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).
The volume includes an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. Each chapter offers a similarly structured title that ties it to other chapters and into the overall theme of the book. Chapter 1, “How to Make a Flag: Internationalism and the Pivot of 1848,” for example, offers a brief history of Bagdad, Mexico (at the mouth of the Rio Grande, where it enters the Gulf of Mexico), and examines how the business ventures and influence of Charles Stillman both internationalized capital and “produced a broad internationalist consciousness” (26). Chapter 2, “How to Make a Map: Small Shareholders and Global Radicals in Revolutionary Mexico,” considers the arrival of the Indian national M. N. Roy in Mexico in 1917 and his impact on the Mexican Revolution. Chapters 3 through 6 trace a similar path and, respectively, examine the incarceration of Ricardo Flores Magón, the life and career of Alexandra Kollontai, the activism of Dorothy Healey, and the work of the sculptor and graphic artist Elizabeth Catlett, particularly as these relate to the construction of internationalism both within and beyond the borders of Mexico.
Although this work represents a valuable contribution to the study of the causes and consequences of the Mexican Revolution, there are occasional moments when a hypothesis distracts from the principal argument. For example, Chapter 4, “How to Make Love: Alexandra Kollontai and the Nationalization of Women,” tells the story of how Kollontai, assigned to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in 1926, traveled there from Veracruz by train. Regarding this journey, Heatherton makes a number of hypothetical observations: Kollontai “would have passed by red stars painted by the windows” (103), “the ambassador might have seen the familiar sight of children” (103), “Kollontai would have been familiar with the sight . . .” (103), “she would have witnessed space” (103), and “Kollontai might have sensed rumblings” (104), among other examples (our emphasis). Although the life of Alexandra Kollontai certainly lends itself to a degree of illustrative license, these conjectures may distract from what is otherwise a solid piece of scholarship.
This same scholarly license, however, often dovetails with a keen archival instinct and scholarly rigor, offering a solid work that considers the lives of a select number of artists and activists within the framework of internationalism in the United States and Mexico before, during, and after the Mexican Revolution. Arise! is an important contribution to the fields of Latin American cultural studies and Mexican history and to a more profound understanding of cultural dynamics and internationalism as these relate to political dynamics, power struggles, and border policies and migrations in North America and Mexico in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
