In Arise!, Christina Heatherton explores the global radicalism of the early 20th century, focusing on the Mexican Revolution. Heatherton centres and humanises marginalised figures involved in the struggle, including those at Leavenworth Prison who fermented revolutionary ideas. According to Moritz Koenig, this gripping book illuminates how radical movements have the power to expand intellectual and political horizons and build international solidarity.
How could the university be reimagined? Recent campus protests and encampments in solidarity with Gaza have shown how radical movements can make new political subjectivities and forge internationalist solidarity. Many of these encampments represent(ed) unique political spaces in which students of different persuasions, backgrounds, and ideologies come together in what Christina Heatherton in her timely book Arise! calls a “convergence space” – a moment in time where political persuasions and aspirations overlap and create something new.
Recent campus protests and encampments in solidarity with Gaza have shown how radical movements can make new political subjectivities and forge internationalist solidarity.
Heatherton’s book, focusing on global radicalism in the era of the Mexican revolution (1910-1920), thus comes at an opportune time, and has fallen into a “convergence space” of its own. In the book’s most engrossing, dramatic, and incisive chapter, aptly titled “How to Make a University”, the author stretches the idea of the university itself. Heatherton delves into the history of Leavenworth prison in the southern United States, repurposed in the early 20th century to incarcerate anarchists, socialists and pacifists at a time of revolutionary foment across the border in Mexico. The focus on these groups was accompanied by the ascendance of a new US-led empire manifesting itself especially in Mexico through the racialised registers of capital. Although Leavenworth was ultimately designed as a harsh disciplinary institution, inmates transformed it into an organising space and a laboratory for new radical ideas. Heatherton narrates this transformation with brilliant story-telling acumen by detailing intellectual exchanges and debates in reading clubs and tracing the invigorating impact of the Mexican revolution on the nascent internationalist radicalism brewing inside the prison walls.
The “convergence space” of Heatherton’s book and the Gaza encampments does not end here. Arise! is a prescient history of our present and the chapter on Leavenworth contains in a nutshell everything that makes the book as a whole so utterly engrossing. It tells the story of the Mexican revolution in an entirely decentralised fashion. The revolution began as an uprising against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz but soon morphed into a collection of movements against dispossession that mobilised especially the rural classes who had been driven off their land by transnational capital and laboured on haciendas (plantations). Reflecting these decentralised mobilisations, Heatherton does not subject the reader to a chronological recounting of events or biographies of its vanguard (figures such as Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata have by now gained pop cultural status), but brings to life the frenzied, organic internationalism inspired by its transformative effects. Heatherton is a gifted narrator for whom the Mexican revolution is an undercurrent that energised radicalism and forged global connections. As such, she chases the revolution’s outgrowths, tangents and entanglements. In doing so, Heatherton has put together a brilliantly sophisticated and, frankly, highly entertaining account of revolutionary struggle in the early 20th century.
Heatherton is a gifted narrator for whom the Mexican revolution is an undercurrent that energised radicalism and forged global connections.
The author stitches together compelling narratives about minor characters from disparate, power-laden archives, such as an artfully circuitous mini-detective story about a certain Jose Martinez, an inmate in Leavenworth, that Heatherton cobbles together out of prison and hospital records. The author has the gift of being able to give emotional depth to the stories of revolutionaries whose lives only remain in fragments in the archives of imperialism. These characters are brought together by their shared experiences of dispossession, haunted by racialisation, and personally transformed by the revolutionary energy of Mexico in the 1910s. Their lives are brought back through anthropological intimacy: we meet them on trains (Chapter Four), migration routes (Chapter Two), and in community art centres (Chapter Six). We can hear the chatter of radical foment in the prison yard, smell the salt in the air that Paul Kochi, a Japanese dissident turned internationalist, smelled en route to North America, and we can almost feel the manila rope through which Heatherton harrowingly describes how dispossessed and racialised communities were bound together through estate labour and punishment.
We can almost feel the manila rope through which Heatherton harrowingly describes how dispossessed and racialised communities were bound together through estate labour and punishment.
Chapters Four, Five, and Six investigate some of the aftershocks of the internationalist energy of the Mexican revolution. In Chapter Four, the reader is taken to Mexico City in 1926-1927 and the short tenure of Soviet diplomat Alexandra Kollontai. Through Kollontai’s writings and work in Mexico, Heatherton teases out some of the frictions Kollontai’s feminist internationalism produced in a post-revolutionary landscape. Conservative media in Mexico and political elites in the US projected onto her their fears about intersectional struggles. Biting critiques of capitalism’s complicity in the patriarchal subordination of women animated wild conspiracy theories and delirious defamation campaigns. Exploring these themes through Kollontai’s work represents yet another masterstroke by Heatherton.
In the midst of the book’s compelling analysis, one brief paragraph, almost an afterthought, made me ponder conceptual contradictions and future avenues for scholarly enquiry. The author seems to suggest that internationalist activists, such as those “trained” at Leavenworth prison, constituted a class of “organic intellectuals” in the tradition of Gramscian thought (93). And indeed, Heatherton’s account of organic intellectual labour by inmates at Leavenworth is utterly convincing. However, the author also argues that “[u]nder capitalism […] traditional intellectuals were tied to creating ‘the conditions most favorable to the extension’ of the ruling class” while “organic intellectuals” were “representative of the interests of the proletariat.” But to Gramsci, organic intellectuals were neither intrinsically good nor bad. He argued that all social groups produced “organic” intellectuals who could consolidate the material relations of these groups. The members of the transnational class of financiers, whom Heatherton describes trenchantly, could, thus, equally be described as such. Stockbrokers, company managers, and technical experts carried out the intellectual tasks that were organic to the economic and social formations of early 20th century racialised transnational capital. Praxis, in this case, does not distinguish traditional from organic. Further exploration of this conceptual issue could, in future research on the Mexican revolution, yield productive new tensions and frictions.
The book does not dwell on internationalism’s failures or missed opportunities. Instead, it brings to life a world that could have been.
Overall, this book is an invaluable addition to recent research on racial capitalism (see Brenna Bhandar and Muriam Haleh Davis) and early 20th century internationalism (especially the League Against Imperialism). Heatherton’s book manages to be rigorously analytical while humanising the illustrious cast of characters through whom the captivating story of internationalism in the age of the Mexican revolution is told. Ultimately, the book does not dwell on internationalism’s failures or missed opportunities. Instead, it brings to life a world that could have been. It is a timely intervention in testing times when our generation, in Heatherton’s words, has a choice to “fulfill or betray” (177) internationalism’s legacy.
- This review first appeared at LSE Review of Books.
- Image credit: Mexican Revolution: Soldiers marching and on horseback, Published [United States] : [Publisher not identified], [between 1911 and 1914] courtesy of the US Library of Congress.
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- Note: This article gives the views of the reviewer, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.
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