From 1910-1920, armed peasants and workers reshaped Mexico in a democratic and agrarian revolution. The Mexican Revolution rippled throughout the world, influencing radical politics from Chicago to Moscow. Despite its potent effect on contemporary revolutionaries, the Mexican Revolution’s legacy has gone somewhat unrecognized today, particularly within the US. Author Christina Heatherton joinsThe Marc Steiner Showto discuss her book on the international influence of the Mexican Revolution,Arise!: Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution.
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s great to have you all with us. We’re going to grapple with how we build a movement, how we deal with the oppression faced by many, how we address the growing tide of neo fascism here and across the globe, and how we bring this diverse grouping of the left progressives together to the future. We’re going to do it by looking at history because sometimes you have to dive into history, wrestle with what it says about the present. My guest today is Dr. Christina Heatherton. Her book is Arise. Now we’re going to start by looking at the beginning of the book about ropes. Yes ropes, 13 simple twists that make a noose out of a rope, a noose to lynch and to kill. She makes the connections between the fiber grown workers exploited to make the rope in the west.
Indigenous workers who fought back in Mexico in the Philippines rope made that lynch black people here in America, rope made by International Harvester that turned indigenous land into capitalist farms. That led to the Haymarket Rebellion and the birth of Mayday that became the international workers’ cry for justice. That to this day is called the Day of Martyrs of Chicago in Mexico. All connecting the oppression of Jim Crow, indigenous peasants, Filipino workers, and as she wrote the interlocking universe of exploitation [inaudible], and oppression. Ropes that bind those in oppression that tie us together and hold together the capitalist’s world and it’s bound in ways we don’t often think about. And in her book, she brings the voice of W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, along with communist organizers, feminist radicals and others, and we see it all through the eyes of the Mexican Revolution and find out how profound his effect was on the entire planet. So her book Arise, radicalism in the era of the Mexican Revolution, and it speaks volumes to our world today.
Dr. Christina Henderson is the Elting professor of American Studies human rights at Trinity College in Connecticut, and co-editor of Policing the Planet while the policing crisis led to Black Lives Matter. And she joins us today to take us on a journey through the interlocking nature of the fighting for freedom and justice and against capitalist power. That’s the soul of this book.
Christina Heatherton:
I’m so glad to be here. Thank you so much for that incredible introduction. Who needs a publicist?
Marc Steiner:
I’m always ready for a new job. I think we should open with what I think is part of the centrality of your book. We don’t really understand the decisive role that both Haiti and Mexico in particular in this book played in changing this planet, played in the world of revolution, played in social change. And I’d like you to kind of wrestle that for a moment, is opening that up for all of our viewers and listeners, and also talk a bit about how you even got into all of this.
Christina Heatherton:
Well, I appreciate that you introduced the book and yourself as somebody who comes from movements. I think that this is where this book comes from and this is who it’s hoping to speak to. I come to this book after having been a part of a number of different social movements for a while, and specifically helping to produce pieces of popular and political education for 20 years. Working on a whole range of issues, racism, housing, militarism, policing. And I think in the process of doing that work, I realize that the task is right now, we have to develop an imaginary of what we want and how to struggle for it that is as big as the forces that are a raid against us. So that’s the kind of task at hand.
In the process of doing that work, I realized a few things I wanted to write about internationalism. I wanted to write about capitalism and racism and how they co-evolved together. And I also wanted to write something understanding that people might not necessarily have a lot of that movement history behind them. So I wanted to write something that would be an introduction, something that would allow people who had never heard of Haymarket or people who maybe had only heard about a certain kind of oppression to be able to understand how those histories interlocked and interconnected. So in a rough way, how I came to the project, but you asked a few other questions in there that I want to make sure I address.
Marc Steiner:
One of the things I think for most of us we would never think about, we would never think about Mexico is being central to this. Given the depth of racism in this country and the depth of racism against Mexicans and the attitude people have, we have as a society. Not understanding that while there’s a revolution happening in Russia, there’s a revolution in Mexico that brought together people from all over the globe, much like the Cuban Revolution did in 1959, the early sixties here in this era. But in that era, in the beginning where it started from, how Mexico was central to all that. I mean, talk a bit about that. I mean, that is something we don’t think about.
Christina Heatherton:
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Well, it’s criminal how little we think about Mexico in understanding US history and politics and the formation of US hegemony. I mean, part of the argument of the book is that US hegemony, the ascendancy of it comes decisively about in relationship to Mexico. In addition to some things that we might be aware of, the conquest of land starting from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 where the US seizes almost half of Mexican territory to, as you said, just the question of Mexican labor. There are very vibrant, visible ways that we need to always grapple with the US’ relationship to Mexico. But there are also some less obvious ways.
In the book, I talk about how the US became a creditor nation for the first time in relationship to Mexico. And a lot of the ways that the capacities with which it would come to superintendent, the global capitalist economy it developed in relationship to Mexico. Mexico becomes this really central place that we need to think about the US’ relationship to as radicals in the early 20th century did, in order to understand both the development of US hegemony and as argue in the book internationalism.
Marc Steiner:
One of the things that struck me immediately as I read this book, besides all things I’d like to get into that I’d never knew before, and I love learning new stuff. Is that when we think of Mexico and it’s relation to this country and it’s relation to the rest of the world, we never think of it in terms of its importance, it’s grounding, how the root of revolutions and the movements in the world, the root of the conflicts in the planet in some ways are planted in Mexican soil and in Mexican world. And I think that’s something you raise throughout the book, but to me, as part of the underpinning of the book, one of the underpinnings of the book that we don’t think about. So A, I want talk about how you came to that and B, just describe that a bit for people listening and watching what that means.
Christina Heatherton:
Absolutely. Well, I think it’s absolutely criminal that we don’t think about Mexico in every instance of how we think about US history and the growth of US power and arguments about radical movements, especially over the 20th century. Mexico, if we just think about how with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the US seizes almost half of Mexico’s territory. So we couldn’t imagine the shape of the United States without Mexico. Obviously people think quite a lot about just the role of Mexican labor, how critical Mexican people have been to the construction of this country. But the book also talks about some lesser known aspects of the US’ relationship to Mexico, namely that it was in Mexico, that the US became a creditor nation for the first time in its history.
I argue in the book that many of the ways that the US learned how to superintendent the global capitalist economy came about in its relationship to Mexico. So on one hand Mexico is not centrally a part of the narrative of US state formation. On the other hand, when you go into the archives of radicals, when you look at speeches and writings of people like Frederick Douglass or W.E.B. DuBois, let alone Mexican radicals like Ricardo Flores Magon, you see that they’re continually drawing attention to this relationship and saying that not only do radicals in the United States, but radicals around the world need to be conscious of this relationship because it has implications for the whole planet.
Marc Steiner:
And so let’s take it from back there. One of the characters in the early part of this book is a man named Charles Stillman and the world that he created, and I don’t, some people have their bank accounts at Citibank. The roots of their nefarious profits lie here, lie in the 1840s, lie with this man Stillman and what he did to undermine Mexico and to control their economy and world and exploit them. Now that is Citibank. So let’s tell that story.
Christina Heatherton:
Sure. Well, in Mexico, Charles Stillman was known as Don Carlos. Here in Connecticut where he was from, he was called Charles. And his interest in Mexico represented the first major incursion of US speculator into Mexican territory. And historians like John Totino and John Mason Hart have explored this. Stillman’s got this really interesting story where I started one of the chapters with the story of Baghdad, Mexico, which was essentially Stillman’s own private port. Basically, he owned everything. He owned the banks, he owned the warehouse and storage facility, he owned transportation companies. And the main commodity that was traded there was cotton.
So during the US Civil War, there was a union blockade of the Confederacy trying to strangle the confederate economy, most of which consisted of cotton and so Baghdad, Mexico served as this illicit backdoor through which confederate cotton produced by enslaved labor could be smuggled. It was put into the name of one of a Stillman’s Mexican trading partners, and a flag, a Mexican flag was flown over it and it was relabeled as Los [inaudible 00:11:14] or Mexican cotton and dispatched for sale on the world’s market. I talk about the machinations of putting out this illicit cotton into the world and how much of a fortune this made Stillman, but I also talk about what happened… So Stillman becomes one of the richest men in the world as a result of doing this. What’s really interesting though is after the Civil War, Stillman, along with all these other US capitalists have these massive amounts of money that they’ve made from the war that they’re looking to move. And a lot of it gets invested into Mexican bonds and Mexican infrastructure.
The story I tell is kind of twofold. I both tell the story about how US land interest turned into a different kind of US financial interest in Mexico, that you can track through the relationship of Charles Stillman. But as you said, the kind of punchline of the story is Charles Stillman’s son is James Stillman, who becomes the head of what we now know as Citibank. And I think a lot of the punitive debt practices that these US financiers develop in Mexico kind of prefigure the forms of punitive debt practices that get dispatched by the US and its entities around the world thereafter.
Marc Steiner:
And that’s kind of in some ways, at the beginning of what you wrote is tied together with how that in some ways is part of the root of the struggle of the Mexican Revolution, revolutions and revolution. And how Mexico became, along with Haiti in certain period is kind of place where revolutionary gathered. And even though it’s not, maybe not be a direct route to Stillman, it’s rooted in that capitalist exploitation, because of what it did to Mexico and what it did to Haiti as you wrote about that in the book as well, and how that kind of inspired people across the globe. That’s a really important piece because… Go ahead. Go ahead, I’m sorry.
Christina Heatherton:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, there’s a 20th century version of that story that I tell a little bit about. At the same time that the US is starting to occupy Haiti, there are all kinds of commentators in Mexico who are making very similar comments. People are saying, how do you think about these different forms of US incursion? How do you think about the presence or the threat of US military in intervention? How do you think about the dominance of US financial interest in US managers? But at the turn of the century, Ricardo Flores Magon makes this really stunning comment where he’s like, there’s not just the kind of overt military presence and the kind of cultural dominance here.
He says, you have to look in the banks in the influence of judges the way business is done in Mexico. And he says, soon it won’t be long until nothing is done in this country without the permission of LT Samwell of Uncle Sam. There’s a self-conscious 20th century story about how the fate of Haiti and the fate of Mexico are understood together. But as you said, the book goes back and thinks about the Haitian revolution and its relationship to the independent struggle of Mexico from Spain. To make a very long argument, hopefully not that long-
Marc Steiner:
Make the argument, make the argument.
Christina Heatherton:
I’m really thinking with people, namely Frederick Douglass, to think about how the revolutions of the 19th century emerged out of what militia Sinna calls an abolitionist international. A way in which the Haitian Revolution really inspired revolutionary struggles from around the world. So a kind of maybe not obvious way to think about this is… Well, I mean, like I said, it’s a long story, so I’m trying to find the easiest way in. But I mean, one interesting fact is that as Julius Scott writes about in The Common Wind, there were stories of the Haitian revolution that traversed throughout the Atlantic world in the form of newspapers and oral testimony, and sailors stopping at different ports and telling the history of what had happened.
Newspapers being intercepted by Spanish colonial officials who were trying to suppress that history and memory, but it couldn’t be suppressed. And I think a really important fact is that the new Black Republic of Haiti gave support, military support, strategic support to people that were struggling for independence in the Americas against colonialism. But they did it on the condition that, for example, a newly independent Mexico or Venezuela could not, in those countries, they could not have slavery. So there’s a way in which the abolitionist project has itself in internationalism that I think when we root our history of internationalism there, an entirely different new picture of what we mean by internationalism comes to view.
Marc Steiner:
It’s also interesting, and what you touched on here that you really delve into in the book is how, and we’ll focus on Mexico, but both Haiti and Mexico, but focus again on Mexico became real centers of revolutionary thought, real centers of people coming in who wanted to take on the oppressor and learned. I mean, I don’t think most people realize the numbers of people from Latin America that you write about that ended up in Haiti learning about revolution and taking that back home, that these connections are never given us before. I mean, all we see about is Haiti as a revolution that you may know the United States didn’t recognize it and despise this black republic, but we never knew… At least, I never knew the extent to which Haiti affected movements across Latin America that then began to affect the entire world.
Christina Heatherton:
Absolutely. I mean, I think the book is really trying to intervene in some of the, we might call them the kind of heuristics of history or the organization of how we’re often taught history. There’s labor history over here that might primarily deal with industrial workers, industrial, western male workers, mostly. Their histories against colonialism, which kind of gets slotted somewhere else. And there’s histories against slavery, and we’re often taught to think about them separately. But when you go into the archive, that’s not what happens. So a real fruitful document for me was a speech that Frederick Douglass gives in 1848 called The Revolutions of 1848, and he’s doing this on an Emancipation Day holiday. This is a big holiday for abolitionists, and he’s choosing to talk about the revolutions that are happening in Europe at that time.
But in this speech and in so many other of his writings at that time, he is consciously making these connections. Thinking about how worker struggles in Western Europe are tied to struggles, for example, of Irish people fighting against British colonialism or Mexican people that are fighting against military aggression or struggles of indigenous people. So it’s not as if I’m inventing a kind of 21st century lens to look back on the 19th century. I’m saying we have to be able to disrupt a little bit these kind of hardened categories that sometimes prevent us from understanding history as it unfolded and solidarity as it developed.
Marc Steiner:
When you mentioned Frederick Douglas, just jumping ahead a little here, but when you mentioned Frederick Douglass, you talk a lot about in the book both W.E.B. DuBois and Frederick Douglas and how their internationalism, how their understanding of the oppression that they came out of is connected to the oppression across the globe and how that was to rookie connected to Mexico for both of us, but especially Frederick Douglass. And how those struggles were not separate and we’re not seen as separate, but we’ve lost that in many ways.
Christina Heatherton:
Absolutely. Well, the book really leans on Douglas and DuBois and Flores Magon’s analysis of the global capitalist system. And I think the argument that they don’t get credited for making enough is how profound, particularly for Douglass to be able to narrate the expansion of the global capitalist system as it was unfolding. So in one of his most famous speeches “What to the Slaves is the 4th of July?” That as I think we tend to call it, he has these dramatic insights about a whole new world coming into being in the mid 19th century. There is a vast expansion of the capitalist world. There are quotes that we sometimes give to 20th century, late 20th century scholars about the Marxist scholars. So think about the annihilation of space by time. But Douglass is there, he’s living it, he’s observing it. He talks about how spaces comparatively annihilated, he describes, he says, “The world has become a whispering gallery.”
“Thoughts that are whispered in one part of the planet are distinctly heard on the other side.” So this is really critical to the argument, the way the global capitalist system is shifting at that time. And not only is it allowing for the transportation of new goods and services and labor and people, but in that metaphor that Douglass is giving it, the world has become a whispering gallery. It’s precisely this, that thoughts that are whispered in one part of the world are distinctly heard in another. And there’s a form of internationalism that develops alongside the particular internationalization of capital that Douglass is describing.
Marc Steiner:
And I think that those connections are really also not really kind of understood by many. And I think to me, that’s one of the powers of your book, is that it brings those things, it brings all that together. There’s so many characters in this book. I mean, you could see how this book could be unwieldy, but it’s not because somehow you managed to bring all these characters from different parts of the globe together in a concise story about the revolutionary movement from 1848 on, and to this day, I mean, how they affected this day. I want to talk about this a bit in terms of some of the people you talk about and how they redefined so much for us and we don’t even think about them. I mean, how many people think of Ricardo Flores Magon? I mean, some people may know the name and I know the name, but people like that are not kind of in the history books as someone who really affected change that pushed, that built movements. So talk a bit about him, talk a bit about him and what that brought to this struggle.
Christina Heatherton:
Sure. Well, maybe the most important thing to note is, well, it’s just become 2023, but we just came out of the year 2022. And in Mexico, that was actually the year of Ricardo Flores Magon. The whole year was dedicated to him by the Mexican government.
Marc Steiner:
2022 was?
Christina Heatherton:
2022, was a centennial area of his death. He died a hundred years before in, as you said, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, which is something I was really interested in. And I think it’s important to say that he’s got a contested legacy. Ricardo Flores Magon was arguably one of this hemisphere’s most fiery and spirited class war anarchists. He was a major agitator, journalist, organizer in the lead up and in the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. And did quite a lot of his organizing here in the United States while he was in exile. And there’s, I think, a very interesting story about how this man who so wanted to overthrow the Mexican government, who so at his heart was a total anarchist, had his body removed and reburied into the rotunda of illustrious men in Mexico. So as I say in the book, there’s this fiery anarchist who’s consecrated in the heart of the state [inaudible 00:24:17].
And I think it’s also just worth mentioning that the families and fellow students of the missing [inaudible 00:24:25], 43 students from IPA have students who it’s now revealed, were disappeared by state actors in Mexico, have organized against the government in a committee called the Ricardo Flores Magon Committee. So even though there’s this attempt to consecrate and capture the memory of Ricardo Flores Magon, there is a living memory of him as a radical in Mexico. So part of what my book does is also to highlight how he had a huge impact on radicals in the United States and around the world. He continually was making these appeals saying, Mexican workers, the eyes of the entire world are upon you. If you’re able to break the chains of the world’s money lords, like you’ll oxygenate the freedom of struggles around the world. And he’s also commanding other radicals.
If you care about capitalism, if you care about racism, if you care about imperialism, you’ll see your struggle in the Mexican Revolution. So there’s not a lot of analysis that needs to assist Magon, a lot of it is just highlighting things that he said. In the book I highlight his final years, which were in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. So this was kind of an accidental find. But in the process of going through a lot of his papers and the papers of his comrades, I found this very interesting episode where not only was Flores Magon in this prison along with other Mexican revolutionaries, but in this period he was joined by radicals of every stripe, communist, socialist, pacifist organizers who were key to struggles against Jim Crow racism, who were all thinking and reading and learning and organizing together in what the federal government called a University of radicalism. I call this chapter How to Make a University, because I’m really interested in how these radicals were communicating together and what sort of conversations they were having.
Marc Steiner:
So I’m going to come back to the how [inaudible 00:26:32] became this university and the men that were in prison there in that period, and how about that period also defined where we are today, I think in America, with the surveillance of the state, that we don’t realize that connection, which we’ll come to that. But I really give people a sense and flavor of what you reveal in this book and in your studies about how and why Mexico is central to all of this, why it’s in that we don’t think about this at all. In terms of both it’s kind of Mexico’s path towards revolution and change, how it redefined the struggle, how it happened at the same time as the Russian Revolution, but in a very different way and how it inspired so many. And it’s something that we don’t really, that most people don’t have in their consciousness. We all know about the Bolshevik and overthrowing the Russian government, the Czar, but not Mexico, how Mexico was like the linchpins is so much, and that really is part of, I think, at the heart of the thesis is your book.
Christina Heatherton:
Sure. Well, maybe I can talk a little bit about how I came to the work, because it’s an unexpected story and it was an unexpected route to find it. A lot of my family come from Okinawa, and they like a lot of people at the time came through Mexico into the United States, and I was interviewing some of them about the Japanese-American internment. And one of them told me this incredible story. He said his father had… A lot of my family was in the Imperial Valley, which is on the US Mexico border. And one relatives, my great uncle, he was a labor organizer there. He was a farm worker, he was a labor organizer. He could speak English, Spanish, Japanese, as well as Okina and dialect. So he was a very well-placed organizer. So people don’t know that in the early rounds of the internment, the FBI did these massive raids, particularly targeting organizers. And my great-uncle was one of the people who was arrested in one of these raids-
Marc Steiner:
And what year are we talking about this?
Christina Heatherton:
This is 43. 1943. So my uncle said they came for his dad. His dad saw these federal agents coming to the door. He didn’t know what was going on. But when my uncle said is since he had been down in Mexico fighting with Poncho Villa in them, he knew how to take care of business. So if he was going down, he was going to take these federal agents down with him. I had to hit pause on the tape recorder and say, “What did you say?” I was really motivated to just think about this question, because it just rearranged so much of what I thought about World War II, about Japanese American radicalism, about my own family’s history. And I really had to ask this question, why would people from Okinawa, if this was true, why would they find affinity with Mexican peasants who were fighting in their own revolution enough that they would fight, find alliances, and apparently leave and come back to Mexico.
So I was able to find a story of somebody who was close to my family. His name was Paul Kochi, who wrote a memoir called [inaudible 00:30:05], an Immigrant Sorrowful Tale, where he talks about being in Revolutionary Mexico and finding internationalism. I can read a part of this if you’d like-
Marc Steiner:
That would be great. No, that’s a good part of the book too, please. Well, the whole book is good. That’s a good piece to read, folks. Go ahead.
Christina Heatherton:
Sure. So I tell a little bit about his… The guy gets incarcerated. The guy is hidden by different indigenous families. He’s smuggled by French traders, and at every episode he’s talking about how he discovers internationalism. So I come out of this story this way. I say, Paul Kochi story demonstrates how the uprooted, dispossessed, and despised of the world came to know each other in shadows, in the tangled spaces of expulsion, extraction, transportation, debt, exploitation and destruction. The garing circuits of modern capital. Whether crammed and tight ship quarters, knocking together over the rails, sweating and swaying in the relentless tempo of industrial agriculture, inhaling the dark air of mine shafts, hearing each other, breathing, coughing, fighting, singing, snoring, and sighing through thin walls or corralled like livestock in jails and prisons. The contradictions of modern capital were shared in its intimate spaces.
Within such sites, people discovered that the circuits of revolution, like the countervailing circuits of capital were realizable in motion, often through unplanned assemblages, roaring at their backs, where the revolutionary currents of the 19th century. Currents that howled from the metropolitan hearts of empire and wailed across the peripheries of the global world system. Standing before them in the middle of its own revolution, was Mexico. From the vantage point of these struggles, the new century did not simply portend the inevitability of urban revolts and insurgencies at the point of production, but an epic of peasant wars, rural uprisings, anti-colonial movements, and of course, the Mexican Revolution. Mexico is both a real country and an imagined space of revolution would become a crucible of internationalism for the world’s rebels like Paul Kochi.
Marc Steiner:
And folks, as you’re listening to and watching this, this is one of the reasons you need to read the book, besides the history in it, how it’s written, there’s poetry with substance. That’s how I thought of it.
Christina Heatherton:
I like that.
Marc Steiner:
It really is. I mean, so one of the things that made me think about was throughout the book, there’s this kind of cross fertilization across racial and ethnic lines that has taken place. In Mexico, in California, across it all, and how racism is so deep that even in the left, the 20th century and late part of the 19th century, people did not want to recognize the meanings you talk about that took place after the Russian Revolution, how people did not want to recognize the centrality of race and racism to all of this. In the big targeted at black folks at African Americans, Mexicans, Okinawans, whoever it was, the great other for the Europeans, and how that really upended the revolutions in many ways. And you try to get to the heart of that and how these roots speak to that.
Christina Heatherton:
Absolutely. Well, I think one really fascinating story that’s illustrative of this point is a story of M.N. Roy.
Marc Steiner:
Oh, yeah. I was about to raise that. That’s good. Yes.
Christina Heatherton:
I mean, he’s another figure that I think doesn’t maybe normally come to mind when we’re thinking about early 20th century revolutions or Mexico. Roy was a diehard militant against British colonialism in India, and I tell the story about how he, in the course of trying to find arms and supports for an armed struggle against British colonialism ends up in Mexico in 1917. And as he writes in his memoir, Mexico became the land of his rebirth. And he describes that it was in Mexico, he becomes an internationalist. And part of the way he narrates it is some journalist asked him to talk about the struggle, the Indian anti-colonial struggle to Mexican people. And he says, in the course of writing this article, he realizes that explaining this struggle was like carrying coal to New Castle. He didn’t have to introduce these dynamics to people in Mexico, but underscore what already resonated in the struggle that was underway.
So he says that it was in Mexico, he became an internationalist. What makes Roy such an interesting figure is that he ended up co-founding the Mexican Communist Party, which I mean in the history of the founding of the Communist Party in the early 20th century, this is actually kind of normal. That there are people from other places and other struggles who come to find themselves in the mix and are really pivotal to the founding of these different parties. So Roy, co-founders, the Mexican Communist Party, and what’s really interesting is he goes as a delegate to the common turn. And for some people on the left, his name is centrally known or essentially attached to these debates on the national and colonial question. He had a famous debate with Lennon about what the role of colonized people was going to be in a global revolutionary struggle.
And Roy’s point was simply that it’s somewhat odd that around the propulsion of revolutionary struggle in the Western world is the working class, but in the colonies, there’s this assumption that the workers are of two backward of a nature and need… So the revolutionary thrust is going to come from the petty bourgeois Z and Roy’s like, what’s the difference? We’re workers too and why this condescension? What’s really interesting is a lot of the arguments that he makes there are configured in the writings he does in Mexico trying to triangulate these experiences. So this is just one instance of how radicals in this period are trying to think both about struggles against racism and colonialism in very specific and localized context, but trying to think with revolutionaries around the world about what this means for a global class struggle.
Marc Steiner:
And also, the way you put this in the book for all these people we’re going to get into in just a moment. Like when you talk about the women in the book, Elizabeth Catlett and others, you really kind of hit a nerve about the paternalistic nature of the European base left, not acknowledging that the complexity of race and racism. In saying, oh, well, you have to go through these stages of capitalism first before you can come and have a revolution. You’re not ready yet. We are, but you’re not. And as I was reading that, made me think about that has been part of the destruction of the left of how it lost, how it loses after it wins by not understanding that critical factor of our existence.
Christina Heatherton:
Well, yeah, I mean, think we could spend a whole nother hour just trying to think about problems with the left and some of these kind of majoritarian strategies that say of kind of obscenely that the working class is X. And so then considerations about gender and sexuality and racism and disability are somehow distractions. And we need to move this imagined center first before we can address these other issues. Instead of dealing with the fact that the working class in this country and around the world, are people of color, are people, are people who are disabled. So I completely agree with you that this is an issue that the left continues to grapple with. And part of the reason I highlight the figures that I highlight in the book, and half the book is about feminists.
Half the book is about how different feminist organizers have approached these questions was a way of saying, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It’s not as if this is the first time we’ve had these considerations. It’s not as if this is the first time we’ve thought about how a class struggle has to for put at the forefront sex workers, renters, people that are struggling over social reproduction, people who are struggling over access to relief, that these have been constitutive parts of how we understand revolutionary struggle. It’s not so much trying to tinker with theory in the present to perfect it, but it means grappling with these past debates and these past central figures who have made these arguments and organized at huge scales in the past.
Marc Steiner:
And I think that the stories you have here talking about the women, which are again, are central to the book. They’re probably the most important characters in the book in many ways, whether we’re talking about Alexandra Kollontai, who was the Russian ambassador, we can talk about her to Mexico, Dorothy Healy, I never think of Dorothy Healy in this way. I mean, having read her stuff when I was younger, but I never thought about Dorothy Healy in terms of Mexico and Elizabeth Catlett, the great artist that you also don’t think about in this way. So I want to kind of approach this in two ways. I want to make sure we get these stories out on the table, who these women were, why they were so central to it all, but B and B, not but, and B, it also talks to the centrality of your theme, which is how important the Mexican Revolution was and is to the planet and to change and to other movements around the globe. And these women in many ways are that connective tissue.
Christina Heatherton:
Absolutely. Well, I would say that the big organizing theme of the book is a concept I have called convergence spaces. So these are sites where different radical traditions are compressed together in struggle that usually produce new articulations of struggle. And I think my motivation with that is to show that the kind of theory, the way that people make sense of the world that they’re in and produce radical theory is something that happens all the time. It’s something that we don’t always give people credit for. And I think that that’s really dangerous. If we think about theory only being done by elites that are removed from struggle as if people are not capable of doing it. I think we develop a totally different theory of radical change. So as an example, I think about Dorothy Healy who was before she became the Dorothy Healy that I think a lot of people in this country know, someone who was a mentor to people like Mike Davis.
She was a very young communist militant. She was somebody who… In the book I talk about how she was at the forefront of a shared struggle in southern California. She was a key organizer of the unemployed councils in the Depression. So these were organizations of unemployed people before there was any federal aid from the New Deal, but she also went to places like the Imperial Valley and organized with farm workers. As an example of what I’m talking about by convergence spaces, I tell a story about what it meant when she met up with all these different striking lettuce workers in the Imperial Valley, as I said, where my family was from. And she reflects in this oral history with Morris Isserman that she’s like, she’s feeling her oats, she’s talking to all these workers about a radical struggle and what it means, what capitalist exploitation means.
And she says, there’s a lot of Mexican workers, there’s a lot of Filipino and black and poor white workers, but a lot of the Mexican workers that kind of fold their arms. And she realizes they’re nodding their head with the kind of patience indulgence, and then they’re like, “Right, so we just went through a revolution. So how about you tell us when you need us to be on the barricades and we’ll be there, but don’t start lecturing us about what it means to have a radical struggle against capitalist US bosses. We’ve been fighting this for a really long time.” So that’s one example of many of how we can think about struggles that we might code in a different way, these dramatic struggles by farm workers in the 1930s that could just be slotted under industrial history. But when we think about all the different radical traditions that were compressed together in struggle, I think we have a totally different sense of that radical history and also of how the Mexican Revolution and its legacies was woven through.
Marc Steiner:
And I think that Elizabeth Catlett story about how, again, people know her as one of the great artists that the United States ever produced, and this light coming out of the African American world and incredible work. But not about her connection to Mexico and how Mexico again influenced her so deeply and the artistic world of Mexico and the revolution in Mexico just affected her work and her life. And how that also translates into the bridge that creates this kind of unity we don’t even think about.
Christina Heatherton:
Absolutely, absolutely. I think it’s a surprise to a lot of people because Elizabeth Catlett’s, art is, it’s omnipresent, it’s everywhere. It’s the cover of a lot of books and posters and magazines, particularly ones that either think really deeply about the history of black power, prominently from the sixties on, but also these beautiful prints she did particularly of black working class women that she was doing from the 1930s on. So I think it would really surprise people to learn that she did most of that work in Mexico where she spent the majority of her life. And the way I came to her story, I wasn’t intending to write about her. I’m so glad I stumbled upon her. I was in the archives looking through the collection of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, which was an internationalist art collective based in Mexico City. It had this really interesting relationship to the great long traditions of print culture in Mexico.
And they had assembled this whole series about the history of the Mexican Revolution. They did just a number of prints narrating each episode. And I just was curious how were people in the 1940s thinking back about the history of the Mexican Revolution. So I’m looking through all these pictures, and then at the bottom in the same box was a series called The Black Woman, and it was by Elizabeth Catlett. And in that series she has figures like Phyllis Wheatley and Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. She has black women that are at the forefront of unemployed council organizing women who are organizing against segregation on buses. And I thought, I was like, is this mislabeled? Should I tell the archivist? And then I started to realize, no, they’re in the same box. They were created at the same time. And I started putting some of the prints out and I realized not only were they made at the same time, but they were very consciously produced alongside each other.
So there are ways in which in the tares images, there’s a picture of say, Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata. And in Catlett black woman series, there’s similar pictures of Phyllis Wheatley that they’re stylistically, they were clearly done with a consciousness of each other, which I thought was really fascinating. But then moving through and seeing that their pictures of, for example, the intense violent exploitation of indigenous people was rendered in a very similar way to the way that Catlett talked about lynching in the US. This opened up a whole different question for me about not only what were these artists doing with each other, but how did they understand the resonance between this history and what did it mean that they were doing this in the 1940s? Which is, I think precedes the period when a lot of us would imagine this kind of internationalist consciousness would’ve been existent.
Marc Steiner:
And I think that’s really, to me, I do encourage people to read this book. I just think many academic scholars don’t know how to write, so we like to read them. But in this book, as I said to you, I think earlier before we started, was there it is like this, you write poetically with substance. And I think that’s engages you to come in to want to read this book even more. And I think that to me, the most important part of this is for this book for me, was opening up a door to understanding the importance of Mexican history and society and circles in Mexico and how they inspired the entire planet and how they deeply interact with this world, this world in the United States. Just kind of think about this whether it is, I think when you write this line, near the end of your book, you mind if I read it? I’m just going to just read this. [inaudible 00:47:48] I just love this piece.
You write, “It’s not by moral outrage that alone, that people have lent their lives the struggle for better worlds. Neither is it by the purity of instruction from theory. There’s certainly no royal road and the only one made by walking, many have walked, many have been forced to move. Many have found roads while walking with others. This book has attempted to map some of the movement in the hope of making the future roads possible. And here it goes. History is not a guide, but a map drawn in the stars of past lights. Out of the prison of the present is a recognition we’ve been warned by others, by other fires that we have not built. What warmth and light shall we leave behind?”
So I wanted to read that just because to me, the heart of your book is talking about this history. We don’t understand about how Mexico inspired revolutions and revolutionaries and people across the globe that we don’t give credit to. And especially now with the tensions around the border of the United States to understand where all this came from and how we better understand this if we want to be able to define our own future.
Christina Heatherton:
I think we’d all feel a lot stronger if we abandoned the kind of missionary approach to radicalism that we thought we had. The one true church and we were proselytizing to other people. I mean, there’s a kind of crime that happens in the writing of mainstream history that I think gets repeated in how we think in organizing, I think in organized. And that’s this idea that people’s histories and consciousness begins as soon as they come into this country. When I think something really opens up when we do what… I mean, we have an incredible tradition of historians and thinkers in this country who say there are worlds, there are revolutionary struggles that people come from. Something as simple as a wage dispute in a restaurant by restaurant workers or a strike or farm worker strike as I talk about. These are deeply imbued with the different experiences that people bring to them that we don’t always have a language to understand.
I think anybody who’s been a part of struggles, whether they’re unionization efforts at logistic centers or Starbucks or any of these incredible strikes that are happening across campuses, people realize that people come to struggle with a number of different experiences that have to be valued and learned from. I think if the book does anything, it’s just an invitation to give us some language for how that’s already been done. Because I don’t think we have to, as I said before, reinvent the wheel or create completely new answers. But I think there’s a gentler method that we can open up and understand the worlds of radicalism, that the extraordinary worlds that we have to draw from.
Marc Steiner:
And sometimes where the left can go. You really wrote a book, I put this, you wrote a really beautiful non-sectarian book.
Christina Heatherton:
Appreciate that. I appreciate that.
Marc Steiner:
That understands that the roles that all these different groups played. And I want people to really understand why they should read this book. To really understand the power of Mexico and what Mexico gave the world and what it continues to give the world and how this internationalist was rooted there. And I just said, it’s a marvelous piece of work. It must have taken you a decade to write.
Christina Heatherton:
How about it took me most of that time to write and then a little bit more time to edit down to what the press wanted me to do. I mean, can you imagine? It’s like you said, the book starts in 1840 and ends in 1940. I was supposed to write like 85,000 words. My publisher was like, you got to be kidding. So I’m glad it’s done. I’m happy it’s in the world, and I really appreciate this opportunity to talk with you about it.
Marc Steiner:
Arise Global Radicalism and the era of the Mexico Revolution by Dr. Christina Heatherton. It’s really well written. You can’t stop reading once you start. As I said to my friend in an email to Marcus Reder, I said, this is one of those books. And I want to thank you so much. This is a fantastic work and I look forward to many more conversations and just maybe as we explore the world here at The Real News and on the Mark Steiner show, just having you on to talk about your viewpoint coming out, all of this about what we face and where we have to go.
Christina Heatherton:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Looking forward to it.
Marc Steiner:
We do appreciate it. Thank you.
Christina Heatherton:
Thank you. Thank you, mark.
Marc Steiner:
And once again, thank you to Dr. Christina Heatherton for this book and this conversation. And once again, thank you to all of you for joining us today. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard and what you’d like us to cover. Write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I promise I’ll write you right back. And if you have an extra minute, stay there. Go to www.therealnews.com, become a monthly donor, become part of the future with us. So for Cameron Grandino and Kele Rivera and the crew here at The Real News, I’m Mark Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
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