Yixin Tian

Research Topic

The Last Revolutionary Mirage? Third Worldism, Counterinsurgent Violence, and US Power in Mexico, 1970–76

Supervisor: Eduardo Posada-Carbo 

I am a third-year DPhil candidate in history. My research sits at the intersection of the political and diplomatic history of modern Mexico and United States. With access to recently declassified and untapped sources from the US, Mexico, and China, my DPhil project excavates a history of Mexican internationalism during the presidency of Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970–76). 

My dissertation explores the tangled internal and external conflicts in Cold War Mexico through the lens of US influence and Third Worldism. By foregrounding both grassroots liberation struggles and high-level diplomatic engagements, it unmasks how the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) covertly repressed student solidarity movements at home, while at the same time, endorsing anti-imperialist regimes and ideological pluralism abroad. Focusing on the case studies of China, Chile, and Vietnam, I trace how revolutionary entanglements with the Socialist Third World informed Mexico’s foreign policy and regime legitimacy. A key aspect of my work revisits the hidden role of the United States, whose anti-Communist sensibility and backstage intervention tacitly aided the consolidation of Mexico’s dictablanda (‘soft authoritarian’) state. Beyond a purely Cold War prism, my research engages the wider debates around East-West détente, transnational left-wing networks, and Mexican presidential internationalism. 

Before coming to Oxford, I completed an MPhil in American History at the University of Cambridge (2022–2023) and a BA at the Institute of the Americas, UCL (2019–2022). Additionally, I spent the summer of 2023 as a research assistant at the Institute of American Studies, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in China.