Anarchist Militants in Latin America: Biographies, Historiographies, and Transnational Lives

Available for preorder.

For the first time, the transnational lives of influential Latin American anarchists are brought together in a single, illuminating volume.

Spanning the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth, this collection follows the militant writers, organizers, and agitators who crisscrossed the Americas and Europe, shaping local struggles while forging regional, hemispheric, and trans-Atlantic networks of resistance.

A remarkably diverse group of women and men navigated vastly different political terrains: the bustling port city of Buenos Aires, the Indigenous highlands of the Andes, the violent US–Mexico borderlands of the Mexican Revolution, the Cold War landscapes of the Cuban Revolution and the Chilean military dictatorship, and beyond. Migrants, exiles, and fugitives, they built movements across borders while sustaining a vibrant anarchist media world, from newspapers and magazines to radio and even television.

More than a collection of biographies, this book offers a wide-ranging exploration of how to write the lives of activists. Its chapters move from classic cradle-to-grave narratives to critical examinations of anarchist autobiographies, probing where they illuminate truth, where they distort it, and how these texts themselves became tools to evade or confound state surveillance. The volume also opens essential conversations on gender, foregrounding anarchist women and revealing the often-overlooked roles women played in the political and literary worlds together with their male counterparts.

Bridging Latin American, European, and North American historiographies, this book demonstrates how transnational and biographical approaches deepen our understanding of anarchism’s complexity, creativity, and enduring global impact.

Praise

“Anarchist Militants brilliantly uses biography, gender and culture as lenses on transnational research to create a pointillistic picture of anarchism as a dynamic, living network powered by individuals who exchange ideas, know-how, and experience between and within the Americas and Europe.”
—Ruth Kinna, author of The Government of No One

"Alongside Big Names like Emma, Petr, and Ricardo, the story of anarchism belongs to countless persons often overlooked and unknown, individuals and groups whose writing translating publishing, protesting striking uprising, feeding childrearing caretaking, has nurtured the dreams of freedom for us anarchists of today and for future generations. Like the anarchist apostle of Flores Magón who 'traverses fields, runs roads, over thorns, through pebbles, his mouth dry from devouring thirst,' the women and men remembered in this volume perpetually crossed boundaries, of nation gender ethnicity, through cities towns villages, moving for solidarity family work, being moved by imprisonment deportation poverty. May we learn from this treasure trove of trajectories how to make the Earth a Common Treasury for All."
—Mitchell Cowen Verter, coauthor of Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader

"An exciting book, which wears its cutting-edge scholarship lightly. This masterful collection offers rich insights into publishing, cross-border circulations, language dynamics, transnationalism, the role of women, gender and sexuality, and surveillance and repression within anarchist activism, and into the nature of anarchist praxis itself—effortlessly and engagingly embedded in a set of fascinating lives and trajectories, told by the best experts in the field."
—Constance Bantman, author of The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914

"Mobile, agile, critical, attentive to their subjects’ legacy of struggle that transcends hidebound fixations on borders, institutions, and statecraft, contributors to this volume befriend anarchists whose biographies they assemble, offering glimpses of the energy, flexibility and emotions that real-life activists brought to the storied revolutions of the 20th century, whose promise they embraced; bequeathing to new generations unheralded insights into the dynamics of race, gender, family, and personal liberation that standard historical narratives tend to ignore."
—Dr. Geoffroy de Laforcade, professor of Latin American, Caribbean & World History Norfolk State University

"This brilliant collection of biographies of anarchists from Spain and Latin America underscores the importance of the independent press and the translation of news and radical literature in the circulation of anarchist ideas across space and time. Knowledgeable contributors provide insight into historical anarchafeminist movements in the US-Mexico borderlands, anarcho-syndicalism in Bolivia, social medicine and medical unionism in Argentina, international efforts to support political prisoners, parallels between the Wobblies and the CNT, and the promotion of free love and free-thinking, among other topics. I highly recommend this volume, for both its historical scholarship and its implications for our present and future."
—Javier Sethness Castro, author of Tolstoy’s Search for the Kingdom of God: Gender and Queer Anarchism

"Anarchist Militants presents the cutting edge of historical scholarship on 19th and 20th century transnational anarchism through the lens of biographies of relatively lesser-known activists. Thoroughly researched, artfully constructed, and painstakingly arranged, this collected volume is sure to become a classic in the field and a window into distant times and places for the militant activists of today and tomorrow."
—Mark Bray, author of The Anarchist Inquisition: Assassins, Activists, and Martyrs in Spain and France

"Anarchist Militants is an astounding leap across the borders of language, culture, and national narrative that have kept gringo comrades like myself woefully in the dark about Latin America’s rich anarchist history for far too long. Ranging from Buenos Aires to Havana and beyond, and covering topics from propaganda by the deed to issues of identity, from syndicalism to radical translation, this book demonstrates in no uncertain terms at a time when we need it most: otro mundo es posible."
—David Campbell, translator of Revolutionary Affinities and co-author of City Time

"Enough about France! This essential volume collects the exemplary lives of Latin American social revolutionaries, interwoven with the struggles that defined them. Anarchist Militants deftly balances the beauty, tragedy, and inextinguishable hope that define the revolutionary life. In the process, it marks an important step toward a truly transnational history of anarchism."
—Jarrod Shanahan, author of Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion, Reaction, and Morbid Symptoms

About the Editors

Amparo Sánchez Cobos holds a PhD in history and is a senior lecturer at the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) in Castellón, Spain. Her research focuses on the history of Cuban anarchism in the early twentieth century and on slavery in nineteenth-century Cuba. She is the author of Colonialismo y Esclavitud según un Reformista Español, Cuba en Ramón de la Sagra, and Sembrando ideales: Anarquistas españoles en Cuba (1902–1925), and coeditor with Steve Palmer and José A. Piqueras of State of Ambiguity: Civic Life and Culture in Cuba’s First Republic. She lives in Castellón, Spain.

María Migueláñez holds a PhD in contemporary history from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and is an associate professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Her work focuses on the political and cultural history of Argentine and transnational anarchism, as well as utopian literature, intellectual history, and the history of anarchist publishing. Her recent publications include “The Translators of Anarchist Print Culture between Europe and the Río de la Plata,” in Avances del Cesor. She is also coeditor of Anarquistas editoras: biografías políticas en femenino and Anarchist Women Translating Ideas: Multilingualism and Intermediality. She lives in Madrid.

Kirwin Shaffer is professor of Latin American studies in the Global Studies Program at Penn State Berks in Reading, Pennsylvania. He has authored four books on Caribbean anarchism and transnational resistance, including Anarchist Cuba: Countercultural Politics in the Early Twentieth Century; Black Flag Boricuas: Anarchism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the Left in Puerto Rico, 1897–1921; Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion; and A Transnational History of the Modern Caribbean: Popular Resistance across Borders. With Geoffroy de Laforcade, he coedited In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American History. His current project is The World through Anarchist Eyes: Latin American Anarchism and Global History.

Click here for one-page information sheet on this product