The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón

by Claudio Lomnitz

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 “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.

Genres: History, Latin American History, Anthropology

598 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Alf Bojórquez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uno de los libros más completos y actualizados sobre el magonismo en México. Desgraciadamente, como la mayoría de los estudios anárquicos se centra en Magón y sus secuaces, cuando Casa del Obrero tuvimos en toda la República y en cada estado por lo menos dos periódicos anárquicos durante el período llamado clásico. Sin embargo, y aunque el libro es muy caro ($500 pesos) me parece admirable, pues teje biografía, historia y anécdotas de un modo muy atrapante para lxs interesadxs en el tema. Igual de bueno que el libro de quien tradujo este al español: Jorge Aguilar Mora - Una muerte sencilla, justa, eterna. A mi gusto el mejor libro sobre la revolución mexicana (junto a Cartucho de Nellie Campobello, Tropa Vieja de Urquizo).

[Lisa]

This weighty tome was research for a book (or two?) I want to write. It didn’t take me over a year to read, I just put it away for months. Life in the time of pandemic seemed an opportune time to finish it.

Exhaustively researched and documented, this book is exactly what I needed, but it’s definitely of niche interest. Not the place to start if you’re new to Mexican history or politics.

[Harris]

"The revolution is a feeling and inchoate moment that is then stabilized in narrative and fixed into a monument."

A remarkable and complex work of scholarship exploring the conflict between pure ideology and action.

[Dawn Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A complex, comprehensive & unflinching look at the life & work of RFM, a well documented history of the Mexican Liberal Party especially the LA based junta. That said Lomnitz glosses over anti-Chinese and anti-Black racism on the part of the FM brothers, even while spending a significant amount of time on the racism faced by Mexicans in the US. While politically brilliant, RFM was a nightmare comrade and this comes through in the manuscript. Lots of interesting details about the anarchist press in the US in the 1910s.

[Charles Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think that I have ever read anything quite like this book.
This is an historical love letter straight to the heart.

It's one of the best books I've read about the Mexican revolution and adds so much about RFM I learned from Hart, Maclachlan, Lytle Hernandez, and a long etc. (I am forever stealing that from Lomnitz).

Don Claudio welcomes you to accompany him through a revolutionary's archive, better: he sits on the floor with you, and lovingly unpacks the contents of a long lost family trunk, one bursting with poetry, ephemera, and lead.

WILL RETURN TO COMPLETE

[Alberto Salcedo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great history, not dense or boring at all. Centers RFM as a figure of the revolution, but is not a biography of the man.