Yixin Tian

Research Topic

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

Supervisor: Eduardo Posada-Carbo 

My interests in history traverse the twentieth-century histories of the United States and Latin America (Mexico). I am mostly interested in how different iterations of US power influenced Latin American regimes' perceptions of order and progress, and how Cold War encounters with the United States fed into the region's collective memory of counterinsurgency. 

For my DPhil research, I delve into recently declassified and under-researched sources to piece together an international history of Mexico during the rule of the 'hegemonic' Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Spanning President Luis Echeverría's sexenio (1970–76), my research unpacks how tangled internal and external conflicts shaped the unfolding of Mexico's Cold War on the one hand, and the repressive trajectory of PRI state-building on the other. It also seeks to understand the Mexican dictablanda state through an integrated analytical framework that would combine transnational revolutionary entanglements, the Third World movement, and backstage US interventions. In line with this methodological approach, I also wish to reconstruct an American imperial history from the 'outside in', through the eyes of those who cooperated and resisted. 

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.