The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Mag鏮

In this long-awaited book, Claudio Lomnitz tells a groundbreaking story about theexperiences and ideology of American and Mexican revolutionary collaborators of the Mexicananarchist Ricardo Flores Magon. Drawing on extensive research in Mexico and the United States,Lomnitz explores the rich, complicated, and virtually unknown lives of Flores Magon and his comradesdevoted to the "Mexican Cause." This anthropological history of anarchy, cooperation, andbetrayal seeks to capture the experience of dedicated militants who themselves struggled tounderstand their role and place at the margins of the Mexican revolution. For them, the revolutionwas untranslatable, a pure but deaf subversion: La revolucion es la revolucion --"The Revolution is the Revolution." For Lomnitz, the experiences of Flores Magon and hiscomrades reveal the meaning of this phrase.

The Return of ComradeRicardo Flores Magon tracks the lives of John Kenneth Turner, Ethel Duffy, ElizabethTrowbridge, Ricardo Flores Magon, Lazaro Gutierrez de Lara, and others, to illuminate the reciprocalrelationship 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 grassrootspolitical movement to span the U.S.-Mexican border. The Return of Comrade Ricardo FloresMagon will change not only how we think about the Mexican Revolution but also how weunderstand revolutionary action and passion.

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