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.

Revolutionary developments along the El Paso and Ciudad Juárez border during the turn of the twentieth century created a cultural renaissance that resulted in scores of literary works, memoirs, films, and other artistic productions that rearticulated the experiences of living in a liminal border zone. This chapter explores serialized literature published by El Paso Spanish-language newspapers during the Mexican Revolution, including Tomóchic (1896) by Lauro Aguirre and Teresa Urrea, Los de abajo (1915) by Mariano Azuela, Memorias de mi viaje (1914) by Olga Beatriz Torres, The Wise Man of the Land of Moctezuma (ca. 1925) by Victor L. Ochoa, and the bilingual film by Félix and Edmundo Padilla, La Venganza de Pancho Villa (ca. 1930). I argue that the literature and film produced in these two cities along the international dividing line reveal the liminality of frontera itself produced much of the affective charge of fronterizo cultural productions.

In the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries, mixed claims commissions were established as a way of resolving claims for injuries caused to foreign nationals by rebels when political instability, especially in the form of revolution and civil war, threatened foreign imperial and commercial ambitions and interrupted periods of capitalist expansion in decolonised Mexico and Venezuela. Enforcing state responsibility for such claims was often the justification for intervention in Latin America during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. While not all of the mixed claims commissions were imposed by the threat or use of force, invasion, occupation and bombardment existed alongside arbitration as part of a spectrum of more or less coercive measures to protect foreign commerce and capital during this time. The system of mixed claims commissions – as a political intervention in decolonised Latin America – served to insulate global economic liberalisation against revolution and civil war in the decolonised world, by taking the question of who assumed the risk of harm by rebels out of the scope of national authority.

This chapter continues to uncover Steinbeck’s interest in Mexico (and the Mexican Revolution) and his relevance as a thinker on the Global South and its social inequalities. Turning to Steinbeck’s collaborative projects in Mexico, the documentary film about water sanitation, The Forgotten Village, and The Pearl--both novel and film made with the Mexican director Emilio Fernandez--we encounter experimental artistic forms that embody a transamerican political vision. If The Forgotten Village fails in its efforts to politicize and improve the living conditions of the indigenous peoples it depicts, then The Pearl represents a more successful attempt to participate in history. Comparing the novel and the film reveals a creative dialogue between Steinbeck and Fernandez, in which the novel’s techniques of sound and vision look forward to its existence as a film. Together with a new understanding of uncertainty and of a human consciousness extending into and capable of changing the world, The Pearl has a curious temporality that imagines society on the verge of revolutionary change.

This chapter explains the global-historical context in which rebel leaders make decisions about how to govern. The chapter argues that although rebel groups have undertaken governance for centuries, they have frequently saved costly and potentially burdensome governance projects until after war ends. Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), however, knowingly and repeatedly introduced burdensome and occasionally perilous governance during war, in addition to some more popular projects. By the 1930s, the CCP had begun propagating this governance strategy globally as a model for later rebel groups. The CCP’s eventual victory provided a larger platform to disseminate information about its experience and governance strategy, including introducing a training program for would-be and active rebel leaders. As a result of the CCP’s efforts, the international system was saturated with information about the CCP’s approach to governance. The CCP’s efforts made a strategy for relatively more burdensome wartime governance cognitively available to later rebel leaders, and it is within this international informational structure that rebel leaders make decisions about governance.

From October 1936, Mexico waged a growing legal campaign at the League of Nations (‘the League’) in favour of the Spanish Republic in the context of the Spanish civil war. The Mexican delegate at the League, Narciso Bassols, repeatedly denounced the intervention of Italy and Germany in the armed conflict, challenging the view that the war in Spain should be described solely as an internal issue.

The Mexican Revolution and the new Constitution of 1917 produced transformations in the field of international law both in Mexico and across the Americas. The impact of these transformations, and particularly their implications for continental and regional debates over armed and unilateral interventionism, have tended to be overlooked by scholarship on international relations and the Mexican Revolution.

The Mexican Revolution is commonly perceived to have been the first social revolution. The revolutionary Mexican Constitution of 1917, at the time perhaps the most radical the world had seen, is well known, as is the subsequent oil nationalisation of the 1930s that it facilitated. Another significant, albeit less immediately striking, consequence of the revolutionary events that took place in Mexico between 1910 and 1920 was that a large number of claims were made against the Mexican state in respect of injuries caused to foreign nationals as a result of the revolution. Such claims found their basis in a (hotly contested) body of international legal rules that had emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth concerning alien protection: that is, concerning the rights of states to protect their nationals overseas and the duties of states when it came to the treatment of foreign nationals in their territory.2 The law of alien protection was also known as, or incorporated, state responsibility for injuries to aliens and diplomatic protection. Subsequently, six mixed claims commissions – with the United States, France, Germany, Spain, Britain and Italy – were set up to adjudicate Mexico’s international responsibility for claims that had arisen in respect of loss or damage caused by ‘revolutionary acts’ between 20 November 1910 and 31 May 1920.3 Loss or damage here encompassed personal injury, property loss or damage and breach of contract.4 Claims could be brought by ‘corporations, companies, associations, partnerships or individuals’.5 In addition, there was a second US commission, the ‘general commission’ (in contrast to the ‘special commission’, as the other US commission was known), which also had jurisdiction over certain other ‘revolutionary damage’ claims.6

Todd Downing (Choctaw), John Joseph Mathews (Osage), John Milton Oskison (Cherokee), Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), and Will Rogers (Cherokee) developed a transindigenous and transborder imaginary while travelling in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. The work of Riggs and Downing especially coheres in their conception of Indigenous Mexicans as political inspiration for (and, potentially, anti-colonial allies of) Native Americans, and in their critical challenge to modernist aesthetics, including primitivism. With its recent history of revolution, a new constitution with an article sanctioning land redistribution from large haciendas to communally owned ejidos, and a national commitment to indigenismo and mestizaje, which appeared to affirm the centrality of Indigenous Mexican culture and history to the nation’s identity, Mexico offered fertile political ground for American Indian writers looking for a path forward for their tribal nations in the final years of the assimilation era and the first years of the Indian New Deal in the mid-1930s.