ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the rise and fall of Latin American Marxist history in the twentieth century; it provides an analysis of salient developments during its resurgence in the last ten years; and identifies the current of analysis that will prevail in its future development. The ascendancy of Marxist history was short-lived, in the 1990s as in the 1920s, a chasm developed between theory and social reality and it took place simultaneously in Europe and Latin America. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of works appeared on the methodology of the economic and social history of Latin America conceived from a Marxist perspective. The rise of Latin American academic Marxism in historical writing was not a phenomenon that emerged only in exile; it also occurred at home, in the 1980s. J. C.Mariátegui reminds that local knowledge in Latin America and outside Europe has much to gain by using creatively many of the contributions of western thought.
