The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Zone Books)

New
Illustrated
2014
$35.01

A tale, never before told, of anarchy, cooperation, and betrayal at the margins of the Mexican revolution. In this long-awaited book, Claudio Lomnitz tells a groundbreaking story about the experiences and ideology of American and Mexican revolutionary collaborators of the Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon. Drawing on extensive research in Mexico and the United States, Lomnitz explores the rich, complicated, and virtually unknown lives of Flores Magon and his comrades devoted to the Mexican Cause. This anthropological history of anarchy, cooperation, and betrayal seeks to capture the experience of 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- The Revolution is the Revolution. For Lomnitz, the experiences of Flores Magon and his comrades 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, Lazaro Gutierrez de Lara, and others, to illuminate the reciprocal relationship between personal and collective ideology and action. It is an epic and tragic tale, never before told, about camaraderie and disillusionment in the first transnational grassroots political movement to span the U.S.-Mexican border. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon will change not only how we think about the Mexican Revolution but also how we understand revolutionary action and passion.

Synopsis

A tale, never before told, of anarchy, cooperation, and betrayal at the margins of the Mexican revolution. In this long-awaited book, Claudio Lomnitz tells a groundbreaking story about the experiences and ideology of American and Mexican revolutionary collaborators of the Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon. Drawing on extensive research in Mexico and the United States, Lomnitz explores the rich, complicated, and virtually unknown lives of Flores Magon and his comrades devoted to the Mexican Cause. This anthropological history of anarchy, cooperation, and betrayal seeks to capture the experience of 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- The Revolution is the Revolution. For Lomnitz, the experiences of Flores Magon and his comrades 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, Lazaro Gutierrez de Lara, and others, to illuminate the reciprocal relationship between personal and collective ideology and action. It is an epic and tragic tale, never before told, about camaraderie and disillusionment in the first transnational grassroots political movement to span the U.S.-Mexican border. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon will change not only how we think about the Mexican Revolution but also how we understand revolutionary action and passion.

$35.01

Quantity

7 in stock

More Information

Format: Illustrated
Pages: 608
Edition: Illustrated
Publisher: Zone Books – MIT
Published: 29 Apr 2014
ISBN 10: 1935408437
ISBN 13: 9781935408437
Book Overview: The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon needs to be read and enjoyed. Its story is exciting and its execution is exhilarating: as history, as psychological analysis and sociology, and as a historian's personal commitment. -- Jorge Aguilar Mora, author of Una muerte sencilla, justa, eterna. Cultura y guerra durante la Revolucion Mexicana Lomnitz's magnificent story of the Mexican Revolution -- told in a Deleuzian 'minor' key around the borderland revolutionary figure of Ricardo Flores Magon and the circles he moved through -- s at once a brilliant reconstruction of this particular piece of twentieth-century transnational history and a poetic interrogation of the pathos inherent in the very conception and practice of revolutionary politics. An outstanding and memorable achievement. -- Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference Lomnitz unearths completely unknown archival sources and offers a fresh look at late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Mexican history. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon challenges conical histories of the Mexican Revolution by offering a new, transnational and comparative model to comprehend the origins of twenty-first Mexico. -- Ruben Gallo, author of Freud's Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon is a magisterial work, at once epic yet intimate; erudite yet lyrical; dispassionate yet deeply personal. In revisiting the seemingly minor story of Magon and his transnational revolutionary network, Lomnitz offers a profound meditation on the very nature of revolution itself, and on its role in modern history making. His deft probing of the tensions that spur this story -- between ideology and accommodation, exile and return, personalismo that is strikingly relevant to our own time: one that rejects predatory nationalism in favor of collectivism, mutual aid, welfare, enjoyment. -- Jean Comaroff, author of Body of P ower, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People

Media Reviews

We have had many biographies of Ricardo Flores Magon and the Mexican Liberal Party [...] but Lomnitz's The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon, a collective biography based on new archival research on both sides of the border as well as on previously unknown or untapped sources, and written as a cultural history of this milieu and period, represents the fullest and richest account so far. -New Politics
The brothers Magon had quite a story. Claudio Lomnitz, a historian-anthropologist and one of Mexico's preeminent public intellectuals, tells it beautifully and compellingly in minute detail... Historians know so very little about how revolutionaries act and think, especially those who lost. Lomnitz does us a great service by illuminating the psychologies and everyday lives of a small, and for a brief period effective, band of intellectuals; one, perhaps small, example of what it was like to live in times of profound upheaval. -American Historical Review * Reviews *
We have had many biographies of Ricardo Flores Magon and the Mexican Liberal Party [...] but Lomnitz's The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon, a collective biography based on new archival research on both sides of the border as well as on previously unknown or untapped sources, and written as a cultural history of this milieu and period, represents the fullest and richest account so far. -New Politics * Reviews *

Author Bio

Claudio Lomnitz is Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books); Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism; and Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican Space.