In the summer of 1931, Ellen Starr Brinton, a pacifist from Pennsylvania, traveled to Mexico City as a representative of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which had been founded during World War I by activists in the United States and Europe. Part of Brinton’s mission was to solicit topics on U.S.-Latin American relations for study and discussion by the U.S. section of WILPF. To that end she met with several groups of women students in Mexico City, who provided her with what she called “irritating suggestions.” Their list of potential topics included Mexicans’ hatred of the...

Though she was not the first to practice it, the author of the new internationalism in the World War I era was Jane Addams. In her closing remarks to the Women’s Auxiliary Conference of the Second Pan American Scientific Congress in January 1916, Addams commended the attendees for fostering “a new type of internationalism.” Earlier philosophers and politicians, she argued, had dreamed of “a rather formal undertaking” in which they would “pass resolutions and found a constitution, and so forth and so on.” But present circumstances demanded a different approach, one stemming “from the point of view of human experience...

In April 1922, more than two thousand women and men from twenty-one American nations descended on Baltimore, Maryland. Convened by the U.S. League of Women Voters, the Pan American Conference of Women (PACW) centered on “subjects of special concern to women,” including education, child welfare, and women’s political status. But the league also acknowledged another, overriding concern. “Peace among nations is essential to the work that women have most at heart,” declared the call to the conference. Seeking to capitalize on the spirit of internationalism flourishing in the early 1920s, the league hoped to further the cause of global peace...

In February and March 1923, Carrie Chapman Catt traveled throughout South America in her capacity as president of the Pan American Association for the Advancement of Women. The journey convinced her, she later reported, that despite the challenges of different languages, cultures, and religions, women in the Western Hemisphere had to join forces, not only to promote women’s rights but also to secure peace. “I am sure the men will never fetch it about,” she wrote to Maud Wood Park, referring to the latter aim, “and they have been at it a hundred years.” She foresaw myriad problems, however, including...

Throughout the winter of 1926–1927, war loomed between the United States and Mexico. The conflict centered on Article 27 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution, which declared all subsoil resources to be vested in the Mexican nation. This represented a serious threat to extensive U.S. ownership of land and control of petroleum reserves. Though accurate numbers on U.S. investments are difficult to come by, theNew York Timesestimated in February 1927 that U.S. holdings in Mexico totaled more than $ 1.265 billion, including more than $ 270 million in oil lands and refineries, and more than $ 140 million...

“International feminism was born,” according to U.S. feminist Doris Stevens, at the Sixth International Conference of American States in Havana, Cuba, in January 1928.¹ Stevens, a longtime member of the U.S. National Woman’s Party (NWP) and a veteran of the U.S. suffrage campaign, had traveled to Havana with three other women to pressure the Pan American Union to create a greater role for women in inter-American affairs. Along with hundreds of Cuban women, Stevens and her colleagues protested the absence of women delegates to the conference and demanded permanent representation in the form of a special commission devoted to women’s...

In his 1933 inaugural address, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt declared, “In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.”¹ That year the United States abrogated the Platt Amendment, which had established Cuba as a U.S. protectorate in 1901. In 1934 Roosevelt withdrew U.S. marines from Haiti, ending the nineteen-year occupation of that country, and restructured...

The image on the cover of this book is from a mural by Diego Rivera entitled “Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and South on This Continent” but more commonly known as “Pan American Unity.” Commissioned for the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, it is one of the largest murals Rivera ever created, twenty-two feet high and seventy-four feet across. This section of the mural shows Helen Crlenkovich, a diver from the City College of San Francisco, suspended above a crowd of onlookers and an artisan carving the image of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent frequently...