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The color line and the class struggle: the Mexican Revolution and convergences of radical internationalism, 1910-1946

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THE COLOR LINE AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE:

THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION AND CONVERGENCES OF RADICAL
INTERNATIONALISM, 1910-1946

by

Christina L. Heatherton

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

December 2012

Copyright 2012 Christina L. Heatherton
ii

The Mexican Revolution was chronologically the first
of the great revolutions of the twentieth century. To understand it correctly,
it is necessary to see it as part of a general process that is still going on.

Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude
iii
DEDICATION

To
Linda Inouye
for being my mother
and
Jordan T. Camp
for being on time

iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My debt to Ruth Wilson Gilmore began shortly after I wandered into her
classroom over a decade ago as a snarky anxious teenager. Ever since she has been
educating me about the geographies of racial capitalism all while giving me the
conceptual tools to comprehend them. She has taught me that why is an insufficient
question on its own since you also have ask why do you know what you know and how do
you know what you know. Over the years, her questions have thrown me into perpetual
ideological disarray. In the process of reassembling myself, she has taught me how to
accept new modes of thinking and being in the world. Her role in my life is nothing short
of metanoia: transforming my mind as much as my person.
The marvelous Robin D. G. Kelley has been the lead dramaturge of this project.
He helped me realize the drama of social history and showed me how to be attentive to
the luminous details of the archive. Like W. E. B. Du Bois, he enabled me to understand
how the color line belts the world with both local manifestations and psychic dimensions.
Under his tutelage I have gained the confidence to describe the dialectics of racial
capitalism as a global narrative. I have had the fortune to work with him as a student and
assistant. In each instance he modeled personal kindness and intellectual courage for me
in equal measure.
I have learned as much about the intersections of race and space from Laura
Pulido as I have about the work of critical mentorship. She is supportive, patient, and not
afraid to tell students when their arguments fall short. Nothing forced me to be more
honest than her admonition, “I am not convinced.” Her critiques were built on a faith that
I could eventually convince her. I drew great strength from that faith. I have been
v
productively challenged by her guidance and have benefitted immeasurably from her
mentorship.
My meetings with Taj Robeson Frasier were pure joy. In our discussions about
internationalism, culture, and radicalism, I found both a guide and a kindred spirit. He
shared insights and questions that he had developed through his own research into
international convergences. He offered especially keen questions into the politics of race
and expressive culture. I am grateful for his assistance in the project.
Other faculty members at USC were instrumental to this project. My extensive
conversations about the Mexican Revolution and hegemony with Maria Elena Martìnez
were foundational to this project. She was generous with her time and pushed me to think
deeply about Mexican history. Along with the scholars of the Tepoztlàn Institute she
sharpened my transnational analysis. My conversations with David Lloyd in and out of
his seminars were nothing short of dazzling. I benefited tremendously from his questions
and provocations in thinking through culture, aesthetics, and resistance. For their help at
various stages in the project I also thank Macarena Gomez-Barris, Jack Halberstam,
Lanita Jacobs, Kara Keeling, Viet Nguyen, Akira Lippit, John Carlos Rowe, and George
J. Sanchez. I am especially appreciative for all the help and compassion shown to me
throughout my time at USC by Jujuana Preston, Kitty Lai, and Sonia Rodriguez.
I am particularly grateful for external feedback on chapters and interventions.
Moon-Ho Jung saw potential in an early presentation and offered comments and criticism
as I developed a chapter for publication. I also thank the two anonymous outside
reviewers who offered insightful notes. For their generous and thoughtful comments on
chapter drafts I offer my deepest thanks to Alan Eladio Gòmez, George Lipsitz, S. Ani
vi
Mukherji, Marcus Rediker, and David Roediger. In addition, Ruth Martin, Marisol
MeBron, Cynthia Greenlee Donnell, Michele Russo, Boris Vormann, Stuart Schrader,
Gina Caison, Jessica Berney, Laura Goldblatt, and Derrais Carter proposed excellent
suggestions on an early chapter draft at the Clinton Institute for American Studies. For
helping me clarify the central interventions of the project, special thanks go to Peter
Linebaugh, Cedric J. Robinson, Devra Weber, and the late Clyde Woods. Thanks also to
Willie J.R. Fleming of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and Mike Davis who
inspired a reassessment of the Unemployed Councils. Feedback on presentations and
panels were extremely useful from James Braggs, Ed Cohen, Juan de Lara, Craig
Gilmore, Rebecca Hill, Kevin Leonard, John Munro, Chandan Reddy, and Seema Sohi.
Conversations with my friends at USC in the Department of American Studies
and Ethnicity and the Department of History made this project entirely possible. Thanks
to Deborah Al-Najjar, Heather Ashby, Umayyah Cable, Jolie Chea, Jih-Fei Cheng, Amee
Chew, Thang Dao, Jennifer Declue, Treva Ellison, Max Felker-Kantor, Laura Fugikawa,
Ryan Fukumori, Jeffrey Govan, Analena Hassberg, Kai M. Green, Priscilla Leiva, Sharon
Luk, Alvaro Marquez, Monica Pelayo, Haven Perez, Jessi Quizar, Nic Ramos, Anthony
Rodriguez, Orlando Serrano, Sriya Shrestha, Tasneem Siddiqui, David Stein, Yushi
Yamazaki, and Jessica Young for their brilliance.
For the exceptional assistance I received in various archives, I am indebted to the
following archivists: Hugo Sergio Sanchez Mavil at the Centro Documental Flores
Magòn AC; Randall K. Burkett at Emory University; Stephen Spence at the National
Archives, Central Plains Region; Kristie French at California State University, Long
Beach; Peter Blodgett and Sue Hodson at the Huntington Library; Gerben van der
vii
Meulen at the International Institute for Social History; Michele Welsing at the Southern
California Library for Social Studies and Research; and the archival staffs at UCLA,
USC, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University. Christopher K. Starr helped me access the
archives of the University of the West Indies. My thanks and regards go to the late
Michael Nash who helped me at the Tamiment Library.
In Mexico, Juan Manuel Aurrecoechea, Jacinto Barrera Bassols, Olivia Gall, and
Diego Flores Magòn all offered me invaluable resources and conversations. Before she
passed, Elizabeth Catlett was kind enough to meet and speak with me about her life and
work. For helping to facilitate my research, I am indebted to Marisa Boyce, Robert
Chlala, Irina Contreras, Ann Fink, Dana Heatherton, Deric Mizokami, David Mora,
Tasneem Siddiqui, Gretel Vera Rosas, Devra Weber, Suzi Weissman, and Yoshiko
Yamanaka.
This project was made possible through the financial support of the USC
Department of American Studies and Ethnicity; the Davis Putter Scholarship Fund; the
USC Donald and Marian James Montgomery Endowed Scholarship; the USC Grayson
and Judith Manning Endowed Fellowship; the W.M. Keck Foundation Fellowship
through the Huntington Library; the USC Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education
Supplemental Award; the Karen B. Wong and Scott W. Lee Leadership Scholarship
through the USC Asian Pacific Alumni Association; a Community Partnership Grant
from the American Studies Association; a Graduate Professionalization Grant from the
USC Graduate School; and the USC College Graduate Merit Award. Special thanks to
Diane Middleton for her support and to Carol Kraemer and Davarian Baldwin for their
steady encouragement.
viii
The pirates, witches, and smugglers of the Bristol Radical History Group shaped
my understanding of global circulations of struggle, particularly Maureen Ball, Roger
Ball, Dan Bennett, Annie, Bill and Dave Cullum, Paul Cupis, Kevin Davis, Zoey Exley,
Johnny Evans, Rich Groves, Ella Harrison, Natasha Harrison, Rachel Hewitt, Sam
Knock, Jim McNeill, Alex Milne, Mark Sands, Will Simpson, Mark Steeds, and Ruth
Syminster. Regards to Ian Bone for keeping E. P. Thompson alive (in more ways than
one).
For making the Imperial Valley come to life, thanks to Michi Miyada, Angel
Nishinaka, Mary Yamashiro, and especially to Dusty Yamashiro for his story about
Pancho Villa that inspired this project. Thanks also to Kathy Cerra Itomura, Rick
Itomura, Mark Nishinaka and Wesley Nishinaka for helping me get to the Chocolate
Mountains. To the Inouye, Nishinaka, Espinoza, Itomura, Mizokami, and Heatherton
families I offer my heartfelt thanks for their love and encouragement.
For helping me understand the conjoined struggles against racism, militarism,
prisons, and addiction, and for their solid support, thanks to my second family from the
Ronnie Nakashima Committee, the Kaishin Justice Committee, the Asian American Drug
Abuse Program, the Asian Vietnam Vets Organization, the Yellow Brotherhood, and
Matsubayashi Shorin-Ryu of Little Tokyo, in particular Debbie Flood, Ray Hamaguchi,
Scott Handleman, Audee Holman, Art Ishii, Cindy and Henry Kato, Eddie and Yuri
Kochiyama, Tara Inouye-Hill, Sandy Maeshiro, Nick, Wendy, and Remy Nagatani, Dean
Nakanishi, Mike Nakayama, Rahimah Shah, Dave Suga, and Mike Watanabe. I owe a
special debt of gratitude to my friend and sensei Art Ishii who brought me into this
community and kept me accountable to it. This study of social movements who struggled,
ix
not for individual gain or narrow advancement, but for the restoration of humanity as a
whole, was guided by the spirit of Victor Shibata.
When I move away from Los Angeles, I’ll be leaving my heart in Skid Row. It
has been my fortune to struggle, strategize, and agitate with the Los Angeles Community
Action Network. They have offered me my most serious lessons about racial capitalism
and resistance. Every day they follow the lead of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by breaking
the silence about racism, domestic militarism, criminalization, and poverty, or as he
called it, the war at home. My friendships with Sonni Abdel, Esther Alejandro, Deacon
Alexander, Bilal Ali, Eric Ares, Deborah Burton, Becky Dennison, Steve Diaz, General
Dogon, King Gerald, Gerardo Gomez, Hamid Khan, James Porter, Al Sabo, Karl Scott,
Joe Thomas, Lydia Trejo, Jose Vanderburg, Wesley Walker, Pam Walls, and Pete White
have transformed me. A luta continua.
My friends, Camille Acey, Trexy Ching, Ann Fink, Diane Gamboa, Shana
Skelton, and Zumi Mizokami, creative forces of nature all, have helped me see what a
better world might look like. Thanks to Erik Matsunaga for his faith in the craft of
writing and to my dearest friend Tien Nguyen for keeping me abreast of the works of
Drs. Venkman, Scully, and Honeydew. Rebels Tomas Carrasco, Jonathan Gomez,
Bridget Harr, Daniel Olmos, Steven Osuna, and Damien Schnyder made Santa Barbara a
center of intellectual insurgency. I could light a city with the joy and collective genius
generated by Tera Agyepong, Eliza Bettinger, Marisa Boyce, Jolie Chea, Jih-Fei Cheng,
Helen Curtis, Jennifer Declue, Mike Duncan, Treva Ellison, Niklas Frykman, Keiko
Fukazawa, Craig Gilmore, Christiahn Govan, Jeffrey Govan, Kate Griffiths, Kai M.
Green, Analena Hope, Anthony Johnson, Neetu Khanna, Priscilla Leiva, Laura Liu,
x
Alvaro Marquez, Ani Mukherji, Amani, Leela, and Mike Murashige, Mo Nishida, Jess
Orlik, Elizabeth Robinson, Tasneem Siddiqui, David Stein, Yushi Yamazaki, and Manuel
Yang.
The ever-present support of James Hawkins, James Hayden, Daro Inouye, Yas
Matsuzaki, Elizabeth Mitamura, Steve and Cathy O’Brien, Alex Suh, Lisa Tomita, Janis
Weiss, and Nancy Yoshihara has sustained me. Thomas Camp soundly came to the
rescue in more ways than he will ever know. Bernay McGee has been a constant source
of kindness. My father Dick Heatherton and stepmother Lucy Heatherton have been
unfailingly loving and supportive. I am so grateful for their presence in my life. My
magnanimous sister Dana Heatherton has always been my biggest supporter. I hope one
day she will realize that I am hers as well.
This dissertation is first dedicated to Linda Inouye. My mother has heard every
rambling twist and turn of this story and lived to tell about it. She gave me the sage
advice that if I couldn’t explain myself in two sentences I probably didn’t know what I
was talking about. She is my harshest critic and greatest editor. By forcing me to find
what was true and healing me when the search left me shattered, she has given me a
confidence to carry in my bones. For her indomitable will and for showing me how to
survive, I offer this work as a small measure of my gratitude.
The day I met Jordan T. Camp, time was reset and my life was changed. He
helped me see that the stakes of the work were bigger than my personal anxieties could
ever be. To bring a new world into being meant becoming a person suitable for that
world. He showed me that the only way to overcome the nastiness was to have the
xi
conviction to write, think, and organize against it. To my collaborator, inspiration, and
friend, I hope to show you that I have been paying attention.

xii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph ii
Dedication iii
Acknowledgments iv
List of Figures xiv
Abstract xvi

Chapter One: Introduction: 1

Racial Capitalism and Global Revolution 6
The American Century 10
The Ontology of the Color Line 17
Convergences Without Guarantees 20
Chapter Summaries 26

Chapter Two: A Common Destiny? 31

The Other 1917 36
Coy Columbia 46
Free Soil or Way Station? 54
Rising Tides of Color 61

Chapter Three: University of Radicalism:
Ricardo Flores Magòn and Leavenworth Penitentiary 63

The Death of José Martínez 63
The Global Production of the Penitentiary 70
University of Radicalism 79
Anti-Racist Internationalism 94
xiii
Chapter Four: Relief and Revolution:
Southern California Struggles Against Unemployment 107

Relief and the Open Shop 113
Mexican Revolutionary Traditions 121
Relief and Revolution 125
Los Angeles Unemployed Councils 127
Spaces of Radical Internationalism 140

Chapter Five: When Culture Respects No Borders:
Struggles Against Racial Capitalism 144

The Psychic Life of Racial Capitalism 148
Revolutionary Cultural infrastructure 161
Art Across the Color Line 180

Epilogue 187

Bibliography 191

xiv
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: !"#$%&'%()*+,)#-"$.%/0$)1-%23456%7-8"94%2)#""1.:%% % %
% % !"#$%&'()%#*+(,-#./012((39)#%;<.%;=;>%% 51%

Figure 2: Ricardo Flores Magòn, National Archives, Central Plains Region,
RG 129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons 66

Figure 3: José Martìnez Death Record, National Archives, Central Plains
Region, RG 129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons 69

Figure 4: Clipping from inmate file, National Archives, Central Plains
Region, RG 129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons 73
Figure 5: Carl Ahlteen, “Big” Bill Haywood, James Slovik, Peter
McEvoy, Vicente Aurelio Azuara RG 129 Records of the
Bureau of Prisons 79

Figure 6: Ben Fletcher, RG 129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons 80
Figure 7: Leavenworth New Era,
Centro Documental Flores Magòn, AC, Mexico City 82

Figure 8: Six Red Months in Russia by Louise Bryant, Enrique Flores
Magon’s Leavenworth Book Collection, Centro Documental
Flores Magon AC, Mexico City, Mexico 85

Figure 9: Roy Tyler, Inmate #12276, 19-year-old 3rd Battalion, 24th
Infantry, U.S. Military Received at Penitentiary: December
16, 1917, RG 129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons 91

Figure 10: Roy Tyler, Inmate #12276, 34 years, Received at
Penitentiary: September 7, 1932, for violating parole, RG
129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons 92

Figure 11: Excerpt from Ricardo Magòn’s final note to “Ellen White”,
November 12, 1922, Ricardo Flores Magon Collection,
International Institute for Social History (Amsterdam, NI) 106

Figure 12: “Why 1,000 More Joined the Party,”
Western Worker, November 27, 1933 126

Figure 13: “All Out for the County Hunger March,” Flyer,
September 18, 1933, USC Special Collections 131
xv
Figure 14: "Thousands Mass at Los Angeles," Western Worker,
October 16, 1933 135

Figure 15: ‘”Homenje a José Guadalupe Posada (Homage to José
Guadalupe Posada)” by Leopoldo Méndez. Woodcut, 1956.
Department of Special Collections and University Archives,
Stanford University Libraries 155

Figure 16: “Harlem's Carver School Draws Capacity Classrooms” The
Chicago Defender, February 5, 1944 178

Figure 17: “La Dictadura Porfiriana Exalta Demagogicamente al Indigena,”
Alfredo Zalce, Estampas de La Revolucion Mexicana, 1946-7.
Department of Special Collections and University Archives,
Stanford University Libraries 182

Figure 18: “And a special fear for my loved ones” Elizabeth Catlett,
linocut, 213x153 mm, The Art Institute of Chicago 191

xvi
ABSTRACT

The Color Line and the Class Struggle: The Mexican Revolution and
Convergences of Radical Internationalism, 1910-1946 seeks to resituate the Mexican
Revolution as a center of twentieth-century global radicalism. While much has been
made of the influences of the Russian Revolution and Chinese Revolution on radical
struggles, this work examines the less well-studied influence of the Mexican Revolution,
as the event that inaugurated an alternate anti-racist and anti-imperialist revolutionary
trajectory in the twentieth century. The project illuminates the ways in which
revolutionaries, particularly those from the world’s “darker nations,” drew on the history
and memory of the Mexican Revolution to produce a form of anti-racist internationalism.
It explores how artists, military prisoners, and workers, among others, theorized,
dramatized, and challenged racist and gendered social relations under capitalist
imperialism and consequently developed new articulations of struggle. Toward this goal
it examines what I term convergence spaces, sites where disparate radical traditions were
forged into alliances, leading to unique modes of political mobilization and the
subsequent creation of new political theory. The project draws on a wide array of
materials from national and international archives including prisoner records, oral
histories, political tracts, private correspondence, and popular art. By tracing the
movement and interaction of social actors through convergence spaces, The Color Line
and the Class Struggle offers a historical and spatial analysis of racial capitalism’s global
development and contestation in the early twentieth century.
;%
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION

On the twentieth anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, a crowd gathered at
the Palace of Fine Arts in the center of Mexico City. Vicente Lombardo Toledano, head
of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, stood before the “overflowing” audience and
spoke about the Mexican Revolution to “unconcealed shouts of joy.” “Like the Russian
Revolution” he is reported to have said, the Mexican Revolution “has had an enormous
effect and influence outside the borders of Mexico.” It has also, he continued, “suffered
misrepresentation and calumny abroad.” Other speakers echoed Toledano’s point,
contending that the Mexican Revolution should be understood as a global model of
revolutionary struggle, especially amidst the growing threat of fascism.
1
While
compelling, this interpretation had been rigorously disputed by Mexican government
officials. Fearing reprisal from anti-Soviet forces, even the President had denied any
similarities to the Russian Revolution, claiming instead that Mexico’s Revolution was
“sui generis,” completely unique and unrelated to any other nation’s revolution.
2
Narciso
Bassols, former Mexican ambassador to Great Britain and delegate to the League of
Nations, rejected this pretense of uniqueness. Speaking after Toledano, he praised the
Mexican Revolution as the “Mexican people’s struggle towards economic and political
freedom.” Opposing the view that it had, “nothing to do with other social movements” he
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
1
“CTM Celebrates Anniversary of Russian Revolution,” Mexican Labor News 3:19 (November
11, 1937): 1; “‘Fight Fascism to Defend Our Revolution,’ Says Lombardo on Anniversary of Mexican
Revolt,” Mexican Labor News 3:21 (November 25, 1937): 1; Alonso Aguilar Monteverde, Narciso Bassols,
Pensamiento y Acciòn (Mexico: Fondo de Cultural Econòmica, 1995), 37.
2
“President Cardenas Defends Revolution,” Mexican Labor News 3:7 (August 13, 1937): 4; Joe
C. Ashby, Organized Labor and the Mexican Revolution Under Làzaro Càrdenas (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1967), 22-23.
2
encouraged the assembled crowd to understand that the Mexican Revolution was the very
thing that linked them to “the exploited people of the rest of the world.”
3

While Toledano and Bassols struggled over the memory of the Mexican
Revolution, key figures of the Revolution had anticipated its international significance
during the event itself. In 1918 Revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata proclaimed:
We would gain much, and human justice would gain much, if all the peoples of
our America and all the nations of old Europe understood that the cause of
revolutionary Mexico and the cause of Russia are the cause of humanity, the
supreme interest of all oppressed people.
4

Zapata was not alone in his appraisal. Years earlier in 1914, radical theorist and agitator
Ricardo Flores Magòn predicted that the Mexican Revolution would be the “contagious”
example that the “the hungry in the United States, the French outcast, the Russian slave,
the British serf, the disinherited of all countries” would follow in order to “reduce the
capitalist system to ashes.” Before “the frightened eyes of the international bourgeoisie
and the governments of the world,” Magòn wrote, the Mexican people were asserting,
“the right of all human beings to live.” For these reasons he proclaimed that the Mexican
Revolution was, “one of the most stirring and sublime dramas in the history of the
peoples of the world.”
5

The international vision advanced by these figures challenged the international
movement of capital in the early twentieth century, particularly U.S. capital. By the
outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, American investors owned more than twenty two
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
3
“CTM Celebrates Anniversary of Russian Revolution,” Mexican Labor News 3:19 (November
11, 1937): 1.
4
Quoted in Daniela Spenser, Stumbling Its Way Through Mexico: The Early Years of the
Communist International (trans. Peter Gellert) (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 36.
5
Quoted in Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magòn Reader, eds. Chaz Bufe and Mitchell
Verter (Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 215.
3
percent of Mexico’s surface, accounting for nearly a quarter of all U.S. investment;
exceeding the total holdings of Mexican entities.
6
Conglomerates like the International
Banking Corporation, the first American multinational bank, emerged in Mexico in 1902,
facilitating U.S. investments in Mexican government bonds, mining, oil, agriculture and
other industries. These profits further capitalized U.S. ventures in China, India, Panama,
the Philippines, and the Dominican Republic. Figures like Zapata and Magòn were
uniquely positioned to understand how capital crossed national borders and exploited
people around the world, linking the destinies of those it dispossessed.
7
In opposing
international capital, they proposed that the Mexican Revolution could inspire new global
visions of liberation.
People around the world came to share this view. When Black radical William
Patterson landed in Mexico in 1919, he “knelt and kissed the ground.” Away from the
“racial hatred,” the “lynching, mob violence, [and] personal insult” that “dominated life
in the United States” Patterson believed he had found “free soil.”
8
Similarly inspired,
Japanese revolutionary Sen Katayama excitedly wrote to Soviet officials in 1921 from
Mexico City. He insisted that an organizing base in Mexico would uniquely, “strike at the
American capitalist imperialism a death blow.”
9
Such experiences interlink seemingly
disparate spaces and histories of revolutionary struggle. Following these figures, we can
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
6
Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin American, the United States, and the Rise of the New
Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 17; John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The
Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xviii.
7
John Mason Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico Since the Civil War
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 91.
8
William Patterson, The Man Who Cried Genocide: An Autobiography (New York: International
Publishers, 1971), 46, 201.
9
Quoted in Akito Yamanouchi, “The Letters and Manuscripts of Sen Katayama in Mexico, 1921”
Monthly Journal of Ohara Institute for Social Research (Tokyo), 506 (January 2001): 4.
4
begin to rethink the history of the Mexican Revolution, a struggle historian John Mason
Hart calls, “the first great Third World uprising against American economic, cultural, and
political expansion.”
10

Prior to the Bandung conference that officially inaugurated the Third World
political project, Vijay Prashad contends there were multiple radical anti-imperial and
anti-racist precedents, such as the foundation of the Indian National Congress (1886), the
Ethiopian defeat of Italy (1896), and Japan’s defeat of Russia (1905), which, as W.E.B.
Du Bois and many others believed at the time, was a revolt against white supremacy.
11

We might consider how these revolts intersected with other revolutionary upheavels in
the period such as the 1915 protests against the U.S. occupation of Haiti, which many
African Americans saw as “America’s Ireland or America’s India.” Similarly, in
resistance to U.S. incursions in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Nicaragua, or the Philippines, and in
opposition to British imperial forces in India, Ireland, Australia, and Wales, we can locate
alternate “streams of internationalism” forming against racism, capitalism, and
imperialism.
12
If we look at the long history of Pan-African revolt which some, like
C.L.R James, dared to predict would coalesce into an eventual overthrow of imperialist
forces in Africa and the Caribbean, or the early movements of anti-imperialist figures
from Asia’s darker nations from China’s Sun Yat-Sen or Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, we can
begin to trace an alternate history of the period. To explore these alternative streams of
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
10
Hart, Revolutionary Mexico, 362.
11
Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New York: New
Press, 2007).
12
On “other streams of internationalism,” see Robin D.G. Kelley, “How the West Was One: On
the Uses and Limitations of Diaspora,” in The Black Studies Reader, eds. Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia
Hudley, and Claudine Michel (New York: Routledge, 2004), 41-46 and Robin D. G. Kelley, “A New Look
at the Communist Manifesto,” Race Traitor 13-14 (Summer 2001): 135-139.
5
internationalism, we need to follow Toledano, Bassols, Zapata, Magòn, Patterson, and
Katayama and rethink the significance of the Mexican Revolution, the first major social
revolution of the twentieth century.
13

The Color Line and the Class Struggle: The Mexican Revolution and
Convergences of Radical Internationalism, 1910-1946, seeks to resituate the Mexican
Revolution as a center of twentieth-century global radicalism. While much has been
made of the influences of the Russian Revolution and Chinese Revolution on radical
struggles, this work examines the less well-studied influence of the Mexican Revolution,
as the event that inaugurated an alternate anti-racist and anti-imperialist revolutionary
trajectory in the twentieth century. It asks: How were workers, artists, and other
revolutionaries who possessed direct experience or knowledge of the Mexican Revolution
were politically transformed? How did they construct a politics of radical
internationalism in the period? How did they come to understand and confront racism’s
centrality in the functioning of capitalist imperialism? To answer these questions, it
examines what I call convergence spaces - sites where disparate radical traditions were
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
13
Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization
and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony King
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 21; Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical
Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), 24; Vijay Prashad, Everybody
Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Books,
2002); Samaren Roy, The Restless Brahmin: Early Life of M.N. Roy (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1970),
82-87; Hyamn Kublin, Asian Revolutionary; the Life of Sen Katayama (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1964); Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black
Internationalism in Asia, 1895-1945 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000); C.L.R. James, A
History of Pan-African Revolt (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Press, 1995); Gerald Horne, The End of Empires:
African Americans and India (Temple University Press, 2008); Bill V. Mullen and Cathryn Watson, eds.
W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005);
Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Richard Hart, From
Occupation to Independence: A Short History of the Peoples of the English-Speaking Caribbean Region
(London: Pluto Press, 1998); M.N. Roy, Memoirs (Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1984); Reynaldo Ileto,
Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de
Manila University Press, 1979); Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Curtis Marez, “Pancho Villa Meets Sun Yat-sen: Third World
Revolution and the History of Hollywood Cinema,” American Literary History 17: 3 (Fall 2005): 486-505.
6
forged into alliances, leading to unique modes of political mobilization and the
subsequent creation of new political theory. By tracing the movement and interaction of
social actors through convergence spaces, The Color Line and the Class Struggle offers
an historical and spatial analysis of global capitalism and various modes of resistance to it
in the early twentieth century.

Racial Capitalism and Global Revolution

There is no shortage of explanations for why revolutions of the early twentieth
century failed. Historians depict the “stumbling” missteps of organized communism or
the audacious rhetoric of anarcho-syndicalists, which came to naught. They overstate the
bumbling political miscalculations; the egoism of charismatic leaders bereft of the
characteristics to actually lead; the bitter infighting; the opportunism; the lack of
“pragmatism”; the theorizing that went over workers’ heads, etc. Mistakes in the
struggles against imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism certainly did occur. But taking
a slightly different view of the era, it is a wonder, rather than a foregone conclusion, that
revolution did not break out all over the world.
To use the term of anti-colonial poet Aimè Cesaire, conditions around the world
were “indefensible.” Had, for example, revolution broken out in the newly produced
“cesspools of misery” where workers lived, fell ill, and died, or where the violent
scandals of colonialism and imperialism endured through the “silent complicity of the
entire world,” or had people who labored in the most exploitative plants, fields, and
slums rejected the “white peace of the cemeteries” and successfully risen up against the
7
nastiness of their conditions, history would have surely absolved them.
14
Encircling the
globe in the early twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois set his eyes all at once on the
butchery in Africa, the savage treatment of workers in India, the starvation in China, the
lynching and dismemberment of Black men in Alabama, and the terror visited upon sex
workers in London. “Flames of jealous murder sweep the earth,” he wrote, “while brains
of little children smear the hills.” In order to grapple with suffering on a global scale, the
history of revolutions in the era must be reconsidered. Was it merely a matter of
unscrupulous infighting, poor sloganeering, or obtuse intellectualization that rebuffed
social movements in the period? Why didn’t revolution break out all over the globe?
15

As this project suggests, revolution did break out around the world. From Mexico
to Haiti to India, this period, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the
twentieth, marked one of the heightened insurgency. Uprisings certainly did occur in
attempts to overturn the conditions of racism and capitalism. Therefore the question is not
whether or not they happened, but why did they happen and why have they been
obscured from the historical record? Furthermore, why were these movements crushed?
Like the butler in a murder mystery, some culprits in the historical record hide in
plain sight. Racism and state violence are never fully obscured elements. They appear in
self-evident and therefore circumscribed ways; matters given obligatory and therefore
marginal notation. Perhaps it is because these forces persist with such unacknowledged
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
14
Aimè Cèsaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 32; Grace
Hutchins, “Takamatsu to See New York Slums,” Daily Worker, April 10, 1931; Arthur Conan Doyle,
Crime of the Congo (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1909), 84; George Bernanos, Los Grandes Cementerios
Bajo la Luna (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veinte, 1964).
15
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York: Free Press, 1962),
728.
8
might at present that they continue to compress our understanding of the past. They
remain the open secrets of life under capitalism.
Cedric Robinson remains one of the most insightful theorists on the question of
racism and capitalism. His work examines the contrivance of life under capitalism,
particularly the ways in which the social order is made to appear natural through racial
narratives. He calls this process racialization. The term helps clarify the ever-present
contradictions between capitalism’s economic imperatives for finding and maintaining a
constant source of cheap, exploitable, expendable labor and the state’s promises of
political freedom.
16
In turn, as Lisa Lowe suggests, racialization locates the contradiction
“between the promise of political emancipation and the conditions of economic
exploitation.”
17
It is the operative site where “inequality and exploitation” are “learned
and legitimated,” as George Lipsitz puts it.
18
Indeed, the production and maintenance of
racial difference are not incidental to processes of capital accumulation; they structure
and ensure those processes.
Robinson offers the term “racial capitalism” to describe the “development,
organization, expansion and ideological” processes by which racialism “permeate(s) the
social structures emergent from capitalism”
19
In one deft move this term names the unity
between processes of capital accumulation and racialization. It braces the theoretical
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
16
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill,
N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 26; Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of
Race and Ethnicity,” in Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and K. Chen
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 436.
17
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1996), 26.
18
George Lipsitz, “Abolition Democracy and Global Justice,” Comparative American Studies
Journal, 2:3 (August 2004): 282.
19
Robinson, Black Marxism, 3.
9
fumbling often involved in ascribing one as epiphenomenal to the other. This insight is
particularly useful for materialists who have understated the centrality of racism in
capitalist development. Unfortunately, some radical scholars have asserted that, “the
deadly historical and cultural divisions” between people seemingly dissolve “in the
shared experience of exploitation.”
20
The concept of racial capitalism should release
analysts from the myopia of seeing capitalism as an equal opportunity exploiter; one
which happens to devastate some racialized groups disproportionately more than others.
Robinson helps us to understand that this disproportion is not by happenstance but
crucially by design.
Racial capitalism also helps ground a critique of white supremacy by enabling an
analysis of its materiality. Without such grounding, white supremacy can appear to be an
immaterial force that produces its own logic and order in the world. Such a version of
history relies on a notion of oppressed people as remaining in a state of permanent and
intractable negation. This belief reproduces an undialectical interpretation of social
change as it effaces the serious and successful efforts of social movements in the past and
the present to powerfully change racist conditions. I argue that scholars should move
beyond simple descriptions of the effects of racism and capitalism and towards clarity
about the elements which impair our very comprehension of them. In this way, an
analysis of racial capitalism becomes essential for the study of radical movements. It
describes how a racial order intensified through the development of capitalism. It also
begins to clarify the questions originally posed: Why did revolutions break out in the
darker nations in the early twentieth century? What fate befell those revolutions?
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
20
David Roediger offers an insightful critique of these processes in How Race Survived U.S.
History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon (New York: Verso, 2010), 66.
10
The American Century
At the turn of the century, radical labor leaders like Eugene Debs remained
ebullient about Marx’s call to unite all the workers of the world. In a 1903 article, Debs
endorsed the idea of a “colorless” class struggle, enabling all to join “regardless of race,
sex, creed or any other condition whatsoever.” This did not mean that Debs was ignorant
of the realities of racism. He mocked the “pent-up wrath” of “Anglo-Saxon civilization”
and sympathized with struggles against race prejudice, writing that, “the white heel” upon
“the black neck is simply proof that the world is not yet civilized.” While Debs
understood “the malign spirit of racial hatred” and that anti-Black racism in particular
would “grow more threatening as the contradictions and complications of capitalist
society multiply,” he maintained a conceit: namely that the class struggle was discrete
from the “Negro question” and questions of racism more generally.
21
Debs saw a telos of
interests, wherein “the race problem will forever disappear” once “the working class have
triumphed in the class struggle.” If struggles against capitalism preceded struggles
against racism, then “economic freedom,” in his estimation, would make racist
hierarchies evaporate “like mist before the sunrise.” Consequently, he wrote that radicals
should defend the “obliteration of the color line in the class struggle.”
22

While Deb’s ideal remains an admirable and politically principled position, the
color line was hardly being obliterated at the turn of the twentieth century. Rather, as Du
Bois observed, it was being deepened and reinforced in the production of what would
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
21
Eugene V. Debs, “Danger Ahead,” International Socialist Review 4:5 (November 1903).
22
Ibid.; For other discussions of Debs’ arguments, see David Roediger, “The Retreat from Race
and Class,” Monthly Review 58:3 (July-August 2006): 53-61; Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class
(New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 151; David Roediger, Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s
Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 214.
11
come to be called the “American Century,” wherein the U.S. found its might as a
sovereign of finance capital and military power.
23
From its inception the U.S. had been
born “nearly free and racist.”
24
The mobilization of racial ideology had been intrinsic to
slavery, imperialism, and the production of new spaces of capitalist accumulation.
25
Since
the beginning of its history, the U.S. had practiced territorial seizure and occupation by
force, a form of “internalized imperialism” more mundanely regarded as westward
expansion.
26
The production and maintenance of difference of nonwhite populations
rendered their claims to protection from and full inclusion in the state illegitimate. These
processes of differentiation provided the means for capital to exploit, enslave,
disenfranchise and serially dispossess racialized people.
27
These practices were ratified in
the conflation of whiteness as property; exclusion and exploitation inscribed in one’s
body and being.
28

Claims that the Mexican people had been bypassed by civilization, for example,
had long justified U.S. intervention in the country. Soon after Mexico’s independence
from Spain in 1821, American trade interests developed into outright land speculation as
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
23
Neil Smith, American Empire,: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
24
George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport:
Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972), 150.
25
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-
Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1-6, 229-249; Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race
and Culture in 19th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 11.
26
Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. London:
Verso, 2007), 221.
27
Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 27-28; David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, The Production of
Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U. S. History (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012), passim.
28
Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106: 8 (1993): 1709-1791.
12
U.S. capitalists saw potential in Mexico for expanding territory, resources, labor, and
influence, as well as gaining a direct route to the Pacific. Mexicans were concurrently
depicted as “uncivilized,” “semicivilized” and “semibarbarian.”
29
Such racist
characterizations constructed the Mexican people both as violent aggressors and also
suggested their incapacity to “mix their labor properly with the land” in the classic
Lockean logic, (i.e. the land was not being developed properly and therefore could
justifiably be expropriated by capitalists).
30
These characterizations should be read in
proportion to the organized and aggressive pursuit of Mexican life, labor, and territory by
U.S. imperialists. Mexico lost one-third of its territory after the Mexican-American War
(1846-1848) as the U.S. incorporated the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona,
Nevada, Utah, part of Colorado and Texas.
31

This longstanding ability to mobilize racism and state violence into forces of
capital accumulation intensified and took new shape at the turn of the century.
32
In
countries like Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, the “crumbs” of the Spanish
Empire, the United States sought formal imperial possessions.
33
The failure of these
ventures led to a new modified form of capitalist imperialism. Under this model, the U.S.
refrained from installing a foreign government or practicing direct administration in
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
29
Tomàs Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 51-57.
30
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 45.
31
Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 11-13.
32
Amy Kaplan also troubles the “central geographic bifurcation” common to histories of U.S.
imperialism which narrate the early twentieth century as the watershed moment whereby the U.S. first
became a formal imperial power. Such a narration serves as a “denial of empire,” obscuring its histories of
conquest, expansion, and dispossession that proceeded this moment. Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire
in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 17.
33
Smith, American Empire, 16.
13
countries where it sought, land, labor, or raw materials. Instead, it exerted dramatic
financial control over the countries in which it heavily invested and subsequently insured
these investments with the threat or actuality of military intervention. The goal of
capitalist imperialism was to control capital and trade without direct territorial
intervention. Latin America became the laboratory in which this practice was refined,
with the deepest and most devastating advances made in Mexico.
34

In this Age of Empire, Mexico was pulled into the “frenetic” development of
world capitalism. To facilitate this process, Mexican banks made a disproportionate
amount of credit available to foreign interests and eased federal restrictions on foreign
trade and lending. U.S. capital took advantage of these concessions and invested much
fixed capital in the landscape, especially in the form of railroad lines. Thousands of miles
of rail were laid at the end of the nineteenth century, often extensions of U.S. lines, which
provided outlets to prominent US centers and ports. Between 1876 and 1911, a period
known as the Porforiato when Porfirio Diaz served as President of Mexico, more than a
quarter of all U.S. investment lay in Mexico. By the end of the era, the main source of
export earnings, Mexico’s mineral resources, were almost entirely foreign-controlled. By
1897, U.S. investments in Mexico totaled more than $200 million. This figure quintupled
in the following fourteen years.
35
Friedrich Katz argues that the Porfiriato era was
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
34
Richard Seymour, American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), 60.

35
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 44; Eric
Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (New York: Random House Inc. 1987); Nora Hamilton, The
Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 51;
Friedrich Katz. The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 3; James D. Cockcroft, Intellectual Precursors of the
Mexican Revolution 1900-1913 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968); John Coatsorth, “Railroads,
Landholding, and Agrarian Protest in Early Porfiriato,” Hispanic American Historical Review 5:1 (1974):
14
significant in that it pulled Mexico along with much of Latin America into the world
capitalist system and inaugurated a relationship of dependency on foreign capital.
36
Debt,
that “alchemy of international usury,” would continue to bind Mexico along with other
darker nations for generations to come.
37

This new regime of capitalist imperialism was indelibly linked with the old.
38

Over time, agencies of capital and the state learned that wealth extraction and territorial
conquest required more than mere deployments of force. As Edward Said has suggested,
questions of who owned the land, who had rights to settle it, to work it, to employ others,
hold future interests on it, and extract wealth from it, were prefigured through the
construction of narratives. It is had always been easier “to pillage and debase”
populations racially constructed as foreign and different, even if they inhabited in the
same territory. In this way, the color line evolved as both a logic and a practice.
39
It did
not operate in the same way in all places and times, but was unevenly and selectively
deployed at different scales. What was consistent was the “fatal coupling of power and
difference” racism as a means of legitimating expropriation, labor exploitation, and
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
48-71; Grandin. Empire's Workshop 17; James D. Cockcroft, Mexico’s Hope (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1998), 85.
36
Katz, The Secret War in Mexico, 3.
37
Prashad, The Darker Nations, 276.
38
Harvey, The New Imperialism, 100; David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso,
2006), 442.
39
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xiii; Harvey, The
New Imperialism, 135.
15
inequality at all scales.
40
This color line, as Du Bois famously noted, would constitute the
struggle of this American twentieth century.
41

A crucial difference in this new mode of capital accumulation was the broadened
participation of the working class in the maintenance of the color line at a global scale.
Up until the late 19
th
century, the color line had “pa[id] dividends” to its primary
beneficiaries, people who also served as the central agents of its enforcement: the
merchants, aristocracies, and broadly speaking, the ruling class. Du Bois recognized that
under the new system “the white workingman” was also “asked to share the spoil[s].”
42

While by no means equal partners in the distribution of wealth, white working classes in
Western Europe and in North America were constructed as racially superior nonwhite
people and duly deputized by their whiteness.
43
“The lust for blood is bred in the bone,”
declared one frequently republished political cartoon from the New Orleans Times-
Picayune (1913). In it the body of a white woman labeled “Civilization” is draped over
an altar, while a man labeled “Mexico” ceremoniously raises her bleeding heart above
her, a bloody knife hidden behind his back.
44

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
40
Stuart Hall, “Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural
Studies” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 5:1 (1992): 10-18; Ruth Wilson
Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography” The Professional
Geographer 54.1 (2002): 15-24.
41
W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David
Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 639.
42
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” The Atlantic Monthly, 115:5 (May 1915): 707-
714.
43
“The Negro Problem” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York:
Henry Holt, 1995), 49; W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 17.
44
W.K. Patrick “The Lust for blood is Bred in the Bone” New Orleans Times-Picayune, February
1913. Published in Aurrecoechea, La Revoluciòn Mexicana en el Espejo de la Caricatura Estadounidense,
Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, 2011. The image was republished in Marshall Everett Marshall’s Exiting
Experiences in Our War With Mexico (Chicago: The Bible House, 1914) and Frederick Starr, Mexico and
the United States: A Story of Revolution, Intervention and War (Chicago: The Bible House, 1914), 3.
16
This transition was also keenly seen in events such as: the end of Reconstruction;
white race riots which terrorized Asian, Mexican, Native American, Southern and Eastern
European communities; the rise of Jim Crow in the South; and the advent of the Ku Klux
Klan.
45
The lynching of Mexican people, hunted down by Texas Rangers, had become a
common practice.
46
On the day the Mexican Revolution broke out, white Texans had
lynched Antonio Rodrìguez, a Mexican man in Rock Springs, Texas, prompting a protest
in front of the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. Acts of racial violence in this era both met
and missed their marks. While devastating to their victims and their communities, such
acts also disciplined their unwitting perpetrators. Through their participation in and
support of racial violence, white workers debased their own conditions of existence. As
long as a racially terrorized segment of the working class was forced to accept coercion,
arbitrary violence, daily indignities, denied access to space and resources, harder work,
lower pay, all without recourse, the conditions for the entire working class declined in
proportionate measure. As Du Bois observed, “The emancipation of man is the
emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority
of workers who are yellow, brown and black.”
47
Workers not only suffered in material
ways, their very imaginations of revolution were constrained by their adherence to the
color line. Under the defensive mantle of whiteness, hope for a liberated future
suffocated.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
45
Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White
Violence in Florida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable
Enemy: Labor and the Anti- Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1971); Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest, passim.
46
Rodolfo F. Acuña, Corridors of Migration: The Oddessy of Mexican Laborers, 1600-1933
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007), 142; Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), passim.
47
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction,16.
17
These developments had global consequences. The United States grew in this
period as both an industrial power and a robust center of finance capital. The “new
wealth” produced in the American Century came, as Du Bois noted, “primarily from the
darker nations of the world - Asia and Africa, South and Central America, the West
Indies and the islands of the South Seas.”
48
He saw that imperial expansion and the
exploitation of labor abroad evolved in dialectical relationship to the violent
implementation of the color line in the United States. “Imperialism, the exploitation of
colored labor throughout the world,” he wrote, “thrives upon the approval of the United
States, and the United States has given that approval because of the south.”
49
In this way,
Du Bois illuminated how the lynchings and racial terror structuring and disciplining all
labor in the United States authorized, among other things, the violent exploitation and
expropriation of land and labor by U.S. capital abroad.
50
The global strides of U.S.
finance capital were shadowed in their movements by the logics and practices of white
supremacy. In Du Bois’ words, this American-reared tragedy, this color line, now belted
the world.
51

The Ontology of the Color Line
If the color line had been readily apparent and tangible, Debs’ would have been
correct to address it in isolation, discrete from the class struggle. While its effects could
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
48
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” The Atlantic Monthly, 115:5 (May 1915): 707-
714.
49
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 706.
50
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),
101-3.
51
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Color Line Belts the World,” 42-43.
18
be tabulated and organized against, the color line itself coursed through deeper
tributaries, eluding full comprehension as well as exposition.
52
In various works, Du Bois
staged the problem of the color line as a conflict of worldviews. He recognized that there
had been a rupture at the turn of the century in which the future contours of the world
would be defined. Would the “great ideals of white civilization” prevail or would
movements “in spite of “ and “against them” become dominant? “This,” he declared, “is
the problem of the Color Line.”
53

The dramatic expansion of capitalist imperialism required a structuring
philosophy to reproduce the world in its image. By analyzing the global situation, Du
Bois perceived a set of logics at work, unifying various processes of domination. He
recognized the color line as an ascendant way of thinking and being, an ontology, one
that legitimated, “the advance of a part of the world at the expense of the whole.”
54

Congealed from the variegated processes of colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and racism
at the end of the nineteenth century, the color line produced a racist substructure for an
intensely destructive capitalist imperialist system in this period. In this logic, an
“unbridgeable difference” was posited between races in order to hold together the
contradictions of racial capitalism: freedom and security for some, dependent upon the
unfreedom, insecurity, and debased existence of others. The ontology of the color line
produced a collective consciousness premised on exclusion, “the overweening sense of
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
52
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2012), xix.
53
Du Bois, “The Color Line Belts the World,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, 43.
54
W. E. B. Du Bois, “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A
Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 18.
19
the I and the consequent forgetting of the thou.”
55
It invoked claims of self-preservation,
protecting its constituents by eliminating bodies that signified violence and exteriority.
Conditioned by this ontology, a “force and fear” dictated the “white attitude toward
darker races.”
56
From poor white members of the Ku Klux Klan to working class British
soldiers in South Africa to American oil barons in Mexico, this ontology could be drawn
on across class and national borders.
Du Bois observed the operation of the color line in the U.S. in common practices
of meaning making. He examined historical figures like Jefferson Davis and the
reverence held for him in popular culture. In praise for Davis, Du Bois noted how the
practice of “murdering Indians” seemingly advanced civilization, just as American heroes
were made through the territorial seizure during the Mexican War. Similarly he noted
how freedom under the color line was predicated on the idea that “another people should
not be free.” While enshrined in individuals like Davis, Du Bois recognized that these
characteristics found “secure foothold” in the policies and philosophies of the state.
57

When the state was defined against that which was deemed external, chaotic, unruly, and
violent, its very legitimacy depended upon the perpetual exclusion and attempted
vanquishing of those elements.
58
The color line defined those elements, consequently
authorizing and protecting states of being and also of non-being. While the effects of
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
55
Ibid.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid., 17.
58
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race, Prisons, and War: Scenes from the History of U.S. Violence.”
Socialist Register 45 (2009):73–87.
20
these logics were vivid and abominable, the power of these structures lay in their
endurance as common sense and their consequent imperceptibility as ontology.
59

Radical social change would not come easy, as many political movements of this
period came to recognize. Since the very act of perception was more often poisoned by
the ontology of the color line, social revolution would require boldness and humility in
equal measure. Understood at this level, a revolutionary movement was not a matter of
overturning mere law or statute, but undoing the fundamental logic that defined the order
of being. If revolution was a project of imagining a shared humanity and an envisioning a
project of liberation from it, how would radicals imagine an alternate collective
consciousness? Could they think themselves around the color line? How could political
movements shift this ontology if its members could not escape its reach? The
intersection of the color line and the class struggle included a reordering of knowledge
and a reframing of consciousness.

Convergences without Guarantees
The Color Line and the Class Struggle traces a history of radicals who sought
clarity on the question of racial capitalism and the ontology of the color line in a
revolutionary struggle to overcome them. It explores how artists, revolutionaries, and
collectives theorized, dramatized, and challenged racist and gendered social relations
under capitalism and consequently developed new articulations – connections,
expressions, and patterns – of struggle.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
59
Robinson, Black Marxism, 170; Denise da Silva, “No-Bodies: Law, Raciality, and Violence,”
Griffith Law Review 18:2 (2009): 212-236.
21
This dissertation considers the early twentieth century when neither the
international U.S. project of capitalist imperialism nor global revolutionary aims of
socialism had yet become hegemonic. It dwells in a space of possibility wherein actors
engaged in the difficult work of comprehending the struggle before them with their
available conceptual tools. Following Frantz Fanon this interdisciplinary project believes
that “Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched” when it comes to analyzing
the darker nations.
60
It seeks to expand an understanding of radical Marxist traditions in
the early twentieth century in keeping with new literature about internationalism.
Scholars have been remapping the topography of social history with considerations of
transnational movements. Alongside a new exciting body of new work about Black
internationalism by Margaret Stevens, Minkah Makalani, and Rod Bush among others,
this project tries to engage with anti-racist visions as they conceived internationalist
projects for the liberation of all oppressed peoples.
61
Seema Sohi and Maia Ramnath’s
respective studies of the Indian Ghadar movement and Devra Weber’s work on the
transnational movements between anarchism and the Partido Liberal Mexicano have been
helpful in this regard.
62

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
60
Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 5.
61
Margaret Stevens, “The Red International and the Black Caribbean: Transnational Radical
Organizations in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919-1939” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University,
2010); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to
London, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Rod Bush The End of White
World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2009).
62
Maia Ramnath, From Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism
and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Seema
Sohi, “Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Empire, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Washington, Seattle, 2008); Devra Weber, “Keeping Community. Challenging Boundaries:
Indigenous Migrants, Internationalist Workers, and Mexican Revolutionaries,” in Mexico and Mexicans
and the Making of the United States, ed. John Tutino (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 208-235.
22
Given the recent opening of the Comintern archives, this study has benefited from
a number of new works that think critically about the role of the Communist
International, such as Josephine Fowler’s consideration of Asian immigrant activists, Ani
Muhkerhee’s thoughtful engagement with working class South Asian and Black
American working class soujourners to revolutionary Russia, and particularly Daniela
Spenser’s extensive work on the Communist Party’s political, diplomatic, and links to
Mexico.
63
This work extends and expands definitions of internationalism alongside these
reconsiderations of the CI as well as beyond it.
Like Brent Hayes Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, this work tries to productively
think through the place of Mexico in a similar way that he thinks through Paris, in order
to understand how a space at a specific time can enable or disable different political
alliances and crossing from occurring.
64
In this way, it draws upon the work of historians
like Gerald Horne and Dan La Botz to consider the conspicuous presence of international
radicals in Mexico alongside workers, cultural figures, and soldiers.
65
It also transcends
the physical space of Mexico to consider the memory of the Mexican Revolution as it
was mobilized beyond the county’s borders.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
63
Josephine Fowler, Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists: Organizing in American and
International Communist Movements, 1919-1933 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007);
S. Ani Mukherji, “The Anticolonial Imagination: Migrant Intellectuals and the Exilic Productions of
American Radicalism in Interwar Moscow, 1919-1939 (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2011); Daniela
Spenser, Stumbling Its Way Through Mexico (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011).
64
Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of the
Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
65
Dan La Botz, “American ‘Slackers’ in the Mexican Revolution: International Proletarian
Politics in the Midst of a National Revolution” The Americas 62:4 (2006): 563-590; Gerald Horne, Black
and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920 (New York: New York University
Press, 2005), 32-37.
23
This project traces a wide of characters and convergence spaces. It follows
uprisings in Northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, as well as further afield in Kansas
and New York City. These spaces include movements by farm workers along the U.S./
Mexico border; radical organizing in Mexico City; mobilizations by the Los Angeles
Unemployed Councils; internationalist movements inside Leavenworth Federal
Penitentiary; and art collectives in Mexico City and New York City where struggles to
represent racial violence were undertaken by anti-capitalist internationalist artists. Each
space represents a unique convergence in struggles against capitalism and the color line.
In such a study, it is essential to proceed with a critical approach to the archive.
As Guillermo Bonfil Batalla argues:
All of the colonized peoples are conscious that their true history (or story) has
only been a colonizer’s postscript. They know that their history is a hidden one,
clandestine, negated. They also know that, in spite of everything, this history
exists and that the proof of evidence is the very same existence of each
community.
66

The invisibility of poor and working class subjects is often as much a product of the
repression originally visited upon them as a consequence of the violence of abstraction
involved in writing history.
67
Mexican Marxist historian Adolfo Gilly explains how
dominant regimes “interminably searches for outside agitators to explain rebellions by
the dominated” incredulous that the poor or working class could have either the initiative
or the consciousness to take such action.
68
The unrecognized subjectivity of those
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
66
Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, “Historias que no son todavía historia,” in Historia ¿para qué? Carlos
Pereyra et al. (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1980), 227-45.
67
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the
Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000),7.
68
Adolfo Gilly, “Chiapas and the Rebellion of the Enchanted World” in Daniel Nugent ed., Rural
Revolt in Mexico: U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subltern Politics (Chapel Hill: Duke University
Press, 1998) 266.
24
excluded from history, conceived as duped and dominated by it, is a distortion built into
historiography’s very optics.
69
As subaltern studies scholar Ranajit Guha details, elite
historiography refuses to comprehend the nature of mass popular initiative and activity.
Uprisings, protests, or smaller acts of resistance, whether completely organized political
movements or acts of substitution as he calls them, have fundamentally shaped history.
However, “the rebel” he says “has no place in this history as the subject of rebellion”
70

because, they are illegible in official records, often having refused the legitimacy of
repressive institutions as well as their standards, values, and measures. Accordingly,
alternative archives and alternative means of reading official archives must be sought as
well as the practice of reading against the grain.
This study draws on an alternative archives, one that moves through the history of
the Mexican Revolution into its afterlife well into the 1940s in order to demonstrate the
persistence of memory about the revolution and the global visions it helped produce. It
examines memoirs, oral histories, correspondence, newspapers, radical publications,
jailhouse newspapers, prison records, private book collections, and lithographic prints
culled from a number of archives in the U.S., Mexico, as well as those unofficial
collections circulated by social movements. Compelled by Karl Marx’s maxim that
people make history but not under conditions of their choosing, this project has
undertaken the difficult task of reconstructing the political traditions and conceptual tools
that were available to the people in the different convergence spaces studied here. It
offers convergence space as a relatively open ended concept, fungible enough to account
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
69
Ranajit Guha “Historiography of Colonial India” Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian
History & Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1982), 77.
70
Ibid.,71.
25
for the multiple ways in which people confronted the color line and engaged in the class
struggle. It reads against the grain, not merely in an effort to make visible forgotten
subjects of history but to document the history of figures in revolutionary stories, who
have become miscast in celebrations of the nation. It abides by Adolfo Gilly’s suggestion
to “follow those footprints, the indices, the traces, the signs left behind by the activity of
those that usually do not appear to be registers in history.”
71

While this project is attendant to the silences of the archive, it does not purport to
rescue marginalized figures from obscurity or invisibility. Though marginalized figures
are absent from the archives of dominant institutions, their absence may sometimes be
preferable to their slick incorporation into dominant narratives. More dangerous than
invisibility are narratives of reconciliation; those that conscript marginalized figures into
historical fictions in order to reaffirm the present. Roderick Ferguson names this “a
poetics of evasion” an “avoidance of elements that confound narratives of heroism,
political purity, innocence.”
72
He describes such narratives as being successful to the
extent that they can “mark injuries of racial exclusions” and at the same time, “promote
the state’s ability to assimilate that which it formerly rejected.”
73
On the brink of naming
“unspeakable things” such narratives of reconciliation can instead shore up a feeling of
unity, progress, and normativity a compulsory faith in the present system.
74
Fictions of
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
71
Adolfo Gilly, History against the Nap: A Constellation (Mexico, D.F.: Ediciones Era, 2006),
17-30.
72
Roderick Ferguson, “A Special Place Within The Order of Knowledge: Kara Walker and the
Conventions of African American History” (unpublished speech) UCLA Hammer Museum, Fall 2008, 5.
73
Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003), viii.
74
Ferguson, “A Special Place Within The Order of Knowledge,” 7; George Lipsitz, The
Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1998), 282.
26
reconciliation appease addictions to fantasies of progress and healing.
75
They are histories
that obscure the violent conditions of their own making. In doing so, they further
legitimate and reproduce domination.
76

This study does not purport to find resolutions. It attempts to understand how
people made meaning with the tools before them. It proceeds with their insights in mind.
It is not interested in conscripting characters as the proto-political figures easily
comprehendible with our categories at present. People made mistakes, tried, failed, grew,
suffered, or changed, but they engaged in the messy work of making meaning for
themselves through revolution. In the process they produced new revolutionary thought, a
process that remains essential to understanding and recognizing the history and lineage of
Marxist theory and practice at present. This study is interested in the figures studied here
because they chose not to retreat and reproduce the cruel racist capitalist logic they lived
within. Their ideological processes in different convergence spaces are the objects of this
study.

Chapter Summaries
The second chapter, “A Common Destiny?” analyzes the processes by which
different individuals came to adopt or deepen their understanding of internationalism in
Revolutionary Mexico. By the time the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in 1917, the
Mexican people already had several generation of struggle behind them. They had seized
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
75
Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race. (Oxford England ; New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 7.
76
Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 152; Adolfo Gilly, “Chiapas and the Rebellion of the Enchanted World,”
266.

27
land, organized communal holdings, orchestrated large-scale strikes in industries and
semi-proletarianized spaces of capitalist agriculture, clamored for a redistribution of
wealth, attacked symbols of domination, and practiced an incipient form internationalism.
Furthermore, they had done this at the doorstep of U.S. Empire and in the shadow of its
military. While the Revolution has often been understood as a national event, the struggle
of the Mexican people was mobilized against the transformation of land rights and
political economy by capitalist imperialism. U.S. capital was largely responsible for this
transformation in Mexico as it coerced similar structural changes throughout the world.
This chapter begins with the experience of M.N. Roy, an Indian born radical whose
understanding of internationalism was profoundly shaped during his time in Mexico. By
considering his life, the life of some of the other radicals he encountered, and the
revolutionary space of Mexico during 1917, this chapter explains why Mexico was
considered a staging ground for the struggle against capitalist imperialism and the color
line.
In the wake of the first World War and the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the US
created the first federal police system and produced a new security infrastructure
designed to monitor, infiltrate and suppress dissent increasingly located within the
boundaries U.S. Empire. The third chapter, “University of Radicalism: Ricardo Flores
Magòn and Leavenworth Penitentiary” examines the development of this new security
infrastructure and the unintentional convergence space it produced. Between 1917 and
1922, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary was occupied by a unique mix of soldiers, war
dissenters, radical labor organizers, foreign-born radicals, Black militants and figures
from the Mexican Revolution such as Ricardo Flores Magòn who had offered one of the
28
earliest and most trenchant critiques of American imperialism in the 20
th
century. The
chapter observes how organizing occurred inside the prison as inmates coordinated night
schools, produced their own newspaper, maintained a radical library, led May Day
marches, initiated strikes, and continued agitating and educating one another. Drawing
from prison records, inmate book collections, correspondence, memoirs, open letters to
the U.S. President, and federal surveillance records, this chapter explores the
unanticipated alliances and political struggles that arose from this unique convergence
space.
The fourth chapter, “Relief and Revolution: Southern California Struggles
Against Unemployment,” examines struggles in the early 1930’s for relief. It argues that
California farm workers and city-based Unemployed Councils became the vanguard in
the struggle for relief during the early years of the Great Depression. At the outset of the
Depression, in rural areas like the Imperial Valley, farm workers were striking. In Los
Angeles, unemployed workers were being thrown off of relief rolls and often coerced into
working in the fields as scabs in order to break agricultural strikes. In this way,
conditions of relief were turning workers against one another across the urban-rural
divide. This chapter conjoins these movements and considers the radical implications in
organizing for relief. It highlights the radical traditions of the Communist Party, the
various anti-racist and anti-imperialist traditions of workers and unemployed organizers,
and the unique revolutionary traditions that Mexican workers brought to the strikes.
Indeed, the struggle against organized capitalist interests was not new to striking farm
workers. Many had lived through extended confrontations with U.S. capital during the
Mexican Revolution. They subsequently brought strategies, tactics, and militancy to the
29
fields inspired by their experiences. The chapter specifically examines the centrality of
Mexican workers in the fields of capitalist agriculture, the condition of unemployment,
and in the struggle against these conditions as both regional and global manifestations. In
this way, this chapter offers an episode in which the global relations of capital were
countered by a radical internationalist movement across regional and national borders.
Drawing primarily from radical Mexican and U.S. newspapers, international papers, and
sources from U.S. Unemployed Councils, this chapter considers the continuity of
struggles across the capitalist landscape.
The final chapter, “If Culture Respects no Borders: Struggles Against Racial
Capitalism” examines the convergence spaces of art collectives in the late years of the
Great Depression into the early years of the Second World War. It considers the
organizing efforts of artists in Mexico and the U.S. to produce a revolutionary
internationalist cultural infrastructure, by which I mean the establishment of physical and
organizational spaces to support the cultural negation of racial capitalism. It explores how
Mexico’s cultural infrastructure that supported artists like Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente
Orozco and collectives like the Taller de Grafica Popular (TGP), influenced the public art
programs of the U.S. New Deal. It appraises Works Progress Administration centers like
Chicago’s Southside Community Art Center and Harlem’s Washington Carver School,
which enabled Black artists like Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, Charles Alston, and
Augusta Savage to cultivate a radical anti-racist internationalist culture. It also considers
the circulation between these spaces as Catlett and White went to Mexico and joined the
TGP and artists like Orozco came to the U.S. to participate in representational struggles
of lynching and racial violence. Drawing from memoirs, oral histories, interviews, and
30
archival print collections, this chapter considers the work this infrastructure produced in
an effort to rebut the psychic and cultural violence of the color line.
A final word - this study does not purport to find resolutions. It attempts to
understand how people made meaning with the tools before them. It proceeds with their
insights in mind. It is not interested in conscripting characters as the proto-political
figures easily comprehendible with our categories at present. In his study of the Guyanese
working class, Walter Rodney encourages his readers to consider convergences as spaces
of fragmentation. His work is attendant to the ways the “cultural convergence(s)” were
inadequate to develop class solidarity across “barriers created by legal distinctions, racial
exclusiveness, and the separate trajectories of important aspects of culture.”
77
Following
this standpoint of irresolution, this study does not impute an unreasonable faith in
convergences that did not congeal. But, if they had been allowed to flourish, this study
asks what king of different times we might be living in.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
77
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University
Press, 1972), xvii.
<;%
CHAPTER TWO
A COMMON DESTINY?
That dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa;
in the West Indies and Central America and in the United States – the great majority of
mankind, on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stone of
modern industry - shares a common destiny..

-W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935)

When Narendranath Bhattacharya set sail from India in August 1915 he was
seeking arms for the Independence movement to overthrow British imperial rule. By the
time he returned in October 1920 he had changed his name to Manabendra Nath Roy and
was charged with the belief that India’s fate was linked to subjugated people around the
world. For M.N. Roy, the national liberation of India was no longer an end in itself but a
necessary step towards global revolution.
1

In his travels and studies, Roy had come to understand where and how the wealth
of nations was produced. His early life in India, observing famine amidst plenty under
British rule, had made him a militant. In the Philippines, China, Korea, Malaysia, Java,
Indonesia, and Japan, his crossings with national revolutionary leaders such as Sun Yat-
Sen, Ho Chi Minh, and Korea’s Syngman Rhee, forced him to reassess imperialism’s
devastating reach. In the New York Public Library, Roy read Marx and developed a
critical language to explain how the epic violence moving people and things around the
planet could be mundanely converted into Wall Street ticker tape.
2
In Mexico between
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
1
Samaren Roy, The Restless Brahmin: Early Life of M.N. Roy (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1970),
59-81.
2
M.N. Roy, Memoirs (Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1984); Satyabrata Rai Chowdhuri, Leftism in
India 1917-1947 (New York: Palgrave, 2007) 42-135.
32
1917-1920, during the Mexican Revolution, Roy was transformed. There in “land of my
rebirth,” he began to see that “the overthrow of the capitalist system” was impossible
without, “the breaking up of the colonial empire.”
3
In 1920 he wrote, “Without the
control of the extensive markets and vast fields of exploitation in the colonies, the
capitalist powers of Europe cannot maintain their existence even for a short time.”
4
What
allowed the imperialist bourgeoisie to maintain social control over Western workers, he
argued, was the very existence of the colonies.
Roy, in some circles, is best known for a remarkable intervention he made in the
Communist Party. In 1920 Vladimir Lenin presented his “Theses on the National and
Colonial Question” at the 2
nd
International Congress of the Comintern. Lenin proposed
that Communist Parties must, “render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among
the dependant and under-privileged nations” which included, Ireland, India, Black people
in America, among others.
5
In these nations, Lenin recommended that the Party “enter
into a temporary alliance” with bourgeois nationalist elements, groups he believed could
best marshal the support and resources.
6
Roy saw contradictions in this formulation. If
the Party sought to foment a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system through the
seizure of power by the working class, why would it compromise its principles and
organize with the bourgeoisie in the colonies? Roy argued that the colonies possessed its
own working class with consistent revolutionary aims. He believed that authority needed
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
3
Sibnarayan Ray, ed. Selected Works of M.N. Roy, Vol. 1, 1917-1922, (Delhi: Oxford University
Press), 166.
4
Ibid. 165.
5
V.I. Lenin, “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” in Collected
Works, Vol. 31, April-December 1920 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 144.
6
Ibid.
33
to be given to these “masses of workers and peasants” and not their self-elected
representatives who failed to represent their interest. He described the two struggles as
fundamentally different, with the “bourgeois national democrats” striving to establish “a
free national state,” while the majority of people were revolting “against the system
which permits such brutal exploitation.” These “contradictory forces” he wrote, “cannot
develop together.”
7

Furthermore, Roy believed that the colonies needed to be understood as central to
the struggle against capitalism. He saw that exploitation in the colonies provided the main
source of wealth in industrialized countries. "The fountain head from which European
capitalism draws its main strength is no longer to be found in the industrial countries of
Europe,” he wrote, “but in the colonial possessions and dependencies."
8
This argument
drew attention to the effects of the color line in the Party’s understanding of class
struggle. While Lenin’s original thesis recognized political actors from the darker
nations, it insinuated that they lacked sufficient consciousness and direction for
revolutionary organization. Roy’s analysis suggests the existence of a resistant
consciousness among the darker nations even if it often appeared unconsciously.
*
Instead
he compelled them to recognize the Indian revolutionary movement as “a vital part of the
world proletarian struggle against capitalism.”
9
What made it invisible to the Party was
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
7
M. N. Roy, “Draft Supplementary Theses On the National and Colonial Question, 2nd Congress
Communist International,” in Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India, Vol. 1 : 1917-
1922, ed. G. Adhikari, (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1971), 179.
8
Ibid, 184, 186-8.
*
Leon Trotsky defined Marxism as “the conscious expression of the unconscious historical
process.” In Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York: Pathfinder Press, Jun 1, 1970), 334.
9
M.N. Roy, “An Indian Communist Manifesto,” in ed. Ray, Selected Works of M.N. Roy, 164.
34
an ideology about revolutionary trajectories and an ideal of the classically conceived
white industrial proletariat subject, an image reinforced by the color line.
10

Many delegates bucked at Roy’s argument. John Reed, delegate from the U.S.
Communist Party (CPUSA), vehemently disagreed, asserting that Black people in the
U.S. were a small geographically contained population seeking social equality rather than
class struggle.
11
A delegate from the British Socialist Party argued that British workers
would not support an anti-imperialist uprising in India since they would only see it as
treason.
12
It was commonly assumed that socialist revolution would lead to the automatic
liberation of the colonies. It followed that the Communist Party would focus its
revolutionary efforts on organizing the industrialized proletariat of the Western world.
Roy challenged this configuration. He promoted centrality of the colonized and racially
subjugated world to the class struggle. Most troublingly, Roy reconfigured the struggle
that many believed they well understood and to which they had committed their lives.
Roy’s comments were also met great deal of excitement. The twenty-five
delegates from Asia, such as Lao Hsiu-Chao of the Chinese Socialist Workers Party, who
were fighting for recognition in both their home countries and in the Comintern, rejoiced
at Roy’s comments that offered recognition and support to communist revolution in the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
10
Ranajit Guha “Historiography of Colonial India” Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian
History & Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1982), 77.
11
Roderick D. Bush, The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the
Problem of the Color Line. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 102-103.
12
Quoted in Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International
Communism from Lenin to Stalin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 162-3. In Roy’s “An Indian
Communist Manifesto” he had explicitly called on the British working class to stage a “simultaneous
general strike” to deal a “vital blow to imperialistic capitalism at home and abroad” in ed. Ray, Selected
Works of M.N. Roy, 161.
35
East.
13
Roddy Connolly, representing the Communist Party of Ireland and son of famed
Irish internationalist revolutionary, James Connolly, “enthusiastically endorsed” the
recognition of the Irish anti-colonial struggle.
14
The Theses also gave America’s Black
Bolsheviks new authority. After being serially ignored in national leadership circles,
“Black radicals found a podium and an audience in the new headquarters of international
Communism.”
15
With this opening, other Black radicals like poet Claude McKay and
delegate Otto Huiswood would come to insist that the party foreground questions of race
and white supremacy in its analysis of labor, capital, and liberation.
16

M.N. Roy’s 1920 intervention is no musty detail dredged from the annals of Left
history. Radicals nearly a century later continue to grapple with the implications of his
arguments. It challenges many widely held beliefs, such as the idea that struggles for
racial equality are discrete or separable from class struggle, that colonial struggles are
incompatible with Marxist analyses, or that race is a minor factor in producing spaces of
capital accumulation. In Roy’s writing we see an early iteration of the argument that
many later articulate, that, simply put, the problem of the color line lies at the heart of the
global class struggle.
17
But it was not in India or Russia where Roy came to this position
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
13
Josephine Fowler, Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists: Organizing in American and
International Communist Movements, 1919-1933 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007),
17-18; Robert C. North and Xenia J. Eudin, M.N. Roy’s Mission to China: The Communist-Kuomintang
Split of 1927 (New York: Octagon Books, 1977), 1; Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical
Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2011), 80-81.
14
M.N. Roy, The Great Radical Humanist: Political Biography and Socio-Political Ideas (New
York: Sterling Publishers, 1988), 64.
15
Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. (Boston: Beacon Press,
2002), 46-7.
16
Katherine Anne Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters
between Black and Red, 1922-1963 (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 28-42.
17
Kelley, Freedom Dreams. 47.
36
but in revolutionary Mexico. This chapter considers the role of Revolutionary Mexico. It
considering the particular historical and political developments which Roy observed.
Drawing from his Memoirs, this chapter describes M.N. Roy’s experience in Mexico
where he initially sought refuge but inadvertently found political transformation in a
convergence space of radical internationalism.

The Other 1917
The world of the early twentieth century was convulsing with unrest. Rumblings
of hunger and indignity sought expression. In cautious stadial silence, some watched and
waited, hedging their bets, while others thrashed in strikes, uprisings, and protest. Around
the world, leaders readied their weapons, anxious of their own illegitimacy. Capitalist
imperialism required the participation of the propertyless in western industrialized
nations and the violently excluded people of the darker nations. Would these groups find
resolution together or would one trample and subduct the other, burying a blazing
insurgent force deeper under the surface? A question mark hung over the earth.
18

In 1917 the Russian Bolshevik Revolution became a global focal point, giving
form and definition to this rebellious energy. It proposed to be the first of the many
revolutions to change the global order. It stressed the primacy of people’s lives over
property rights and upheld people’s right to self-determination. The project of radical
anti-imperialist proletarian internationalism proposed a vision that could transform the
world. People all over the planet were swept up in the possibilities of the moment. What
did it mean to be a Bolshevik? There were as many interpretations as there were
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
18
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
(New York: Verso, 2010), 64; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction 30.
37
dreamers. According to Victor Serge, there was no such thing as a true Bolshevik outside
of the newly formed Soviet Union. But for others, bolshevism represented the
culmination of already existing desires and activities.
19

Emboldened socialist movements arose around the world. In Cuba, tobacco
workers were moved by the concept of soviets and organized their workplaces
accordingly. In Spain, people were largely swayed by what they perceived as an
expanded practice of their already existing anarchism. In Australia, sheep shearers
cheered the concept of a workers’ state. For socialists, communists, and anarchists
throughout the U.S. it appeared that a new day had dawned.
20
M.N. Roy entered Mexico
in the fiery year of 1917 and was “sucked up” into “an atmosphere surcharged with great
expectations.” For Roy along with all other “left-wing socialists” he was around in
Mexico, it was a defiant moment of possibility. In Mexico, Roy experienced a “rise of the
revolutionary temperature.”
21

Roy was faced with the dilemma of squaring his newfound admiration for
communism with his own nationalism. The Bolshevik Revolution gave him an
opportunity to think anew about his political position. Not long after he arrived in the
country, Roy was asked to pen some articles about the Indian struggle against British
imperialism. The editor of the Mexican popular paper El Pueblo believed that such a
story would find sympathetic ears in Mexico. Since Mexico had overthrown its own
colonial rule but was still seeking independence, the editor reasoned that Mexican
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
19
Victor Serge quoted in Dan La Botz, “American ‘Slackers’ in the Mexican Revolution:
International Proletarian Politics in the Midst of a National Revolution” The Americas 62:4 (2006); 575.
20
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (Vintage: New York,
1995), 65-66.
21
Roy, Memoirs, 59.
38
audiences would be “benefited by a knowledge of your country and the struggle of its
people for freedom.”
22
The assignment gave Roy pause. As he reflected in his memoir:
The spectacle of poverty of the Mexican people was no less grim than that of the
Indian. To tell the Mexican all about the poverty of the Indian and its cause,
British exploitation, etc, would be like carrying coal to Newcastle.
23

Realizing that a standard anti-British tract might not compel a Mexican audience,
Roy thought through Indian history and how he could make it legible and relevant. He
turned to Marxism to make his case:
In the articles I outlined the picture of India past and present, as a picture of class
struggle. The poverty of the Indian masses was the result of economic
exploitation by British imperialism and native feudalism. The liberation of the
Indian masses, therefore, required not only the overthrow of British imperialism,
but subversion of the feudal patriarchal order which constituted the social
foundation of the foreign political rule. The corollary was that India needed a
social revolution not mere national independence.
24

Roy was still sympathetic to the events that had brought him to a position of Indian
nationalism. It was still against racism, starvation, poverty, dispossession, and indignity
that he wrote. In Mexico, he was forced to broaden his analysis of power to account for
the similarity of conditions he had experienced there. In the additional context of the
Russian Revolution, Roy began to wrestle with the role capitalism played in producing
these conditions at a global scale. These early articles inaugurated for Roy, “a sudden
jump from die-hard nationalism to communism.”
25
Triangulating the contexts of Russia,
Mexico, and India, Roy began to think about the intersecting forces of capitalism,
imperialism and racism, as well as the logics that held them together. In this regard, he
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
22
Roy, Memoirs, 71.
23
Ibid., 75-6.
24
Ibid., 76.
25
Ibid., 59.
39
began to pay more attention to the country he was in and to the revolution he was living
amidst.
By the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Mexican people already had several
generations of struggle behind them. Their acts of insurgency pervaded the entire
country. They had seized land, organized communal holdings, orchestrated large scale
strikes in industries and semi-proletarianized spaces of capitalist agriculture, clamored for
a redistribution of wealth and recognition of their rights and basic protections. They had
also attacked symbols and practices of domination, mobilized class solidarity, engendered
a new revolutionary culture, and practiced “an incipient international solidarity”
according to historian Daniela Spenser.
26
Furthermore, they had done this at the doorstep
of U.S. empire and in the shadow of its military.
While the Revolution was often understood as a national event, the struggle of the
Mexican people was mobilized against the transformation of land rights and the political
economy by capitalist imperialism. U.S. capital was largely responsible for this
transformation in Mexico just as it had coerced similar structural changes throughout the
world. Through the stewardship of President Porfiro Diaz, Mexico had undergone a
violent process of modernization and integration into the world market, the benefits of
which were unevenly distributed across the country. The federal government had
centralized state and class power, often wresting funds, rights, and control of services
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
26
Daniela Spenser, Stumbling Its Way Through Mexico, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2011), 2.
40
from local state entities in order to become the major broker between foreign finance
capital/ foreign industrial capital and Mexican land, labor, and industry.
27

The federal government under the Porfiriato granted exclusive rights and
privileges to foreign capitalists who, in turn, manipulated those rights and exploited the
newly available land, labor, and resources. An emerging bourgeoisie attempted to keep
pace with these developments and largely supported Diaz. A frustrated middle class saw
their labor force, resources, and public services increasingly absorbed by foreign
investment but were unable to voice their grievances and vote out the Diaz dictatorship.
A newly proletarianized workforce bore the brunt of industrial exploitation. To handle
the multiple contradictions, the Diaz regime often expanded its repressive measures by
embedding them in industrial and state infrastructure. For example, the railroads spread
with dramatic promises of travel and expanded trade, all the while establishing the
capacity to ferry soldiers in greater numbers, at greater speeds, over greater swaths of the
land.
28

These processes converted Mexico from a largely subsistence based economy to
one based on commercial agriculture. In this transition, the rural peasantry constituting
over 75% of the population experienced violent dispossession, criminalization, and
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
27
Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982), 51; James D. Cockcroft, Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution 1900-
1913 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 14-34; John Coatsworth, “Railroads, Landholding, and
Agrarian Protest in Early Porfiriato,” Hispanic American Historical Review 5:1 (1974): 48-71; Friedrich
Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), 4-27; Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin American, The United
Sates and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 17.

28
David Walker, “Porfirian Labor Politics: Working Class Organizations in Mexico City and
Porfirio Diaz, 1876-1902,” The Americas 37 (1981): 257-89; Paul Vanderwood, “The Mexican Revolution:
Region and Theory, Signifying Nothing?” Latin American Research. Review 25 (Winter 1990): 231-242.
41
persecution during intense rounds of primitive accumulation. Land was transformed from
a means of substance into a commodity. As Adolfo Gilly notes, “If the land is
successfully converted into a commodity, people – along with their community;
inseparable as they are from its territory – wind up having sold their body and lost their
soul.”
29
By 1906 a full quarter of all of Mexico’s territory was seized by government
initiated ‘settlement acts.’ As a result of these processes, eighty-one percent of all local
communities in Mexico had been taken over, uprooting many peasants from their land
and forcing them out of their villages by 1910. By stripping peasants of their land and
communities, leaving them with nothing to sell but their labor power, this accumulation
by dispossession transformed peasants into wage-laborers.
30
Yet, as Daniel Nugent
writes, this transformation also had the “curious consequence” of creating fewer workers
and more rebels. Masses of dispossessed former peasants increasingly participated in
mini-revolts through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, setting the stage for
the Revolution.
31

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
29
Adolfo Gilly, “Chiapas and the Rebellion of the Enchanted World,” in Rural Revolt in Mexico:
U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern Politics, ed. Daniel Nugent (Chapel Hill: Duke University
Press, 1998), 263.
30
In Capital, Karl Marx refers to the process “when great masses of men are suddenly and
forcibly torn from their means of subsistence.” Marx writes that this initial act of ‘enclosing the commons’
and creating private property originates the schism between “the wealth of the nation and the poverty of the
people.” It is the process by which private property relations are originated and through which masses of
people, removed from their land and livelihood are forced into a capitalist modes of production as wage
laborers. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1976),
876; Adolfo Gilly, The Mexican Revolution (New York: The New Press, 2005), 4; 40; David Harvey, The
New Imperialism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 137-182; John Mason Hart, Revolutionary
Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997), 362.
31
Daniel Nugent, “Introduction: Reason to be Cheerful” in Rural Revolt in Mexico: U.S.
Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern Politics ed. Daniel Nugent (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press,
1998), 16.
42
In Mexico, Roy began to perceive the enormous diversity of forms that the
struggles of the Revolution had already taken. Just as the French Revolution was
composed of different tactics, revolts, and targets from village, Mexico also possessed a
great variety of regional interpretations, goals, and means.
32
As James Scott explains, the
revolution was “a constellation of local revolutions that had taken root before the new
state was created.”
33
Since Mexico was not a hermetically sealed or culturally insulated
territory but a product of global forces, within each region, global relations were
differently inflected. For Roy, the forces slowly came into view.
Popular depictions of the Revolution often focused on the southern state of
Morelos, where armed villagers led by Emiliano Zapata had occupied sugar plantation. In
protesting the loss of their common land and water rights alongside their dispossession
and exploitation, sugar company owners and administrators, “had no alternative but to
meet the revolutionary demands” according to John Womack.
34
Given his the
transformations, Zapata was able to understand how the modernization and dispossession
of people in Morelos was linked to the investment of foreign capital.
35
In his 1917
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
32
Joseph and Nugent write that histories of the Revolution have “suffered from a marked tendency
to isolate and privilege the revolution as event - as the supreme moment of popular resistance in Mexican
history - rather than to study it as a culturally complex, historically generated process.” Gilbert M. Joseph
and Daniel Nugent, “Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico” in Everyday Forms of
State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, eds. Joseph and Nugent
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 5; James Scott, “Forward,” in Everyday Forms of State
Formation, eds. Joseph and Nugent, viii; Mark Wasserman, “The Mexican Revolution: Region and Theory,
Signifying Nothing?” Latin American Research Review 25:1 (1990): 231-242.
33
James Scott, “Forward,” in Everyday Forms of State Formation, ix.

34
John Womack, Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 87.
35
Ibid.; Paul Hart, Bitter Harvest: The Social Transformation of Morelos, Mexico, and the Origins
of the Zapatista Revolution, 1840-1910 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 175; Arturo
Warman, “The Political Project of Zapatismo” in Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in
Mexico, ed. Friedrich Katz, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 321-337.
43
“Manifesto of the People,” he declared his intention to “emancipate the country from the
economic domination of the foreigner.”
36

Roy first came to Mexico with a letter of introduction directed to General
Salvador Alvarado, socialist governor of the state of the Yucatan. Alvarado had been
swept into power by a revolt of the Mayo Indians who installed a slate of self-professed
socialists to their governing body. This region had a deep insurgent history. For a short
time, Mayo Indians had set up an autonomous state in the southern part of Yucatan that
had remained independent until 1902.
37
In 1912 the Casa del Obrero Mundial, the House
of the World Worker, an anarchist-syndicalist inspired trade union organization that
organized the country’s emergent industrial working class, was founded in the region.
The ideologies of the Casa had been inspired by the Ricardo Flores Magòn’s organization
the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), which had articulated many of the key ideals of the
Mexican Revolution and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a U.S. based
anarcho-syndicalist organization whose interests overlapped greatly with the mission of
the PLM in Mexico. Members were also influenced by the Russian anarchist Piotr
Kropotkin and the Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer Guardia.
38

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
36
Robert P. Millon, Zapata: The Ideology of a Peasant Revolutionary (New York: International
Publishers: New York, 1969), 78.
37
Kris Manjapra, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2010),
32; Enrique Montalvo Ortega, "Revolts and Peasant Mobilizations in Yucatan: Indians, Peons and Peasants
from the Caste War to the Revolution" in Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution, 295-317; Linn A. E. Gale,
“Socialism in Yucatan,” Gale’s Magazine (March 1920); 7, Josè Carlos Mariàtegui, “Mexico and the
Revolution,” in The Heroic and Creative Meaning of Socialism: Selected Essays of Josè Carlos Mariàtegi,
ed. Michael Pearlman (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996), 124.
38
Daniela Spenser, “Radical Mexico: Limits to the Impact of Soviet Communism” trans. Richard
Stoller Latin American Perspectives, 35:2 (March 2008); 60; Devra Weber, “Keeping Community,
Challenging Boundaries: Indigenous Migrants, Internationalist Workers, and Mexican Revolutionaries,” in
Mexico and Mexicans and the Making of the United States, ed. John Tutino (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2012), 208-235.
44
The Casa itself was home to a number of radicals from throughout the country
and beyond, from revolutionary artist José Clemente Orozco, his teacher, Dr. Atl who
had been inspired by his travels in European radical circles, as well as Black radical
Lovett Fort-Whiteman. Fort-Whiteman spent several years in the Yucatan peninsula.
Between the early years of the revolution until 1917, he witnessed leaders of the
Revolution, reform prostitution, establish schools, fight the Catholic Church, and publicly
punish landowners for past crimes committed against their workers.
39
He was inspired by
these massive cultural shifts and the radical change they portended. After his time in
Mexico, Fort-Whiteman would become one of the very first African Americans to
sojourn to Moscow, pursuing a vision of global freedom through the Soviet project.
Roy would also bear witness to the extreme cultural shifts in the country. In
Torreón for example, newspapers decried a lack of civility as the poor and working class
began refusing passage to “respectable” people, forcing wealthy women to walk in the
middle of muddy streets.
40
In Mexico City schools, the names of saints, religious figures
were replaced with the names of revolutionary heroes: Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa,
Ricardo Flores Magòn, and Karl Marx. Students were taught students about the triplicate
evils of ‘clergy, ignorance, and capital.’
41
The upheavals, displacement and migrations
(disproportionately of men) had transformed gender roles, forcing women in many towns
into the traditionally male workforce and opening previously gendered positions of
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
39
Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York: W.
W. Norton, 2008), 33-34
40
Quoted in Alan Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987), 210.
41
Alan Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940,” Hispanic
American Historical Review 74:3 (August 1994); 393-444.
45
authority. As a result women were at the forefront of public campaigns as diverse as rent
strikes, temperance movements, industrial agitation, suffrage movements, conservative
appeals to rehabilitate sex workers, education campaigns and school strikes. Women also
profoundly reshaped the private and domestic sphere in less immediately public ways, for
example, challenging standards of fashion, gender normativity, and sexuality. In so
doing, they also challenged social and cultural norms predicated on gendered
subordination.
42

Roy had to come to terms with Mexico’s own revolutionary year in 1917. The
year marked the creation of Mexico’s revolutionary Constitution, one of the most radical
and comprehensive in modern political history for its nationalization of resources and
sweeping land reforms. In cities like Orizaba over a million copies of the Constitution
were sold. Enshrined in law were provisions ensuring the nationalization of resources in
defiance of U.S. and British holdings, massive education programs, and proposals for
sweeping land redistribution. Article 27, for example, declared that the ownership of
lands and water belonged to the nation, setting limits on the inviolability of private
property. Article 123 offered dramatically increased protections for workers. It provided
the legal basis for a minimum wage, an eight-hour day, worker’s compensation, and
obligated employers to provide clean, sanitary, and affordable housing to their workers,
as tenant organizers well understood. It also restricted child labor, banned extorting
practices of company stores and debt peonage, and set new regulations on employers’
ability to fire workers. Children in Mexico City were sometimes named 323 or 66, these
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
42
Stephanie Michell and Patience A. Schell eds., The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910-1953
(Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 2006), passim; Gabriela Cano, “Unconcealable Realities of Desire: Amelio
Robles’s (Transgender) Masculinity in the Mexican Revolution” in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics,
and Power in Modern Mexico, eds. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006), 36-56.
46
being, respectively, the articles which regulated the clergy and sanctioned the
expropriation of private property. While many of these tenants wouldn’t be enforced until
over a decade later, the promises of the new Constitution signified a great cultural shift.
Like Civil Rights legislation in the United States, these radical articles enshrined ideals of
a new society and gave authority to movements to push for their implementation.
43

Coy Columbia
While Mexico was seven years deep into its own revolution by the time the
Bolshevik Revolution was in its first, the Mexican Revolution was difficult for
Americans to comprehend as a revolution that they could draw from. For some, this lack
of support represented a difficulty in reconciling the occurrence of the revolution with the
schemas of classical Marxist theory. In some instances this led radical movements in the
U.S. to support imperialist regimes, as the Socialist Party did in 1914, believing that
Mexico could only undergo true revolution if it first went through a capitalist phase. This
conception of revolution that relegated the darker nations into positions as history’s tag-a-
longs would persist in some communist theory. This was the same imaginary that M. N.
Roy would encounter in his public disagreement with Lenin on the National and Colonial
Question. In spite of clear historical rebuttals like the Mexican and Russian Revolution,
how did this teleological vision of revolution persist?
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
43
Joe C. Ashby, Organized Labor and the Mexican Revolution under Làzaro Càrdenas, Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 10-12; Andrew Grant Wood, Revolution in the Street:
Women, Workers, and Urban Protest in Veracruz, 1870-1927 (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Books,
2001), 29; Gilly, Mexican Revolution, 233-235; Alan Knight, “The Working Class and the Mexican
Revolution, c. 1900-1920,” Journal of Latin American Studies 16:1 (May, 1984): 51-79; Knight,
“Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?” Journal of Latin American Studies 26:1 (1994): 82.
47
It was clear early on that the twentieth century was not going according to plan.
Despite the expansion of industrial capital, the proletarian revolution of European
industrialized workers had failed to materialize as classic Marxism had predicted.
Instead, vibrant insurgencies were beginning to emerge in colonized and semi-
proletarianized territories. The rural revolts and peasant-based wars of national liberation
were irrevocably linked to the material conditions produced by imperial expansion
initiated in the nineteenth century. The frantic incorporation of these counties and
territories into the global market created “a huge global class of immiserated semi-
peasants and farm laborers lacking existential security of subsistence,” according to Mike
Davis.
44
Imperial expansion and the suppression of industrial development in colonized
and semi-proletarianized territories had severe consequences. It introduced widespread
famine and the phenomenon of mass death by hunger into the modern world and
guaranteed poverty, insecurity, and starvation for generations to come.
45

At the end of the 19
th
century, imperialism was increasingly a strategy used by
Western nations as well as Japan to “fix” their overaccumulation crises.
46
In common
definitions, particularly those formulated by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, imperialism
refers to the process by which capitalism solves problems of overaccumulation by
acquiring new spaces, opening up new markets, selling off surplus commodities,
extracting raw materials or exploiting cheap labor.
47
In these definitions, imperialism is
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
44
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2007), 174.
45
Ibid.; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard
University Press, 1972), passim.
46
David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 2006), 423-482.
47
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers,
1939), 37; Rosa Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, 2003), 426.
48
typically seen as the external response that resolves capitalism’s internal contradictions.
The expansion of imperialist practices abroad was also linked to the expansion of the
color line at home. The struggle for radicals to comprehend revolutions in the darker
nations reflected their struggle to outthink the ontology of the color line.
This movement of imperialism was difficult to perceive. By 1917, it was such a
commonplace practice that most Americans ceased to ask for motivations or justifications
for it.
48
The U.S. had learned to mask its explicitness. Through its ‘Open Door Policy’ the
U.S. implemented informal role as a creditor for counties like Haiti, the Philippines,
Samoa, and Hawaii, obtaining markets, acquiring territory, and labor without the burdens
of formal empire. Noting this seeming divide between the perception of the U.S. as an
imperial power and its global intentions, poet Langston Hughes penned a poem entitled,
“Columbia,” In it, the poem’s narrator urges “Columbia” (another name for the United
States) to just “come on out” and admit its imperialistic urges like Japan England and
France, the other “big vampires” of the world already had.
Really,
You're getting a little too old,
Columbia,
To be so naive, and so coy.
Being one of the world's big vampires.
Why don't you come on out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France.
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power
Who've long since dropped their
Smoke - screens of innocence
To sit frankly on a bed of bombs?
O, sweet mouth of India,
And Africa,
Manchuria, and Haiti.
49

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
48
M.N. Roy, “An Indian Communist Manifesto,” in ed. Ray, Selected Works of M.N. Roy, 164.
49
Excerpt from Langston Hughes, “Columbia,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed.
Arnold Rampersad (New York: Vintage Classics, 1994), 168.
49
Capitalist imperialism constituted “the most oppressive and violently exploitative
forms of imperialism ever invented,” according to David Harvey.
50
What enabled these
processes to persist seemingly under the radar? In other words, how was this rule
accomplished?
51
Racism, mobilized through nationalism, jingoism, and patriotism
enabled the perpetration of this form of imperialism.
52
Some of the fiercest white
supremacist doctrines of racial superiority, well honed in the United States, were
employed in order to legitimize brutal imperial expansion.
53
Harvey writes, “it is far
easier politically to pillage and debase far-away populations particularly those who are
racially, ethnically, or culturally different” than it is to confront forces at home.
54
While
imperialism appeared as a monolithic process, it is more properly understood as a shifting
but interrelated set of power relations that change over space and time.
55
Its shifting
reflected the movement of the color line; implemented abroad and irrevocably connected
to the color line fixed and reproduced at home.
Imperialism was not unique to overseas expansion. As Harvey explains, the
“territorial logic” of capitalist accumulation always seeks a “spatial fix” to avoid crisis.
“Fix” in his analysis has a double meaning: It refers both to the process of physically
fixing or embedding something in the landscape (for example railroad track, a pipeline,
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
50
Harvey, New Imperialism, 45.
51
Philip Corrigan, “State Formation” in eds. Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State
Formation, xvii.
52
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 243. Harvey, New Imperialism, 44.
53
Ibid.
54
Harvey, New Imperialism, 135.
55
Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 14.
50
or other infrastructure immobilized in space). It also means “fix” in the sense of solving a
problem, as in “fixing” the problem of capital surplus wrought by overaccumulation. The
two “fixes” are joined, Harvey argues. Capital can only accumulate, that is, keep value in
motion through finding new markets, land, labor, or materials, if at the same time it is
embedded in the landscape. For example, in order to ride a train to search for new
markets or materials, one would have to already have laid the railroad track. Harvey
writes, “Fluid movement over space can be achieved only by fixing certain
infrastructures in space.”
56
This desire for both immobility and mobility in the landscape
is one of capitalism’s major internal contradictions.
Capital’s double movement required a correlating movement of the color line.
The ways in which the color line was concretized into an ontology in the U.S. enabled its
utility as a force naturalizing dispossession and exploitation overseas. Odd Arrne Wested
explains that capitalist imperialism in the early twentieth century was linked to the
nineteenth century through a discursive reinterpretation of slavery and Reconstruction. In
a rewriting of the experience of slavery, Native American genocide, and the repression of
Reconstruction, the U.S. state configured itself as emancipator and guide. An ontology of
the color line reconfigured the U.S. state as the entity that brought freedom to slaves and
later offered guidance to formerly enslaved people as well as to Native Americans in
order to achieve full and fair incorporation into the society. The violent history of U.S.
was, in this way, assimilated into metaphors of benevolence.
With this discursive power, reinterpreted histories about emancipation and
reconstruction became mythic truths about the function of the U.S. state to provide
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
56
Harvey, New Imperialism, 100.
51
liberation and assistance. This myth rationalized the logics of capitalist imperialism.
57

The U.S. depicted itself as offering the darker nations tutelage in helping them to achieve
their own freedom and self-determination.
58
A 1916 Chicago Daily Tribune political
cartoon is emblematic of this construction. In it, Uncle Sam is depicted as a strict
schoolmaster, with the Philippines, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua represented as well-
disciplined pupils seated before him. Mexico is depicted as a wild and unruly student
shooting a gun in the air, dancing and drinking. Uncle Sam rolls back his sleeve and
poises to hit the student with a stick thinking to himself, “Eventually, why not now?” The
cartoon speaks to the U.S.’ consideration of military intervention in Mexico. It also
describes the purported role of the U.S. as teacher, disciplinarian, and guide to the nations
under its informal control.

Figure 1: John T. McCutcheon, “Uncle Sam’s Reform School,”
Chicago Daily Tribune, March 13, 1916
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
57
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our
Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22.
58
Donald Pease, “Between the Homeland and Abu Ghraib: Dwelling in Bush's Biopolitical
Settlement,” in Exceptional State: Contemporary US Culture and the New Imperialism, eds. Ashley
Dawson and Malini Johar Schueller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 61.
52

In this same interpretive move the U.S. produced a fictional view of its place in
world history. Its fabrications about its own history obscured the actual global processes
that led to the abolition of slavery. If it hadn’t been for revolts and uprisings throughout
the Caribbean, in U.S. slave plantations, on ships, connected to orchestrated abolitionist
campaigns within the other slave trading nations of Europe, the trade would have never
ended and the institution itself would have never been abolished.
59
By absorbing the
global circulations of struggle and excising itself from broader histories of revolt, the
U.S. fabricated a version of itself an emancipating power. This reordering of reality, this
denial of empire, and this false resolution of slavery, produced a master fiction of
American exceptionalism.
Furthermore, by eliminating the history of Reconstruction, the U.S. obscured its
own radical history of self-determination and wealth redistribution. Du Bois’ masterwork,
Black Reconstruction, described how enslaved people had gone on a general strike during
the Civil War, defecting from their posts as slaves to join the Union army, subsequently
stopping labor production of the Southern economy and fighting ultimately to free
themselves.
60
Recognizing that they “could not be free in a society premised on their
exclusion,” the subsequent project of Reconstruction was guided by an all-encompassing
vision of “abolition democracy.” In a briefly realized alliance between formerly enslaved
people and their white allies, this vision implemented resources for a common good, such
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
59
Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's
Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), passim; Richard Hart, From Occupation to Independence: A
Short History of the Peoples of the English-Speaking Caribbean Region (London: Pluto Press, 1998),
passim; C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution.
(New York: Vintage Books, 1989), passim.
60
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York: Free Press, 1962),
55-84.
53
as schools, roads, homes, infrastructure, and suffrage.
61
This project was soon betrayed
by the withdrawal of federal troops protection, disarming of Black people in the South,
the failure to rigorously implement the amendments won during this period (13
th
, 14
th
,
and 15
th
) and by the onset of Jim Crow.
62
The remnants of this project lived on in the
Constitution but it would take later social movements to force their implementation. This
history was occluded in the project of U.S. capitalist imperialism.
By depicting itself as a benevolent force, the U.S. state displaced an inassimilable
history of self-activity by enslaved Black people into a myth of state intervention.
Denying its own libratory history of self-determination, the U.S. precluded recognition of
any similar political activities in territories abroad. In this version of history, the U.S.
state was also exculpated from responsibility for formerly enslaved and dispossessed
people. If these individuals had not achieved incorporation, it was arguably a reflection of
those groups’ cultural deficiencies and not the actions of the state. This logic extended to
the people of the darker nations. Capitalist imperialism sought cheap labor, markets, and
resources, not the political advancements of foreign populations. Enduring poverty,
ensured by abusive labor regimes, processes of mass dispossession, and military control
could similarly be explained away as individuated deficiencies. Under the obfuscating
logic of the color line, those who seemingly could not achieve progress even under the
U.S.’ tutelage had only themselves to blame.
Imperialism did not result from any “absolute economic imperatives,” but rather
as Harvey suggests, “from the political unwillingness of the bourgeoisie to give up on
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
61
Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York:
Seven Stories Press, 2005); George Lipsitz, “Abolition Democracy and Global Justice,” Comparative
American Studies Journal, 2:3 (August 2004); 273.
62
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 670-710.
54
any of its privileges.”
63
Surplus capital could have been absorbed in the local production
of social or physical infrastructure.
64
The history of Reconstruction offered a model of
such infrastructure building. Achieving abolition democracy required a mass investment
in public infrastructure. Such a project defied the capitalist imperialist project and
strained the logic of the color line. Instead of implementing social reforms within
countries of origin, capitalist imperialism sought foreign territories as repositories to soak
up the excesses of labor, capital, and/or commodities abroad. In rewriting its own history
of Reconstruction, the U.S. disqualified any model of equitable wealth redistribution
either at home and abroad. Accordingly, the project of capitalist imperialism and the
logic of the color line persisted.

Free Soil or Way Station?
Of course, not all radicals were taken by the project of capitalist imperialism or
the logic of the color line. In Mexico City, Roy would encounter other radicals who were
linking space between Mexico and Russia. American journalists and U.S. Communist
Party member John Reed participated in some organizing events with Roy. Before going
Russia to document that Ten Days that Shook the World, Reed spent a significant time in
Mexico, documenting the Revolution there and writing the book Insurgent Mexico
(1914). He observed the operations of U.S. capital and the arrogance of their
functionaries. While American businessmen and politicians preached democracy and
promised to help develop Mexico, Reed noted:
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
63
David Harvey, The New Imperialism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 126.
64
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Life in Hell: How Capitalism Saving Capitalism from Capitalism
Should Fire Our Political Imagination,” Paper presented at the UC Berkeley Center for Race & Gender,
Berkeley, California, October 29, 2009.
55
They have a deep-seated contempt for the Mexicans, because they are different
from themselves. They prate of our grand old democratic institutions, and then
declare in the same breath that the peons ought to be driven to work for them with
rifles. They boast in private of the superiority of American courage over Mexican,
and then sneakingly buckle to whatever party is in power.
65

In his 1914 article he concluded, “American Business Men in Mexico are a
degraded race.”
66
Roy would also encounter other foreign radicals similarly opposed to
U.S. capitalist imperialism in Mexico City. Carleton Beals, Linn Gale, Charles Phillips
were some of the hundreds of American pacifist, anarchists, and socialists “slackers” who
had escaped the draft and found it “more pleasant and profitable to be in Mexico than
Leavenworth [Penitentiary]” according to Samuel Gompers.
67
There they participated in
Mexican politics, produced radical publications such as Gale’s Magazine and tried to
advance a revolutionary socialist movement. For many slackers, Mexico offered them the
unique opportunity to experience the blunt end of U.S. imperialism, an experience many
were spared from in the United States as a result of their whiteness and class privileges.
Many were radicalized by the experience. For others, Mexico offered a “way station” of
sorts where they could experiment with political ideas but where they were ultimately felt
little accountability. Nonetheless, many Mexican political organizations and presses were
heartened by their presence and excited that white Americans would take a stand against
U.S. imperialism in defense of Mexico. As a result of their efforts, such as Kenneth
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
65
Ibid.
66
John Reed, “What About Mexico?” Masses, June 1914.
67
Quoted in Spenser, Stumbling Its Way Through Mexico, 94
56
Turner’s novel Barbarous Mexico or Carleton Beals’ writings, more Americans became
aware of the Revolution.
68

As much as the Mexican government endorsed the anti-imperialism of American
“slackers,” it deeply supported the upheaval of the color line as it was employed in the
U.S. In various ways it promoted the idea that Mexico was a land of freedom, unmarred
by the restrictions of U.S. racism. Many were taken by this image. As a young man, the
Black radical William Patterson, worked on a ship. He recalls that he kissed the ground
when he disembarked onto Mexican soil, declaring in 1919 that:
I knew that as a Mexican city it must be free of racial hatred, except for that
which may have been brought there by the Yankees. Shore leave was granted, and
when I set foot on the soil of Mexico I did what I had done only once before. I
knelt and Kissed the ground. For me it was like free soil; no man on board that
ship had greater rights ashore than I. Skin color was not a measure of human
worth here, I had left the standards that dominated life in the United States.
69

To a large degree, Mexico did offer Black Americans respite from the brutal
violence and exclusion in the United States. The Mexican press heavily promoted this
image. A newspaper editor in Mexico City was even kidnapped by the Klan given that his
statements about the fate of Black Americans were circulating widely to such
sympathetic audiences.
70
During World War I, with the decoding of the Zimmerman
Telegram, rumors circulated that the German military was recruiting Black people in
Mississippi, Alabama, St. Louis, South Carolina, Texas, and encouraging them to defect
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
68
La Botz, “American "Slackers" in the Mexican Revolution,” passim; Spenser, Stumbling Its
Way Through Mexico, 38; John Kenneth Turner Barbarous Mexico (Austin: University of Texas, 1969);
Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (London: Verso,
1993), 14-34.
69
William Patterson, The Man Who Cried Genocide: An Autobiography (New York: International
Publishers, 1971), 46.
70
Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 25; “Mexico City Editor Seized” New York Times, Aug 28, 1923.
57
and to turn against the U.S. According to the rumors, the German government would
send Black people to Mexico to train with Germans soldiers. Government agents in
Dallas had intercepted a message from Mexican recruiters promising Black Americans
the possibility of living “in peace and luxury” if they came to Mexico since "the white
people are the cause of the Negroes being held down."
71

In the bloody year of 1919 “race riots” famed Black American boxer Jack
Johnson became a cultural fixture in Mexico. He gained fame for his boxing matches in
Mexico, some of which were said to be funded by Pancho Villa. Others were fought
before huge crowds in bullfighting rings. Still others were fought in northern towns
adjacent to the U.S./ Mexico border. The proximity was not accidental. Johnson was
invested in spreading the message that Mexico offered Black people freedom and
prosperity. The U.S. government believed that Johnson was “using Mexico as a
beachhead of subversion.” Indeed, Johnson wielded his celebrity in Mexico in order to
encourage Black migration. As part of this project, he started a land company to facilitate
settlement.
72
Many heeded Johnson’s call. A group of American Garveyites teamed up
with investors to build a “Little Liberia” in Baja California, Mexico. At twenty dollars an
acre, they advertised that Black people who “want to be really free” could be
“‘sovereigns of [their] own labor’”
73

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
71
Theodore Kornweibel, Jr. Investigate Everything: Federal Efforts to Compel Black Loyalty
During World War I, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 40-41, 42, 45, 57, 58, 68, 70, 244.
72
Gerald Horne, Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920
(New York: New York University Press, 2005), 32-37.
73
Delores Nason McBroome, “Harvests of Gold: African American Boosterism, Agriculture and
Investment in Allensworth and Little Liberia,” in Lawrence B. de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, & Quintard Taylor,
eds., Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001),
161; Karl Jacoby, "Between North and South: The Alternative Borderlands of William H. Ellis and the
African American Colony of 1895," in Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
History, eds. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 209-240.
58
But as other Black Americans capable of moving across U.S. borders would often
find, the promises of anti-racism could never hold in lands dominated by the capitalist
system. Whereas some people would find their position elevated in Mexico, Mexicans of
African decent were found among the poorest rungs of the population. Mexico’s legacy
in the slave trade obscured by an emergent discourse of “mestizaje” which imagined the
country as a righteous mix of Spanish colonial and indigenous ancestry. Within this
fiction, the actual differential and segregated treatment of the indigenous and African
descended people was obscured. Tribes like the Yaqui nation endured routine
dispossession, disgrace and dismemberment while the country professed a singular
“mixed” national identity.
74

Langston Hughes’ father had also taken advantage of his position in Mexico,
owning several properties including a large ranch and several apartment buildings in
Mexico City. While he did not look like a traditional White Yankee, Hughes explains that
his father was, “just like the other German and English and American business men with
whom he associated in Mexico”
75
in his low opinion of Mexican people. Hughes writes,
“He said they were exactly like the Negroes in the United States, perhaps worse.”
76
As a
young man visiting his father in Mexico, Hughes began to reflect on the process of the
color line. In Mexico, Hughes came to think deeply and critically about the color line as
he witnessed his father’s cruelty towards his Mexican workers, tenants, and other poor
Mexicans. He recognized that his father had “a great contempt for all poor people” and
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
74
Olivia Gall, “Identidad, Exclusión y Racismo: Reflexiones Teóricas y Sobre México” Revista
Mexicana de Sociologìa 4:2 (2004); 221-259; Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable Violence:
Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 177-280.

75
Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1940), 40.
76
Ibid.
59
thought, “it was their own fault that they were poor.”
77
It was while traveling by train to
visit his father in Mexico and crossing over the Mississippi River that Hughes penned one
of his most famous poems, “A Negro Speaks of Rivers.” He reflected on his father’s
desire to escape to Mexico in order to leave the degraded position available to him in the
U.S:
My father hated Negroes. I think he hated himself, too, for being a Negro. He
disliked all of his family because they were Negroes and remained in the United
States, where none of them had a chance to be much of anything but servants. My
father said he wanted me to leave the United States as soon as I finished high
school, and never return – unless I wanted to be a porter or a red cap all my life.
78

The possibilities available in Mexico did not guarantee radical outcomes. Like Roy had
described in his debate with Lenin, the sway of capitalist forces would not necessarily
lend themselves to revolutionary ends. In fact, as Hughes’ description of his father
demonstrated, there was a good chance that aspiring bourgeois figures would reinforce
the color line, even those who had been victimized by it.
For this reason, Roy did not believe that a transition through capitalism would
produce a revolution of the color line. He compelled his comrades from western
countries to “Cease to fall victims to the imperialist cry that the masses of the East are
backward races and must go through the hell fires of capitalistic exploitation to escape.”
Recognizing both the Indian and the Mexican struggles as part of the class struggle was
essential for a global redefinition of revolution. Similarly, Roy understood the necessity
of convincing those from the darker nations that they were fighting against more than a
national struggle against racism. They had to overthrow capitalism as well. If not, the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
77
Ibid.
78
Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1940), 40.
60
same conditions were guaranteed to persist. In this way he echoed an insight made
decades earlier by Irish revolutionary James Connolly:
If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin
Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts
would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her
capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array
of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and
watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.
79

Like Paris, Moscow, Harlem, and Mexico was a place where desires could be
imputed and the shape of new world could be imagined. Radicals like Roy encountered
both the possibilities and limits of theory. In Mexico, Roy gained his “first experience in
practical politics” organizing with the Socialist Party and then heading “the first
Communist Party outside of Russia.”
80
Inspired by the new Soviet project, Roy was
involved with plans to form a Socialist Latin American Union, which would be a
“powerful international instrument of mutual co-operation and common resistance to the
overlordship of the northern colossus.”
81
In December 1918, several hundred delegates
from across Mexico as well as Central and Southern America met to form a Latin
America League. Banners at the conference proclaimed, “Down with Yankee
Imperialism,” “Petroleum Belongs to the Mexican People,” “Long Live the
Revolutionary Alliance of Latin American Republics,” and “Long Live the Soviet
Republic of Mexico.”
82
It was agued that since socialism was international, the socialist
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
79
Quoted in P. Beresford Ellis ed., James Connolly: Selected Writings (London: Pluto Press,
1988), 124.
80
Roy. Memoirs, 108.
81
Ibid., 107.
82
Ibid., 143.
61
party could not be limited within the confines of a single country. Accordingly, at that
conference, M.N. Roy was elected General Secretary of El Partido Socialista Regional
Mexico.
Subsequently, Roy was involved in the formation of the first Communist Party
outside of Russia. “Until the middle of 1919, no Communist Party had been formed
anywhere. Why should not Mexico, true to her revolutionary tradition, take the lead?”
83

In that same year, Roy helped form and headed the Latin American Bureau of the
Communist International. In the conference establishing that party, a major highlight was
the outline of Communist Party platform, designed to back “up the anti-imperialist
struggle of the oppressed and subjected people.”
84
The platform became the very Theses
on the National and Colonial Questions that Roy would represent in Moscow a year later.
On leaving Mexico for Moscow, Roy reflected:
I left the land of my rebirth an intellectually free man, though with a new faith.
But the philosophical solvent of the faith was inherent in itself. I no longer
believed in political freedom without the content of economic liberation and
social justice...But I had also learned to attach greater importance to an intelligent
understanding of the idea of revolution. The propagation of that idea was more
important than arms. With the new conviction, I started on my way back to India,
round the world.
85

Rising Tides of Color
Anxious regimes became terrified of the contradictions being producing by
capitalist imperialism. In 1920, Lothrop Stoddard warned of a “Rising Tide of Color
Against White World-Supremacy.” Stoddard’s book by the same name was meant as a
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
83
Ibid., 204.
84
Ibid., 211.
85
Ibid., 219-220.
62
warning to a white world torn asunder after the First World War. The Red Scare, Yellow
Peril, and rising Darkwater, were all tributaries of this rising tide of color. He writes:
As the colored men realized the significance of it all, they looked into each
other’s eyes and there saw the light of undreamed-of hopes. The white world was
tearing itself to pieces. White solidarity was riven and shattered. And-fear of
white power and respect for white civilization together dropped away like
garments outworn. Through the bazaars of Asia ran the sibilant whisper: ‘The
East will see the West to bed!’
86

Read backwards, his comments offer an unintentional description of new insurgency
against the color line. Mexico contained the potential to become a staging area for a new
internationalist vision that could counter the color line. But there were no guarantees.
Like C.L.R. James after him, M. N. Roy produced a unique synthesis between the
color line and the class struggle. Because he saw capitalism as intrinsic to the project of
imperialism and colonialism, he did not merely affix Marxist rhetoric to a project of
national emancipation. By also understanding the class global struggle as it actually
unfolded rather than as it was prophesized, he defied the conviction that colonial
struggles were discrete and secondary to the main objective of revolutionary communism.
Global revolution could only come through such an understanding. As James concluded,
“People do not just win freedom for themselves; but they expand the struggle for freedom
worldwide”
87
Roy’s experience with the Mexican Revolution helped him comprehend the
ways in which fates were linked and objectives where shared in the struggle against racial
capitalism.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
86
Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 9.
87
Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart, “American Civilization: An Introduction” in C. L. R. James,
American Civilization, Ed. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 9.
><%
CHAPTER THREE

UNIVERSITY OF RADICALISM:
RICARDO FLORES MAGÒN AND LEAVENWORTH PENITENTIARY

The Death of José Martínez
The local Kansas paper called it a “desperate but unsuccessful” escape attempt.
“A Mexican Ran Wild and Killed,” “Mexican Shot After Stabbing Seven Guards,”
declared the headlines in mid November 1922. Inmate José Martínez, an “apparently
crazed man” had “fashioned the knife” from a piece of steel and attacked several guards
at Kansas’ Leavenworth Penitentiary, seriously injuring six and fatally wounding the
seventh. Martínez staggered off the prison yard into the penitentiary coal shed after being
shot by guards in the knee and stomach. A dramatic standoff ended after a guard hit
Martínez in the head with a large block of coal, sending Martínez to the prison hospital
and one guard to the morgue. Days later, a deputy sheriff inquired whether his friend,
Captain Andrew Leonard, had survived the attack. Leavenworth warden W. I. Biddle
confirmed that the Captain had indeed been “fatally stabbed by [a] crazed Mexican.”
1

The story seemed self-evident. Martínez was a convicted murderer serving
twenty-five years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. He had killed the much feared
and respected captain of the guards A.H. Leonard, a Spanish American War veteran
employed at the prison since 1900. In most reports José Martínez was depicted as
deranged. The narrative of his bloody rampage and stand-off was both scintillating
enough to land on the front page of the Kansas Hutchinson News and mundane enough to
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
1
“A Mexican Ran Wild and Killed,” Hutchinson News, November 14, 1922, 1; “Mexican Shot
After Stabbing Seven Guards,” Baltimore Sun, November 15, 1922, 9; “Convict Kills Guard, Stabs 6
Others; Dying,” New York Tribune, November 15, 1922, 6; Telegram from Biddle to G.E. Herron, Deputy
Sherriff, Havre Montana, November 16, 1922, National Archives, Central Plains Region (NA), RG 129
Records of the Bureau of Prisons (BP), Box 554, Inmate #13396.
64
be tucked in page six of the New York Tribune and page nine of the Baltimore Sun. To a
public accustomed to dime novels, silent films, and new detective fiction, this story fit
familiar scripts of violent convicts attempting escape. The fact that Martínez was
Mexican enabled journalists to confirm readily available racial narratives about Mexican
blood-thirst and sociopathy. While the story was new, the characters and their staging
would have been familiar to U.S. audiences. It was six years, for example, since Pancho
Villa had entered U.S. soil in Columbus, New Mexico. The U.S. had launched a military
expedition to find Villa in Mexico and also threatened a large-scale intervention in the
country. Alongside these efforts, Mexicans were routinely depicted as bloodthirsty
savages or wild gun-toting madmen in need of pacification. As a result, Mexicanos on
both side of the border were routinely under attack in print, as well as on the streets, a
violence rarely commented upon or condemned in the public imagination. Accordingly,
Martínez was not just a crazed prisoner, but the fulfillment of a mass-produced fantasy: a
wild murderous representative of his race.
2

Within days of the prison yard attack, the story disappeared from headlines. While
José Martínez lay dying in the prison hospital, another prisoner’s dramatic story occupied
news coverage of the prison. On November 22, 1922, Mexican revolutionary Ricardo
Flores Magòn was found dead in his cell. As rumors abounded about the cause of
Magòn’s death, the Kansas prison was swarmed with international attention. Workers
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
2
Keneth M. LaMaster, U.S. Penitentiary Leavenworth (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2008),
100; Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American
Theater and Film Before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Nan
Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the
Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Michael Denning, “Cheap
Stories: Notes on Popular Fiction and Working-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century America,” History
Workshop 22 Special American Issue (Autumn 1986): 1-17; Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West:
1850-1935 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
65
expressed outrage throughout Mexico. Demonstrators protested in front of the White
House with the name “Magòn” inscribed on their signs. Beloved by labor leaders,
anarchists, socialists, and Mexican workers alike, it was no surprise that Magòn’s death
received attention from far and wide. Magòn’s closest comrade and political ally in
prison, Librado Rivera, a fellow anarchist and Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) member,
alleged that he had seen bruises around Magòn’s neck, suggesting that Magòn had been
strangled to death. He also reported that Magòn had been moved into a cell out of earshot
from Rivera’s the night of before he was found murdered.
3
While some doubted claims of
Magòn’s assassination, others like socialist labor leader Eugene Victor Debs accused the
prison of committing slow murder. Writing in the New York Call, Debs echoed the
concern of many of Magòn’s friends and supporters, arguing that he had been killed as a
result of medical neglect and the indifference of prison officials.
4

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
3
Chas Bufe and Mitchell Cowe Verter, eds. Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magòn
Reader (Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 99; Juan Gómez Quiñones, Sembradores: Ricardo Flores Magòny el
Partido Liberal Mexicano (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center, Aztlan Publications, UCLA, 1973), 68;
Andrew Grant Wood “Death of a Political Prisoner: Revisiting the Case of Ricardo Flores Magón,” A
Contra corriente 3:1 (2005): 38-66; W. Dirk Raat, Revoltosos: Mexico’s Rebels in the United States, 1903-
1923 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1981), 287; Ethel Duffy Turner, Ricardo Flores
Magòn y el Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexico: Comisiòn Nacional Editorial del C.E.N., 1984), 341.
4
Eugene V. Debs, “The Assassination of Magòn,” New York Call, December 3, 1922.
66

Figure 2: Ricardo Flores Magòn, National Archives, Central Plains Region,
RG 129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons, Box 1, Folder 14596

Magòn had been a force to be reckoned with, even while incarcerated. He was a
leader and friend among inmates, particularly to a growing number of Mexican prisoners.
A Nation article written during Magòn’s incarceration at McNeil Island Federal
Penitentiary, just prior to his transfer to Leavenworth, reported that “there was not a
Mexican worker in that prison – and there were many – who would not have laid down
his life to give Magòn a free and easy hour.”
5
This insight illuminates the likely solidarity
between Ricardo Flores Magòn and José Martínez. There were multiple spaces where the
two could have encountered one another: in the Leavenworth library where Magòn
worked for a time as a librarian, on the prison yard where inmates circulated, by one of
Magòn’s favorite hang-outs the rock pile where between November 25, 1919 and
February 3, 1920 Martínez was assigned to work, or possibly in the mess hall where all
the prisoners ate their meals.
6

Not long before Magòn’s death, a strike broke out in the mess hall. The prisoners,
fed up with a sickening diet of boiled parsnips, first silently and then raucously expressed
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
5
Gilbert O’Day, “Ricardo Flores Magòn,” The Nation (Dec. 20, 1922): 689-690.
6
NA, BP, Box 554, Inmate #13396; Bufe and Verter, eds., Dreams of Freedom, 97.
67
their disapproval. Shortly after the “food riot,” the guards singled out Magòn, even in his
frail health, for punishment and subjected him to public torture. Martínez, like many of
the Leavenworth prisoners, was enraged at Captain Andrew “Bull” Leonard’s beating of
the enfeebled Magòn. Martínez attacked Leonard as well as several other guards, killing
Leonard in the process. Librardo Rivera, Magòn’s closest friend and ally and fellow
inmate, came to aid the injured Martínez. One eyewitness account reports that Martínez
wept on Rivera’s shoulder before being taken to the prison hospital.
7*

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
7
Turner, Ricardo Flores Magòn, 342-343; Gòmez-Quiñones, Sembradores, 68; Raat, Revoltosos,
288; Ralph Chaplin, Wobbly: The Rough and Tumble Story of an American Radical (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1948) 278-281; “Salvajismo Inconcebible” C.R.O.M. May 1, 1923; NA, BP, Box 554,
Inmate Numbers: 13396.
*
The story of José Martínez’ death is a subject of minor dispute among some historians of Ricardo Flores
Magòn. For an argument that José Martínez killed the guard who he believed killed Ricardo Flores Magòn,
see Gòmez-Quiñones, Sembradores, 68. Others contends that the death of Ricardo Magòn was
embellished by his brother Enrique Flore Magòn, including the story of José Martínez’ retribution killing,
correctly noting that Martinez attacked the guard A. H. Leonard prior to Magòn’s death, not after. See W.
Dirk Raat in Revoltosos: Mexico’s Rebels in the United States, 1903-1923 (College Station: Texas A & M
University Press, 1981), 288. Raat’s cites Magòn’s fellow inmate Ralph Chaplin’s memoir Wobbly: The
Rough and Tumble Story of an American Radical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) as
evidence about Enrique Magòn’s embellishment. Raat also writes that Chaplin “makes no mention of any
connection between that event [Martinez’ attack on the guards] and the death of Ricardo” and that this is a
“rather strange omission if Enrique’s account was correct.” Raat, Revoltosos, 288. Indeed, Chaplin does not
mention a connection between the two men. Yet, a May 1, 1923 article from the Mexican labor newspaper
CROM (Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana) reports that Ricardo Flores Magòn had been singled
out for punishment for a recent riot in the mess hall over the food. The article suggests that the guards used
the opportunity to beat Magòn as well as some of the other leaders and educators among the inmates for
their alleged participation in the food riot. It further reports that Martínez witnessed this attack and was
incensed at the public torture of the enfeebled Magòn and that later Martinez attacked the responsible guard
as a result. The article cites eyewitness Joseph Savas Reza, a Mexican railroad worker who had been
released from Leavenworth not long before the article was published (Leavenworth penitentiary did have a
Mexican inmate named Jose Reza, inmate number #16251 who was imprisoned in 1921). Ralph Chaplin’s
own memoir corroborates some of these details. Namely, it records the riot in the mess hall over the food,
though it states that Magòn was not held responsible (278-281). Chaplin adds the unexplained detail that
Librardo Rivera, Ricardo Flores Magòn’s closest friend and ally and fellow inmate, came to assist José
Martínez immediately after his attack on the guards. Chaplin believes Rivera sentimentally “loved men like
[Martinez] all his life” and perhaps aided Martinez his “berserk countryman” out of some misplaced
sentimentality. In Chaplin’s narrative, the “maddened” Martínez simply snapped for being asked to remove
his hat. Chaplin describes Martinez dismissively as a “simple pelado” and suggests that the guard perhaps
“didn’t understand how proud a Mexican Indian can be of a hat, even a battered old prison-issue straw
sombrero” (277). The most oft cited evidence of the link between Martinez’ involvement in the PLM and
his relationship to Magòn can be found in one of the definitive biographies of Magòn. Ethel Duffy Turner
Ricardo Flores Magòn y el Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexico City: Comision Nacional Editorial del C. E.
N, 1984), 342-343, writes that Martinez as well as other inmates believed that Leonard victimized Magòn
(“Pero es obvio que Martìnez consideraba que el Jefe del los Celadores era el victimario de Ricardo Flore
68
Martínez was brought to the infirmary after being shot in the knee and stomach by
guards. His hospital record indicates that for five days he was administered the same
treatment: aspirin. Not until the fifth day was he given the additional treatment of “ice
bags to abdomen.” In retribution for killing one guard and attacking others, Martínez lay
in the prison hospital with a growing fever and blood poisoning spreading throughout his
system, with aspirin and ice to treat him. He eventually succumbed to his injuries fifteen
days later, with the official cause of death reported by prison officials being, “Septicemia,
following gunshot wound, abdomen.” In sharp contrast to Magòn, there was no media
scrutiny following the death of José Martínez. He was buried at Leavenworth, in the
Kansas soil far away from Mexico, alongside other prisoners with no family to claim
them. On the note indicating who to contact in case of illness and emergency, the typist
entered “noboyd (sic).”
8
There was no memorial for José Martínez, a common fate for
many Leavenworth prisoners. In his poem “At the Grave of a Felon,” fellow inmate
“Andy” Lockhart offers a eulogy for the many men like Martínez buried in the prison
grounds:
The poor wretched arms on the sunken breast … Perhaps in their day they helped
to raise/ A fallen brother on the rough, hard ways … And as Life was bitter in the
days long fled/ So Death may be sweet to the unmourn’d dead!
9

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Maòn. Tal apreciaciòn no solamente la tenìa èl, sino era la opiniòn que en general sostenìan los demàs en
la penitenciarìa” 342). Furthermore, a review of José Martínez’ record in Leavenworth does not support
claims that Martinez was insane or unstable. He had four minor violations in his four years in prison prior
to his attack on the guards: two for smoking a cigarette, one for not stopping when told to and another for
not taking his clothes off when told to by the guards. In addition, a March 1921 physician assessment found
that Martinez “does not give any evidence of mental unbalance at this time” and a February 1921 note from
the Warden to the War Department indicates that Martinez’ “conduct during confinement has generally
been excellent.” National Archives, Central Plains Region, RG 129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons, Box
554, Inmate Numbers: 13394-13401. (A Freedom of Information Act report request on José Martínez is
pending at the time of this writing.)
8
NA, BP, Box 554, 13396.
9
“Andy” Lockhart “At the Grave of a Felon,” Leavenworth New Era (March 28, 1919), Centro
Documental Flores Magòn (CDF), AC, File 41738.
69

Figure 3: José Martìnez Death Record, National Archives, Central Plains Region,
RG 129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons, Box 554, Folder 13396

This chapter examines the dialectical production of convergence spaces of radical
internationalism in the Leavenworth Penitentiary between 1917 and 1922. It shows how
prisoners of different ethnicities, nationalities, political orientations, and ideologies were
brought together through a shared experience of incarceration. Incarcerated for their
resistance to militarism, capitalism, and racism, prisoners transformed Leavenworth into
an organizing space, or, as one federal surveillance file called it, “A University of
Radicalism.”
10
Through a survey of their writings, teachings, cultural production, and
records, this chapter explores an internationalist political imagination articulated by
radical prisoners themselves. It argues that the convergence spaces of Leavenworth
Penitentiary offered a microcosm of antiracist and anticapitalist struggles in the period,
reflecting how the color line and the class struggle were both understood and resisted
during this moment.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
10
Quoted in Theodore Kornweibel, ‘Seeing Red’: The Federal Campaign Against Black
Militancy, 1919-1925. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 160.
70
The Global Production of the Penitentiary
The global significance of struggles within Leavenworth Penitentiary in the
twentieth century should be read against the production of the space itself. Leavenworth
Federal Penitentiary in Kansas was the largest maximum-security federal prison in the
United States for most of the

twentieth century. Built as a fort in the 1820s, it first
operated as an outpost for western conquest. The base offered military protection for
settlers and merchants trading along the Missouri River, the Oregon Trail, as well as
along the Santa Fe Trail, the primary U.S. trade route into Mexico. Leavenworth became
a central “staging area” for the Mexican-American War, where thousands of soldiers and
volunteers were housed, equipped, and trained. The army sieges that captured Santa Fe
and Los Angeles were headquartered there. Later the Department of the Missouri
organized many brutal Indian campaigns from the base. After the Civil War, the fort
became home to regiments of Buffalo soldiers, squads of Black soldiers who were
stationed in the Plains, deployed against Native American forces, or trained for imperial
battle overseas in the Philippines. Once Leavenworth became a military prison in 1874,
among its first prisoners were the original captives of U.S. Empire: Native American men
from the Cherokee, Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Nez Perce nations;
Mexican men from the newly conquered territories; and Buffalo soldiers, many of whom
were formerly enslaved or the children of slaves themselves.
11

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
11
Bosworth, Explaining U.S. Imprisonment, 58; Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest, 11-16;
Jessica Enoch, Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American,
and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2008), 77; David Wallace
Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995) 36-38; Spencer Tucker, The Encyclopedia of North
American Indian Wars, 1607-1890: A Political, Social, and Military History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO,
2011), 289; Irene Schubert and Frank N. Schubert, On the Trail of the Buffalo Soldier II: New and Revised
Biographies of African Americans in the U.S. Army, 1866-1917 (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 16, 49,
71
Given its readily available pool of prison labor, Ft. Leavenworth was authorized
to become a federal penitentiary under the Three Prisons Act in 1891. Six years later, the
military prisoners of Ft. Leavenworth were marched two and half miles every morning to
the site of the future Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary to dig, clear, and build the new
penitentiary. Prisoners cut grey stone from the high bluffs overlooking the Missouri River
for building materials. Those who stepped out of line, slowed down, or stopped on these
twelve-hour shifts were punished with twenty-five pound iron weights affixed to their
legs. To Congress’ delight, this labor regime persisted for decades keeping the costs of
prison operations perennially low.
*
The prison budget was actually underfunded given
that so much of the labor, from the construction work, maintenance, clerical work, to
duties like running the electrical generator, filing prison records and even practicing
medicine in the prison hospital, fell to Leavenworth’s prisoners.
12

Unwilling to hire construction crews to complete the building project, the steel for
the remaining cellblocks lay untouched on the prison yard for several years. In 1913
Leavenworth officials located skilled workers for this particular job. Thirty-four
ironworkers were convicted of conspiring to destroy bridges and buildings in protest of
the anti-union open shop policies of the National Erectors’ Association, a brutal employer
association. Their conviction was Leavenworth’s gain. After fighting low pay, hazardous
work conditions, and the construction companies’ violent thugs on the outside, the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
211, 286; Willard B. Gatewood, ‘Smoked Yankees’ and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro
Soldiers, 1898-1902 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987), 228.
*
Before the establishment of the Bureau of Prisons in 1930, Congress directly financed the federal
penitentiaries.
12
Paul W. Keve, Prisons and the American Conscience: A History of U.S. Federal Corrections
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 36, 53-56, 141; Tapan K. Mukherjee, Tarknath
Das: Life and Letters of A Revolutionary in Exile (Calcutta: National Council of Education, Bengal, 1998)
144-145; "The Dynamiters Convicted," The Independent 74 (January-March 1913), 3.
72
ironworkers found themselves erecting steel inside Leavenworth’s walls for next to no
pay while being surrounded by armed guards in gun towers—which had been built by
prisoners under similar conditions of duress. Construction continued until 1927 with
prisoners employing use of a penitentiary stone quarry, brickyard, carpentry shop, and
stone saw mill among other advanced construction “offices.”
13
So impressed with the
efficiency of the labor organization at Leavenworth, Henry Ford commissioned Harry R.
Hillier from the motion picture department of his Ford motor plant to film the institution
in 1919. Hiller was quoted in the prison paper as follows, “I believe there is no
community of the same size in the United States, which contains the amount of brains
and even genius that the two thousand men in here have.”
14

As the U.S. entered World War I, Leavenworth’s prisoner ranks swelled to
include a growing number of court-martialed soldiers, many of whom were Mexicanos
like Jose Martínez. In 1917, military prisoners were joined by political dissidents like
Ricardo Flores Magòn. Between 1918 and 1919, the prison population vastly expanded to
house nearly 2,000 men, nearly four hundred of who were foreign nationals. While
maintaining its role as a military prison, Leavenworth Penitentiary became a unique
space of control for political radicals after 1917 due to a series of new federal laws
criminalizing dissent. In June of that year, Congress passed the Espionage Act, making it
a felony to “make ‘false statements’” that might cause insubordination or disloyalty in the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
13
Louis Adamic, Dynamite: A Century of Class Violence in America, 1830-1930 (London:
Aldgate Press, 1984), 110-114; Marilyn D. McShane and Frank R. Williams III, eds., Encyclopedia of
American Prisons (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996), 342-343.
14
“Prison life in Leavenworth is Writ on Film by Henry Ford,” Leavenworth New Era, 6:5 (March
28, 1919), CDF, File # 41738.
73
military.
15
After the U.S. entered World War I, federal legislation increasingly focused on
suppressing dissent against the war, both against individual draft dodgers and those
organizing broader political opposition. Later amendments to these laws intensified the
repression. The Selective Service Act in 1917 mandated compulsory conscription and
prosecuted those who avoided it. The Sedition Act of 1918 forbade the use of “disloyal,
profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the U.S. government, flag, military and
Constitution.

Figure 4: Clipping from inmate file, National Archives, Central Plains Region,
RG 129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons, Box 526, Folder 13104

In the wake of WWI and the Russian Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917,
these laws as well as the creation of the first federal police system produced a new
security infrastructure designed to monitor, infiltrate and suppress dissent increasingly
located within the boundaries U.S. Empire. In effect, WWI saw the federal government’s
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
15
Zaragosa Vargas, Crucibles of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from Colonial Times
to the Present Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 189; Mukherjee, Tarknath Das, 143-144;
Kohn, American Political Prisoners, 7.
74
production of its first massive domestic intelligence program.
16
This was also the first
wartime instance when the U.S. government actively operated prisons to house its own
civilians. Over 2,000 prosecutions occurred under the original Espionage Act, including
Socialist spokesman and draft opponent, Eugene V. Debs and anarchist intellectual
Emma Goldman. In creating new state capacities to legalize the detention, repression, and
imprisonment of thousands of Americans for their political beliefs and associations, the
expansion of federal government capacities in this period laid the groundwork for the
first Red Scare of 1919-1920. As the largest and oldest of the three federal prisons,
Leavenworth became a central node of this new security infrastructure.
17

The expansion of the prison system and the shifting capacities of the federal
government responded to the contradictory movements of capital in the period.
18
The
onset of the First World War was a boon to U.S. industrial production, distribution, and
transportation, particularly as European powers increased their demand for U.S.-produced
war materials such as munitions, guns, and airplanes. By early 1917, Allied powers had
purchased over two billion dollars of such equipment, helping to position the U.S. as the
world’s primary industrial power. As a consequence, the demand for production
expanded, outstripping the available pool of surplus labor even with the large pre-war
immigration wave primarily from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, and also with
the relaxation of former immigration restrictions for workers in Mexico and additional
immigration from Asia and South Asia. By 1918, with 44,000,000 people employed in
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
16
Kohn, American Political Prisoners, 7
17
Keve, Prisons and the American Conscience, 141.
18
For a materialist analysis of prison expansion, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag:
Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007).
75
the formal labor force, industrial production peaked, real wages rose, and workers
dramatically enhanced their leverage. Strikes broke out across industries, such as iron,
steel, mining, lumber, textile, and a number of wartime industries, significantly among
East coast ship-builders. The period produced an emboldened labor movement including
political gains by the Socialist Party, agitation by anarcho-syndicalist groups, and
specifically efforts by the Industrial Workers of the World (a.k.a. the Wobblies) to
organize a class struggle across the color line. By 1919, approximately one in seven U.S.
workers went on strike, with as many as one in four in New York City. Various
mechanisms were used to combat the real and potential growth of this class power,
including employer subterfuge, raids, brutal strikebreaking by hired thugs, surveillance
by private detective agencies like the nefarious Pinkerton National Detective Agency, and
assistance or compliance by local law enforcement. In this vein, state laws and new
federal legislation such as the Espionage Act explicitly targeted labor organizing.
19

The 1917 Espionage Act, in practice targeted three main groups: WWI peace
activists and war dissenters; labor organizers (especially foreign-born members of groups
like the Wobblies); and Black workers, writers, and cultural producers organizing against
Jim Crow racism.
20
As Sen. Lee Overman of North Carolina reasoned, the Espionage Act
was necessary to stop papers from being circulated “through the South urging Negroes to
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
19
Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men who Made It (New York:
Vintage Books, 1989), 341-342; Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation and the Making of the
New Negro (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2003) 8-36; Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Cambridge: South End
Press, 1997), 116; Melvin Dubovsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 376-425; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third
World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 16-17.
20
Mary Bosworth, Explaining U.S. Imprisonment (Los Angeles: Sage, 2010).
76
rise up against white people.”
21
Though seemingly discrete actions, efforts to repress
labor were deeply entangled with movements to promote militarism.
This movement of industrial capitalism was abetted by the geographic expansion
of finance capital prior to and after World War 1. In 1915 President Wilson lifted a ban
on U.S. creditors making private loans to Allied countries. Between 1914 and 1919 U.S.
investments abroad nearly doubled from $5 billion to $9.7 billion. The export of both
money and munitions securely tied the interests of U.S. finance capital to an Allied
victory, and ultimately, prompted the deployment of U.S. soldiers to support the Allied
nations. Therefore, the criminalization of war dissenters by new federal legislation during
the war was intended as much to punish individuals as it was designed to ensure
investments of U.S. capital abroad. A successful peace movement would have
compromised both American investments overseas and the U.S.’s new role. As a result of
its role in the war the U.S. became a creditor nation for the first time in its history.
22

As Cedric Robinson writes, the opposing interests of various factions of capital
and their conflicting racial agendas “crystallized with the onset of World War I.”
23
This
could be understood through the newly criminalized social movements of the period.
Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, a container of dissent against racial capitalism and
militarism, offers a site through which the fluidity of the racial regimes within and across
borders are made legible. As many of Leavenworth’s prisoners believed, the global
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
21
Quoted in Stephen M. Kohn, American Political Prisoners: Prosecutions under the Espionage
and Sedition Acts (Westport: Praeger, 1994), 8.
22
Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, 341-350; Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison,
The Economics of World War I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 334; Robinson, Forgeries
of Memory and Meaning, 237; Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper
Collins, 2010), 362-364.
23
Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 237.
77
regimes of racial capitalism were not inevitable. Inmates came from the powerful social
movements of the period and reflected alternative visions to racial capitalism. Though
diverse and specific to their contexts, these global movements all held in common a
desire for a more equitable distribution of wealth.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 clearly articulated this radical vision. By
supporting efforts of self-determination and denouncing the social relations of private
property, it offered a bold counter to capitalist visions. It was by no means the only
revolution of the period, but it was one of the most dramatic and revolutionaries around
the planet were inspired by its radical imagination of a new society. The Soviets
organizing during 1917 October Revolution not only overthrew Tzarism and directly
confronted the Russian bourgeoisie but inspired struggle around the world. From labor
movements in Europe and the Americas to the “distant interior of Australia” Irish
Catholic sheep-shearers “cheered” the Soviets workers’ state. In Spain, the years between
1917-1919 came to be known as “the Bolshevik biennium,” even though most supporters
were “passionately anarchist.” Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci would write,
“The new history of humanity had begun; a new experiment in the history of the human
spirit.”
24

1917 also marked the creation of Mexico’s revolutionary Constitution, one of the
most radical and comprehensive in modern political history for its nationalization of
resources and sweeping land reforms. In this period, the Ghadar movement against
British imperialism in India was also growing with critical centers in the U.S. especially
in California and throughout the Pacific Northwest. As was the case in many other
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
24
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Random
House Inc. 1994), 66; Antonio Gramsci, “One Year of History,” Il Grido del Popolo, March 16, 1918.
78
occupied countries of the time, anti-colonial insurgents in Ireland took advantage of their
new leverage during First World War in order to launch a counter attack on occupying
forces. By 1917, Irish rebel forces were regrouping after the Easter Uprising rebellion
against British colonial forces the prior year. In this period, the Tuareg and Hausa people
continued their extended rebellion against French colonial forces in Niger. In 1917,
Marcus Garvey opened his first U.S. chapter of his UNIA (United Negro Improvement
Association). That year Haitian Caco rebels continued their struggles against U.S.
military forces. African American papers like the Messenger would soon deem the U.S.
occupation of Haiti “America’s India,” “America’s Corea (sic) and Ireland.”
25
According
to the political economist Giovanni Arrighi such movements represented, “the most
serious wave of popular protest and rebellion hitherto experienced by the capitalist world-
economy.”
26
The challenge for all those opposed to violent racist capitalist domination
was to mobilize an alternate anti-racist and anti-capitalist global vision that could grip the
minds of the masses. As much of the organizing occurred within and against the U.S.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
25
Maia Ramnath, From Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism
and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Seema
Sohi, “Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Empire, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America,” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Washington, Seattle, 2008); Ani Mukherji, The Anticolonial Imagination: Migrant
Intellectuals and the Exilic Productions of American Radicalism in Interwar Moscow,” 1919-1939 (Ph.D.
diss., Brown University, 2011); Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-
1950 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), 24; Priscilla Metscher, James Connolly and the Reconquest
of Ireland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002), 182-200; Kimba Idrissa, “The Kawousan War
Reconsidered,” in Rethinking Resistance: Revolt and Violence in African History, eds. Jon Abbink, et. al.
(Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2003), 191-217.
26
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times
(London: Verso, 2010), 65.
79
Empire, Leavenworth Penitentiary in this period offered a microcosm of these global
waves of rebellion.
27

University of Radicalism

Figure 5: Carl Ahlteen, “Big” Bill Haywood, James Slovik, Peter McEvoy, Vicente A. Azuara
RG 129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons, United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth, Kansas

Between 1917 and 1922, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary was occupied by a
unique mix of war dissenters, radical labor organizers, foreign-born radicals and Black
militants. Some key figures in this early post 1917 period included inmates like
Taraknath Das an Indian leader in the U.S. Ghadar movement, George Andreychine a
Bulgarian socialist and trade-unionist who would go on to have major positions in the
Comintern, and Earl Browder future general secretary of the Communist Party of the
USA. Some of the most prominent political prisoners at the time were Wobblies. On
September 28, 1917, 97 members of the IWW were convicted of conspiring to obstruct
the war by opposing the draft. Those sentenced included figures like “Big” Bill
Haywood, a founding member and lead organizer of the IWW; Vicente Aurelio Azuara, a
newspaper editor originally from Spain; Peter McEvoy, an iron molder from Ireland;
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
27
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ (Cambridge: University of Cambridge,
1970), 137. This analysis of global waves of rebellion is indebted to Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker,
The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

80
James Slovik, a fisherman from Russia; and Carl Ahlteen, a writer from Sweden.
28
Ben
Fletcher, an African American longshoreman, and one of the most talented African-
American labor leaders of his time as one of the few Black Wobblies, was also among the
convicted. In the period when few African Americans were permitted to join American
unions, Fletcher attempted to shift the racial consciousness of the IWW and of the labor

Figure 6: Ben Fletcher, RG 129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons,
United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth, Kansas

movement more broadly. In an op-ed he penned for the Messenger, Fletcher wrote,
“Organized labor, for the most part be it radical or conservative, thinks and acts, in the
terms of the White Race.”
29
So concerned about his activities, J. Edgar Hoover, then head
of the anti-radical General Intelligence Division of the Bureau of Investigation,
monitored Fletcher’s mail for information about “Negro agitation.” Imprisoned Wobblies
also included those with overlapping between the membership of the PLM and IWW
such as Mexican-born miner Tomas Martínez. The combination of these figures—
Bulgarian communists, Indian Ghadarites, Mexican anarcho-syndicalists, and African-
American anti-racist socialists—made for an unusual convergence of radical traditions. In
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
28
NA, BP, Boxes 510, 525, 526, 534, 554.
29
Kornweibel, ‘Seeing Red,’ 157-9; Irwin Marcus, "Benjamin Fletcher: Black Labor Leader,"
Negro History Bulletin 35 (October 1972): 131-40.
81
September 1919, the Liberator, a socialist magazine out of New York published an
article by a Leavenworth inmate, which dubbed the prison a “school for revolution.” The
phrase is useful in describing the repurposing of space within the walls of Leavenworth.
30

The prisoners wrote, published and edited a prison newspaper called the
Leavenworth New Era. The paper was an innovative source of information, including
prison news, gossip, inmate demographics, coverage of the prison baseball league, book
reviews, poetry and even excerpts from other prison newspapers. British Wobbly Charles
Ashleigh wrote regularly about culture and politics. Future CPUSA leader Earl Browder
wrote about jazz, culture, and the fallacies of whiteness.
31
Enrique Flores Magòn,
Ricardo’s brother and PLM member, published a regular column called “Mexican
Kaleidoscope.” In a series of short stories he educated fellow prisoners about the
Mexican Revolution. In one dramatic story entitled “The Invader” he described a
fictionalized encounter in which elders in a Mexican village educated a young white
American man about the causes of the revolution. “’Why did you sell your land, your
waters, your plows and your beasts?’” asks the American. “‘They took it all away from
us,’” replies one of the villagers. Following this exchange, a “long deep sobering sigh
comes forth from the very bottom of [the villager’s] heart; [a] sigh that finds echo in the
bosom of all the others.”
32
Perhaps such works transformed the thinking of other inmates
about Mexico and the plight of Mexicans in the U.S. In an open letter to President
Harding in 1922, fifty-two of the imprisoned Wobblies plead their case by making a
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
30
NA, BP Box 510, 12895; Socialist C.O, “May Day in Ft. Leavenworth,” The Liberator 2:6
(Serial No. 16) June 1919.
31
Earl Browder, “Values in Music,” Leavenworth New Era 5:7 (February 20, 1920): 41746, CDF.
32
Enrique Flores Magòn, “The Invader,” Leavenworth New Era 5:7 (February 20, 1920): 41746,
CDF.
82
poignant point about racialized representation, saying “In the capitalist newspaper the
I.W.W. is like the Mexican in the movie show; he is always the villain.”
33

Figure 7: Leavenworth New Era, Centro Documental Flores Magòn, AC, Mexico City

The cover story of the April 9, 1920 issue of the Leavenworth New Era describes
the success of the Leavenworth night school, a minor university self-organized by the
prisoners for the prisoners with the instructors being drawn from the ranks of the prison
population itself:
Over six hundred men gathered nightly in the great hall, to pursue their studies
under the guidance of teachers, who were also their fellow prisoners. Yet, without
any intervention by the officers of the prison, an admirable discipline prevailed …
the school is their institution; and they were responsible for its order and
success.
34

Classes included Automobile Mechanics, English; Russian; French; general electricity,
mechanical drawing, typewriting, general electricity, automobile mechanics; and three
classes in Spanish (one of which was taught by Enrique Magòn and another by Spanish
Wobbly Vicente Azuara). Four out of five nights were devoted to study. On every
Wednesday night, students were shown educational films or slideshows depicting other
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
33
Industrial Workers of the World, “An Open Letter to President Harding. From 52
Members of the I.W.W. in Leavenworth Penitentiary Who Refuse to Apply for Individual
Clemency” (Chicago: General Defense Committee, 1922).
34
Superintendent, “Our School,” Leavenworth New Era 7:7 (April 9, 1920), File #41751, CDF.
83
countries alongside a lecture.
35
Inmates often wrote to the warden’s office to order
textbooks, foreign language dictionaries, notebooks, and other school supplies.
36

Aside from the “formal” education of the night school, there were informal and
innovative ways in which the prisoners educated each other. Regular lectures were held
in the wings of the cellblocks with inmates crowding corners or craning their ears down
from tiers above to hear the lessons. Lectures came from incarcerated lecturers like Allen
Broms about propaganda, sociology, Marxism and political economy. In good weather,
Indian Ghadarite Tarknath Das would go outdoors to the “wobbly shed,” to join
Wobblies like Ralph Chaplin and Charles Ashleigh to discuss the Russian Revolution,
poetry, the day’s news, medieval ballads, and would sometimes deliver speeches about
Indian Vendata philosophy. Das also introduced the Dewey Decimal System to the prison
library, cataloguing over 8,000 volumes. Radical textbooks and pamphlets were brought
in by any means possible. Some prison-issued copies of the Bible had been taken by
prisoners to the printing plant, gutted, rebound and filled instead with the Communist
Manifesto.
37

Prisoners read and passed around other magazines like the Liberator, the
Messenger, the Industrial Worker, Regeneration, the Political Prisoner, the Nation,
Arizona Labor Journal, the Globe, The Modern Review from Calcutta, and Workers’
Dreadnought out of England. Books also circulated in the prison. The act of reading often
provided a means of transfiguring the space of enclosure. “Books!” wrote J.A. McDonald
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
35
Ibid.
36
NA, BP, Box 510, 525, 526, 534, 554.
37
H. Austin Simons, “The U.S. Revolutionary Training Institute,” Liberator 19 (September
1919): 42-44; Mukherjee, Tarknath Das, 150, 147.
84
in The New Era, “With Homer we are spectators at the Siege of Troy. We climb Olympus
and listen to the congress of the gods…We travel over fantastic seas to grotesque lands
found only in the geography of the imagination.”
38
Some books from Enrique Flores
Magòn’s personal collection included The Universal Kinship by J. Howard Moore, Death
of a Nobody by Jules Romains, Thought in the Russian Revolution by Albert Rhys
Williams, and Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome. One popularly circulated book was
Louise Bryant’s Six Red Months in Russia the first hand account of Bryant, an American
socialist feminist, in the early years of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Bryant spoke with
many Bolsheviks, especially Russian feminists like Katherine Breshkovsky and
Alexandra Kollontai, who made radical arguments about gender and sexuality, arguing,
for instance, that until the revolution could fundamentally transform gender relations and
liberate notions of sexuality it could not be truly transformative. Inside Bryant’s book is
Enrique Flores Magòn’s name and inmate number. On the next page is a note he has
written to the other prisoners, “Please take good care of this book, do not write in its
pages, and return it to its owner as soon as you are through reading it, for there are others
who want to read it and are waiting for their turn.”
39

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

38
J.A. McDonald “The White Magic of Books” Leavenworth New Era 5: 48 (January 30, 1920),
CFP, File # 41745
39
CFP, Box 2, 10, 16, 17, & 18
85

Figure 8: Six Red Months in Russia by Louise Bryant, Enrique Flores Magon’s
Leavenworth Book Collection, Centro Documental Flores Magon

From this type of education, it is no surprise that radical action happened inside the
walls as well. Strikes, work stoppages, and social protests occurred with frequency. On
May Day in 1919, the prisoners held a march/celebration inside the prison. Successfully
appealing to the warden that the first of May, International Workers’ Day, was as sacred
to radicals as religious holidays were to practicing observers, the prisoners gained a May
Day celebration with little interference. Inmates turned their prison-issued jackets inside
out, exposing the red flannel lining. They hoisted magazine cut out images of Vladimir
Lenin and Abraham Lincoln on broomstick handles. The day began with a singing of
“The Internationale,” an anthem that communists, socialists, anarchists and all “prisoners
of starvation” and “wretched of the earth” could sing together. The program also included
a discussion of revolutionary methods, a quote contest between the anarchists and the
socialists, and an open-air parade. The program gives a sense of the political tendencies
within the prison, and the camaraderie and political dialogues among the prisoners. The
planned program of the day was as follows:
86
9am
1. “The International,” by all Revolutionists.
2. “Dead March,” by Russian chorus.
3. Address: “Karl Marx,” by…..
4. “The Red Flag,” by all Reds.
12 noon
1. Open Air Parade Through Wire City.
2. “Hold the Fort,” by I.W.W. choir.
3. Address: “The First of May,” by….
4. “Stung Right,” by all Reds.
6pm
1. Open Air Singing Between No. 6 and No. 7 Barracks.
2. I.W.W. vs. Socialist – Quotes Contest.
3. Address: “The American Way” by….
4. Discussion of Revolutionary Methods.
5. “The Marseillaise,” by all Reds
40

While the marches, the night schools, the lectures, and the publications produced
a unique political space, Leavenworth, of course, remained a punitive disciplinary
institution. Prisoners were subjected to brutal treatment: malnourished, harshly punished,
subjected to extended periods of solitary confinement, and routinely denied adequate
medical care. Prison guards took out personal vendettas against prisoners for their
political beliefs. The Wobblies were often subjected to weeks in what was referred to as
the “torture chamber” of the hole for their associations and protests, denied contact and
even the most minor privileges. Sometimes men were particularly punished for their
stance as conscientious objectors. Labor and IWW leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
recounts the gruesome treatment of a dozen Mennonite men who were serving long
sentences for their “uncompromising opposition to warfare.” Because of their refusal join
the military and wear army uniforms, they were disgraced and tortured by prison guards.
Against their religious custom, their beards were cut and buttons were affixed to their
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
40
Socialist C.O, “May Day in Ft. Leavenworth,” The Liberator 2:6 (Serial No. 16) June 1919.
87
uniforms. They were made to sleep on the concrete with no blankets at night and during
the day they were “manacled to bars so high they could barely touch the ground.” With
intense pressure, the cuffs dug into their wrists, swelling and eventually cracking the skin
of their hands, spilling blood down their arms and upon them. Two of the men, Joseph
and Michael Hofer, died as a result of this extreme torture. Adding insult to injury, the
prison returned the bodies of the men to their pacifist Mennonite communities in South
Dakota dressed in army uniforms. Their example illustrates the breadth of punishment in
Leavenworth from the extreme to the minutia.
41

There were other ways in which the prison itself was a disciplining institution,
particularly in terms of race and gender. This was perhaps most clearly seen in the
incarceration of the famed boxer, Jack Johnson. Johnson had risen to fame in Black
communities and reached notoriety in many white communities when he defeated the
“Great White Hope” Jim Jeffries in 1910. In that defeat, the myth of white racial
supremacy was profoundly ruptured. Films of Johnson overpowering white boxers were
made illegal in some states after violent white mobs rioted across the country after
viewing them. Johnson flouted his victory and his wealth in the face of white rage,
openly dating and marrying white women, many of whom were sex workers. Eventually,
Johnson was convicted under the Mann Act, a law prohibiting the trafficking of “white
slaves” across state lines. At this time, the regulation of sexuality through such laws
criminalizing prostitution and interracial relationships enabled the growth of the federal
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
41
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, My First Life (1906-1926) (New
York: International Publishers, 1973), 255; Mukherjee, Tarknath Das, 146; Paul Alexander and Glen
Stassen, Peace to War: Shifting Allegiances in the Assemblies of God (Telford: Cascadia Publishing House,
2009), 135-136.
88
prison system, local convict lease systems, and gave credence to deputized bands of
vigilantes and lynch mobs.
42

After his conviction, Johnson and his then wife fled the country, eventually
winding up in Mexico. There, Johnson also began to sympathize with possibilities of
revolutionary Mexico. He compelled other African Americans to follow suit to “Latin
America, the garden of the world,” which he reasoned “offers us all the golden privileges
of a land that has never known racial prejudice.” Mexico, he wrote, “was willing not only
to give us the privileges of Mexican citizenship, but will champion our cause.” According
to FBI records, the 1919 films of Johnson in Mexico City, dressed to the nines,
announcing that he, an African American man, was a member of the finest clubs in the
city, caused jubilant celebrations and the possible “incitement” of African Americans in
the U.S. In face of Jim Crow segregation, the image of Johnson symbolically upending
U.S. racial codes fired people’s imaginations. In crossing back across the Mexican border
in 1920, Johnson was arrested and sent to Leavenworth.
43

Jack Johnson’s time in prison would make an interesting film or historical novel
in itself. He conducted daily financial affairs through telegrams, wrote an autobiography,
invented and patented a new tool, staged a public boxing exhibition in the prison with the
blessing of the warden, and arranged his post-release boxing schedule. For a while, his
official duty was to maintain the prison baseball yard. Through this work he would have
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
42
Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York:
Vintage Books, 2006); Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York:
Free Press, 1983); Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the
Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 133.
43
Gerald Horne, Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920
(New York: New York University Press, 2005), 33.

89
encountered prisoners such as Roy Tyler. Tyler was much younger than Johnson. He
became his sparring partner and developed a relationship that would carry on in letters
after Johnson was released. On that baseball field, Tyler discovered his own athletic
talent. He was effectively drafted into the Negro Leagues when the head of the
organization became his parole sponsor. After his team lost a major championship, Tyler
was marooned in Indiana and found work as a porter, a car washer, and other menial jobs.
He was quickly picked up on a trumped up charge and returned to Leavenworth for
violation of his parole.
44

Tyler was never listed as a “political prisoner” but perhaps this is a misnomer.
Tyler was involved in another long forgotten event in that global year of 1917. In August,
the 3
rd
battalion of the 24
th
infantry mutinied against their officers in Houston, Texas.
This was a regiment of Buffalo Soldiers, all Black men, one whose history reminds us of
the U.S.’s vast and contradictory imperial ambitions. The 24
th
infantry had been deployed
to Cuba as part of the Spanish-American war 1898. Later they were sent to the
Philippines as part of the Philippine American war, where Black soldiers, or “smoked
Yankees” as they were called, had to newly consider their support in waging an
imperialist war against the Filipinos. In 1916, this regiment entered Mexico to assist
General Pershing’s search for Pancho Villa, where soldiers would have encountered a
number of African Americans who had defected to that country.
45

In 1917, the battalion was stationed in Houston during construction of a base
there. Racial tension in the city was incredibly high with white Houstonians
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
44
NA, BP, Box 467, File 12276.
45
Robert V. Haynes, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rogue: Louisiana
State University Press, 1976); Gatewood, ‘Smoked Yankees’ and the Struggle for Empire, passim.
90
unwelcoming of this Black regiment. On the evening of August 23, 1917, a Black soldier
attempted to stop the assault of a Black woman by white officers. He was subsequently
arrested. Later that day, when another Black soldier, Charles W. Baltimore inquired about
the arrested man, he was brutally beaten by white officers and severely injured. A rumor
spread that he had been killed. Against the backdrop of violence, humiliation, threats of
white mobs, and the specter of lynchings, this rumor set anger amongst the Black
soldiers. Around one hundred and fifty members of the regiment took up arms and
marched to the center of town, opening fire on the police station and killing fourteen
people. For the crimes of murder and mutiny, nine soldiers were executed by hanging
and over forty were sentenced to Leavenworth.
46
Many young men in this regiment were
paroled, picked back up, and sent back to Leavenworth in a higher frequency than other
political prisoners.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
46
Martha Greuning, “Houston,” The Crisis Magazine, November 1917.
91

Figure 9 Roy Tyler, Inmate #12276, 19-year-old 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry, U.S. Military
Received at Penitentiary: December 16, 1917, RG 129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons,
United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth, Kansas

The documents for Roy Tyler’s parole add a curious footnote to the story of
Leavenworth Penitentiary. In support of Tyler’s parole, one guard has noted several
commendable actions. In these Tyler is praised for protecting prison guards from other
inmates. In one instance, Tyler is credited with preventing “a gang of I.W.W. prisoners”
from harming the deputy warden and other officers. In a 1923 note, the warden praises
Tyler with “the highest commendation of the prison officials.” The warden recounts the
incident:
On November 14
th
, when Joe (sic) Martinez, a Mexican murderer, killed Captain
Andrew Leonard and wounded six guards by stabbing them, Tyler voluntarily
entered the underground coal bunker and took a dagger from Martinez.
47

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
47
“Case Summary of Federal Parolee” (September 13
th
, 1932); Note on behelf of Tyler dated
January 2, 1923 from Warden “To Whim it May Concern,” NA, BP, Box 467, File 12276.
92
For apprehending Tyler, the Warden offered Tyler “the full confidence and respect” of
the prison officials.
48
Despite this praise, Tyler’s parole was denied. Tyler, like many
other men in his unit, returned a few times to Leavenworth. His mug shots show him
progressively aging in prison.

Figure10: Roy Tyler, Inmate #12276, 34 years, Received at Penitentiary: September 7, 1932,
for violating parole, RG 129 Records of the Bureau of Prisons

This entanglement between Tyler and Martìnez highlights the unfortunate
convergences enabled by the prison. José Martìnez had defended Ricardo Flores Magòn,
the Mexican Revolutionary figure who had offered one of the earliest and most trenchant
critiques of American imperialism in the 20
th
century. In doing so, Martínez had
unwittingly entered a struggle with global dimensions. But Martínez himself had been a
soldier of U.S. Empire. He was incarcerated at Leavenworth after serving in Company M
of the 125
th
Infantry, part of the Expeditionary Forces in France during WWI. Alongside
many unwilling and suspicious Mexican workers in Texas, Martínez had enlisted with the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
48
Ibid.
93
U.S. Army in 1917. One of the few office buildings in El Paso that did not carry a “No
Mexicans Allowed” sign was the U.S. Army Draft office.
49
In World War I, as in other
wars, the contradictions of U.S. racial capitalism came to bear on the sudden comradeship
of sworn enemies. Americans served alongside Mexicans when not long before, they had
fought against them. In France, Martínez was involved in a fight with a superior officer
named Eugene Binder. Martínez fought in self-defense and in the process, killed Binder.
After being court-martialed in Alsace, France, he was sentenced to the military prison in
Leavenworth, Kansas.
Martìnez had come to the United States from Chihuahua, Mexico, where Pancho
Villa had briefly served as a provisional governor (1913-1914) and where American
publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s owned the million-acre Babicora Cattle
Ranch. A leatherworker by trade, he had been a bullfighter in his youth, a laborer in
Sacramento, California and El Paso, Texas and possibly also a field-hand in Plainview,
Kansas.
50
His immigration form asked if he was educated, healthy, and if he was an
anarchist, a new category prompted by the growing popularity of Magòn and fellow
members of the PLM. He lived in El Paso, Texas, a notoriously racist town with a large
Mexican labor force and a history of rampant lynchings, beatings, and disappearances by
civilians and deputized Texas Rangers alike. In 1916, twenty Mexican people were
doused with kerosene and burned alive, an incident that incensed Mexicans on both sides
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
49
Cynthia Orozco, No Dogs or Mexicans Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights
Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 52-53
50
NA, BP, Box 554, Inmate #13396; “Un Mexicano Preso Q' Muere De Sus Heridas,” El Heraldo
De Mexico (December 1, 1922).
94
of the border and provided the rallying cry for Pancho Villa’s invasion of Columbus,
New Mexico.
51

Ostensibly, there was much in common between José Martìnez and Roy Tyler.
Both men had enlisted in the military defense of the United States. Both had faced racism
from within and outside of their ranks. Both had consequently found themselves
condemned to the same military prison. But the common experience of incarceration did
not ensure that the men shared the same political commitments. While Leavenworth
penitentiary enabled a unique convergence of radical traditions and provided a space for
productive and vibrant dialogue, this by no means guaranteed that all prisoners found
common cause or shared affinities between themselves. Such alliances would need to be
built and organized.
52

Anti-Racist Internationalism
In his autobiography Wobbly, imprisoned IWW member and famed songwriter,
poet, and artist, Ralph Chaplin describes his path from Chicago to Leavenworth by way
of Mexico. Kansas-born and Chicago-reared he came to work with the radical Charles H.
Kerr publishers in the windy city. Through them he found a way to Mexico and later,
solidarity with the Mexican Revolution. He wrote “The struggle in Mexico, like that in
Russia, India, and Ireland, was becoming my struggle; Enrique and Ricardo Flores
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
51
Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution (London: Jonathan
Cape, 2000), 323.
52
On the problem of identification between characteristics, fixed interests, and the struggle to
build a “purposeful social movement,” see Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 191-196.

95
Magòn were becoming my personal heroes.”
53
Chaplin came to Mexico in 1907 prior to
the outbreak of Revolution and linked up with the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). He
wrote, “My own loyalties were with the Magòn brothers and Emiliano Zapata. These
men, I thought, were seeking to establish freedom in human affairs not only in Mexico
but throughout the world.”
54
In prison, Chaplin had something of a reunion, as he found
himself again in the company of the brothers who had so greatly influenced his
understanding of internationalism. He took special notice of Ricardo Flores Magòn.
Magòn was a spokesperson and organizer in the revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist
organization, the PLM, which articulated many of the original calls of the Mexican
Revolution. Legendary in Mexico, Magòn’s calls for tierra y libertad, land and freedom,
articulated the radical aims of the Mexican Revolution. He was a radicalizing force
within the PLM, the major opposition group and served as a propagandist and organizer.
After being exiled from his country, he continued agitating through his newspaper
Regeneration in El Paso, St. Louis and later Los Angeles, garnering support in and out of
Mexico, wherever the paper traveled.
55

His speeches and writings in his paper Regeneración commanded the world to
witness, support, and join the struggle for freedom represented by the Mexican
Revolution, which Magòn saw as a battle against U.S. imperialism and racial capitalism.
In 1914 he wrote that “the international bourgeoisie and all governments fear that the
spark which glows in Mexico will be the beginning of a formidable conflagration which,
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
53
Chaplin, Wobbly,106.
54
Ibid., 113.
55
Ward Albro, Always A Rebel: Ricardo Flores Magòn and the Mexican Revolution (Fort Worth:
Texas Christian University Press, 2003).
96
sooner or later, will turn the world into a single flame which will reduce the capitalist
system to ashes.”
56
The paper was eagerly distributed throughout the Americas, as well as
among internationalist circles in Europe. As a result of these revolutionary aspirations
and efforts he and his PLM comrades were criminalized and imprisoned in U.S. jails and
prisons. The state’s repression of Ricardo Magòn and his comrades was directly
proportional to the popularity of their message among the poor and the working class.
After several arrests and several attempts on behalf of U.S. and Mexican officials to
sabotage the publication of Regeneración, Magòn was finally charged under the new
Espionage Act for sending indecent materials through the mail and sentenced to 21 years
in federal prison. The appeal for which he was imprisoned, and which he co-authored,
was directed to American workers. It included the lines:
The Mexican problem is not really a problem incumbent only to Mexico; it is a
universal problem, it is the problem of hunger, the problem that the disinherited of
all the world have to resolve under the penalty of living with their bodies bent
down under the yoke of the master class.
57

Magòn’s writings sought to foment a global revolution. For this, he was imprisoned in a
U.S. Federal Penitentiary.
Magòn worked for a time in the prison library in Leavenworth. He became a
counselor, letter writer, lecturer and confessor for many other inmates. Ralph Chaplin
sometimes joined Magòn, and his PLM comrades for their daily conversations and
debates. For an hour a day, Magòn, Librado Rivera and other prisoners would gather
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
56
Ricardo Flores Magòn, “The Intervention and the Prisoners of Texas,” Speech, May 31, 1914 in
Dreams of Freedom, eds. Bufe and Verter, 214.
57
Ricardo Flores Magòn, Enrique Flores Magòn, Librado Rivera, Antonio de P. Arajo and
Anselmo L. Figueroa, “To the Workers of the United States,” November 7, 1914.

97
near the rock pile in the prison yard they called the “campus” near the “wobbly shed” not
far from another area they called “wall street.” There they would have long conversations
about Mexican culture and philosophy and recite revolutionary poetry.
58

In many respects, Ricardo Flores Magòn was like another imprisoned radical, his
contemporary in Italy, Antonio Gramsci who was imprisoned in fascist prisons from
1926 until shortly before his death in 1937. Both men had been agitators for revolution in
their respective countries. While Magòn was a leader in the PLM, Gramsci was a key
figure in the Italian Communist Party. Both had been editors for radical periodicals.
Magòn helped found Regeneración, and Gramsci co-founded Ordine Nuevo. Like
Magòn, Gramsci had been a key part of revolutionary movements by the industrial
working class and articulated their need to form an alliance with the peasantry. Magòn’s
group the PLM had been instrumental in assisting the first two major Mexican industrial
strikes of the twentieth century: one among the textile workers at the Rio Blanco
manufacturing complex in Orizaba and another by the Cananea copper miners in Sonora.
Gramsci had been a major proponent and chronicler of the council movement of the
automobile factories in Turin. In both cases, these labor actions had the effect of
mobilizing the working class in their counties, and were key moments in the
revolutionary movements of which the two men were key theorists.
59

Both Gramsci and Magòn were invested in the production of revolutionary
working class intellectuals. Magòn believed that people certainly needed education, but
not the dominant modes of education “whose programs have been suggested or dictated
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
58
Raat, Revoltosos, 285.
59
Gwyn Williams, Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils And The Origins Of
Italian Communism, 1911-1921 (London: Pluto Press, 1975), 182-185.
98
by those with an interest in perpetuating the slavery of the poor for the benefit of the evil
and brazen.”
60
Similarly, Gramsci saw that traditional intellectuals were characterized by
the “specific conditions and specific social relations” in which they worked. Under
capitalism, this meant that traditional intellectuals were tied to creating “the conditions
most favorable to the extension” of the ruling class, however much they liked to believe
that they operated under “autonomous and independent” conditions.
61
Gramsci saw the
working class challenge of developing “a new stratum of intellectuals,” what he called
“organic intellectuals” who would be tied to and representative of the interests of the
proletariat. Magòn anticipated Gramsci’s insights. Magòn saw that the “education of the
masses, in order to be truly in their interests … must be in charge of the workers.”
62
This
would be no easy task. As Gramsci realized, “intellectuals develop slowly, much more
slowly than any other social group, by their very nature and historical function.”
63
The
precondition for the revolutionary education of the proletariat, Magòn insisted, was the
production of material conditions enabling an “environment propitious for the
education.”
64
Specifically, he saw that the present conditions of the working class were
antithetical to the formation of libratory knowledge production:
The long hours of labor, the insufficient food, the hard conditions in the places of
labor and habituation, make it so that the Mexican laborer cannot progress. Tired
from long hours of work, he hardly had enough time to rest before he must return
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
60
Ricardo Flores Magòn, “The Chains of ‘The Free,” Regeneraciòn, October 22, 1910, in Dreams
of Freedom, eds. Bufe and Verter, 182-185.
61
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers,
1971), 5-6.
62
Magòn, “The Chains of ‘The Free,” Regeneraciòn, October 22, 1910, in Dreams of Freedom,
eds. Bufe and Verter, 182-185.
63
Antonio Gramsci, The Southern Question (Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2005), 45.
64
Magòn, “The Chains of ‘The Free,” Regeneraciòn.
99
to his prison-like task. And of course this doesn’t allow time to meet with his
comrades from work and discuss and think over the common problems of the
proletariat, nor does this allow him time to open a book or read a workers’
newspaper. The laborer, thus, is absolutely at the mercy of voracious capitalism.
65

Neither man suggested that the prison was an ideal environment for supplying
these preconditions. Prisons consciously impeded intellectual activity through methods
such as surveillance, censorship of correspondence, isolation, regulation of reading time
and material, denial of writing implements, destruction of personal writings, severe and
arbitrary limitations on contact with other prisoners, and corporal punishment for reading
material, writing, or verbal support of ideas deemed inappropriate by the prison
administration. As scholars of incarceration suggest, the very fact of the prison produced
its own “pedagogy,” that is, the institutions of prisons constantly demark the boundaries
of freedom under capitalist social relations. However, as the writings and activities of
Gramsci and Magòn during their respective confinements suggest, the prison also
contained the potential for producing alternate pedagogies and also for producing more
expansive definitions of freedom. The case of Leavenworth Penitentiary with its unique
convergence of radical traditions shows how insurgent prisoners repurposed the space of
the prison to engage in the labor of radical knowledge production. In this way, the
prisoners demonstrated how racial capitalism could unintentionally produce its own
negation.
66

Significantly, both men came from countries that had not passed through the
“classic” path of development. This position significantly influenced their respective
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
65
Ibid.
66
Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century
(London: Verso, 2003) 113-152.
100
theories of revolution. Popular interpretations of Marxist theory at the time presumed that
revolution would emerge from countries containing the most developed industrialized
working class and where bourgeois economic and political power had already been
consolidated. Confounding these perceptions, the early twentieth century was inaugurated
by a series of revolutions and rebellions in rural semi-proletarianized countries. History,
by this point, had rewritten radical theory. In spaces where the wealth of nations was
filched and where the contradictions of racial capital were most keenly felt, the first
revolutions of the twentieth century arose. As Magòn compelled the world to see, the first
major revolution of the twentieth century had occurred in Mexico.
67

Russian revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and later Leon Trotsky accounted for this
phenomenon with a theory of uneven development. The experience of the Russian
Revolution demonstrated that an industrial worker-peasant alliance could combine
various stages of development, quickly advance the most underdeveloped sectors, and
move toward socialism.
68
Antonio Gramsci attempted to understand similar conditions in
Italy. In one of his final writings before his incarceration, The Southern Question,
Gramsci proposed a revolutionary alliance between the northern industrial proletariat and
the southern Italian peasants. He wrote:
The proletariat can become the leading and dominant class in the measure in
which it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances that will permit it to
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
67
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, (New York: Verso, 2007), 174; W.E.B. Du Bois, Black
Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York: Free Press, 1962), 20-21; Cedric J. Robinson, An
Anthropology of Marxism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 153.
68
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1932; London: Sphere Books, 1965); Stuart
Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” in Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and K. Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996), 424-5; Michael Lowy,
The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2010), passim.
101
mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the
bourgeois State.
69

In this task, organizers would have to confront the dominant and divisive nationalist and
racist discourses.
70
Racial ideology had been successfully deployed to divide a working
class-peasant alliance in Italy. In stories, folklore, and through popular culture, Gramsci
suggested that the poverty and underdevelopment of the southern peasantry was made to
seem natural, biologically induced, and separate from a class condition. Southerners were
represented as “biologically inferior beings” sometimes “semi-barbarians” or “barbarians
by national destiny.” Therefore, their poverty and underdevelopment did not appear as
the “fault of the capitalist system, or any other historical cause” but as result of the
Southerners’ very nature: “lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric.”
71
Amidst a political
drift toward fascism, Gramsci also recognized how Southern peasants were being swayed
by nationalist appeals. A powerful bloc of southern landowners and northern industrial
capitalists sought to make their own alliance with the Southern peasants through
sentimental appeals to national regional identity. Unless these racist and nationalist
ideologies could be ruptured, this peasant-worker class alliance could not come to
fruition. As Gramsci correctly prophesized, the failure to unify in this class struggle,
rendered Italy vulnerable to the onset of fascism.
Magòn also found himself in the position of explaining the seemingly peculiar
development of the Mexican Revolution in a semi-proletarianized country. He wrote in
the early years of the revolution, “Mexico is marching toward communism more quickly
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
69
Gramsci, The Southern Question, 31.
70
Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” in Stuart Hall, Morley
and Chen, eds., 417.
71
Gramsci, The Southern Question, 20
102
than the most extreme revolutionaries had hoped for.” Since the Mexican people had
carried out radical acts of land seizure, industrial strikes, urban revolt, resistance to the
Church, and rural insurgencies against large-scale landowners, he noted that, “the
government and the bourgeoisie now find themselves not knowing what to do.”
72
He did
not feel compelled to explain how foreign radical ideas had mobilized the Mexican
masses. For Magòn, communism was no foreign import. A child from the Southern
Mexican state of Oaxaca and son of a Zapotec Indian, Teodoro Flores and a mestiza,
Margarita Magòn, Ricardo was raised with a belief in communal ownership of land and
in collective labor practices. He understood these practices as being culturally consistent
with indigenous Mexican practices. He wrote, “the Mexican people are suited for
communism, because they’ve practiced it, at least in part, for many centuries.”
73

In Magòn’s interpretation, the Mexican peasants had not simply and quickly
overcome feudal relations. While the mode of production appeared feudal, given its
brutality and inequality, Magòn understood the Mexican peasantry as a rural proletariat
working in a system of capitalist agriculture under conditions of debt peonage.
74
He made
little distinction between the industrial and the rural proletariat, and referred to them both
as “the only producers of wealth.”
75
To him, the primary contradiction was that all
workers were bereft of the wealth that they produced: “everything, absolutely everything
is made by your creative hands, and nonetheless you lack everything.” In his calls for
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
72
Ricardo Flores Magòn, “The Mexican People are Suited to Communism,” Regeneraciòn,
September 2, 1911, in Dreams of Freedom, eds. Bufe and Verter,176-177.
73
Ibid, 176.
74
James D. Cockcroft, Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2010), 52-55.
75
Ricardo Flores Magòn, “To the Proletarians,” Regeneraciòn, September 3, 1910, in Dreams of
Freedom, eds. Bufe and Verter, 161.
103
revolution, Magòn configured the weavers, harvesters, builders, and miners as all being
part of the same class:
You weave the cloth, but you walk around almost naked; you harvest the grain,
and you hardly have a miserable crumb to take home to your families; you build
houses and palaces, and you inhabit huts and attics; the metals which you drag out
of the earth only serve to make your bosses more powerful and your chains
stronger and heavier.
76

Consistent with this general definition of the working class is Magòn’s definition of
capital. He recognized the social organization of the means of production, that the
“machinery, buildings, docks, railways are accumulated labor, the work of intellectual
and manual laborers in all of the ages up to the present day.” In turn, he believed that
“there’s no reason that this work should belong to a few individuals.”
77
His notion of
revolutionary tactics was in keeping with this analysis of production. While Magòn, a
self-identified anarchist, took great inspiration from other anarchists like Mikhail
Bakunin and Errico Malatesta, he did not support the anarchist notion of the “propaganda
of the deed,” which sought to spark spontaneous rebellion among the masses through acts
of public violence. Instead of “blowing up factories with dynamite, the uprooting of
plants, the caving in of mines” in other words, “destroying the common inheritance,”
Magòn called instead for the seizure of the means of production in both the cities and the
countryside. He writes to his “revolutionary brothers” to take “possession of the factories,
workshops, mines, foundries, etc.”
78
In these ways, Magòn approached the alliance
between the urban and rural proletariat as one of conscious collaboration amongst the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
76
Ibid.
77
Ricardo Flores Magòn, “The Chains of ‘The Free,” Regeneraciòn,, October 22, 1910, in Dreams
of Freedom, eds. Bufe and Verter, 182-185.
78
Ricardo Flores Magòn, “To the Strikers and to the Workers in General” Regeneraciòn, (August
5, 1911) in Dreams of Freedom, Bufe and Verter, eds.,163-166.
104
working class towards the collective ownership of land, the means of production, and the
topping of capitalist social relations.
Just as Gramsci understood that hope lay in an alliance between workers and
peasants in a class struggle against the capitalist state, Magòn similarly considered scales
and alliances. For him, the victory of the Mexican Revolution was incomplete without a
global overthrow of racial capitalism. Accordingly, Magòn consistently sought to
internationalize the struggle, which he believed had found an early expression in Mexico.
He reminded the Mexican workers that their struggle, “the struggle of humanity” was
global:
millions of intelligent eyes contemplate you from across the oceans, from other
continents, from other lands, with the same emotion that awaits a life or death
decision, because, know it well Mexican workers, because your triumph will be
the dawn of a new day for all of the oppressed of the Earth, just as your defeat
will result in the tightening of the chains on every worker on Earth.
79

For Gramsci, racist and nationalist ideology possessed the capacity to thwart potential
revolutionary alliance. Magòn, in turn, recognized that a global revolutionary movement
would need to shatter the agreed upon lies of racial hatred. Racism, in his analysis, was a
conscious strategy by “the millionaires, the big businessmen, [and] the financial bandits”
to “open abysses between the diverse races and nationalities, and in this manner to ensure
their empire.”
80

In his life, Magòn had been uniquely situated on both sides of the U.S./Mexico
border. He had witnessed the color line disfigure class solidarities both within and across
borders. The beatings, lynchings, and mischaracterizations of Mexican and Black
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
79
Ibid.
80
Ibid.
105
workers had wide implications. Such violence prevented class solidarity from forming
amongst the entire working class. For Magòn, these racist divisions were not inevitable.
He identified himself among those “creating fraternal ties among all human beings.” The
struggle for this identification among people was simultaneously a struggle against
capitalism. He wrote, “capitalism foments racial hatred so that the peoples never come to
understand each other, and so it reigns over them.”
81
Despite his hope for an alternate
way of being, towards the end of his life Magòn saw the limits of solidarities produced
within the confines of white supremacy. In one of his final letters written from
Leavenworth, he concludes with somewhat tragic lines. He ends this letter as follows:
it is cold, and I dream of the South, and its sky, and its flowers. Before long,
perhaps, shall I be blessed with its beauty…And when by my native cliffs, I
happen to discern the vague outlines of the northern shore on which lay scattered
the wreckage of so many hopes of mine, I shall say with a sigh- I meant well, my
blonde brothers, I meant well, but you could not understand me.
82

Magòn spent most of his final months writing to friends and allies pleading for medical
care to treat his illnesses and fading eyesight. In a chilling note to his lawyer, Harry
Weinberger, Magòn compared his failing health and creeping blindness (the result of
medical neglect) to the torturous conditions he suffered during an earlier confinement in
Mexico’s Belèn prison prior to the Mexican Revolution. “Once when I was young I was
kept for several weeks in a dark dungeon, so dark that I could not see my own hands,”
Magòn remembers. “But,” he writes, “I could suffer all that excepting the absence of
light. I need light. I need light.” There was a diabolic symmetry between the international
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
81
Ricardo Flores Magòn, “The Repercussions of a Lynching,” Regeneraciòn, November 12, 1910
in Dreams of Freedom, eds. Bufe and Verter, 198-200.

82
Ricardo Flores Magòn, letter to “Ellen White,” November 12, 1922, Ricardo Flores Magòn
Collection, International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam.
106
spotlight on Magòn and the darkness of his sequestration.
83
As Michel Foucault has
suggested, the more monstrous the criminal seemed, the more he or she was deprived of
light and recognition, “he must not see, or be seen.”
84

Figure 11: Excerpt from Ricardo Magòn’s final note to “Ellen White”, November 12, 1922,
Ricardo Flores Magon Collection, International Institute for Social History (Amsterdam, NI)

Ricardo Flores Magòn was not in command of any army, nor was he a violent
fighter himself. What made him dangerous enough to be imprisoned were his anti-racist,
anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist commitments; his belief in an internationalist struggle;
and the wide and warm reception of his ideas. With these as his crimes, Magòn was
sentenced to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary—a space he helped transform into a
university of radicalism. Here, anarchists, communists, nationalists, and pacifists
produced new affinities and new understandings. In the writing, reading, teaching, and
friendships formed in this convergence space, Magòn and a number of other self-
professed radicals, alongside imprisoned working-class soldiers of color, were able to
confront the expanse and limitations of various radical traditions. In the years during and
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
83
Quoted by Harry Weinberger in a letter to The New Republic Vol. XXVI, No. 396 (July 5,
1922): 162.
84
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books,
1995), 13-14.
107
after World War I, radical movements, inside and out of the prison, were grappling with
the parallel formations of racism and capitalism, although few large-scale movements
could successfully theorize their congruity. Given the different experiences of prisoners
from both imperial countries and darker nations, there was potential for radical
conversations about the color line to take place. To some extent, it appears that these
conversations did happen. To what extent this influenced the political traditions of the
prisoners remains to be seen. There was only so much that could be accomplished within
these confines. If the color line could penetrate prison walls, a movement confronting it
would need to find ways to do the same. This was perhaps a thought that preoccupied
Magòn at the end of his life. Before he died in a cold Kansas cell, he dreamt of the cliffs
and skies of Mexico, hoping his blond brothers could one day understand him.
85

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
85
NA, BP, Box 554, 13396.
;?@%
CHAPTER FOUR
RELIEF AND REVOLUTION:
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA STRUGGLES AGAINST UNEMPLOYMENT

Arise, you prisoners of starvation! ¡Arriba, parias de la Tierra!
Arise, you wretched of the earth! ¡En pie, famélica legion!
-The Internationale -La International

The women in the jail cell were singing. The dusty facility in the farming town of
Brawley, California, some twenty-five miles north of the Mexican border, was full of
striking lettuce pickers, their wives, and supporters. Crammed together in the women’s
section were a number of Mexican women who had been arrested in the strike, and one
brassy white teenager. The teen couldn’t speak Spanish, because as she later recalled,
“I’m a backward, stupid, provincial Anglo.”
1
To pass the time, the women taught each
other songs. The young woman, Dorothy Healey, a Communist organizer from Los
Angeles, tried teaching the women radical labor songs. The other women, “part of that
generation of Mexicans who had grown up with the Mexican Revolution,” bested the
young white organizer. In Spanish, they sang the “Internationale,” a song that
commanded the “prisoners of starvation” and the parias de la Tierra “wretched of the
earth” to arise.
2
In the early 1930s, this song was still an anthem that socialists,
anarchists, communists, and fellow travelers alike, all those desiring an end to
oppression, could sing together. This song, remembered Healey, “bridged all the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
1
Dororthy Healey, oral history interview, Tradition's Chains Have Bound Us 1982, Dorothy
Healey Collections, Special Collections, California State University, Long Beach, 102.
2
Dorothy Healey, interview in The Internationale, DVD, dir. Peter Miller, (Icarus Films, 2000);
Michael Denning, “Representing Global Labor," Social Text 92, 25:3 (Fall 2007): 21-45.

%
109
countries of the world.”
3
The women, who had lived through the Mexican Revolution, a
struggle variously derided as the chaos of an underdeveloped nation and also praised as
the first social revolution of the twentieth century, knew the lyrics well.
4

Brawley, a small town in the Imperial Valley, was one of many areas in rural
California on fire in the early years of the Depression. In 1933, a year before general
strikes would rock docks, mines, mills, and shop floors across the country, California’s
fields exploded in labor rebellions across the state. Santa Clara cherry pickers, Lodi grape
cutters, Yolo county orchard pruners, and Oxnard sugar beet workers, among others—
close to 50,000 workers in total—went on strike, accounting for half of all U.S. farm
worker strikes that year. In the largest single strike in agricultural history to that date,
over 18,000 workers walked away from the cotton fields throughout the San Joaquin
Valley. Spanning over one hundred miles, affecting sixty-five percent of the state’s crops,
these thirty-seven strikes represented an unprecedented insurgency in the California
fields.
5

Farm workers wanted a closed shop, better wages, and union-controlled hiring,
demands parallel to the radical industrial strikes of the period. While the conditions
facing farm workers were “quite similar to those which prevail in mass-production
industries,” as Carey McWilliams observed, the disproportionately Mexican workers and
smaller numbers of Filipino, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, and Black workers in the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
3
Healey, The Internationale, 2000.
4
Luis F. Ruiz, “Where have all the Marxists Gone: Marxism and the Historiography of the
Mexican Revolution,” A Contra Corriente, 5:2 (Winter 2008): 196-219; Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, The Great
Rebellion: Mexico 1905-1924 (NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1980), passim; Theda Skocpol, States and
Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1979) 287-288.
5
Richard Walker, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California (New York:
New Press, 2004), 285.

%
110
California’s fields were uniquely disciplined by, among other forces, racism,
incarceration, deportation, and the uneven dispensing of local, state, and federal relief.
The sustained vulnerability of farm labor was a key feature of this labor regime. For it to
function in the interest of capital, a reserve army of labor, available for work during
harvests and subject to deportation or arrest during growing seasons, was constantly
required. In this situation, McWilliams noted, “‘labor is an unemployed pool available on
call, much in the manner of water or electricity.’”
6
It was against these conditions that
workers organized. Furthermore, it was against the state’s deployment of imprisonment,
deportation, and relief as racialized processes of regulation, that farm workers, their
families, and allies rebelled.
In December of 1933, striking lettuce workers in the Imperial Valley travelled
two hundred miles northwest to Los Angeles to seek organizing aid from the Communist
Party. Given that the Party had assisted farm workers in the majority of strikes
throughout the state that year (twenty-four out of the thirty-seven) and had also
participated in earlier Imperial Valley strikes, it was logical for the lettuce workers to
again seek their assistance. Dorothy Healey agreed to accompany the workers and other
organizers to support the strike. In driving the long highway between Los Angeles and
the Imperial Valley, the group traced the urban-rural continuum across the capitalist
landscape, where migratory workers, crops, and capital moved in symbiotic circulation.
For Los Angeles-based entities like the Bank of America, the Los Angeles Chamber of
Commerce, and members from the Los Angeles Police Department, it was a path well
trod. Throngs of migrant workers across the state also made this trek after the harvests.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
6
Ibid., 285; Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), 156, 158.

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As Carlos Bulosan would write of Filipino and other migrant farm workers like him, “All
roads go to California and all travelers wind up in Los Angeles.”
7

Before joining the lettuce workers, Dorothy Healey had been a leader in the Los
Angeles Unemployed Councils, a project of the Communist Party, which organized
unemployed workers for relief before the New Deal promised any such federal
provisions. In leaving the unemployed movement in Los Angeles to assist the strikers in
the fields, Healey had unwittingly come to the forefront of a shared struggle. In rural
areas like the Imperial Valley, workers were striking. In Los Angeles, unemployed
workers were being thrown off of relief rolls and often coerced into working in the fields
as scabs in order to break agricultural strikes. In this way, the allocation of relief was
turning workers against one another across the urban-rural divide. Confronting these
conditions required the nimble capacity to organize workers in the fields alongside
unemployed relief seekers in the city. During the Depression, such an organizational
structure was provided by the Communist Party and utilized by workers from
revolutionary and anti-imperialist traditions, in particular, a Mexican Revolutionary
tradition.
This chapter argues that organized California farm workers and city-based
Unemployed Councils converged in a revolutionary struggle for relief during the early
years of the Great Depression. Both movements understood the critical nature of securing
relief in the forms of unemployment insurance, food aid, rent supplements, and often
funds for heat, education, and subsistence. Relief allowed workers to reproduce
themselves at a basic level and also gave them leverage against their employers. With
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
7
Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 111.

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112
provisions of relief, workers were able to extend their strikes, press for better wages, and
enhance their bargaining power for improved working conditions. The struggle promoted
a collective consciousness and a radical redistribution of resources in place of
individualized notions of failure. Conversely, in the hands of growers and the region’s
capitalists, relief had a different meaning. It could be strategically denied or supplied in
order to break strikes, damage worker’s leverage, coerce labor, and provoke police
repression. As such, the struggle for relief had extended geographical as well as political
dimensions.
In examining the revolutionary struggle for relief in Southern California between
1930 and 1933, this chapter establishes connections between organizing efforts across the
capitalist landscape. By conjoining the Unemployed Councils in Los Angeles to the
agricultural strikes of the period, it considers the convergence of radical traditions
enabled by this struggle. It specifically highlights the radical traditions of the Communist
Party, the various anti-racist and anti-imperialist traditions of workers, and the unique
revolutionary traditions that Mexican workers brought to the strikes. Indeed, the struggle
against organized capitalist interests was not new to the striking farm workers. Many had
lived through extended confrontations with U.S. capitalist imperialism during the
Mexican Revolution. They subsequently brought strategies, tactics, and militancy to the
fields inspired by their experiences. The chapter assesses how these traditions—
Communist, anti-imperial and particularly Mexican Revolutionary traditions - converged
to resist racism, globalized capitalist production, and state repression in the early years of
the Depression. It specifically examines the centrality of Mexican workers in the fields of
capitalist agriculture, the condition of unemployment, and in the struggle against these

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113
conditions as both regional and global manifestations. In this way, this Southern
California revolutionary struggle for relief offers an episode in which the global relations
of capital were countered by a radical internationalist movement across regional and
national borders.

Relief and the Open Shop
California was a key destination for desperate job seekers during the Depression.
With few jobs to be had, the Golden State quickly became the “transient capital of
America.” twelve to fifteen hundred hopefuls a day drove, hitch-hiked, jumped trains,
and made their way across California’s state lines in 1931 from the Dust Bowl, northern
Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, Pacific Islands, and the Jim Crow South. Los Angeles
became home to most of California’s job seekers and half of the state’s jobless
population. Unemployment soon reached crisis levels, with one out of five Angelinos
unable to find work. Those lucky enough to gain employment were beset by a growing
mass of the unemployed crowded into the city’s shelters, relief offices, jails, and
peripheries. On the outskirts of downtown and in the banks of the culverted Los Angeles
river, a new landscape had cropped up, a veritable jungle of shantytowns and ramshackle
tent cities, bearing the president’s namesake, Hoovervilles. Squats of shacks and lean-tos
rendered poverty publicly visible. Men hired by the city to sweep streets and clear brush
in these outlying areas could barely finish a day’s work, regularly fainting from
malnutrition. The Health Board would soon recommend that the unemployed hunt
pigeons for sustenance.
8

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
8
Anne Loftis, Witness to the Struggle: Imagining the 1930s California Labor Movement (Reno:
University of Nevada Press, 1998), 109; Errol Wayne Stevens, Radical LA: From Coxey's Army to the

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In the early years of the Depression, there was no national unemployment
insurance, no provisions for direct relief and no federal legislation to help the jobless
millions. State-level assistance was paltry, inefficient, and discriminatory. To receive aid
recipients often needed to qualify as mentally or physically disabled. Barely a fraction of
people in need could receive it. Survival was made increasingly difficult as the
Depression progressed, particularly for the many Mexican farm workers and their
families who travelled to Los Angeles after the harvest seasons. In L.A., these workers
were able to find communities of other Mexican people, some industrial work or odd
jobs, albeit in a highly racially segregated environment, and were also able to take
advantage of charity largely administrated through the Catholic Welfare Bureau. Formal
and informal measures made it increasingly difficult for them to receive aid. In 1931
unemployment hovered around twenty-eight percent in Southern California, with rates as
high as fifty percent for Black and Mexican workers in Los Angeles. Racist
administration by local state and regional entities often meant that relief was doled out in
variable sizes, with the smallest grants given to Black and Mexican families. In August
1931, the state legislature passed the Alien Labor Act making it illegal for companies
doing business with the government to employ immigrant workers labeled “aliens” on
public jobs. The same year the legislature passed residency requirements, insisting that
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Watts Riots, 1894-1965 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 189, 192, 193; George J. Sànchez,
Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angles, 1900-1945 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 210; Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political
Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 78; Louis Bloch, Abstract of Hearings on
Unemployment Before the California State Unemployment Commission (April and May 1932); Becky M.
Nicolaides. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002), 59; “Pigeons Urged to Feed the Poor,” Los Angeles Times,
December 22, 1932.

%
115
relief applicants prove that they had resided in the state for three years and one year in the
county. These provisions excluded many migrant Mexican workers.
9

During the Depression, as relief grew scarce, public sentiment was turned sharply
against migrant workers receiving aid in the city. As resentment grew, the police began to
increasingly target Mexican people. Charles P. Visel, director of the Los Angeles
Citizens Committee on Coordination of Unemployment Relief, helped to centralize and
accelerate this process, arguing that “it would be a great relief to the unemployment
situation if some method could be devised to scare these people out of our city”
10
By
coordinating local police and immigration agents based in surrounding states and under
the guidance of federal officials, Visel arranged a large scale round up of Mexican
workers. In February 1931, federal agents and local law enforcement began a
concentrated drive of scare tactics, political pressure and deportation. In turn, relief
agencies began to invite Immigration and Naturalization Services agents into their offices
to conduct raids in L.A.’s Mexican communities. Welfare agencies also sponsored
repatriation drives, inducing an exodus of approximately fifty thousand persons from Los
Angeles. Nearly five hundred thousand Mexican and Mexican American workers were
forcibly and illegally “repatriated” as deportation was deployed as a national solution to
the economic crisis.
11

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
9
Josh Sides, LA City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the
Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 27; Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of
a Barrio (1983, reprt., Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 164; Western Worker, “Mexican Workers
Get Only 70 Pct. Of What Others Do,” November 6, 1933; George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American
211; Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field, 322; Louis B. Perry and Richard Perry, A History of the
Los Angeles Labor Movement, 1911-1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 238.
10
Camille Guerin-Gonzalez, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation
and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 81.
11
Cybelle Fox, “Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and Public and Private Social
Welfare Spending in American Cities, 1929,”American Journal of Sociology, 116:2 (September 2010):

%
116
While repatriation policies in the Southwest were rationalized as responses to the
Depression, such practices had developed out of longer histories of conquest,
displacement, and racialized labor management strategies in the region. Southern
California in particular had developed into a model for the racialized regulation of labor
in the early 20
th
century southwest. By the 1920s, major capitalists like Harrison Gray
Otis, Henry Ford, and the heads of Firestone, Bethlehem Steel, Proctor and Gamble had
devised a formula to “eliminate the root causes of class conflict and inefficient
production.” This formula involved a policy of strident anti-unionism, enforced through
an emboldened police department and the racial management of the labor force.
12
Los
Angeles in particular was conceived as an industrial town that would buck the red trend
on the Pacific Coast where successful organizing in heavily unionized cities like
Portland, Seattle and San Francisco had achieved higher wages and better labor
conditions for workers. The Chamber of Commerce under the leadership of Los Angeles
Times magnate Harrison Grey Otis dedicated itself to repressing labor and undermining
any rhetoric sympathetic to unionization or organizing from the late nineteenth century
on. The ideal according to the Times was an “open shop,” one where employers can
conduct business “free from interruption and interference” of labor organizing. In no
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
466-468; Abraham Hoffman, “Stimulus to Repatriation: The 1931 Federal Deportation Drive and the Los
Angeles Mexican Community,” Pacific Historical Review 42:2 (May, 1973): 219; Peter Hecht, “Mass
Deportations to Mexico in 1930s Spurs Apology,” The Sacramento Bee, December 28, 2005; Francisco E.
Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), passim.
12
On racialized management, see David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, The Production of
Difference: Race and the Tha Management of Labor in U. S. History (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012), 193-204; Davis, “Sunshine and the Open Shop,” 358.

%
117
major US city had such a model been achieved. Ruling class forces were aligned to make
Los Angeles the “open ship citadel of America.”
13

From the point of view of the region’s capitalists, such a model had been largely
achieved in California’s agribusiness farms in the form of vulnerable, precarious, racially
segregated and largely unorganized labor. By the onset of the Depression, most migrant
agricultural labor in California came from Mexico. The relation of forces shaped the
conditions of farm workers in a distinct manner, as they were often “treated as so much
scrap when it was needed,” according to John Steinbeck. Local capitalists focused on the
seemingly itinerant nature of Mexican workers in order to allay nativist fears about racial
inbreeding and cultural contamination. The assumption prevailed that Mexican workers
would move back to Mexico after a job, leaving, as some growers proposed, nothing
behind but profits.
14

Multiple mechanisms controlling the movement of laboring bodies were key to
this regime. As Kelly Lytle Hernàndez notes, the Border Patrol, first established in 1924,
enforced immigration as a form of labor control. In Hernandez’ words, it was, “just
another weapon in the arsenal of agribusiness.” Working hand in hand with growers,
Border Patrol agents learned to look the other way as Mexican people crossed the
U.S./Mexico border to work in the fields. Agents also understood how to look back,
ensuring that workers did not leave jobs in the middle of the harvest or try to stick around
once their labor was unneeded. Local police departments operated toward similar ends.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
13
Ibid., 362; “The Forty-year War for a Free City: A History of the Open Shop in Los Angeles,”
Los Angeles Times, October 1, 1929; McWilliams, California, 144.
14
John Steinbeck, Their Blood is Strong: A Factual Story of the Migratory Agricultural Workers
in California, (San Francisco: Simon J. Lubin Foundation, 1938), 26; Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Migra! A
History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 31; “Oxnard Workers
Fight Evictions,” Western Worker, November 27, 1933.

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The supple definition of vagrancy laws, for example, meant that nearly everyone was
vulnerable to arrest, whether they lacked homes or were on their way to strike meetings.
Law enforcement could also redouble the controlling mechanisms of growers. For
example, police could evict workers and their families from company-owned homes if
the workers dared to oppose their working or living conditions or threatened to join
strikes. Police could similarly and selectively evict people who lived in ramshackle
“Hoovervilles” or hobo jungles adjacent to the fields, claiming that such encampments
posed public health hazards. As long as growers could control the movement of workers,
such mobility was an asset. Deportation and policing were the key mechanisms fo social
control.
15

In 1928, Charles Collins Teague, a major banker and powerful agribusiness
leader, declared itinerant Mexican laborers ideal for work in the California fields because
they did not need “to be supported through the periods when there was no work to do.”
Relief, or the denial of it, operated as another mechanism regulating the movement of
Mexican people. A study from the State Relief Administration found that most
agricultural workers had employment for an average of six months a year. With the
declining wages during the Depression, workers were increasingly unable to subsist on
meager wages alone. Barred from racially segregated industries and with other available
work hard to find, public relief increasingly became a measure guaranteeing their
subsistence. At a 1931 statewide public hearing, agricultural worker Juan Serrano
explained, “my family is facing starvation.” Farm worker Innocentio Mendez added that
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
15
Hernàndez, Migra!, 54, 26.

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119
he was, “in danger of having my gas and water shut off,” and also “in danger of losing
my home.”
16

The presence or absence of relief also became a critical factor in facilitating
confinement or deportation. Workers like Louis Barros who picked peas in Castroville
for 15 cents a basket, found he barely made enough to cover his nightly board of $1.25.
He travelled to Los Angeles and soon found himself arrested for vagrancy. “Reaching
Los Angeles too late one evening for the soup line,” he wrote, “I was picked up by a
detective and jailed.” In a 1932 editorial, Barros explains that imprisonment was the
“penalty workers pay for being unable to find jobs which do NOT exist.” For Mexican
workers in similar situations to Barros, arrests for vagrancy were often followed by
deportation. The vulnerability of Mexican workers intensified alongside mechanisms for
deportation. Any resistance to the low wages or abysmal living conditions, meant
laborers “could be deported to Mexico at [the] Government’s expense.” Provisions of
relief were therefore imbricated with mechanisms of deportation and imprisonment.
17

For a brief time in 1933, federal relief was offered to Mexican farm workers with
fewer stipulations through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. After the 1933
strike wave, agribusiness leaders quickly and successfully organized to wrest control over
relief from the federal government. Once relief was administered by state and local
agencies sympathetic to agribusiness, farm workers remained at the mercy of growers. By
1935, agricultural workers would be formally excluded from many New Deal protections.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
16
Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference, 196; McWilliams, Factories in the Fields,
322; “Reveal Jobless Suffering in San Jose and ‘Frisco,” Western Worker, January 1, 1932.
17
“Jail Worker for Begging Food,” Western Worker, January 1, 1932; John Steinbeck, “Their
Blood is Strong,” 25; Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the
Great Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 210.

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The National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act, and the Fair Labor Standards
Act all denied agricultural workers equal protection. According to historian Cletus
Daniel, these measures only “codified” the already existing powerlessness of Mexican
farm workers.
18

But deportation, decreased wages, and provisions of relief helped produce some
unintended consequences. To the dismay of growers, repatriation severely reduced the
available labor pool of experienced Mexican farm workers. Growers who had initially
supported efforts to reduce aid needed to find ways to compel remaining Mexican
workers back to the fields. Many workers had decided that the hard work, unsafe working
conditions, and impunity of the growers were not worth the meager pay. Since farm
workers could earn more on the meager relief they qualified for, there was little incentive
for them to return to the fields. While paltry, relief provided by local government or by
the state operated as a de facto minimum wage against which growers had to compete.
Mexican workers, having gained new leverage as a class, became emboldened to
challenge the terms of their employment. As their bargaining power increased, so did
their militancy. As George Clements of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce warned:
The Mexican on relief is being unionized and is being used to foment strikes
among the few still loyal Mexican workers. The Mexican casual labor is lost to
the California farmer unless immediate action is taken to get him off relief.
19

In the early years of the Depression, the heads of agribusiness were growing
increasingly worried that their fields were spawning fertile grounds for radicalism. To a
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
18
Cletus Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981), 261.
19
Donald L. Zelman, “Mexican Migrants and Relief in Depression California: Grower Reaction to
Public Relief Policies as They Affected Mexican Migration.” Journal of Mexican American History 5;
Devra Weber. Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton and the New Deal (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996), 127.

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meeting of the Farmer’s Union, San Francisco Chronicle editor Chester Rowell
announced, “Make no mistake about it, if you yourselves do not settle this question of the
migratory laborer, the Communists will.”
20

Mexican Revolutionary Traditions
Communists like Dorothy Healy did, in fact, help migrant workers organize
against agribusiness capitalists. Yet, Communists did not introduce Mexican workers to
this fight. For many Mexican farm workers in California, their struggles represented an
ongoing confrontation with the brutal conditions produced by U.S. capital. The Mexican
Revolution was itself a struggle against those interests. In the years following the First
World War, U.S. capital continued to dominate the Mexican economy as it had since the
beginning of the century. In the 1920s, sixty-five to eighty-five percent of all Mexico’s
exports went to the United States and nearly seventy-five percent of all of Mexico’s
imports came from the United States. In addition, U.S. companies commanded eighty
percent of all Mexican mineral production and close to ninety-five percent of all refinery
production by 1929. Throughout the 1920s and into the Depression, the United States
looked to Mexico for economic relief as a market for U.S. manufactured goods, a source
of raw materials for U.S. production, and also a manufacturing source for local
consumption. Los Angeles invested more capital in Mexico than any other city in the
country.
21

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
20
Raymond P. Barry ed., A Documentary History of Migratory Farm Labor in California
(Oakland: Federal Writers Project, 1938), 43-44.
21
Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982), 73, 106; James D. Cockcroft, Mexico’s Hope: An Encounter with Politics and
History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 111; Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin
America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006),

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The expansion of U.S. investment, extraction, production, and transportation in
Mexico also led to the expansion and radicalization of working-class organizations. By
the early 1930s, the Mexican working class was enveloped in a dramatic upsurge in
industry. In 1933, over 17,000 workers walked off their jobs demanding better wages,
housing, schools, and medical services. In 1934, Mexico saw a rash of major strikes
launched across its industries. Strikes were mostly organized against foreign-owned
industries like the Huasteca Petroleum Company (owned by U.S. Standard Oil) and the
Mexican Telephone and Telegraph Company (American Telephone and Telegraph’s
allied company). By the next year, over 100,000 workers went on strike from industries
as diverse as mining, oil, railroad, telephone, and sanitation, in one of the largest
industrial strike waves in the country’s history.
22

Significantly, many of these strikes grew out of everyday indignities. The
Huasteca strikes, for example, grew from unrest over decrepit workers’ housing. Workers
also protested unsanitary conditions and the insufficient space for their children at
company-run schools. While demands for better housing and schools did not appear to be
revolutionary, the organization of workers for their basic rights and dignity informed the
broader struggle for control over production, the ownership of national resources,
overturning of exploitative conditions, thus continuing the project of the Mexican
Revolution. The strike wave across industries and revolts in the countryside in the 1930s
forced the implementation of the most radical tenants of the 1917 Revolutionary Mexican
Constitution. Consequently this era saw the nationalization of the oil and railroad
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
35; Jessica Kim, “Oilmen and Cactus Rustlers: Los Angeles, Mexico and the Building of a Regional
Empire, 1890-1941,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2012), 8.
22
Joe C. Ashby, Organized Labor and the Mexican Revolution under Làzaro Càrdenas (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 23-24.

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industries, the revoking of foreign interests, massive national education and literacy
programs, and the most sweeping land redistribution programs in the history of the
Americas. Notably, this era saw the enforcement of Article 123, which authorized
protections for Mexican workers and obligated employers to provide affordable and
sanitary housing for employees.
23

These experiences were circulated in the California fields. Organizer Pat
Chambers discussed his experience with Mexican workers in the 1933 Cotton Strike.
During the strike, he noted, the workers had discussed the “many revolutions and wars”
waged so that “the Mexican people might be free, have some land of their own,” and
“have the right to live without fear of starving to death.”
24
Such experiences had
profound effects on the militancy of farm workers in California, both those who migrated
after the Revolution and those who kept abreast of news in Mexico. Communist
organizers came to realize the value of this experience. In the Imperial Valley, Dorothy
Healey soon noticed that her radical appeals were met with patient indulgence. While she
talked about strategy, the workers explained to her:
Of course we’re ready for revolution. When the barricades are ready, we’ll be on
the barricades, but don’t bother us with meetings all the time. We know what to
do, we know who the enemy is ... Just tell us when the revolution is ready. We’ll
be there.
25

The Mexican strikers drew on a radical consciousness and history of tactical alliances
that they had gained during the Mexican Revolution. As Devra Weber’s research has
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
23
Adolfo Gilly, “Chiapas and the Rebellion of the Enchanted World,” in Rural Revolt in Mexico:
U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern Politics, ed. Daniel Nugent (Chapel Hill: Duke University
Press, 1998), 261–333; Ashby, Organized Labor and the Mexican Revolution, 24-26.
24
Ed Royce, “A Scene From the Cotton Strike,” Western Worker, October 30, 1933
25
Healey, Traditions, 96.

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shown, the Revolution operated as “a model of a collective struggle,” which inspired the
tactics and symbols of the strike. Former military officers organized patrols and sentries
with other veterans. Within the strike camps, workers named streets after revolutionary
heroes and sang revolutionary corridos. Workers like Luis Lima reminisced about friends
and relatives who had participated in revolutionary strikes, such as an uncle who had
been killed in the 1906 strike against the U.S. owned Cananea Central Copper Company.
“The Mexican people are revolutionary as it is,” insisted organizer Leroy Parra. With
their knowledge of the Mexican Revolution he believed that they were better able to see
“the exploitation here in this country.” While workers maintained different and
conflicting sympathies about the Revolution, these differences appeared to be
“submerged” during the strike. Instead, the workers’ memories of the Revolution
“stressed commonality through class, nationality, and a historical antipathy toward the
United States.” For people long exposed to the incursions and impunity of U.S. capital in
Mexico, unity through antipathy was a plausible position.
26

This shared history made a deep impression on all the striking workers. In his
coverage of the Cotton Strike, Joe Evans observed that white workers and even some
workers of color shifted how they understood Mexican workers learning that “Mexican
workers were not ‘greasers’ as portrayed by Hollywood films.” In the process of struggle,
they came to see them instead as “courageous, determined, intelligent workers.” “Never”
reported Evans, “has there been greater courage shown than that of the Mexican workers
in the course of this strike.” This solidarity was made evident by the deep affinity
between workers. When growers at Corcoran tried to intimidate workers, setting up
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
26
Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold, 87-88, 94.

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loudspeakers and demanding that the leaders come forward, a “spontaneous shout” came
back proclaiming, “We are all the leaders.”
27

While unified in their struggle in the fields, workers posed the following question
to their “comrades in the big cities.” What would they do “to help smash the vigilantes’
murder gangs and the policy to starve them back to work”?
28

Relief and Revolution
These workers are getting a raw deal. The growers will cut wages to a starvation
level. If the men cannot hold up under the grueling ten our day, they will get fired.
Where can they go? They can’t get back on relief. Industry cannot absorb them.
Will the California highways be strewn with emaciated dead in the next year?

-Unnamed Depression-era Los Angeles county relief worker
29

The Communist Party experienced a major upsurge in participation and
membership throughout the Depression. The Western Division attributed this jump to two
primary campaigns: the organizing among farm workers through the Cannery and
Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) and the advent of the Unemployed
Councils. Both organizing efforts found their greatest successes in California. Both
projects were also outgrowths of the new Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), an
independent trade union organization that sought to organize the unemployed, women,
people of color, and others traditionally excluded from trade unions. The CAWIU and
Unemployed Councils achieved particular success in Southern California as an
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
27
Joe Evans, “Only Communists Lead, Cotton Pickers Learn,” Western Worker, November 20,
1933.
28
Ed Royce, “A Scene From the Cotton Strike,” Western Worker, October 30, 1933.
29
McWilliams, Factories in the Field, 291.

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unintentional result of the restrictions placed on their organizing. The open shop policies
of the region coupled with the American Federation of Labor’s unwillingness to share
organizing space with the Communist Party meant that factories and white factory
workers were largely out of reach, particularly in Los Angeles. In turn, the Party sought
new constituencies. In the notoriously sectarian Third Period between 1928-1935, the
Party was able to reach people of color who were farm workers, unemployed workers,
half of whom were women, and almost all of whom were renters or squatters. In Southern
California in particular, this period offered a significant example where the struggle
against capitalism broadened to include sites like the home, food banks, jails, deportation
centers, and relief offices in addition to factories and other points of production. Given
these new constituencies, the Party became more attentive, through its organizing, to the
intersections between the color line and the class struggle.
30

Figure 12: “Why 1,000 More Joined the Party,” Western Worker, November 27, 1933.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
30
“Party Welcomes 1,000 New Recruits,” Western Worker, November 27, 1933.

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Los Angeles Unemployed Councils

To organize the unemployed, the Unemployed Councils had to address a
widespread conceit about poverty that encumbered organizing efforts: the idea that
poverty was a transient condition that one, by dint of will, could overcome. A profoundly
“American Assumption,” as W.E.B. Du Bois would detail in 1935, was the idea that
“wealth is mainly the result of its owner’s effort and that any average worker can by thrift
become a capitalist.”
31
In turn, when wealth was not achieved it appeared to be the result
of the individual’s failure or lack of ambition.
At the outset of the Great Depression, with millions out of work, this assumption
represented a major ideological and material barrier to relief.
32
As Dorothy Healey
remembers, “The mood of Americans who were unemployed was the feeling that it was
all their own fault…that they hadn’t done the right things.”
33
Employers like Henry Ford
were in agreement. “I’ll tell you why the great majority of men not at work today are in
that condition,” he was quoted as saying at the outset of the Depression, “it is simply
because they did not do their best while they had a job.”
34

In 1931, with over eight million people out of work poverty was still seen as
being rooted in laziness and disgrace rather than as a structurally produced reality for the
majority of the population. The persistence of this belief owed itself to the racial
dimensions of class conflicts. The condition of poverty was racially grafted onto people
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
31
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York: Free Press, 1962),
183.
32
Scott Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2005), 18; Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed,
How They Fail (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 41.
33
Healey, Traditions Chains, 46.
34
“Wall Street on Trial,” Federated Press Eastern Bureau, March 20, 1930.

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of color, specifically Black people, Mexican immigrants, Native Americans, and ethnic
populations who were not yet considered white. A “wage of whiteness,” Du Bois
reasoned was a public and psychological compensation of deference, short-term
advantages, and minor privileges, which appeared to ameliorate an exploited class
position and effectively masked the commonalities that poor whites shared with people of
color. While the crisis impoverished most people in the country, the challenge was to
overcome this wage of whiteness as meager compensation and as a basis for social
division. An ideology of whiteness, in turn, eroded potential identification across class
lines. It forced people to individualize their impoverished conditions and internalize their
suffering. It further ensured that relief was made as disagreeable as possible, forcing
recipients to get jobs, despite the fact that few were to be had at this time.
35

Public relief operated as a disciplinary measure, dispensed to few and intended to
demean recipients to discourage their reliance upon it. Oftentimes, relief was
administered through the auspices of the police department, a provision that discouraged
many applicants. As late as 1934 in fourteen states, receiving relief deprived persons of
the right to vote or hold political office. The disciplinary power of the relief system, both
federal and state-sponsored, lay not in an outright refusal of relief but through the
systematic degradation of those who received aid.
36

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
35
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 700, 20-21; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and
the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country:
Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 91.
36
Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements, 42; Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History
of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), 240, 287; Ira Katznelson, When
Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New
York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005), 38; Theodore Draper, “Notes on Unemployed,” (unpublished) Emory
University, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Theodore Draper research files, 1919-1970, Box
17, Folder 16. .

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The official silence around mass suffering was deafening. Falling beyond the
purview of the president, politicians, labor leaders and social scientists, the poor seemed
invisible to all but “the doctor, the judge, the gravedigger, and bum-bailiff.”
37
Carving
out existences on the peripheries of public consciousness, Herman Boren, an unemployed
milling operator from San Francisco, stated, “‘The way that homeless unemployed men
have to live is worse than the way animals and insects live.”
38
In the crushing
desperation, as the writer Meridel Leseur observed, “a woman will shut herself up in a
room until it is taken away from her, and eat a cracker a day and be as quiet as a mouse
so there are no social statistics concerning her.”
39
If the poor were willing to suffer
silently there seemed no incentive for the government to intervene and certainly, no New
Deal on the horizon. Herbert Benjamin, national leader of the Unemployed Councils told
a Senate Committee in 1931 that no real help would be forthcoming “until every man in
Congress is shivering in his very pants because he thinks the unemployed are going to
engage in struggle.”
40

With nearly a third of the national U.S. workforce out of work, Unemployed
Councils were organized around the country, demanding recognition and resources
during the Great Depression. These Councils gave voice, expression, and mobilization to
an otherwise unrecognized population that had grown exponentially after the stock
market crash of 1929. They became the nation’s first poor people’s organization,
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
37
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers,
1975), 284.
38
Bloch, Abstract of Hearings, 3.
39
Meridel Leseur, “Women on the Breadlines” in Communism in America: A History in
Documents, ed. Albert Fried, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 196.
40
Moritz Hallgren, “Mobilizing the Poor” in Fried, Communism in America, 132.

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representing one of the first, large-scale protest movements against the economic crisis.
In contrast to segregated American worksites, the Unemployed Councils produced spaces
wherein working-class peoples of different genders, races, and ethnicities could engage in
a common struggle for radical social change. Popular slogans of the movement included
“Work or Wages,” “Fight Don’t Starve!” and “Bread Not Bullets.”
The Unemployed Councils had several objectives: organize the unemployed for
immediate relief by door-to-door outreach; develop new leadership from the rank and file
through block committees; and bring groups of people in need to welfare offices to
demand jobs and relief. The Los Angeles Councils practiced a range of activities: They
organized at charities and welfare bureaus for relief. They demonstrated at City Hall and
negotiated with the Board of Supervisors to implement citywide increases in relief. Once
relief was made available through the New Deal, they organized in locals of the Relief
Workers Protective Union to try to make relief commensurate with union scale wages.
They also defended against racial discriminatory hiring in public jobs. The L.A. Councils
called for an end to foreclosures, protested evictions, and sometimes moved furniture and
families back into their homes. They protested until judges or relief officials relented and
canceled evictions. They also organized those living in shelters for better conditions, such
as serving non-rotten food or mandating that all residents have beds to sleep in. In
addition, they defended those forced to live in the city margins in Hoovervilles and
forced evicting officials to find alternative housing. They joined with Veterans’
movements and demanded housing and bonus pay for starving World War one soldiers.
They fought for free medical care, public utilities, and transportation for the unemployed.
The Councils protested the incarceration of their members and the deportation of

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Mexican workers. They tied these protests to broader revolutionary demands, calling for
example, for a tax on the rich to end the Depression.
41

Figure 13: “All Out for the County Hunger March,” Flyer, September 18, 1933,
University of Southern California Special Collections

Local organizing efforts in different neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights, Echo
Park, Hollywood, Huntington Park and Long Beach, led up to citywide Hunger Marches
convergences in the Plaza downtown plaza. Later the Councils coordinated statewide
demonstrations in Sacramento.
42
On caravan trips to the state capitol, members would
stop in small towns, organizing throughout the trip and recruiting new members along the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
41
Wild, Street Meeting, 183; “L.A. Jobless to Fight Relief Cut with hunger March October 2,”
Western Worker, September 11, 1933; “Evicted Family Put Back in the House by Jobless,” Western
Worker, September 18, 1933; “Relief Union in Fight on Eviction of Negro Families,” Western Worker,
September 25, 1933; “Homes Won Families Evicted When ‘New Deal City’ Razed,” Western Worker,
October 2, 1933; “Five Days Red Tape for a Flop At Tavern,” Western Worker, October 2, 1933; “All Out
for LA County Hunger March Oct. 2,” Western Worker, October 2, 1933; “LA Jobless battle cops at
Welfare Office,” Western Worker, October 23, 1933; Jennie Grey, “12,000 in Militant March Force 10%
L.A. Relief Raise,” Western Worker, November 20, 1933; “Public Works Mean Full Time Work for 45c
Per Hr,” Western Worker, November 27, 1933.
42
“All Out for LA County Hunger March Oct. 2,” Western Worker, October 2 1933.

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way. The same process would repeat across the country leading up to Hunger Marches on
Washington.
43
With their efforts, “marching columns of unemployed became a familiar
site.” As observer Len de Caux wrote, “the communists brought misery out of hiding in
the workers’ neighborhood.”
44
In increasing numbers, the unemployed refused to suffer
in silence.
While the Unemployed Councils expressly organized and raised consciousness
around unemployment, they also helped expose the unwaged relations that permanently
structured the processes of capital accumulation. As Karl Marx had noted nearly a
century before, the accumulation of capital required a “constant transformation of a part
of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed ‘hands.’” A permanent
surplus labor population functioned to pressure the employed segment of the working
class into accepting lower wages and more exploitative conditions. Throughout the
country and in Southern California in particular, this surplus labor population had
disproportionately been composed of people of color. Though hunger and unemployment
had become newly recognizable as a national condition during the Depression, they had
long structured the lives and labors of workers of color, in particular female domestic
workers, migrant farm workers, and industrial workers who were racially excluded from
trade unions. What had been deemed “exceptional” for racialized sectors of the working
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
43
Mike Davis, “The Necessary Eloquence of Protest,” The Nation, March 17, 2009; Harvey Klehr,
The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 49-68;
Healey, Traditions Chains, 86; Sadie Amter, “Episodes at Cumberland: Reflections by Sadie Amter,” Daily
Worker, March 23, 1958.
44
Len De Caux, Labor Radical: From the Wobblies to CIO, A Personal History (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1970), 162-3.

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133
class soon became a generalizable condition for much of the country. The economic crisis
only deepened trenches of class inequality already established along the color line.
45

The Unemployed Councils was one of several new vehicles that established
greater participation of working-class people of color in radical politics. Other communist
campaigns in the period included: defense of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama;
organization against racist hiring practices in local businesses; support for jailed
Unemployed Council leader Angelo Herndon; opposition to Japanese imperialist
incursions into China; and support for striking Mexican, Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese
farm workers through the CAWIU. In multiethnic Los Angeles, these created greater
spaces within which peoples of color could operate. Official membership in the
Communist Party tripled, and the ranks of sympathizers grew exponentially, drawing
increasingly from Black, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese as well as from already established
Russian, Jewish, and poor white communities. Meetings often required translation into
Spanish, Italian, and Japanese.
46

With its range of issues, the communist movement resonated with people of color
and also offered them a unique infrastructure in which to mobilize. While there was
notably tension within the national party on questions of race, Mark Wild observes that
these tensions “did not always percolate down to far-flung jurisdictions such as Los
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
45
Marx, Capital, 786, 789-790; Sundstrom, “Last Hired, First Fired?” 415-429; Bernstein, The
Lean Years, 287; Theodore Draper, “Notes on Unemployment,” 15.
46
“Discrimination Against Negroes on LA Jobs” Western Worker, December 11, 1933;
“Scottsboro Mother, Moore and Carter tour So. Ca,” Western Worker, September 25, 1933; Scott
Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los
Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 78; Josephine Fowler, Japanese and Chinese
Immigrant Activists: Organizing in American and International Communist Movements, 1919-1933 (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 67; Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil
Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 40; Fried,
Communism in America, 98.

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Angeles.”
47
The relative autonomy of the Los Angeles Unemployed Councils and its
leadership model, which focused on local issues, enabled the Councils to organize diverse
communities against poverty and racism.
In 1931 Healey moved to predominantly Mexican East Los Angeles on Soto
Street near Hollenbeck Park. There she organized block committees of Unemployed
Councils. She recalls, “You could go anywhere and knock on doors and you were going
to find the unemployed.”
48
Through the Councils, organizers went house to house in
working-class neighborhoods, setting up meetings, convincing the unemployed to form
block committees among their neighbors. In effect, the councils became an “informal
neighborhood association” for the “destitute.” With local organizing efforts at the level of
neighborhood councils, it was largely female organizers that led the strongest centers of
movement and activity. People who joined were women like housewife Mildred Olsen
who was able to secure relief through the organization of the Councils. Olsen had been
unable to feed her children or afford rent or gas bills before she gained the assistance of
the Unemployed Council to demonstrate at the local relief office.
49
To a California State
Commission on unemployment she testified about her involvement with the Unemployed
Councils, saying, “we could go hungry; we could live in basements and skirmish in ash
cans and our children go hungry; but by organized pressure we got our demands met.”
50

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
47
Karl Yoneda, Ganbatte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker (Los Angeles: Asian American
Studies Center UCLA, 1983), 47-49; Bernstein, Bridges of Reform, 39-41; “Two Decades of Progress:
Communist Party LA County 1919-1939” (Sept 1939), 13; CSULB, Healey, Box 58, Folder 1; Wild, Street
Meeting, 181.
48
Healey, Traditions Chains, 48, 73, 72.
49
Wild, Street Metting, 181; Daniel J. Leab, '“United We Eat’: The Creation and Organization of
the Unemployed Councils in 1930,” Labor History 8: 3 (1967): 300-315.
50
Louis Bloch, Abstract of Hearings, 71.

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Though Healey would go on to have a nearly forty-five year-long career in the
Los Angeles Communist Party, some of her most transformative experiences recalled in
her three volume oral history were in the Unemployed Councils. There she witnessed,
“fragmented” and “atomized” unemployed participants “start to feel a consciousness.”
51

She recalled the transformation of participants in the organizing process:
We didn’t just agitate. People joined an organization, and those people, those
unemployed, would lead the next demonstration, and you’d go on and set up a
new block committee a block away that would meet every week and take its
delegations down. You’d keep doing that so that you were constantly developing
new leaders. People belonged to the organization, and they grew with it, they
developed with it, they emerged with new talents that were latent before but then
became explicit.
52

This method of leadership changed the composition and demands of the party itself.

Figure 14: "Thousands Mass at Los Angeles," Western Worker, October 16, 1933.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
51
Dennis McLellan, “Dorothy Healey, 91; Lifelong Communist Fought for Workers,” Los
Angeles Times (August 8, 2006); Healey, Traditions Chains, 48-9; Bernstein, The Lean Years, 434.
52
Healey, Traditions Chains, 49.

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On March 6, 1930, the Unemployed Councils held an International Day of
Struggle Against Unemployment. Over 1.2 million people came out in cities and towns
across the United States and around the world. On that day, “the unemployed and
homeless – poor farmers, Black workers and sharecroppers in the deep South, miners in
Appalachia,” according to Los Angeles Unemployed Council member Elaine Black, “all
became a strategic political force to be reckoned with.”
53
In Los Angeles, the protest
drew a crowd of 5,000 to 10,000 to the Plaza, one of the biggest demonstrations in the
city’s history (before 1933 Hunger March which drew nearly 40,000). Nationwide, these
protests helped convert unemployment into a front-page issue that was impossible to
ignore.
54

Like many spectators in the city, Elaine Black witnessed hundreds of people,
demonstrators and spectators alike, arrested and beaten, some “almost clubbed to
death.”
55
A Presidential Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement would later
corroborate her statement, describing the attack on the Los Angeles demonstration as “an
eight hour clubbing party.”
56
Truncheons, brass knuckles, tear gas, rifles, blackjacks,
blades and impunity made the Los Angeles Police Department’s Red Squads a brutal
force against demonstrators and often onlookers as well. Many were repelled by the
violence, but many more were transformed with the obvious injustice of police brutality
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
53
Raineri, The Red Angel, 23.
54
McClellan, Policing the Red Scare, 173; Davis, “The Necessary Eloquence of Protest,”; Grace
M. Burnham, Unemployment (1932), 34, EU MARBL Draper, Box 1, Folder 1; Jordan T. Camp and
Christina Heatherton, “The Housing Question: An Interview with Mike Davis,” in Freedom Now! Struggles
for the Human Right to Housing in LA and Beyond, eds. Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton (Los
Angeles: Freedom Now Books, 2012), 86.
55
Raineri, The Red Angel, 23.
56
Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity, 81.

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and emboldened to join the Unemployed Councils. An unsympathetic Los Angeles
Record article agreed, opining, “in the existing unemployment situation, they can count
on making recruits among jobless men made desperate by hunger and indignant by
senseless police cosackism.”
57

Alfred Wagenknecht, head of the Communist Party’s relief arm, complained that
while “thousands of unemployed workers were kept intact” the ranks of the party did not
increase proportionally as a result of the Councils. Since the Unemployed Councils did
not require membership in the Communist Party, tens of thousands streamed through
their ranks, making it a less than ideal recruiting strategy.
58
Participation in this
movement, however transient, was significant. As one historian observed, “The soul and
the spirit of the Communist Party came from the people who joined the party itself and
who joined in the popular movements of the 1930s.”
59

While many Mexican workers joined the movement, an almost equal number
soon left. While some commentators believe this transitory status owed to a fundamental
incompatibility between Mexican nationalism and communism, Mexican involvement
with other organizations such as Congresso, and later the CIO demonstrated that there
was a widespread desire for involvement with issues of housing, police brutality, and
racism in hiring practices. Others suggest that a predisposition to anarcho-syndicalism
impaired Mexican workers’ willingness to join the party. But the success of the CAWIU
demonstrated that Mexican workers were highly amenable to the goals and aims of
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

57
Wild, Street Meeting, 191; "Brains Wanted," Los Angeles Record, February 28, 1930.
58
Len Meyers and Chris Knox, “Organizing the Unemployed in the Great Depression: Fighting
for Unity” Workers Vanguard, 73 (July 1975).
59
Douglas Monroy, “Mexicanos in Los Angeles, 1930-1941: An Ethnic Group in Relation to
Class Forces” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1978), 155.

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Communist organized campaigns. Often the organizing difficulties amounted to smaller
concerns.
60

In 1939 Emma Tenayuca, Communist organizer and one time Unemployed
Council leader in Texas had considered such a point in an article she co-wrote entitled,
“The Mexican Question in the Southwest.” While she recognized that Mexican and
Mexican Americans formed distinct communities, isolated by racial, cultural and political
discrimination, she concluded that their liberation was tied to a broader radical
movement. She encouraged the Communist Party to attend to the language, culture, and
specific needs of this community. The Western Worker, the organ of the West Coast
Communist Party, anticipated these concerns. In a 1932 editorial, Irving Kreitzberg wrote
that there was great support among Mexican workers, especially when efforts were made
to include Mexican communities and when fliers were published in Spanish. Mexican
workers often spoke at rallies or spontaneously joined in demonstrations. The failure of
the Party to focus on attracting Mexican workers in its organizing efforts discouraged a
fair amount of participants from joining. Those who did join, like Jose Arispe, extended
their efforts at outreach and organization of other Mexican workers.
61

Mexican workers were critical in the movement given that they were among the
most exploited and vulnerable among Southern California workers. Repatriation efforts
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
60
Bernstein, Bridges of Reform, 43 ; Douglas Monroy, “Anarquismo y Comunismo: Mexican
Radicalism and the Communist Party in Los Angeles during the 1930s,” Labor History 24 (Winter 1983),
42.
61
Zaragosa Vargas, “Tejana Radical: Emma Tenayuca and the San Antonio Labor Movement
during the Great Depression,” Pacific Historical Review 66:4 (Nov., 1997): 553-580; Irving Kreitzberg,
“For a Decisive Turn in Our Mexican Work and the Creation of a Mexican Department to Concentrate on
the South-West,” Western Worker, July 1, 1932; George H. Shoaf, “Jose Arispe – Story of Worker’s
Broken Home,” Western Worker, May 15, 1932; “Red Suspect Under Arrest,” Los Angeles Times, Nov 17,
1929.

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put extreme pressure on Mexican relief seekers, forcing them to accept diminished wages
and comply with any and all stipulations. As an editorial in the Western Worker
suggested, if a worker refused the conditions placed on relief, “over the border [s/]he
goes.” In the same piece, a Mexican worker who withheld his name in fear of reprisal,
describes how he was used as a strikebreaker.
We go to the fields in the hot sun and work long hours- at 15c an hour. It is too
little… Our children get hungry, or women get sick. We cannot buy medicine.
Then we try to get more wages-just a little more, to live on, not to get rich. What
happens? The sheriff comes with lots of men. They have clubs, pistols, machine
guns. They beat us with the clubs. They throw the gas that burns our eyes. …Then
the courts-they issue injunctions…it means we cannot strike. They put us in
jail….they tell us there is a job for us in the country. We go there – and there is a
strike going on. WE must break the strike to keep the workers from getting the
more wages.
62

After the outbreak of agricultural strikes in 1933, Los Angeles relief recipients were
being given the following ultimatum: scab in the fields or relinquish eligibility for aid.
Mexican workers were particularly targeted. Relief workers were instructed to offer the
jobs with guarantees of free transportation and sometimes an advance of one bag of
groceries. Instructions to relief workers concluded with this admonition, “We can offer
this employment to our clients; if they refuse, do not threaten them, only state that they
need not expect any more favors from Los Angeles County.” Several Western Worker
articles beginning in November 1933, analyze this ultimatum. In their estimation it was
not only “an attempt to furnish scabs” and break strikes. They concluded that it was also
“an attempt to deport county welfare cases to other counties.” Movement to other
counties meant that workers would “lose their legal residence in L.A. County” and as a
result, any person agreeing to such terms “will be SURE to be cut from all further relief
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
62
“Tells Why Mexican Workers Join the Hunger March,” Western Worker, October 2, 1933.

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when the cotton season is over.”
63
This practice was soon formalized so that federal and
state unemployment services “functions as labor recruiting personnel of farm
industrialists” according to Carey McWilliams.
64

By 1935, growers working directly with the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce
and the state relief administration were tailoring relief rolls according to the needs of
growers. Between August and October 1935, 75,000 workers were dropped from relief
rolls so that they would be forced into the fields. The Los Angeles struggle for relief was
therefore directly tied to the struggle in the fields. To confront the machinations of
capital’s organization across regions, the Communist Party would had to operate across
regions, organizing in both cities and rural areas with a concrete consideration of a global
scale as well.
65

Spaces of Radical Internationalism
Otto Huiswoud, one of the first Black members of the Communist Party of
America, believed that the Depression presented an opportunity for a “broad campaign
among the Negro masses on the basis of every-day demands for a united revolutionary
struggle of the entire working class against Yankee Imperialism.”
66
Leading Pan-
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
63
“Welfare Letter in L.A. Exposes Scabherding Role,” Western Worker, November 20, 1933;
“Cut 20,000 Mexicans Off Relief, Supplies Cotton Field Scabs,” Western Worker, November 13, 1933;
McWilliams, Factories in the Field, 286.
64
Paul S. Taylor and Clark Kerr, “Documentary History of the Strike of the Cotton Pickers in
California 1933,” in Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the
Committee on Education and Labor, United States Senate, Part 54, Agriculture Labor in California
(Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1940), 19994.
65
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, 224; McWilliams, Factories in the Field, 286-7.
66
Otto Haywood, “The Effects of Unemployment on the Negro Masses in the USA.,” Inspector
(April 2, 1931): 359.

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Africanist and communist leader George Padmore agreed. Addressing Black workers
throughout the colonized world in his magazine, The Negro Worker, Padmore instructed
his readers to follow the example of the Unemployed Councils:
The gigantic hunger marches of the unemployed workers in USA, - colored and
white united, -in England, and other European countries have struck deep fear in
the hearts of the bosses and have caused a halt to the tide of many contemplated
anti-working class measures in these countries. These splendid examples of
proletarian mass action should serve as an inspiration to the unemployed colonial
toilers to do likewise.
67

As Padmore’s observations suggest, the struggle against hunger and unemployment was
decidedly international. At the core of this struggle was an understanding that racism was
a force repressing the working class as whole. As a journalist writing about the case of
Atlanta Unemployed Council organizer Angelo Herndon concluded, “Maintenance of the
color line is the core of anti-labor policy.”
68
Through their struggles in U.S. cities and
across regions, Unemployed Council members came to see their work as a part of a
worldwide class struggle.
Key figures of the Los Angeles movement included Pettis Perry, who would go
on to become the head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Communist Party and later, one
of the most influential African Americans in the national party. Perry had left Alabama
after witnessing black workers routinely killed and maimed in cold blood and barely
escaping the clutches of southern racial terror himself. He moved around the country,
finding jobs in auto plants, canneries, packinghouses, and eventually harvesting work in
the Imperial Valley. There in the California fields he encountered a majority of Mexican
farm workers alongside Communist organizers who together formed the CAWIU. He
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
67
George Padmore, “The Fight for Bread,” Negro Worker 3:6-7 (June-July 1933): 3-4.
68
Angelo Herndon, Let Me Live (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 316.

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eventually joined the movement in Los Angeles, working as a full-time organizer,
particularly involved with the struggles of poor and unemployed Black workers in the
city.
69
He became one of the party’s foremost critics of white supremacy and capitalism,
writing in one pamphlet “the working class will never come to power unless there is a
relentless struggle against white chauvinism.”
70
By 1938 he had become chairman of Los
Angeles County Communist Party.
Japanese American organizer Karl Yoneda made numerous appeals to the
unemployed Japanese in Los Angeles as he helped coordinate a Japanese branch of the
Unemployed Councils in Los Angeles. As a worker and organizer of farm workers, fruit
stand workers, waiters, newspaper writers, in the early Depression years, Yoneda had
become acquainted with Mexican, Black, Filipino, Japanese and poor white workers,
encounters that helped to shape his comprehension of race and class in the labor
movement. Recognizing the complex position Japanese farm workers occupied in the
early 1930s, he appealed to Japanese berry pickers in El Monte “not to scab!” but to “join
their Mexican and Filipino brothers in strike.” Similarly, he condemned the Japanese
boarding house owners, growers, and scab providers for being on the wrong side of the
class struggle. Significantly, Yoneda was one of many voices to lead the Los Angeles
party in protest against Japanese imperialism. With members like Yoneda, movements
for unemployment relief were meshed with calls to free the Scottsboro Boys, Tom
Mooney, Angelo Herndon, as well as demands such as, “Hands off China” and “Down
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
69
Kurashige, Shifting Grounds of Race, 81-82; Sides, LA City Limits, 32; Wild, Street Meeting,
194.
70
Pettis Perry, White Chauvenism and the Struggle for Peace (New York: New Century
Publishers, 1952), 18.

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with Japanese Imperialism!” In these ways, among others, a radical internationalist spirit
infected the local work of Unemployed Councils.
71

The California strikes occurred amidst a wave of radicalism circulating
throughout the globe. By 1934, strikes were being staged by sugar cane workers in Puerto
Rico, unemployed marchers in Trinidad, miners in northern Spain, miners, tens of
thousands of workers across Mexico, as well as sharecroppers, longshoremen, domestic,
and unemployed workers in the United States. The struggles for relief and against racism
and repression in the California fields, Los Angeles Unemployed Councils, and Mexican
industries underscore a militancy developing at an international level.
With their diverse composition, the CAWIU and the Unemployed Councils in
Southern California enabled a unique conceptualization of geographies of capitalism. By
organizing simultaneously in non-traditional spaces such as the agricultural fields and
among the urban unemployed, they offer a view of how capitalism develops across
regions. In order to appeal to racialized groups and immigrant populations being
organized, these Southern California vehicles integrated considerations of racism and
imperialism in their analyses of capitalism. Taken together these movements demonstrate
how convergences of radical traditions emboldened the global anti-racist class struggle of
the period.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
71
Karl Yoneda Papers, Collection 1592, Box 1, Folder 2, Folder 2, University of California, Los
Angeles, Library Special Collections.
;AA%
CHAPTER FIVE
WHEN CULTURE RESPECTS NO BORDERS:
STRUGGLES AGAINST RACIAL CAPITALISM

If violence respects no borders, neither should the culture that protests it.
-José Clemente Orozco

In his 1941 application for the Rosenwald Fellowship, an award supporting the
development of Black American artists, Charles White explained his intention to study in
Mexico. He wanted to use art to rebut the prevailing racism of his day, he explained,
particularly the serial reproduction of racist images in film. His artwork grew from a
disgust for the “plague of distortions, stereotyped and superficial caricatures of ‘uncles,’
‘mammies,’ and ‘pickaninnies’ that were used to portray black subjects in Hollywood
and in art.”
1
Since childhood, White had been incensed “by the clownish role forced upon
Negroes in cinema.” In film as well as in comic books, newspapers and casual
conversation, White saw that, “everything characteristic of Negro culture was isolated
and distorted into an object of hilarity.”
2
The images of Black subordination in film and
mass culture inspired White to produce counter-images through his paintings. A trip to
Mexico, he believed would help him in this endeavor. Shortly before White completed
his application, W.E.B. Du Bois had published a related critique concerning artistic
expression in a racist culture. “Most whites want Negroes to amuse them,” he observed,
“they demand caricature.” Du Bois deeply admired the artistic movement of Black
Americans but warned that under the weight, expectations, and containment of white
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
1
Quoted in Andrea D. Barnwell, Charles White (San Francisco: Pomegranate Communications,
2002), 29.
2
Charles White, “Path of a Negro Artist,” Masses & Mainstream 8:4 (April 1955): 36.

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supremacy, “it has never flourished and never will.” To this statement, he added a
significant caveat: Black art will never flourish as libratory self-expression, “until it is
deliberately planned.”
3

Charles White would make the journey to Mexico several years later. With his
then wife, artist Elizabeth Catlett, he briefly joined the ranks of the Taller de Gràfica de
Popular (TGP), a radical internationalist art collective committed to struggles against
racism, oppression, and fascism. Arguably this collective offered the kind of “deliberately
planned” space for art that Du Bois had advised. But like many artists of his time, White
and Catlett had both come to Mexico already possessing a range of similar experiences,
having been part of Black art collectives in the United States. In spaces such as Chicago’s
Art and Crafts Guild (which later became the Southside Community Art Center), or New
York’s Harlem Arts Center (which became the George Washington Carver School),
Black artists organized themselves towards a cultural negation of racial capitalism. Like
Charles White and Catlett, a number of artists would go on to Mexico or would be
strongly influenced by Mexican artists. Similarly, a number of Mexican artists would
come to be profoundly influenced by these Black artists, particularly during their travels
in the U.S. and in their own efforts to resist racial capitalism on the cultural terrain. In
radical collectives, artists from Chicago to New York and Mexico City were able to heed
Du Bois’ admonition, creating spaces to contest the color line and class exploitation at a
global scale.
As these artists were well aware, the cultural struggle was not simply a rebuttal of
images produced by cinema. In addition to contesting racist caricatures in film, the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
3
W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward An Autobiography of a Race Concept (New
York: Schocken Books, 1940), 202-203.

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circulation of scenes of racist terror in print prompted the critical response of artists. As
African American artist John Wilson explains:
Above all, the kinds of images that affected me as a young man were gotten from
picking up a newspaper … and seeing pictures of black men, burnt, lynched, and
tortured. Once every two or three months there would be a lynching. Emotionally,
I felt that every one of these victims was me because white racists were out to
subdue, dehumanize and kill black men, and ultimately, intimidate the entire
black community.
4

During his time in Mexico, Wilson continued to be moved by these images, explaining
that the news of “racially motivated lynchings” often “seeped down to me from the
States” and “prompted me to express my feelings about these horrors directly in my
work.”
5
The images of lynched Black bodies functioned in tandem with the fictionalized
caricatures of Black life found in film. Indeed, the staged images of subjection in cinema
helped legitimate and naturalize the lynchings that endured as ghastly newspaper images
throughout the Depression and beyond.
6
These images of racist carnage and sadism
compelled Wilson to use his art, “to create and shape images that would exorcise these
kinds of experiences.” He concluded, “I was trying to make sense out of them or
concretize them so that I could deal with them.”
7

Black people living among the conceits of racial caricature, as it was expressed in
cinema, and depictions of expendability in newspaper images of lynchings, had to carve
out identities within and against the settled heft of these representations. Artists who
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
4
Quoted in Stacy I. Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature,
1930-1953 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 103-104.
5
Ibid.
6
John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York:
Knopf, 1974), 359; Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History
of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum International, 2006) 15; Ethnic Notions, VHS,
directed by Marlon Riggs (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1986).
7
Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism, 103-4.

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struggled against these images performed an act of clarification, enabling others to see
them and permitting them to see themselves. This deliberate planning was thus a radical
act of self-preservation. But this work also had global implications. Film had long been
enlisted as a global emissary of U.S. capital. More effective than printed manuals or
lectures from visiting company directors, film could speedily dispense attitudes and racial
management strategies for the regulation of colonized people and imperial subjects who
provided the essential labor for U.S. investments abroad.
8
Just as they functioned in
domestic spaces at home, these images enabled, among other things, the hyper
exploitation of a racialized segment of the labor force and concurrently, the generalized
degradation of labor relations for all workers. In other words, the damage was not
confined to the racialized groups being caricatured. Everyone suffered as a result of the
production and these images’ circulation, in both material and deeply psychic ways. To
contest cinematic images was to confront the ideological might and roughly consolidated
interests of U.S. capital in the period. How then would artists, singularly armed with a
pen and a personal sense of outrage, offer a serious counter? What spaces would they
collectively develop to sustain an artistic struggle against racial capitalism and white
supremacy?
This chapter examines the convergence spaces of art collectives in the late years
of the Great Depression into the early years of the Second World War, a period when
artists produced forceful rebuttals to the prevailing consciousness of their day. It first
considers the impacts of film as the major site of cultural production in the period and the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
8
Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in
American Theater And Film Before World War II (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
2007) passim; V.J. Jerome, “The Negro in Hollywood Films” (New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1950),
4, 8.

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methods artists had available to respond. It then considers the organizing efforts of artists
in Mexico and the U.S. to produce a revolutionary internationalist cultural infrastructure,
by which I mean the establishment of physical and organizational spaces to support the
cultural negation of racial capitalism. Finally, it considers what specific work this
infrastructure produced in an effort to rebut the psychic and cultural violence of white
supremacy.
9

The Psychic Life of Racial Capitalism
Artists like Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White understood how racism, as one
scholar has noted, “feeds on underground streams of sensibilities.”
10
Overturning the
social order would therefore require the production of an alternate consciousness.
11
As
some artists would come to realize, racial capitalism operates through a kind of psychic
dimension, holding sway over instincts, language, and subjectivities, as much as it
structured the social relations, organization, and ideologies of capital accumulation. This
understanding often motivated their artistic expression in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
The process of addressing this psychic realm and training new subjectivities
meant that artists would have to confront an awesome onslaught of images, laden with
the sensibilities shaped by Jim Crow and industrial capital, particularly those images
animated through the medium of film. As a Depression era film reviewer wrote, “’I can
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
9
For a discussion of “infrastructure of feeling” see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Life in Hell: How
Capitalism Saving Capitalism from Capitalism Should Fire Our Political Imagination,” Paper presented at
the UC Berkeley Center for Race & Gender, Berkeley, California, October 29, 2009.
10
George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport:
Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972), 128.
11
Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1978), 36.

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no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving
images.’”
12
As viewers’ consciousness was overloaded by the repetition of images,
radical artists were charged to struggle over this psychic space with their art. During the
1930s, artists had to contend with the fact that the psychic life of racial capitalism was
ceaselessly regenerated through cinema.
With as many as ninety-five million people going to the movies a week, the
dominant cultural form of the Depression was unmistakably film. As C.L.R. James
observed, filmmakers banked on their ability to appeal to a “common collectivized social
attitude.”
13
Men and women, who felt robbed of their dignity, purpose, and future during
the economic crisis, often witnessed their own sense of besiegement reflected back to
them on the screen. But successful films in the period avoided being too literal about the
stark realities engulfing their audiences. While newspapers, political speeches, and novels
could address controversial social questions and even propose alternative political
solutions, James reasons that there was a “common agreement” between filmmakers and
their audiences that such subjects would not be explicitly breached in film. Films
succeeded to the extent they could give logic and public expression to sublimated
feelings.
14
Their power lay in their capacity to stir emotions, both the surface and the
subterranean. They helped cultivate a consciousness of race and class amenable to
prevailing conditions. As Cedric Robinson suggests, films helped construct social
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
12
Quoted in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 238.
13
C.L.R. James, American Civilization (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 136.
14
Ibid., 123.

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systems wherein race helped justify existing power relations. These systems, he labels
“racial regimes.”
15

Whiteness, and its purported guarantees of safety, prosperity, and opportunity,
had been profoundly ruptured during the 1930s. Films of the period reflected this break
and uniquely appealed to a besieged white identity both at home and abroad. New
dramatic genres dominated the period including gangster films like Public Enemy (1931),
jungle fantasies like King Kong (1933), and the ongoing trend of Southern fantasy films,
most famously Gone With the Wind (1939). Each genre gained popularity in relation to
its ability to express the sentiments of besieged whiteness. The gangster films reflected
the notorious lives of real life gangsters like Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone, but they found
sustained appeal for other reasons. These films celebrated a new embittered
individualism, where characters operated by their own code of ethics, beyond the law,
pursuing personal vendettas and vigilante violence to seek their own definitions of justice
and absolution. These films also depicted extra-legal violence and aggression as methods
to recover the protagonist’s thwarted sense of masculinity. In the gangster films, James
explains, sublimated violence, sadism, and aggression found cathartic public
expression.
16
The circulation of logics and sentiments within these films were critical to
the phenomenon of racial violence. Lynch mobs, for example, routinely constructed
identical narratives of besiegement, extra-legal codes of ethics, and assertions of thwarted
masculinity to authorize their practices of racist vigilante violence.
17
While not directly
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
15
Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, xii.
16
James, American Civilization, 121-132.
17
Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995), 78-114; Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence
in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 98-115.

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causing incidents of violence, these films endorsed the accepted narratives of
besiegement that both lynch mobs and their apologists used to justify their bloody deeds.
More dangerous than condoning acts of racial violence, these films authorized and
reproduced the sentiments that compelled them.
In a related fashion, Gone with the Wind (1939), along with other Southern
fantasy films that preceded it, induced a simpering nostalgia for the South before
emancipation, and in turn, the racial order of the plantation. Just as Birth of a Nation
(1915) had done many years before to wild acclaim, these films presumed the audience’s
sympathy with the enriched or assailed Southern plantocracy. While these films appealed
to “simpler times” before whiteness had been challenged, this romance of the South
represented an enchantment with an unimpeachably violent racial order. The filmic
depictions of slaves and slave culture rendered poverty a natural and seemingly enjoyable
phenomenon among Black people. As George Rawick notes in his introduction to the
WPA slave narratives, white workers had long imputed their fantasies of pre-industrial
life onto Black bodies, a “pornography” of a past life, constantly longed for and thus,
constantly requiring repression. These projections were redirected to the screen in
Southern fantasy films. In so doing, the psychic life of racial capitalism preceded and
enabled a transformation into a cinematic imagination.
18

Film companies had long been capitalized by investment houses and banks like
Goldman, Sachs, Morgan, and Rockefeller and also by manufacturers like General
Electric, Westinghouse and RCA. During the Depression, these financial backers
increasingly took a management role in film companies. One result was the proliferation
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
18
Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 277; Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, 132-133.

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of jungle films. Seen in isolation, these films, often based on colonial literature, provided
vulgar and racist caricatures of foolish, violent, and over-sexualized African “savages.”
In these films, Africa became a “propitious site” for Americans to project their conceits
about the historic origins of the standing racial order. Companies like RKO or MGM
were literally invested in the production of imperialist racial regimes extending from
Africa, to the Caribbean, to Latin America and beyond. The capital financing these
companies was either directly linked to imperial ventures or stood to indirectly gain from
them. U.S. companies like Firestone were directly invested, for example, in the extraction
of Liberian rubber. Long after the U.S. ended its formal military occupation of Haiti in
1933, Rockefeller continued to profit from its relationship with the National City Bank of
New York, the most influential financial entity in the country. In the hands of film
companies, jungle films reconfigured colonial contexts into caricatures recognizable as
American racial regimes. Significantly, when filming budgets could not accommodate a
flight to Africa, Mexico stood in as a serviceable backdrop. As U.S. capital continued to
be deeply invested in Mexican land, labor and resources, and as film companies were
simultaneously invested in racial regimes, which depicted Mexicans as buffoons and
villains, the interchangeability of locations was more apt than accidental.
19

Commenting about cultural production in this period, Walter Benjamin noted the
radical potential and destructive capacities of mass culture. His 1936 essay “The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” offers an early meditation on the political
work of perception. Benjamin contemplates the work of mass produced culture, like film,
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
19
Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 329-347; Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop:
Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2006), 27-39; Steven Bender, Greasers and Gringos: Latinos, Law, and the American Imagination (New
York: New York University, 2003), passim.

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by likening it to architecture. Its impact occurred “much less through rapt attention than
by noticing the object in incidental fashion.”
20
Rather than in deep contemplation,
messages were received nearly by distraction. Through the “kaleidoscopic speed” of
repetition, images became commonplace, breeding an indifference of familiarity, a type
of “invisibility of sight.”
21
Combating images of racial violence and subordination meant
confronting people’s subconscious engagement with images. Just as film was able to
engage widespread sublimated desires and feelings of rage and dread, artists needed to
cultivate alternate messages and sensibilities. In face of film’s might, they would need to
utilize mediums to counter the potency of cinematic images.
Charles White noted that his medium followed from the choice of his message, “I
guess the most important thing … for me has always been to say something that is
meaningful … much more important than the media I use.”
22
One of White’s preferred
mediums was graphic art. Graphic art could attempt to counteract the mass production
and dissemination of film images if it could similarly be mass-produced and distributed.
This was not without historic precedent. Images were reproducible at a mass scale before
the printed word ever was. Before Gutenberg’s printing press, woodcuts and lithographs
reproduced images at high volumes, anticipating the photographic image and later the
cinematic image.
23
Black artists during the Depression were drawn to these same graphic
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
20
Benjamin, Illuminations, 240.
21
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang,
1981), 19-20; Hallie Flanagan, Arena (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1940), 45; John Berger, Ways
of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1977), 130; Hortense Spillars,
Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 457.
22
Oral history interview with Charles Wilbert White, 1965 Mar. 9, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution.
23
Benjamin, Illuminations, 219.

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art methods of lithograph and woodcut alongside drawing. The efficiency of their
circulation depended on the ease with which people could encounter the images. Graphic
art that appeared on the covers of cheap magazines or within the pages of highly
circulated radical publications enabled a greater frequency of interaction than an art
gallery. Images reprinted in magazines like The Crisis, Opportunity, or Communist Party
publications such as the Daily Worker or New Masses were routinely torn out and hung
on the walls of kitchens, bars, bedrooms, and barbershops.
24
White was most proud when
he heard that his work was circulating widely, learning, for instance, that a group of
Alabama sharecroppers had pooled their money to purchase a small portfolio of White’s
prints, and split the images amongst themselves.
25
While the images could be put in
motion through dissemination, White’s graphic art itself was also influenced by Thomas
Hart Benton’s theories of motion. With this influence, White directed the movement of
viewers’ eyes and also modulated the rhythm of their engagement with his work.
26

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
24
Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism, 19.
25
White, “Path of a Negro Artist,” 43.
26
Barnwell, Charles White, 26.

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Figure 15: ‘”Homenje a José Guadalupe Posada (Homage to José Guadalupe Posada)”
by Leopoldo Méndez. Woodcut, 1956
Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries

In a similar and influential fashion, graphic art had been foundational to the
cultural infrastructure of revolutionary Mexico. Mexican artists had long been the key
articulators of popular grievances. The beloved illustrator, José Guadalupe Posada, was a
central inspiration for the Mexican muralists as well as the artists in the Taller de Gràfica
Popular (TGP). In the years leading up to the Revolution, for example, Posada’s cartoon
calaveras (skeletons) had whimsically caricatured the daily pleasures, pains, and fears of
the masses as well as the excesses and impunity of the ruling class and foreign
capitalists.
27
During a period of repressive political, economic, and ideological control,
Posada’s illustrations seditiously mocked those in power, provoking wry insubordinate
laughter throughout the country and perhaps, a collective realization that the sound before
the fury could be found in such a chuckle.
28
Posada’s broadsheets were mass-produced
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
27
Carlos Cortez, ed., Viva Posada! (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 2002), passim.
28
Patrick Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery, 1890-1910. (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1998), passim; Diane Miliotes, Jose Guadalupe Posada and the Mexican
Broadside. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); “The sound before the fury” is a phrase borrowed
from the Attica manifesto, delivered by prisoner Elliot James “L.D.” Barkley during the 1971 uprising in

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and printed on cheap paper, marking, as one scholar has noted, the “dawn of urban mass
popular culture in Mexico City.”
29
The daily production of cheap cartoons was a
progenitor of the comic strip and perhaps a forerunner of the cartoon film. As later artists
like TGP founder Leopoldo Mèndez observed, Posada’s method owed itself to a form of
filmic representation.
Posada famously produced his engravings out of a street-level office before a
large street-facing window. In Mèndez’ rendering, Posada, a large stern man, looks out
onto the street where a police officers on horseback are beating a group of men. Etching
tools in hand, Posada’s act of witnessing and removal has the quality of a hidden camera.
More than simple surveillance, Posada is depicted in a critical process of representation.
By caricaturing the police, and elsewhere, the bourgeoisie, foreign interests, the state, and
the public, Posada was able to animate the structuring power relations. In his depiction,
Mèndez inserted the revolutionary thinker Ricardo Flores Magòn in the background
witnessing Posada’s work, thus demonstrating how Posada would foreshadow both
political journalism and public appeals for revolutionary change. Mèndez’ own homage is
also suggestive of the ways in which Posada inspired the graphic popular work of the
TGP, in particular, and the Mexican revolutionary tradition of mural-making more
broadly.
30
Indeed, famed Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco grew up watching
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Attica Prison. See Jordan T. Camp, “The Sound Before the Fury: A Genealogy of Neoliberal Racial and
Security Regimes” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2011), 115.
29
Susan Valerie Richards, “Imagining the Political: El Taller de Gràfica Popular in Mexico, 1937-
1949” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2001), 4.
30
Deborah Caplow, Leopoldo Mèndez: Revolutionary Art and the Mexican Print (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2007), 25-28.

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Posada produce his illustrations. Living near Posada’s office, Orozco, would sneak in to
the office as a child, quietly pocketing the metal shavings that fell from artist’s desk.
31

The most popular mediums of the WPA art projects, as they had been for the
Mexican revolutionary artists, were murals. Mural painting offered some of the most
accessible forms of public images, which ostensibly could compete with the mass
projections of film images. Murals commissioned by the WPA appeared in public
buildings like schools, post offices, libraries, courthouses, and hospitals where people
came in daily contact with them. Students, patients, library goers and passer-bys all
animated the murals with their own movement and regular encounters. Whether or not
people interpreted the murals in the way they were intended is another matter. It can be
said that the medium of the mural possessed the potential to reshape landscapes. They
introduced familiarity with new concepts and suggested alternate power relationships
through images. Art became a repository of alternate ways of being, which might later be
realized.
32

Drawing from the techniques of the Mexican artists, muralists consciously
incorporated elements of film into their production.
33
Mexican muralists who came to the
U.S. had enhanced their practice and in turn developed experimental “filmic” methods.
Like White, David Alfaro Siqueiros was particularly fascinated with techniques that
incorporated movement into still images. He developed a method of “curved-surface
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
31
José Clemente Orozco, José Clemente Orozco: An Autobiography (Mineola: Dover
Publications, 1962), 8.
32
Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 21, 161.
33
Jose Orozco incorporated elements of motion in his own work, considering the relationship
between graphic objects a type of visual poetry designed to “set the reader-spectator’s physical senses in
motion.” MacKinley Helm, Man of Fire J.C. Orozco: An Interpretive Memoir (Boston: The Institute of
Contemporary Art, 1953), 85.

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painting with multiple-exposure figures.”
34
Instead of engaging head-on with the art, the
spectator is made to occupy the role of the movie camera, animating a mural with his or
her movement. This method was enhanced in discussion with the Russian filmmaker
Sergei Eisenstein during his time in Mexico in 1931 while filming ¡Que Viva Mèxico!
Siqueiros began to employ the use of the camera in the production of his murals,
projecting images onto walls to paint, for example, his 1932 America Tropical in Los
Angeles. As he had done with his Mexico City murals, Siqueiros was conscious of the
performance of painting in public places. At the Olvera Street site, near a railway
terminal and City Hall, he produced in view of the “flow of traffic and millions of
people.” The production of the mural took on a dramatic quality as he carefully revealed
different elements at different times for an expectant public who either sat and studied the
work, or watched distractedly on their way somewhere else.
35
At 1 am the night before
the mural’s debut, Siqueiros added the central and most controversial element, a Mexican
peasant, lashed to a cross, under the eye of an American eagle. “When the scaffolding
finally came down,” according to one reviewer, “onlookers gasped.”
36
America Tropical:
Oprimida y Destrozada por los Imperialismos [Tropical America: Oppressed and
Destroyed by Imperialism], the mural’s full name, sought to link the oppression of
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
34
Shifra M. Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and
the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 95.
35
Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas, 93.
36
Arthur Millier, “Power Unadorned Marks Olvera Street Fresco,” Los Angeles Times, October
16, 1932.

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indigenous Mexicans by U.S. imperialism to the deportations of Mexicans in California.
37

Not long after the unveiling, the mural was quickly painted over.
Debates raged throughout the 1930s about radical art and representation. As the
global threat of fascism grew and the color line deepened, political movements sought to
develop aesthetic practices that could most effectively contest these forces and also
project hope of a new world. The official art policy of the Soviet Union was Socialist
Realism, a literal and didactic artistic style which promoting the values and goals of
socialism. Its use by radicals around the world was subject to debate and interpretation. A
broad coalition of anti-fascist forces known as the Popular Front considered various
methods, and broadly promoted an aesthetic of social realism, seeking symbols and
imaginative visual language to transform social relations at local and global scales.
38

Organizations like the Association des Ecrivains y Artistes Rèvolutionnaires (AEAR) in
Paris and the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionnaires (LEAR) in Mexico City, and
the Artists Union in the U.S. sought to channel radical artistic efforts against the growth
of fascism.
39
Artists met in formally organized international congresses and also in more
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
37
Philip Stein, Siqueiros: His Life and Works (New York: International Publishers Co, 1994), 79-
80; Rubén Martínez, “Bringing ‘America Tropical’ Back to Life,” Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2010.
38
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Verso, 1998), 118-123; Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism, 2.
39
Jennifer Jolly, “Art of the Collective: David Alfaro Siqueiros, Josep Renau and their
Collaboration at the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate,” Oxford Art Journal 31:1 (2008): 135.

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casual groupings to communicate with their counterparts from around the world.
40
Many
looked to Mexico for grounded, popular aesthetic alternatives.
41

Leon Trotsky had found political refuge in Mexico with the help of Diego Rivera.
During his stay, Trotsky would meet and discuss the role, function and development of
art with Rivera and French surrealist, Andrè Breton. Together they would theorize about
art as a hegemonizing force, as a mechanism to unleash the political imagination, and as
dialectical expression of revolutionary action, which both reflected and helped to
constitute the world anew. Against the dictates of Soviet realism, Trotsky believed that
art should be drawn from the world being refashioned around it, rather than coldly drawn
from what he considered to be dogmatic language and theories. For him the Mexican
artists offered a profound alternative.
42
“Do you wish to see with your own eyes the
hidden springs of the social revolution?” asked Trotsky, “Look at the frescoes of Rivera.
Do you wish to know what revolutionary art is? Looks at the frescoes of Rivera.”
43

To produce libratory images—and at the same time encourage people to unlearn
the language, concepts, instincts, and images to which they had become accustomed—
was no small task.
44
It necessitated, among other things, the construction of an alternate
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
40
Joseph Freeman “Artists in Action” New Masses (February 23, 1937): 6-8; Brent Hayes
Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of the Black Internationalism
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Theodor Adorno, et. al. Aesthetics and Politics (London:
Verso, 2007), 9-59.
41
Andrew Hemingway, "American Communists View Mexican Muralism: Critical and Artistic
Responses," Crónicas: El Muralismo, Producto de la Revolución en América 8-9 (March 2001-02): 13-43.
42
Olivia Gall, Trotsky en Mèxico y la Vida Polìtica en el Periodo de Càrdenas, 1937-1940
(Mèxico, D.F.: Collecciòn Prolemas de Mèxico, 1991), 89-96; Andrè Breton and Diego Rivera (& Leon
Trotsky), “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” in On Literature and Art, Leon Trotsky (New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1970), 115-121; Paul Buhle and Susan Smulyan, Review: Art of the People,” American
Quarterly, 53:4 (December 2001): 670-690.
43
Trotsky, On Literature and Art, 10.
44
Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, 37.

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cultural apparatus, starting with the production of alternate spaces within which to do the
work. While film companies had studios, editing rooms, sound booths, set design
departments, and screening theaters, the challenge for radical artists was to find spaces
where they could develop their work and refine their craft. Artists involved in radical
collectives, like Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, and John Wilson understood that the
production of collective art spaces had an intimate relationship with the production of
alternate psychic spaces.
45
As their experiences, along with the experiences of other
artists like Hale Woodruff, Jacob Lawrence, and Charles Alston proved, these radical
spaces, just as the art they produced, would be dialectically developed in relationship to
the art and artists of the Mexican Revolution.
46

Revolutionary Cultural infrastructure
The coming of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 would have been apparent to
those wandering the halls of the Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos in Mexico City.
Resentful of the traditional European and, in particular, Spanish styles of their
instruction, Mexican art students had begun scouring their neighborhoods, painting and
drawing the men and women of Mexico City’s barrios. Former student José Clemente
Orozco remembers, “On every canvas there began to appear, bit by bit, like a dawn, the
Mexican landscape, and familiar forms and the colors.”
47
Recording the world as the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
45
Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press),
14.
46
On the politics of the “open-ended process of cultural creation” between Black and Chicano
artists, see, Luis Alvarez and Daniel Widener, “A History of Black and Brown: Chicana/o–African
American Cultural and Political Relations,” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 33:1 (Spring 2008): 151.
47
José Clemente Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, 21.

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students saw it and depicting the people who inhabited it was a, “first and still timid step
toward liberation from foreign tyranny,” according to Orozco.
48
To the consternation of
many Mexican people, the government had chosen to celebrate the 100
th
year of
Mexico’s independence from Spain with an art exhibition of contemporary Spanish art.
Insulted by the government’s decision to exalt art from its former colonizer and equally
affronted by the ongoing economic and political dominance of foreign powers, people
protested the exhibition. The Academy students ambitiously assembled an alternative
collection of their studies of Mexican life and landscape. Paintings were lifted before a
raucous crowd, who roared their approval or hissed their disdain. The art “filled the patio
of the Academy, the corridors, and whatever halls were available.” In this way, art was
chosen by popular demand and people communicated their desire to see their lives
reflected in popular culture. As Orozco recalled in 1942, “There has never been another
such showing in Mexico”
49
Permission was granted for the students to curate their own
exposition of paintings and murals. On the twentieth day of November, as the students
prepared their exhibit, the Mexican Revolution erupted, a moment of transformation
foretold in the very paintings they had raised and in the murals they were poised to
complete.
Besides Orozco, other students at the Academy included David Alfaro Siqueiros,
and Diego Rivera, men who would come to be known as los tres grandes [the three
greats], of Mexican art. Through the continued organizing of art students, their
participation in trade union movements, and continued popular support for the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
48
Ibid.
49
Ibid., 28.

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development of Mexican art, culture became a primary component of the revolutionary
movement. The development of Mexico’s national cultural infrastructure became one of
the Revolution’s most innovative and internationally inspiring developments. By the
1920s, the Mexican government was subsidizing the work of artists, in effect, “giving
them walls” on which to inscribe the new ideals of the revolution.
50
The country’s
cultural awakening would come to have profound effects on the rest of the world in both
direct and indirect ways.
By the 1930s, many Black American artists had been moved by the intention of
Mexican artists who wanted to produce art about poor and working class people, for
those people, and in order to advance an internationalist politics that would benefit them
and all oppressed people. They shared with these artists a radical anti-racist ethic, a
refusal to promote ruling class interests or its racist aesthetics.
51
Throughout the period,
Black artists in major U.S. cities had organized their artistic efforts and resources. In
some places, they had organized in guilds or unions to draw mutual support from one
another. Many were able to cultivate their talents independently or through Communist
Party affiliated John Reed Clubs and exhibitions, efforts which later became formalized
in the 1930s as the WPA began to fund artists and public art centers across the country.
52

In the process of developing in this infrastructure, Black artists began to learn about the
Mexican artists who were not only pursuing similar goals but had been successful in
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
50
Diego Rivera, “Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art” Modern Quarterly 6:3 (Autumn 1932);
David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America 1910-1990 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)
9; Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
51
Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins and Shifra M. Goldman, In the Spirit of Resistance: African-American
Modernists and the Mexican Muralist School (New York: The American Federation of Arts, 1996), 9.
52
Denning, The Cultural Front, 45.

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gaining widespread public support in order to do so. They encountered other WPA
funded artists who had been to Mexico and worked with Diego Rivera, David Alfaro
Siqueiros, or José Clemente Orozco. Mexican artists in turn were coming to the U.S. and
meeting with Black artists and displaying works in their exhibitions. For many Black
American artists, Mexico became a “Mecca” where they were able to nurture their radical
artistic training. These links between Black American artists and Mexican artists
produced a significant cultural infrastructure designed to expose the conditions of racial
capitalism in an effort to change them.
53

In 1932, a group of visual artists formed the Art and Crafts Guild in the South
Side of Chicago. Given that there were few easily accessible venues for Black artists to
receive formal training, exhibit their work, or expand their craft, artists like Margaret
Burroughs, George Neal, William McGill, and Bernard Goss began their own Guild. The
group met once every Sunday, alternating between one another’s homes. Later the Guild
rented a garage as a studio, which doubled as a home for some of the artists. George
Neal, who was enrolled in the highly respected Art Institute of Chicago, was the only
member of the collective receiving formal training. During the Guild’s Sunday sessions,
Neal would share what he had learned the previous week in class, offering guidance and
instruction in technical aspects of art production. Members painted and drew the world
around them, the predominately Black Southside of Chicago, one of the areas in the
country hardest hit by the crisis. In 1931 alone, the Chicago bailiff’s office had thrown
1,400 families out of their homes. Relief offices were filled. Schools were closed. The
poverty that already existed prior to the financial crash was intensified. The Guild
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
53
Curators of Culture, DVD, directed by Rita Coburn Whack, (Chicago: WYCC-TV, 2005);
LeFalle-Collins and Goldman, In the Spirit of Resistance, 9.

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illustrated scenes rarely depicted in Chicago galleries, namely the lives of the poor and
working class Black people whose communities surrounded those galleries. In the
beginning, Guild artists practically had to “lasso” audiences to view their exhibitions,
which were held “in whatever spaces were available” as founding member Margaret
Burroughs noted. These spaces included church basements, the YMCA, Boys Clubs, and
occasionally vacant lots. The Guild gained popularity over time and with the initiation of
fundraising parties, which would morph into elaborate costume balls later in the decade.
The money raised as “scholarships” covered the costs for one member to attend night
classes at the Institute and, in turn, continue to train the other members in the tradition of
George Neal.
54

Charles White was embraced as a very young man by the scene. At fourteen he
had developed his talent in the void of opportunities, shearing his education from the
corners of public resources. While his mother worked as a domestic, White went to the
public libraries and learned to draw out of books, or alternately wandered the galleries of
the Art Institute which were open to the public. At the park he would set up paints within
earshot of the Art Institute students, listening in on their lessons and sheepishly asking for
instruction. He was quickly recognized for his talent, winning awards in schools and also
being contracted by a sign painter, who exploited his talent and non-union status. White
remembers that he was, “unconscious of trade unions” since his schools certainly, “never
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
54
Margaret Goss Burroughs, “Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center: A Personal
Recollection,” in Art in Action: American Art Centers and the New Deal, ed. John Franklin White
(Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1987),132; White, “Path of a Negro Artist,” 37; Robert Bone and Richard A.
Courage, The Muse in Bronzville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932-1950 (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 148-149; Elizabeth R. Schroeder, “The Chicago Black
Renaissance: Exercises in Aesthetic Ideology and Cultural Geography in Bronzeville, 1932-1945” (Ph.D.
diss., Saint Louis University 2008), 120; Bill Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American
Cultural Politics, 1935-46 (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1999), 77-82.

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mentioned them.”
55
His experience with the Guild was to be the first of many politicizing
experiences White would have with organized groups of artists. Like him, they made
time after their work as bellhops, cooks, maids, dishwashers, and porters and carved out
time on Sundays to produce art. He joined the Guild in 1932 after learning about the
group from an article in the Chicago Defender.
56

The Guild developed during the Chicago Renaissance where figures such as
writers Margaret Goss Burroughs and Richard Wright, dancer Katherine Dunham, poet
Gwendolyn Brooks, photographer Gordon Parks, scholar Horace Cayton, and organizer
Harry Haywood flourished.
57
Like the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago’s artists,
intellectuals, and organizers were part of a vibrant intellectual and political culture. These
artists mixed in various venues including the exhibitions and fundraisers for the Art and
Crafts Guild, particularly in their extravagant costume balls where artists produced
elaborate costumes and sets. These spaces enabled convergences between intellectuals
like Wright and White, who were exposed to artistic collectives through the John Reed
Clubs organized by the CP. As a young man, White took art classes with Morris
Topchevsky, a member of the John Reed Club who had spent time in Mexico with the
Taller de Gràfica Popular. Through these types of relationships, participants in Chicago’s
cultural scene found connection to a global context, building solidarity with Russia’s
soviet workers’ state, developing support for the Spanish people’s fight against fascism,
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
55
White, “Path of a Negro Artist,” 36-37.
56
Barnwell, Charles White, 16.
57
Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928-35 (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2008), 50-52; Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism, 17; Erik S. McDuffie,
Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 202; Schroeder, The Chicago Black Renaissance, 138.

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167
and to varying degrees, supporting the Mexican, Nicaraguan, and Haitian people’s fights
against U.S. imperialism.
58

The Guild came to co-exist with the Works Progress Administration (WPA),
which federally funded public projects and employed artists. The influence of the
Mexican artists was so strong that Edward Bruce, head of the Fine Arts in the WPA,
vowed to stop the radical content appearing in the early murals by preventing the
“Mexican invasion on the border.”
59
Not only were individual Mexican muralists great
influences on WPA mural artists, the very inspiration for the WPA came from Mexico.
Throughout Mexico’s revolutionary and post-revolutionary years 1910-1940, the nation
subsidized cultural work, as well as a prominent public mural program. This national
effort effectively reframed artists as “cultural workers” in service to the public.
60
The
effects were dramatic. As a friend of FDR’s recounted to the then President:
The Mexican artists have produced the greatest national school of mural painting
since the Italian Renaissance. Diego Rivera tells me that it was only possible
because [President] Obregon allowed artists to work at plumber's wages in order to
express on walls of government buildings the social ideals of the Mexican
Revolution.
61

Influenced by Mexico’s program, the U.S. government made the bold move to subsidize
similar national public art programs in the United States through the Public Works of Art
Programs (PWAP) from 1933-34 (which later became the WPA).
62
The PWAP and later
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
58
Bill Mullen, Popular Fronts, 84-93.
59
Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas, 286.
60
Shifra M. Goldman, “Six Women Artists of Mexico,” Women’s Art Journal 3:2 (Autumn, 1982,
- Winter, 1983): 2.

61
Shifra Goldman, “Resistance and Identity: Street Murals of Occupied Aztlan,” Latin American
Literary Review 5:10 (1977): 124.
62
Ibid.

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168
WPA were the first New Deal experiments to employ artists. The WPA projects
embraced the principle, said White, “one practically unheard of up to then in United
States history- that the arts were socially useful work.”
63
As with all the New Deal
Programs, the PWAP was not an equal employer. The PWAP, which preceded the WPA,
provided employment for thousands of artists across the country, but counted only ten
Black artists in their ranks.
64

A professor at Howard University recognized this disparity and encouraged his art
students to apply.
65
One of those was a reluctant young artist named Elizabeth Catlett.
Catlett qualified for the federal program. Her assignment for the PWAP first exposed her
to the murals of Diego Rivera as well as the paintings of Miguel Covarrubias, a Mexican
artist who had spend a significant amount of time in Harlem, depicting life there in a
collection called Caricatures of Harlem (1929). The encounter with these works greatly
influenced Catlett’s own. As Catlett’s biographer would later note, “To emulate the
Mexican artists was not only an aesthetic choice. It was also a political decision with
lasting repercussions.”
66
For Catlett, this encounter sparked an interest in the Mexico and
aided her developing critical consciousness about race, capitalism and gender, the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
63
White, “Path of a Negro Artist,” 38.
64
“1934: A New Deal for Artists,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.,
November 4, 2009.
65
Samella Lewis, The Art of Elizabeth Catlett (Los Angeles: Museum of African American Art
and Handcraft Studios, 1984), 10.
66
Lisa E. Farrington, Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 119; Melanie Ann Herzog, Elizabeth Catlett: An American
Artist in Mexico (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 53.

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169
repercussions of which would eventually lead her to Mexico where she would spend over
six decades of her life.
67

Charles White became a part of the WPA, working first on easel painting and then
murals in 1938. On joining the mural division, White met Mitchell Siporin and Edward
Millman, two radical artists who had been to Mexico to study with the tres grandes and
subsequently sought to translate the radical anti-capitalist ethos of the Mexican
revolutionary art into an American context. These artists helped shape White’s aesthetic
choices alongside his political consciousness.
68
White joined a newly formed Artist
Union to protest the inequality of the WPA programs and its failure to hire a sufficient
number of qualified Black artists. He recalled, “We picketed the project. Finally we won.
And so my first lesson on the project dealt not so much with paint as with the role of
unions in fighting for the rights of working people.”
69
With this politicized outlook on art,
White began to appreciate new attitudes toward both art and property relations. The WPA
project put murals in “public possession” as Holger Cahill, head of the Federal Arts
Project believed, making art, “the property of all rather than the hobby of the few.”
70

Murals hung in public buildings and became public entities that could not be sold to
private buyers. For artists like White, as well as Jacob Lawrence, Charles Alston, and
other WPA muralists, a “gratifying new spirit” entered their work with the realization that
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
67
Thalia Gouma-Peterson, “Elizabeth Catlett: The Power of Human Feeling and of Art,” Woman’s
Art Journal 4:1 (Spring-Summer 1983), 49.
68
Mullen, Popular Fronts, 79.
69
White, “Path of a Negro Artist,” 38.
70
White, Art in Action, 160.

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their art was meant for public viewing and appreciation rather than private consumption
after private commission.
71

Furthermore, Chicago artists affiliated with this growing public cultural
infrastructure felt emboldened by the political imperatives of the Mexican muralists. In
1924 David Alfaro Siqueiros published his manifesto for the Mexican Syndicate of
Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, which served as a mission statement for the
mural movement. Describing the new revolutionary art, it read in part, “It is great
because it surges from the people; it is collective, and our own aesthetic aim is to
socialize artistic expression, to destroy bourgeois individualism.”
72
The decision to arm
artists in the United States with paintbrushes had profound implications for a world
convulsing with radical activity. In this latter interwar period, radical sentiment in the
U.S. resounded with revolts occurring globally, from general strikes in Mexican railroads
and oil fields to U.S. docks and factories. Images of newly imagined worlds could be
seen in federally commissioned murals. When they were not painted over or hidden
behind American flags, murals adorned local schools, post offices, and libraries which
depicted scenes of integrated classrooms, multi-racial workers reading revolutionary
literature together, organizing strikes, or even of war mongers surrendering to mutinying
soldiers.
73
The powerful dialectic between art and revolutionary practice was expressed in
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
71
Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism, 51; Barnwell, Charles White, 26; White, “Path of a Negro
Artist,” 38; David and Cecile Shapiro “The Artists’ Union in America,” in The Other America: Art and the
Labour Movement in the United States, eds. Philip Foner and Reinhard Schultz (London: Journeyman
Press, 1985) 93-96.
72
Rick A. Lòpez, “The Noche Mexicana and the Exhibition of Popular Arts: Two Ways of
Exalting Indianness” in The Eagle And the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940,
ed. Mary Kay Vaughn, and Steven E. Lewis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 44.
73
Anthony W. Lee, Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco's
Public Murals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta
Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 256-7.

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WPA projects as it had also done in Mexican murals. As Diego Rivera wrote in 1932,
“the importance of an artist can be measured directly by the size of the multitudes whose
aspirations and whose life he serves to condense and translate.”
74
The murals could
reappropriate prosaic public spaces and familiar, mundane images and reimagine them as
sites of transformation projecting visions of liberation.
Critical to a public art program’s success was the development of an artistic
culture, one that not only funded artwork but one that also created spaces wherein people
could be exposed to art, celebrate it, and produce it themselves.
75
In this respect, the
WPA-sponsored Community Art Centers Project as part of the Federal Arts Project
offering federal subsidies to enhance and make more permanent structures for art
production and instruction.
76
The WPA would provide funding if a community could
demonstrate their organizational capacity by selecting an administrative board, raising the
initial funds, and find a suitable location. In this way the Art and Crafts Guild became the
WPA sponsored South Side Community Art Center. Funding was found locally not only
through the annual Artists and Models Ball and exhibitions but also by community
outreach. A “mile of dimes” campaign raided over $20,000 from across the community.
Teachers and artists joined gamblers, sex workers, and white uptown gallery owners in
their contributions, all of whom felt invested in the project. David Ross, speaking on
behalf of the other members, said at the South Side Center’s official opening, “Here was
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
74
Diego Rivera, "The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art," The Modern Quarterly 4:3 (Autumn
1932): 51-57.
75
“We revolutionized the methods of teaching drawing and art to children,” Rivera remembers,
“with the result that the children of Mexico began producing artistic works in the course of their elementary
school development.” Rivera, “Revolutionary Spirit,” 61.
76
Lewis, Elizabeth Catlett, 159.

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our chance to stop shining shoes all week and painting on Sundays. This gave us a means
of learning as well as earning our living as artists.”
77
With free art classes, exhibition
space, as well as a place for artists to discuss and develop their own work, the South Side
Community Art Center was “tremendous for the community.”
78

In 1942, Elizabeth Catlett came to Chicago to study lithography at the South Side
Community Center. Here she was exposed to her first art collective. While Catlett had
advanced training in art at the graduate level and private lessons from professional artists,
the South Side Community Center would profoundly shaped her consciousness about art
and its relationship to radical politics. Catlett had experienced and fought against the
gamut of Jim Crow practices throughout the country. As a high school student in her
hometown of Washington, D.C., she had protested lynching in front of the White House
with a noose around her neck. In her first job out of college as a high school teacher in
North Carolina, she had helped organize a teacher protest against a racial disparity in pay.
As an art teacher at Dillard College, she found that her Black students were barred from
entering a local museum, but brought them in any way, giving most of them their first
experience with art in a museum. On segregated buses she would tear down partitions
and throw them up the aisle, scolding bus drivers that they needed to do their own dirty
work. These experiences all came to inform Catlett’s work.
At the South Side Community Art Center, Catlett was able to develop her skills
alongside other Black artists in a thriving socially conscious environment. “It was a solid
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
77
Quoted in Loa Maie Foushee, “North Carolina’s Community Art Centers” in White, Art in
America, 160.
78
Whack, Curators of Culture, passim.

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group of creative people,” she said.
79
She engaged in political debates about the meaning
of art, representation, and struggles for Black people in Chicago and oppressed people
around the world, with particular emphasis on the role of Mexican artists.
80
The Center
had begun to operate as a celebrated community space, hosting lectures from figures like
Lorraine Williams, one of many artists who had gone to Mexico, as well as club meeting
by groups like the Negro Press Club, performances from the People’s Group Theater, and
events like the Communist Party influenced National Negro Congress’ “Cultural Fiesta.”
At the 1941 “Pan-American” themed Artists and Models Ball, a program which featured
“Latinized” music and dance, Catlett took home top prize as Queen of the Ball for her
costume depicting “Mexico itself,” an assemblage of household drapes and cloth from
friends who had recently visited the country. After her first summer at the Center she
met, befriended, and eventually married Charles White.
81

White and Catlett would leave Chicago, living and working for a short time in the
South. Eventually they moved to New York City where they were immediately wrapped
up in Harlem’s art and cultural scene, encountering an internationalist cultural
infrastructure very similar to the one they had left in Chicago. White and Catlett moved
into the apartment of the actor Kenneth Spencer who was in Hollywood filming Cabin in
the Sky (1943). Their apartment building at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, was a familiar
address for Harlem’s luminaries, variously housing figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Duke
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
79
Herzog, Elizabeth Catlett, 28.
80
Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, “The Mexican Connection: The New Negro and Border Crossings”
American Visions 11:6 (December-January 1996): 20.
81
“The Education of Sculptress Elizabeth Catlett,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 25
(Autumn, 1999): 77; Lynn Norment. “Elizabeth Catlett: Dean of Women Artists,” Ebony (April 1993);
Herzog, Elizabeth Catlett, 24; Mullen, Popular Fronts, 93.

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Ellington, and Thurgood Marshall, many of whom Catlett and White would come to
know.
82
Quickly, they would come to meet a broader New York scene including Charles
Alston, Gwendolyn Bennett, Ben Davis, Aaron Douglas, Langston Hughes, Jacob
Lawrence, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Harry Bellefonte, Jacob Lawrence, Paul Robeson,
and Louise Thompson, artists, activists, and cultural workers who considered their work
in a radical global context.
83

Throughout their time in New York, Catlett and White remained in the orbit of
Mexican art. The presence of Diego Rivera and José Orozco Catlett was still fresh in the
murals they had painted around the city. While some had been destroyed, others for
example, Orozco’s 1931 murals at the New School, including Homecoming of the Worker
of the New Day and Table of Universal Brotherhood, and Rivera’s 1933 murals,
including Mussolini, Modern Industry, Proletarian Unity at the New Workers’ School,
still stood.
84
In 1933, Charles Alston had observed Rivera as he painted his mural Man at
the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center. Jacob Lawrence had observed Orozco as he
painted a mural for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
85
As Catlett studied lithography at
the New York Art Students League, she met the artists Raùl Anguiano, José Chàvez
Morado, and Ignacio Aguirre of the Taller de Gràfica Popular. Aguierre would invite her
to be a part of the TGP and Morado would later give her and Charles White the address
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
82
Barnwell, Charles White, 30.
83
Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism, 23; McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 77, 150; Gerald
Horne, Race Women: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press,
2002), 110.
84
James Oles, South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914-1947
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 137; Desmond Rochfort, Mexican Muralists: Orozco,
Rivera, Siqueiros (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993), 145.
85
Schrieber, Cold War Exiles in Mexico, 34.

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175
of Siqueiros’ mother-in-law who ran a boarding house in Mexico City. These artists as
well as others from Mexico City would have kept abreast of the New York cultural scene
as it was regularly reported on in José Juan Tablada’s “Nueva York de dìa y noche”
column [New York by Day and Night] in the Mexican newspaper El Universal.
86

The 1930s had also seen a number of exhibitions featuring Orozco, Siqueiros, and
Rivera, as well as a number of artists who had been to Mexico to work with them. Shows
hosted by the American Artist Congress Against War and Fascism (1936), the NAACP
(1935), and the Communist Party (1935), for example featured their artwork against
racial violence. Both the NAACP and the Communist Party hosted competing exhibitions
protesting lynching. Both exhibits featured Orozco’s lithograph Hanged Negroes (1930),
a haunting image of four lynched Black men being consumed by fire. Art historians have
observed the stylistic similarities between Orozco’s depictions of lynching and earlier
series he had done about violence suffered during the Mexican revolution.
87
The common
style served to link broader similarities between the two war zones. Also participating in
these shows were members of the TGP (who appeared in the American Artist Congress
Show) and American artists who had traveled to Mexico, such as Japanese American
Isamu Noguchi who displayed his work in both anti-lynching exhibits.
88
Also present in
the NAACP exhibit was Hale Woodruff, a muralist who had gone to Mexico in 1936 to
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
86
Anna Indych-Lòpez, Muralism Without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United
States, 1927-1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009) 6-7.
87
Renato Gonzàlez Mello and Diane Miliotes, Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-
1934 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), 85-87.
88
Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004), 151-160; Helen Langa, “Two Antilynching Art Exhibitions: Politicized
Viewpoints, Racial Perspectives, Gendered Constraints,” Journal of Contemporary African Art (Fall 2006):
96-115; Margaret Rose Vendryes, “Hanging on their Walls: An Art Commentary on Lynching, The
Forgotten 1935 Art Exhibition,” in Race Consciousness; African-American Studies for the New Century,
eds. Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 153-176.

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176
study with los tres grandes, and subsequently painted a three-paneled mural
commemorating the Amistad slave rebellion in Atlanta's Talladega College Slavery
Library upon his return.
89

White and Catlett also encountered artists, cultural workers, and intellectuals,
many of whom had developed within local public community spaces. For example, the
great musical artist Thelonious Monk had found his “second home” during the
Depression at the Columbus Hill Neighborhood Center, a Boys’ (and Girls’) Club in San
Juan Hill. In this space he played basketball, ping-pong, and participated in the music
program, all of which had the greatest influence on his “early development as a musician
and as a young man,” that is, outside his mother.
90
Young Monk might have crossed the
young Jacob Lawrence on his way to the after-school community art workshops at the
Utopia Children’s House in Harlem. Charles Alston was one of many teachers Lawrence
would have who recognized Lawrence’s young talent. Alston would resume teaching
Lawrence when the young man was a member of the Harlem Community Act Center, a
member of the Harlem Artists Guild, and a frequent guest of Alston’s social studio
space.
91

The internationally acclaimed Black artist, Augusta Savage had been key to
organizing space and securing federal and private funding for art production. Her Studio
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
89
Rebecca M. Schreiber, Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of
Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 36-37; Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism,
88-89; Stephanie Mayer and Stephanie Mayer Heydt eds., Rising Up: Hale Woodruff's Murals at Talladega
College (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), passim.
90
Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (New
York: Free Press, 2009), 28-30.
91
Oral history interview with Hale Woodruff, 1968 Nov. 18, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution; Oral history interview with Charles Henry Alston, 1965 Sept. 28, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Oral history interview with Norman Lewis, 1968 July 14, Archives
of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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177
for Arts and Crafts in Harlem became the Harlem Art Workshop, offered free instruction
to around seventy-seven students in 1933. This space, located at 306 West 141
st
Street,
came to affectionately be known as “306.” The artist Charles Alston moved into to 306,
making it his home, studio, as well as a salon for cultural workers living in or passing
through Harlem. Poet Claude McKay became a special influence for Alston. McKay’s
wife Selma Hortense Burke was also an artist who had been shaped by Augusta Savage’s
training and artistic spaces. Other artists included Countee Cullen, Ralph Ellison, Walter
White, Alain Locke, Eugene O’Neil and Aaron Douglas.
92
Here artists discussed social
issues of the day, some eventually forming a Harlem Artists Guild, similar to the Artist’s
Union, but with a greater focus on the particular exclusions of Black artists in the WPA.
With Savage’s lobbying efforts and the help of other artists, notably Alston, she secured
WPA funding, transforming the Workshop into the Harlem Arts Center. In 1936, this
Center was teaching 1,500 students in drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, and
photography.
93

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
92
Schreiber, Cold War Exiles in Mexico, 36; Farrington, Creating Their Own Image, 103-104.
93
Oral history interview with Charles Henry Alston, 1965 Sept. 28, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution.

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178
Figure 16: Charles White and students
“Harlem's Carver School Draws Capacity
Classrooms” The Chicago Defender,
February 5, 1944.

Artists from this milieu joined to
form another community space called the
George Washington Carver School, also known as “A People’s Institute.”
94
Students of
Carver were the cooks, maids, janitors, elevator operators, garment industry workers, and
domestic workers of New York. They quickly transformed the place as their own. Young
artists painted the originally “dreary” walls of the school. A minister volunteered to
“rolled up his sleeves and glued together chairs” for students to sit on. McCrory’s Five
and Ten Cent Store up the block donated a grand piano. In the first term, 157 people
came from trade unions, fraternal organizations, youth groups and churches. After three
years, enrollment rose to 702 students. The curriculum was determined by what the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
94
Ramon Lowe, “Harlem’s Carver School Draws Capacity Classrooms,” Chicago Defender,
February 5, 1944.

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179
students needed.
95
Popular classes included a Negro History Class classes taught by Alain
Locke and E. Franklin Frazier; Irwin Freudndlish of Julliard taught music appreciation;
Dorothy Homer, head librarian at the 135
th
street library held a class on “Current Books
and Social Classes.” “”But the most popular class,” notes the Chicago Defender not long
after the center opened, “was the one called ‘How to Make a Dress.’”
96
Due to high
demand, an advanced course was added. Dividing her time between teaching a sculpture
class, Catlett taught this popular class, remembering:
When I worked a the Carver school, theoretically a Marxist institution, people
said, ‘How do you teach Marxism making a dress?’ And I said, Well, while we’re
sewing, we talk. And when a lady says, ‘I have to leave early to get my news,’ I
say, ‘Do you know what the news thinks of you and black people?’ And we’d get
into a discussion of why newspapers are printed, and who reads them, what they
support, what they don’t support … it was the way that we worked.
97

Through this experience, Catlett witnessed the profound shortcomings of the New
Deal. The Black working class stood to gain the most from federal relief legislation and
New Deal programs but were the group most ruthlessly excluded from benefits - in
particular, to social security benefits, government grants, elderly poor assistance, and
unemployment insurance.
98
Despite the promise of the New Deal to offer relief evenly
throughout the country, the 1930’s witnessed the solidification of racial disparities. The
Black unemployment rate in Northern cities actually doubled that of whites by the end of
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
95
Gouma-Peterson. “Elizabeth Catlett,” 50; M. Moran Weston, “Labor Forum,” New York
Amsterdam News (Feb 10, 1945); Constance Curtis, “George Washington Carver School Has Classes From
Sewing To High Science,” New York Amsterdam News, Jun 1, 1946.
96
Lowe, “Harlem’s Carver School Draws Capacity Classrooms,” 18.
97
Lewis, Elizabeth Catlett, 37.
98
George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger. (University of Minnesota Press,
2001) 47

%
180
the 1930s, essentially leaving Black workers “mired in the Depression.”
99
The crisis was
most dramatic for Black women. Many of Catlett’s students were domestic workers who
were excluded from receiving benefits from New Deal relief legislation.
100
The Carver
school had given Catlett the transformative opportunity to better understand the position
of Black working class women. It also helped her understand how art could be responsive
to their lives. With this in mind, Elizabeth Catlett proposed a series about the lives of
Black working class women, submitting an application to the Rosenwald Fellowship to
go to Mexico.

Art Across the Color Line

In 1946 Catlett and White came from New York City to Mexico City where they
were both introduced to TGP, a radical artist collective composed of like-minded
Mexican and international artists. At the end of the day, the artists would gather their
work and affix it to the walls. Moving slowly as a group, they would stop at each other’s
drawings and discuss. Some comments revolved around style, others around purpose and
clarity. Artists were firm but encouraging. Catlett recounts:
[A]t the taller we all worked more or less collectively; everyone was interested in
your project. Each artist would select a theme, go home, and do a drawing. Then
the drawings were brought in and put up so we could see how they related to the
assignment. The criticism was always constructive. `I think the symbolism is very
good,' someone might say, `but the drawing is weak. To make it a stronger work,
you could improve the way you drew that hand, which you slurred ... when you
were focusing on the face.'
101

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
99
David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The
Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 204.
100
Ira Katznelson. When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
2005), 22.
101
Lowery Stokes Sims, “Elizabeth Catlett: A Life in Art and Politics,” American Visions 13.2
(April-May 1998): 20.

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181

The success of the image was the shared intention of the collective. Could the image
convey its message to the other artists present? Could it illustrate the specific elements of
the campaign for which striking students, trade unions, or other anti-fascist movements
that had enlisted the TGP’s help?
102
How might it disrupt prevailing assumptions about
power and inequality? Could it, in turn, communicate these visions to the majority of the
people in Mexico and beyond?
During Catlett and White’s first visit, the TGP artists were in the middle of
producing their series on the history of the Mexican Revolution. The Estampas de la
Revolucion Mexicana (1946-1947) was a series of eighty-five linocuts graphically
illustrating the history of the Revolution. Catlett was clearly moved by what she saw and
was compelled to incorporate elements into her own work. She had come to Mexico with
the intention of producing a series of pictures entitled the Negro Woman, celebrating the
lives of Black working class and poor women. The TGP’s inspiration is evident in her
series. Both The Negro Woman and the Estampas feature several portraits of key
historical figures. In the TGP’s series, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa are given heroic
depictions, while in Catlett’s series, famous Black leaders such as Sojourner Truth and
Phyllis Wheatley are featured. Significantly, both series also celebrated the experiences
of ordinary men and women, and their lives as workers, musicians, grievers, fighters, and
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
102
Samella Lewis, The Art of Elizabeth Catlett (Los Angeles: Museum of African American Art
and Handcraft Studios, 1984), 21.

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182
organizers.
103
Placed side by side the stylistic similarities and political resonance between
the two series becomes apparent.

Figure 17: “La Dictadura Porfiriana Exalta Demagogicamente al Indigena,”
Alfredo Zalce, Estampas de La Revolucion Mexicana, 1946-7.
Department of Special Collections and University Archives,
Stanford University Libraries

One piece in the TGP’s series, La Dictadura Porfiriata Exalta Demagogicamenta
al Indigena [The Porfirian Dictatorship Demagogically Exalts the Native] (1946) by
Alfredo Zalce depicts a scene leading up to the Mexican Revolution. An impoverished
indigenous Mexican man lies prostrate on the ground while a procession of foreign
capitalists parade in the background, seemingly over his body. In the center of their
procession is an exalted indigenous figure in costume, seated in a throne carried by other
men. The image reflects actual parades held in Mexico City on the eve of the Revolution.
Celebrating President Porfirio Diaz’ reelection in 1910, thousands witnessed a historical
pageant meant to link indigenous history to Diaz’ modern Mexico. In the procession,
indigenous figures were extolled as national symbols. Zalce’s panel highlights the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
103
Sandhya Rajendra Shukla and Heidi Tinsman, Imagining Our Americas: Toward a
Transnational Frame (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 294

%
183
hypocrisy of this act. Indigenous people suffered greatly under Diaz. Few were even
allowed to get close to the parade. As one historian describes, “all beggars, ragged-
trousered peasants and anyone who did not obey an unwritten sumptuary code were
expelled from the central section of the capital.”
104
This irony played out throughout the
country as the Mexican state tried to claim to a pre-Hispanic Indian ancestry for itself,
while, at the same time, expropriating the land and labor of indigenous Mexicans.
105

Arbitrary laws and violent disciplinary measures were put in place to suppress the
indigenous masses. The shadow of prison hung over the land by checking
disobedience.
106
The existence of some indigenous groups like the Yaqui, threatened the
expansion of railroads and subsequent capitalist production. Accordingly they endured
some of the most barbarous persecution.
107
In Zalce’s image, the exalted indigenous
figure is flanked on either side by white men in top hats holding French and American
flags, representatives of the foreign capital invested in the entire spectacle.
Elizabeth Catlett’s image, And A Special Fear for My Loved Ones (1946),
illustrates a similar scene from a different time and place. The image depicts a Black man
who has been lynched, his body on the ground, and a noose around his neck. The feet
surround him appear, at first glance, to belong to a lynch mob. Compared with the
Zalce’s image, a few elements are thrown into different relief. The man’s hand is also
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
104
Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution (London: Jonathan
Cape, 2000), 2.
105
Adolfo Gilly, “Chiapas and the Rebellion of the Enchanted World” in Rural Revolt in Mexico:
U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern Politics, ed. Daniel Nugent (Chapel Hill: Duke University
Press, 1998), 277.
106
Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata, 8.
107
Evelyn Hu-De Hart, Yaqui Resistance and Survival: The Struggle for Land and Autonomy,
1821-1910 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).

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184
outstretched, like the indigenous in Zalce’s image. What is different is that his eyes are
open, looking up at the figures surrounding him. It becomes unclear whether those eyes
indict the figures above him or look sympathetically at them. Like Zalce’s image, the
fore-grounded figure presses one part of his body to the base of the page. In both images,
ill-defined horizons make the background figures appear to float. In Zalce’s piece, this
contrast successfully conveys the symbolism of the procession, contrasting the extolled
myth of indigenous ancestry and the actual suffering of indigenous people during Diaz’
reign. Catlett’s image is similarly composed. The man with the noose around his neck has
his foot placed at the base of the page. An ill-defined horizon, exaggerated by Catlett’s
shifting lines, destabilizes the ground. Instead of standing above him, the feet
surrounding the man also appear to be floating. The lynch mob could be construed as
other men who have also been lynched but not yet cut down. Their feet appear at the top
of the picture as the only visible part of their bodies. The ambiguity of perspective in the
picture alters the tragedy of the image. Catlett’s image, read in this way, depicts lynching
as an act of terrorism and racial subordination: one that equally destroys the lives of those
acted upon and those committing the act.

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185
Radical artists from Chicago, to New York, to Mexico City had to reflect on the
challenge of producing politicized art. Many found that the spirit of an image’s
inspiration differed from the method of execution. In other words, drawing with outrage
was not the same as conveying a sense of outrage through an image. Hale Woodruff’s
experiences in the U.S. and Mexico had given him unique insight into the complicated
process of using art as a political medium. He believed that “protest can be done by
shouting or haranguing, or whatever, on the one hand,” but making “protest through
pictures,” he explained, was “not the same thing.” Speaking about Picasso’s painting
Guernica, a powerful commentary on the bombing of the city of Guernica by German
Figure 18: “And a special fear for my loved
ones” Elizabeth Catlett, linocut, 213x153 mm,
The Art Institute of Chicago

%
186
forces and the bloody onset of fascism in Spain, Woodruff
commented on the craft required to reflect and relay the sentiments that had inspired a
piece of artwork.

It's well known that Picasso worked days and days at making sketches and studies
for this one painting. He painted out of his anger and out of his deep concern, but
he had to believe, he must have believed, that in order for this thing to be a
compelling argument against the terribleness of war it had to be a compelling
work of art. He made hundreds of sketches, you know.
108

In this statement, Woodruff acknowledges the difficulty of producing art that can both
protest the prevailing power relations while simultaneously transcending them.
109

Creating effective political artwork meant thinking critically about power relations and
also sufficiently honing one’s craft in order to represent them. Radical Black and
Mexican artists struggled to move beyond mere literal interpretations of history, and
towards the seizure of an image as it flashed up, in a way that could illuminate the
prevailing conditions of danger and simultaneously suggest alternative outcomes.
110
As
artists discovered, this was a deeply collective process. Through the revolutionary
cultural infrastructure initiated by the Mexican Revolution and dialectically developed
within Black art collective spaces in the U.S., these collective spaces produced serious
counters to racial capitalism in both its material and psychic forms.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
108
Oral history interview with Hale Woodruff, 1968 Nov. 18, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution.
109
Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, ix.
110
Benjamin, Illuminations, 255; David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America 1910-1990
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 9.
;@B%
EPILOGUE

“1917 was a global year of revolutionary possibility.” This first sentence of my
presentation was punctuated with the shuffle of escaping feet and a resolute slam of the
conference room door. After years of discussing chapters of this dissertation in
conferences and seminars, I have become familiar with the gut level discomfort that the
project can provoke. As people physically escaped or mentally withdrew from
conversations, I learned that they were often registering their anxiety with Marxist
methods of analysis, as they understood them. I have also learned that interpretations of
Marxism can be infinitely wide and varying. Marxism, like race, is a term in common
usage albeit without a stable or consistent definition. In turn, the anxiety about Marxism
has often sprung from the belief that such an analysis is always already exclusionary and
also incompatible with an analysis of race and racism. Against these interpretations, I
offer this project as a corrective.
Ethnic studies scholars as well as scholars of color have long drawn on the
analytical tools of Marxism to make interventions about the intersections of race, class,
gender, inequality, and punishment. This study has extended their work and analytical
tools towards similar ends. It has specifically examined convergences of figures with a
relationship to the Mexican Revolution in order to trace anti-racist and anti-imperialist
Marxist traditions throughout the early twentieth century. The aim of this social history
was to challenge prevailing misconceptions about Marxist analyses. It has sought to
recover early social movements against racism, imperialism, and capitalism with the

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belief that these movements and Marxist traditions are intensely relevant to the world at
present.
This dissertation was written amidst the tumult of the economic crisis. As the
crisis deepened, considerations about capitalism broadened. While both public and
scholarly discourses reflected a greater willingness to discuss class inequality, these
discourses also revealed their limitations. Discussions about the economic crisis were
disaggregated from analyses of racism. The seemingly new conditions of insecurity
wrought by foreclosures, unemployment, underemployment, and criminalization were
seldom described as logical extensions of pre-existing conditions that disproportionately
crippled communities of color. In these ways, I believe, considerations of the color line
and the class struggle continue to be relevant at present. My study offers an alternate
framework for intervening in the moment. How would an analysis of capitalism change
if, for example, the experiences of the poorest communities of color were understood as
central rather than marginal or aberrant to it? In turn, how would our analysis of class
struggle change if, looking beyond the Occupy movement, we saw that the first large-
scale public responses to the economic crisis came from prisoners on hunger strikes,
struggles by domestic workers, demonstrations by immigrant workers and students of
color, communities protesting against police brutality, organized low–income renters,
public housing residents, and homeless people fighting for the human right to housing?
Aimè Cèsaire once wrote that no one would be surprised about fascism if they had
understood what had long been happening in the colonies.
1
In the same way, no one
would have been surprised about widespread economic devastation, austerity measures,
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
1
Aimè Cèsaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 19-20.

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criminalization or the disproportionate spending on security if they had been attentive to
conditions long produced in ghettoes, barrios, and skid rows across the country. The
failure to register the experiences of the poor communities of color as generalizable can
be attributed to what the late Clyde Woods recognized as a “lovingly cultivated
theoretical blindness.”
2
I have attempted to understand this blindness as an ontology of
the color line.
In the spirit of Michel Foucault, this project has attempted to offer a “critique” of
these present conditions. In his usage, critique is not just a matter of decrying the
unfairness of conditions. Rather, it means thinking about the practices we accept and also
understanding the “familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought” on which
those practices rest. Change begins by declassifying the self-evident. In Foucault’s
definition, “practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.”
3
To this I
would add, critique is about making facile gestures difficult and also about making other
conversations possible. The facile gestures I want to make difficult are impoverished
discussions about racism, white supremacy, imperialism, and capitalism. The
conversations I want to make possible are about racial capitalism and the elements that
impair our very comprehension of it.
This social history has traced individuals who understood that the movement of
capital was dependent on the structures of racism and white supremacy. Is has also
sought to explain what people did with that knowledge. The Color Line and the Class
Struggle considers a period when neither the U.S. project of capitalist imperialism nor the
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
2
Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: Race, Power, and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta (New
York: Verso, 1998), 4.
3
Michel Foucault, “Practicing Criticism” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other
Writings 1977–1984(New York: Routledge.1988), 154-155.

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global revolutionary aims of socialism had become hegemonic. It dwells in a space of
possibility wherein actors were engaged in the difficult work of comprehending the
struggle before them. They thought, wrote, organized, converged, and in the process,
produced new knowledge about the world and new radical traditions with which to
change it. My hope is that we take their work to heart and draw from their insights as we
continue to engage in our own struggle at present.
;=;%
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DISSERTATIONS AND UNPUBLISHED PAPERS
Camp, Jordan T. “The Sound Before the Fury: A Genealogy of Neoliberal Racial and
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the Conventions of African American History.” unpublished speech to UCLA
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Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “Life in Hell: How Capitalism Saving Capitalism from Capitalism
Should Fire Our Political Imagination.” Paper presented at the UC Berkeley
Center for Race & Gender, Berkeley, California, October 29, 2009.

Kim, Jessica. “Oilmen and Cactus Rustlers: Los Angeles, Mexico and the Building of a
Regional Empire, 1890-1941.” Ph.D. diss, University of Southern
California, 2012.
McClellan, Scott. “Policing the Red Scare, The Los Angeles Police Department Red
Squad and the Repression of Working Class Activism in Los Angeles, 1900-
1938.” Ph.D. diss, University of California, Irvine, 2011.
Monroy, Douglas. “Mexicanos in Los Angeles, 1930-1941: An Ethnic Group in Relation
to Class Forces.” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1978).
Mukherji, S. Ani. “The Anticolonial Imagination: Migrant Intellectuals and the Exilic
Productions of American Radicalism in Interwar Moscow, 1919-1939.” Ph.D.
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Richards, Susan Valerie. “Imagining the Political: El Taller de Gràfica Popular in
Mexico, 1937-1949.” Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 2001.
Schroeder, Elizabeth R. “The Chicago Black Renaissance: Exercises in Aesthetic
Ideology and Cultural Geography in Bronzeville, 1932-1945.” Ph.D. diss.,
Saint Louis University 2008.
Sohi, Seema. “Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Empire, and Indian Anticolonialism in North
America.” Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, Seattle, 2008.
Stevens, Margaret. “The Red International and the Black Caribbean: Transnational
Radical Organizations in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919-
1939.” Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2010.

EXHIBITIONS
“1934: A New Deal for Artists.” Smithsonian American Art Museum. Washington, D.C.
November 4, 2009.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Heatherton, Christina L. (author)

Core Title The color line and the class struggle: the Mexican Revolution and convergences of radical internationalism, 1910-1946

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 08/28/2017

Defense Date 08/10/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag capitalist imperialism,convergence spaces,leavenworth prison,Mexican revolution,OAI-PMH Harvest,racial capitalism,social movements

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (committee chair), Frazier, Robeson Taj (committee member), Kelley, Robin D.G. (committee member), Pulido, Laura (committee member)

Creator Email c.heatherton@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-93234

Unique identifier UC11289115

Identifier usctheses-c3-93234 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Heatherton-1172.pdf

Dmrecord 93234

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Heatherton, Christina L.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA