The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon (Zone Books)

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 Magon. Based on extensive research in American and Mexican archives, Lomnitz explores the rich, complicated, and virtually unknown lives of Magon 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 revolucion es la revolucion.” For Lomnitz, their experiences reveal the meaning of this phrase. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon tracks the lives of John Kenneth Turner, Ethel Duffy, Elizabeth Trowbridge, Ricardo Flores Magon, and Lazaro Gutierrez 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.