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For the first time, the transnational lives of influential Latin American anarchists are brought together in a single, illuminating volume.
Spanning the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth, this collection follows the militant writers, organizers, and agitators who crisscrossed the Americas and Europe, shaping local struggles while forging regional, hemispheric, and trans-Atlantic networks of resistance.
A remarkably diverse group of women and men navigated vastly different political terrains: the bustling port city of Buenos Aires, the Indigenous highlands of the Andes, the violent US–Mexico borderlands of the Mexican Revolution, the Cold War landscapes of the Cuban Revolution and the Chilean military dictatorship, and beyond. Migrants, exiles, and fugitives, they built movements across borders while sustaining a vibrant anarchist media world, from newspapers and magazines to radio and even television.
More than a collection of biographies, this book offers a wide-ranging exploration of how to write the lives of activists. Its chapters move from classic cradle-to-grave narratives to critical examinations of anarchist autobiographies, probing where they illuminate truth, where they distort it, and how these texts themselves became tools to evade or confound state surveillance. The volume also opens essential conversations on gender, foregrounding anarchist women and revealing the often-overlooked roles women played in the political and literary worlds together with their male counterparts.
Bridging Latin American, European, and North American historiographies, this book demonstrates how transnational and biographical approaches deepen our understanding of anarchism’s complexity, creativity, and enduring global impact.
“Anarchist
Militants brilliantly uses biography, gender and culture as lenses on
transnational research to create a pointillistic picture of anarchism as a
dynamic, living network powered by individuals who exchange ideas, know-how,
and experience between and within the Americas and Europe.”
—Ruth Kinna, author of The Government of No
One
"Alongside
Big Names like Emma, Petr, and Ricardo, the story of anarchism belongs to
countless persons often overlooked and unknown, individuals and groups whose
writing translating publishing, protesting striking uprising, feeding childrearing
caretaking, has nurtured the dreams of freedom for us anarchists of today and
for future generations. Like the anarchist apostle of Flores Magón
who 'traverses fields, runs roads, over thorns, through pebbles, his mouth dry
from devouring thirst,' the women and men remembered in this volume perpetually
crossed boundaries, of nation gender ethnicity, through cities towns villages,
moving for solidarity family work, being moved by imprisonment deportation
poverty. May we learn from this treasure trove of trajectories how to make the
Earth a Common Treasury for All."
—Mitchell
Cowen Verter, coauthor of Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores
Magón Reader
"An
exciting book, which wears its cutting-edge scholarship lightly. This masterful
collection offers rich insights into publishing, cross-border circulations,
language dynamics, transnationalism, the role of women, gender and sexuality,
and surveillance and repression within anarchist activism, and into the nature
of anarchist praxis itself—effortlessly and engagingly embedded in a
set of fascinating lives and trajectories, told by the best experts in the
field."
—Constance Bantman, author of The
French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914
"Mobile,
agile, critical, attentive to their subjects’ legacy of struggle that
transcends hidebound fixations on borders, institutions, and statecraft,
contributors to this volume befriend anarchists whose biographies they assemble,
offering glimpses of the energy, flexibility and emotions that real-life
activists brought to the storied revolutions of the 20th century, whose promise
they embraced; bequeathing to new generations unheralded insights into the
dynamics of race, gender, family, and personal liberation that standard
historical narratives tend to ignore."
—Dr.
Geoffroy de Laforcade, professor of Latin American, Caribbean & World
History Norfolk State University
"This
brilliant collection of biographies of anarchists from Spain and Latin America
underscores the importance of the independent press and the translation of news
and radical literature in the circulation of anarchist ideas across space and
time. Knowledgeable contributors provide insight into historical
anarchafeminist movements in the US-Mexico borderlands, anarcho-syndicalism in
Bolivia, social medicine and medical unionism in Argentina, international
efforts to support political prisoners, parallels between the Wobblies and the
CNT, and the promotion of free love and free-thinking, among other topics. I
highly recommend this volume, for both its historical scholarship and its
implications for our present and future."
—Javier
Sethness Castro, author of Tolstoy’s Search for the Kingdom
of God: Gender and Queer Anarchism
"Anarchist
Militants presents the cutting edge of historical scholarship on 19th
and 20th century transnational anarchism through the lens of biographies of
relatively lesser-known activists. Thoroughly researched, artfully constructed,
and painstakingly arranged, this collected volume is sure to become a classic
in the field and a window into distant times and places for the militant
activists of today and tomorrow."
—Mark
Bray, author of The Anarchist Inquisition: Assassins, Activists, and
Martyrs in Spain and France
"Anarchist
Militants is an astounding leap across the borders of language,
culture, and national narrative that have kept gringo comrades like myself
woefully in the dark about Latin America’s rich anarchist history for
far too long. Ranging from Buenos Aires to Havana and beyond, and covering
topics from propaganda by the deed to issues of identity, from syndicalism to
radical translation, this book demonstrates in no uncertain terms at a time
when we need it most: otro mundo es posible."
—David Campbell, translator of Revolutionary
Affinities and co-author of City Time
"Enough
about France! This essential volume collects the exemplary lives of Latin
American social revolutionaries, interwoven with the struggles that defined
them. Anarchist Militants deftly balances the beauty,
tragedy, and inextinguishable hope that define the revolutionary life. In the
process, it marks an important step toward a truly transnational history of
anarchism."
—Jarrod Shanahan, author of Every
Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion, Reaction, and Morbid
Symptoms
1. Kirwin R. Shaffer, “The Transnational World of a Cuban-Born Anarchist Revolutionary: Marcelo Salinas López”
2. Susana Sueiro Seoane, “‘Looking at the World’: The Asturian Anarchist Maximiliano Olay in the Cigar Factories of Tampa”
3. Ivanna Margarucci, “Luis Cusicanqui Durán and the Biography of Trade Unionism in Bolivia”
4. Sonia Hernández, “Doing Transnational History through the Lens of Anarcha-Feminists: Caritina Piña”
5. Amparo Sánchez Cobos, “Emilia Rodríguez in Cuba: Theory and Practice of an Anarchist Woman”
6. Laura Fernández Cordero, “Juana Rouco Buela: Keys to Open Her Autobiography”
7. Nadia Ledesma Prietto, “Juan Lazarte: Anarchism and Sexuality from San Genaro to the World”
8. María Migueláñez Martínez, “Diego Abad de Santillán: An Anarchist Translator”
9. José Julián Llaguno Thomas, “Ricardo Falcó Mayor: An Anarchist Publisher between Barcelona and San José”
10. Lucia Campanella, “From Character to Editor: Orsini Bertani’s Literary Journey through Illegalist Anarchism”
11. Martín Albornoz, “With the Storm in Tow: Abraham Hartenstein and the Terrorist Diaspora between Odessa and Buenos Aires”
12. Eduardo Godoy Sepúlveda, “Néstor Vega Salazar and the Chilean Anarchist Exile in Paris”
Bibliography