Ward S. Albro

Albro writes on the story of the Mexican anarchist writer and revolutionary Práxedis Guerrero. Guerrero was a key figure in the development of the movement led by Ricardo Flores Magón, a movement that was instrumental in bringing on the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the 20th century. For three crucial years, Guerrero exhorted, organized and led into battle rebel forces opposed to the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, while Magón was imprisoned in Los Angeles.

The story takes place in the broad borderlands from Guanajuato to San Francisco. Guerrero abandoned his life as the son of a wealthy hacendado to join the magonista forces, took work with immigrant miners in southern Arizona and stevedores in California, and edited and published a number of samizdat newsletters in El Paso, St. Louis, and San Antonio (“Hungryopolis”). He died in December 1910 at the age of twenty eight, at the head of a column of rebels fighting the federales in Chihuahua, only months before Díaz was forced into exile and the revolution began in earnest.

While the magonistas organized themselves as the Partido Liberal Mexicano, Albro makes clear that liberal tactics were a means to anarchist ends. Pyotr Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta were Guerrero’s intellectual forebears. The anarchist roots of the rebellion against Díaz were subsequently scrubbed from the historical record by the leaders of post-revolutionary Mexico.

In the final section Albro allows Guerrero the last word, through a selection of his writing on the purpose of revolution, on the dignity of work, on the libertarian equality of women. The best piece—a prose poem that Guerrero wrote after witnessing the immolation of a Mexican migrant by a lynch mob in Texas ("Blancos, Blancos")—is an incisive commentary on the paradox at the heart of American identity.… (mehr)