A tale, never before told, of anarchy, cooperation, and betrayal at the margins of the Mexican revolution. In this long-awaited book, Claudio Lomnitz tells a groundbreaking story about the experiences and ideology of American and Mexican revolutionary collaborators of the Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón. Drawing on extensive research in Mexico and the United States, Lomnitz explores the rich, complicated, and virtually unknown lives of Flores Magón and his comrades devoted to the “Mexican Cause.” This anthropological history of anarchy, cooperation, and betrayal seeks to capture the experience of dedicated militants who themselves struggled to understand their role and place at the margins of the Mexican Revolution. For them, the revolution was untranslatable, a pure but deaf subversion: La revolución es la revolución—“The Revolution is the Revolution.” For Lomnitz, the experiences of Flores Magón and his comrades reveal the meaning of this phrase. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón tracks the lives of John Kenneth Turner, Ethel Duffy, Elizabeth Trowbridge, Ricardo Flores Magón, Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara, and others, to illuminate the reciprocal relationship between personal and collective ideology and action. It is an epic and tragic tale, never before told, about camaraderie and disillusionment in the first transnational grassroots political movement to span the U.S.-Mexican border. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón will change not only how we think about the Mexican Revolution but also how we understand revolutionary action and passion.

In this long-awaited study, Claudio Lomnitz tells an unprecedented story about the experience and ideology of American and Mexican revolutionary collaborators of the Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón. Based on extensive research in American and Mexican archives, Lomnitz explores the rich, complicated, and virtually unknown lives of Magón and his comrades devoted to the “Mexican Cause.” This anthropological history of anarchy, cooperation, and betrayal seeks to capture the experience and meaning of these dedicated militants who themselves struggled to understand their role and place at the margins of the Mexican Revolution. For them, the revolution was untranslatable, a pure but deaf subversion: “La revolución es la revolución.” For Lomnitz, their experiences reveal the meaning of this phrase. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón tracks the lives of John Kenneth Turner, Ethel Duffy, Elizabeth Trowbridge, Ricardo Flores Magón, and Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara, among others, to illuminate the reciprocal relationship between personal and collective ideology and action. This book is an epic and tragic tale, never before told, about camaraderie and disillusionment in the first transnational grassroots political movement to span the US–Mexico border. This book will revise how we think about not only the Mexican Revolution but also revolutionary action and passion.

The words of this Mexican American working-class hero brought to English-language readers for the first time.

A tale, never before told, of anarchy, cooperation, and betrayal at the margins of the Mexican revolution. In this long-awaited book, Claudio Lomnitz tells a groundbreaking story about the experiences and ideology of American and Mexican revolutionary collaborators of the Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón. Drawing on extensive research in Mexico and the United States, Lomnitz explores the rich, complicated, and virtually unknown lives of Flores Magón and his comrades devoted to the “Mexican Cause.” This anthropological history of anarchy, cooperation, and betrayal seeks to capture the experience of dedicated militants who themselves struggled to understand their role and place at the margins of the Mexican Revolution. For them, the revolution was untranslatable, a pure but deaf subversion: La revolución es la revolución—“The Revolution is the Revolution.” For Lomnitz, the experiences of Flores Magón and his comrades reveal the meaning of this phrase. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón tracks the lives of John Kenneth Turner, Ethel Duffy, Elizabeth Trowbridge, Ricardo Flores Magón, Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara, and others, to illuminate the reciprocal relationship between personal and collective ideology and action. It is an epic and tragic tale, never before told, about camaraderie and disillusionment in the first transnational grassroots political movement to span the U.S.-Mexican border. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón will change not only how we think about the Mexican Revolution but also how we understand revolutionary action and passion.

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS A riveting study of the intersections between Jewish and Latin American culture, this immigrant family memoir recounts history with psychological insight and the immediacy of a thriller. In Nuestra América, eminent anthropologist and historian Claudio Lomnitz traces his grandparents’ exile from Eastern Europe to South America. At the same time, the book is a pretext to explain and analyze the worldview, culture, and spirit of countries such as Peru, Colombia, and Chile, from the perspective of educated Jewish emigrants imbued with the hope and determination typical of those who escaped Europe in the 1920s. Lomnitz’s grandparents, who were both trained to defy ghetto life with the pioneering spirit of the early Zionist movement, became intensely involved in the Peruvian leftist intellectual milieu and its practice of connecting Peru’s indigenous past to an emancipatory internationalism that included Jewish culture and thought. After being thrown into prison supposedly for their socialist leanings, Lomnitz’s grandparents were exiled to Colombia, where they were subject to its scandals, its class system, its political life. Through this lens, Lomnitz explores the almost negligible attention and esteem that South America holds in US public opinion. The story then continues to Chile during World War II, Israel in the 1950s, and finally to Claudio’s youth, living with his parents in Berkeley, California, and Mexico City.

The anarchist movement had a crucial impact upon the Mexican working class between 1860 and 1931. John M. Hart destroys some old myths and brings new information to light as he explores anarchism's effect on the development of the Mexican urban working-class and agrarian movements. Hart shows how the ideas of European anarchist thinkers took root in Mexico, how they influenced revolutionary tendencies there, and why anarchism was ultimately unsuccessful in producing real social change in Mexico. He explains the role of the working classes during the Mexican Revolution, the conflict between urban revolutionary groups and peasants, and the ensuing confrontation between the new revolutionary elite and the urban working class. The anarchist tradition traced in this study is extremely complex. It involves various social classes, including intellectuals, artisans, and ordinary workers; changing social conditions; and political and revolutionary events which reshaped ideologies. During the nineteenth century the anarchists could be distinguished from their various working- class socialist and trade unionist counterparts by their singular opposition to government. In the twentieth century the lines became even clearer because of hardening anarchosyndicalist, anarchistcommunist, trade unionist, and Marxist doctrines. In charting the rise and fall of anarchism, Hart gives full credit to the roles of other forms of socialism and Marxism in Mexican working-class history. Mexican anarchists whose contributions are examined here include nineteenth-century leaders Plotino Rhodakanaty, Santiago Villanueva, Francisco Zalacosta, and José María Gonzales; the twentieth-century revolutionary precursor Ricardo Flores Magón; the Casa del Obrero founders Amadeo Ferrés, Juan Francisco Moncaleano, and Rafael Quintero; and the majority of the Centro Sindicalista Ubertario, leaders of the General Confederation of Workers. This work is based largely on primary sources, and the bibliography contains a definitive listing of anarchist and radical working-class newspapers for the period.

The history of Mexico's fearless intimacy with death--the elevation of death to the center of national identity. Death and the Idea of Mexico is the first social, cultural, and political history of death in a nation that has made death its tutelary sign. Examining the history of death and of the death sign from sixteenth-century holocaust to contemporary Mexican-American identity politics, anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz's innovative study marks a turning point in understanding Mexico's rich and unique use of death imagery. Unlike contemporary Europeans and Americans, whose denial of death permeates their cultures, the Mexican people display and cultivate a jovial familiarity with death. This intimacy with death has become the cornerstone of Mexico's national identity. Death and Idea of Mexico focuses on the dialectical relationship between dying, killing, and the administration of death, and the very formation of the colonial state, of a rich and variegated popular culture, and of the Mexican nation itself. The elevation of Mexican intimacy with death to the center of national identity is but a moment within that history--within a history in which the key institutions of society are built around the claims of the fallen. Based on a stunning range of sources--from missionary testimonies to newspaper cartoons, from masterpieces of artistic vanguards to accounts of public executions and political assassinations--Death and the Idea of Mexico moves beyond the limited methodology of traditional historiographies of death to probe the depths of a people and a country whose fearless acquaintance with death shapes the very terms of its social compact.

As background to the events in Chiapas, here is a seminal collection of essays by the famous theorist and activist Ricardo Flores Magón who influenced the Mexican Revolution, particularly the movements of Villa and Zapata. 1977: 156 pages, illustrated "paperback" ISBN: 0-919618-30-8 $12.99 "hardcover" ISBN: 0-919618-29-4 $41.99

Peter Sahlins’s brilliant new book reveals the remarkable and understudied “animal moment” in and around 1668 in which authors (including La Fontaine, whose Fables appeared in that year), anatomists, painters, sculptors, and especially the young Louis XIV turned their attention to nonhuman beings. At the center of the Year of the Animal was the Royal Menagerie in the gardens of Versailles, dominated by exotic and graceful birds. In the remarkable unfolding of his original and sophisticated argument, Sahlins shows how the animal bodies of the menagerie and others (such as the dogs and lambs of the first xenotransfusion experiments) were critical to a dramatic rethinking of governance, nature, and the human. The animals of 1668 helped to shift an entire worldview in France — what Sahlins calls Renaissance humanimalism — toward more modern expressions of Classical naturalism and mechanism. In the wake of 1668 came the debasement of animals and the strengthening of human animality, including in Descartes’s animal-machine, highly contested during the Year of the Animal. At the same time, Louis XIV and his intellectual servants used the animals of Versailles to develop and then to transform the symbolic language of French absolutism. Louis XIV came to adopt a model of sovereignty after 1668 where his absolute authority is represented in manifold ways with the bodies of animals and justified by the bestial nature of his human subjects. 1668: The Year of the Animal in France explores and reproduces the king’s animal collections — in printed text, weaving, poetry, and engraving, all seen from a unique interdisciplinary perspective. Sahlins brings the animals of 1668 together and to life as he observes them critically in their native habitats — within the animal palace itself by Louis Le Vau, the paintings and tapestries of Charles Le Brun, the garden installations of André Le Nôtre, the literary work of Charles Perrault and the natural history of his brother Claude, the poetry of Madeleine de Scudéry, the philosophy of René Descartes, the engravings of Sébastien Leclerc, the trans_fusion experiments of Jean Denis, and others. The author joins the non_human and human agents of 1668 — panthers and painters, swans and scientists, weasels and weavers — in a learned and sophisticated treatment that will engage scholars and students of early modern France and Europe and readers broadly interested in the subject of animals in human history.