In this long-awaited book, Claudio Lomnitz tells a groundbreaking story about the experiences and ideology of American and Mexican revolutionary collaborators of the Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magn. Drawing on extensive research in Mexico and the United States, Lomnitz explores the rich, complicated, and virtually unknown lives of Flores Magn and his comrades devoted to the "Mexican Cause." This anthropological history of anarchy, cooperation, and betrayal seeks to capture the experience of dedicated militants who themselves struggled to understand their role and place at the margins of the Mexican revolution. For them, the revolution was untranslatable, a pure but deaf subversion: La revolucin es la revolucin -- "The Revolution is the Revolution." For Lomnitz, the experiences of Flores Magn and his comrades reveal the meaning of this phrase. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magn tracks the lives of John Kenneth Turner, Ethel Duffy, Elizabeth Trowbridge, Ricardo Flores Magn, Lzaro Gutirrez de Lara, and others, to illuminate the reciprocal relationship between personal and collective ideology and action.
It is an epic and tragic tale, never before told, about camaraderie and disillusionment in the first transnational grassroots political movement to span the U.S.-Mexican border. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magn will change not only how we think about the Mexican Revolution but also how we understand revolutionary action and passion.