The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon

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.