Mexico's Revolution and the Internationalist Movement

Abstract

Christina Heatherton’s book is a timely and necessary contribution to the study of the parallels between the Mexican Revolution and the Internationalist Movement within and beyond Mexico’s borders. Although works such Megan Threlkeld’s Pan American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico (2014) have examined this subject, and the collection Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (2017) includes David M. Struthers’s chapter “IWW Internationalism and Interracial Organizing in the Southwestern United States,” Heatherton’s monograph effectively contextualizes the study within the broader framework of “the era of New Imperialism” during the early twentieth century. Under this New Imperialism, the “shadow hegemony” exercised by the United States represents “a defensive subjectivity of becoming, a longing for power required through racist terror” (13). Heatherton uses the writings of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois and considers the lives and works of Ricardo Flores Magón, Dorothy Healey, Alexandra Kollontai, and Elizabeth Catlett, among others, to “[foreground] the influence of the Mexican Revolution, the first major social revolution of the twentieth century” (14).