of Catholic presence in society, from the religious to the cultural, without neglecting the socio-economic context (often dramatic) in which religious and lay people found themselves working on a daily basis.