4 - Indoamerica against Empire: Radical Transnational Politics in Mexico City, 1925–1929

Summary

Mexico City in the mid-1920s was a crucial gathering point for Latin American anti-imperialists. This chapter retraces the emergence of a common agenda among Communists, radical Mexican peasant movements, and exiled dissidents from across the region, focusing on the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA) and its publication, El Libertador. While it drew on the region’s deep anti-imperialist traditions, the convergence that took place in the wake of Mexico’s 1910–1920 Revolution was decisively shaped by transnational connections with the Communist International, which served as a conduit to anticolonial movements across the world. In the second half of the 1920s, LADLA and El Libertador not only animated movements for regional solidarity – notably against the US occupations of Nicaragua and Haiti – they also showcased a newly global anticolonial sensibility, drawing parallels between Latin America’s situation and those of peoples subject to direct or indirect colonial rule in Africa, India, and China.