Arise!: Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution (American Crossroads)

by Christina Heatherton

An international history of radical movements and their convergences during the Mexican Revolution
 
The Mexican Revolution was a global event that catalyzed international radicals in unexpected sites and struggles. Tracing the paths of figures like Black American artist Elizabeth Catlett, Indian anti-colonial activist M.N. Roy, Mexican revolutionary leader Ricardo Flores Magón, Okinawan migrant organizer Paul Shinsei Kōchi, and Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai,  Arise!  reveals how activists around the world found inspiration and solidarity in revolutionary Mexico. 
 
From art collectives and farm worker strikes to prison "universities,"  Arise!  reconstructs how this era's radical organizers found new ways to fight global capitalism. Drawing on prison records, surveillance data, memoirs, oral histories, visual art, and a rich trove of untapped sources, Christina Heatherton considers how disparate revolutionary traditions merged in unanticipated alliances. From her unique vantage point, she charts the remarkable impact of the Mexican Revolution as radicals in this critical era forged an anti-racist internationalism from below.
 

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics

335 pages, Hardcover

Published October 4, 2022

Reviews

[Anneke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tight and powerful exploration of global radicalism in the first half of the 20th century as related to the Mexican Revolution. At times I felt that the book became too narrowly focused in on specific individuals rather than the movements themselves, often spending less time on how the individuals were representative of larger causes. I’m not sure I would call this short-sighted or lacking, necessarily, but perhaps it’s just not my specific taste in writing as much. That kind of balancing act is difficult in historiography though and on the whole I feel that Arise! was an effective study of various aspects of revolutionary organizing and internationalism. I think Christina Heatherton’s methodological approach is very strong and it resonated with how I’ve come to think about history as of late. I appreciate Heatherton’s emphasis on the constant making and unmaking of our perceptions of history, the messiness of this process and our entanglement in it. I also think that the emphasis on economic subjugation through capitalism, at root of colonialism, was very well-defined.

Thank you Nacie for introducing me to this book! Will hopefully be incorporating some of this into my thesis and art practice 🤞 The chapter on Elizabeth Catlett was especially inspiring to me and I feel very motivated to reconsider art’s pedagogical potential as I move forward w various creative projects.

[Luise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christina's writing is effortlessly brilliant. Arise! illustrates the importance of international solidarity and the plurality of the convergence spaces where it is forged. Her take on how we make sense of history and how the narratives we choose to reproduce creates spaces in which we can see our histories, their contradictions and legacies more clearly - at a time where a feeling of disconnectedness and political powerlessness seems epidemic. She recovers the traditions of key thinkers and organizers, not as larger-than-life heroes but drawing our attention to the conditions against which they arose and the ways in which they never ceased to collectively make sense of the world. Arise! invites us to do the same.

[danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overall I loved this book and was really taken with its approach to telling an internationalist history of radicalism in (mostly) the early 20th century, with the Mexican Revolution as a central node of analysis. That being said, it took me a little while to figure out what was going on with the book as a project, because the introduction (and conclusion, to a lesser extent) differed from the actual body of the book in terms of its theoretical density and, it seemed to me, questions of central interest. As is perhaps typical of some academic/academic-adjacent nonfiction, the theory (I guess political theory / political economics) in the book is front-loaded in the intro and then really recedes to the background throughout the six chapters, which feel very different in style and methodology. This isn't a critique of either of them, but something that I found somewhat disorienting - the introduction really felt like a set up for a more theory-heavy text, whereas most of the book itself alternates between biographical and social history.

My other maybe big-picture thought is that I expected this book to be a lot more about the Mexican Revolution than it ended up being. I think that may be on me for not really understanding the project from the start, but I would say this book more presupposes some knowledge of the Mexican Revolution than serves as any kind of introduction to it. Heatherton's interest is in the internationalism of the time, and the way that the revolutionary ideas in Mexico over a broad timescale (leading up to, during, and after the actual revolutionary activities) circulated beyond the geographical limits of the Mexican state. The introduction and conclusion do some of the work of situating Mexico in terms of the "New Imperialism" that Heatherton describes with regards to the United States's foreign policy and economic interests in the late 19th into 20th century, but the chapters themselves tend to lose this geopolitical perspective in favor of the more down to earth stories of the radicals whom Heatherton profiles. Which again, is great! But for me at least, as someone without much knowledge of the actual happenings of the revolution and figures like Zapata and Pancho Villa, left me wanting to read something with a more sweeping view of the revolution itself (open to recs!).

Now as far as the six chapters of the text itself, there was so much rich history and fascinating biographical detail on figures with whom I really was not too familiar. In no particular order, and more to preserve what I learned than anything, here are some things I found interesting:

- the way that international capital bound together workers forced to labor in the Yucatán with the labor organizing and resistance that led to the Haymarket Square murders (and thus May day), through the McCormick Harvesting Machine company
- "By the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1919, the US capitalist class owned more than 22 percent of Mexico's surface" and thus "from the vantage point of the Mexican Revolution, the internationalization of capital in the period helped to produce a decidedly internationalist consciousness."
- the way that capitalists like Charles Stillman used Mexico and the port of Veracruz during the Civil War to evade the Union blockade and sell confederate cotton by flying ships under Mexican flags. How that profit was then invested in the bank that became Citibank (thinking also of the crimes that citibank is now continuing to commission and finance).
- that the term internationalism was apparently coined by Jeremy Bentham
- the way that MN Roy's time in Mexico from 1917-1920 turned him from an anti-colonial nationalist into an internationalist and founder of the Mexican Communist Party, who helped argue for anti-colonialism within the communist movement.
- How the Black boxer Jack Johnson became part of a project to encourage Black migration to Mexico, including partnering with Garveyites to build a "little liberia" in Baja California, as well as the limitations of that project and politics.
- Everything about Ricardo Flores Magón's time at Fort Leavenworth Penitentiary, and the way that the prison then, as now, functioned to contain and also concentrate radical thinkers (from anarchists to communists and pacifists), who in turn sought ways of continuing radical pedagogy and practice from behind bars.
- The fact that Henry Ford was impressed by the efficiency of forced labor at Ft. Leavenworth and commissioned someone from his company's film department to make a film of the prison.
- "some prison-issued copies of the Bible were taken by prisoners to the printing plant, gutted, filled instead with the Communist Manifesto, and rebound" :)
- The uprising of Black soldiers against racist white Texans who were mistreating them that led to a mutiny in Houston in 1917.
- Everything about Alexandra Kollontai, an early Soviet thinker I was not familiar with! Her attempts to rethink ideas about love and change the social relations of capitalism, her idea of "love-comradeship" and that "love is an emotion that unites and is consequently of an organizing character." Also her attempts to create a "Palace of Motherhood" in Petrograd or her deployment of the Soviet navy on a group of monks which led to a monk being killed and Kollontai marrying the 28 year old navy officer in charge of the unit who was also 17 years younger than her!! Also her use of the novel and romance genre to try to popularize ideas about love-comradeship.
- Dorothy Healey and the Communist organizing in southern california in the midst of the labor militancy of the 20s and 30s and depression years. How this narrative of Communist party organizing mirrors and is also distinct from the history of Communist organizing in Alabama that Robin Kelley documents in Hammer and Hoe. The way that Border Patrol was used in that period and place to regulate the flow of labor from Mexico. How this led to "nearly half a million Mexican workers" being forcibly and illegally 'repatriated' during the Great Depression.
- The organizing undertaken by Unemployed Councils in LA during this period, from protesting racially discriminatory hiring to challenging evictions and moving furniture back into the homes of people who had been evicted.
- The life and work of Elizabeth Catlett, another central character of the book with whom I was not familiar. The way that Catlett circulated between the midwest of her birth, the New York of the Harlem Renaissance, and the post-revolutionary Mexican art scenes. The allusions to the innovations and popularization of art in Mexico in this period was another place where I found myself craving a more straightforward social history.
- The history of the George Washington Carver School in Harlem where Catlett taught and which practiced radical political education (Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois were both board members). One story recounted by Heatherton where Catlett was moved by a performance of Shostakovich's 7th Symphony ("Leningrad"), which the students were engrossed by (this whole story is so cool). Catlett's print contribution to the Taller de Gráfica Popular Mexican Revolution series, "To pay for petroleum," which is a single cultural object that embodies a lot of what Heatherton is trying to argue about her significance, and how I now want a copy!

Okay I'll leave it there for now! As mentioned that list is largely a memory aid for me, but hopefully it also serves as a sort of indication of how far ranging and information-filled this book is. I would really recommend it almost as a reference text for both radicals and understanding radicalism in North America in the late 19th/early 20th century, with a particular focus on analyzing the color line, the intersections of capitalism and imperialism, and labor radicalism. By the end of this book, when I reached the acknowledgements (which were very sweet!), it was not at all a surprise to learn that Heatherton is a student of both Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Robin Kelley, which is about the highest compliment I can imagine giving it.

[Joe Kusters]

Picked this up expecting more focus and background on the Mexican Revolution, but it just cursorily refers to it at various points, and is more about picking a couple radicals and telling a loose overview of their life and highlighting what they were doing around the years 1910-1921. Think it's meant to be more of a supplement to an actual history of the Mexican Revolution and expects you to already know that history in detail, and is also much shorter than I was expecting, so just wasn't what I was looking for with this.

[Jared Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and beautifully written. Delicate balance between breadth and depth where narrow focus on individuals was used to illuminate broad movements and interaction of ideologies.

[Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

good but strays away a lot from the mexican revolution and even mexico towards the end, overly academic in parts

[Alicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This rocked. Inspiring methodology, clarity, and heart.