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A hybrid political education collaboration between Haymarket Books and the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction.
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The Mexican Revolution was like a crucible—once heated, it radically transformed everything it touched and reshaped Mexico for a century. Aspiring initially to the liberal reform of the 35-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the movement quickly gave way to something more radical: the demand for land, indigenous rights, and even grassroots communal power. If 19th-century Latin America politics was fundamentally about independence, and the 20th century about socialism, what are we to make of this crucial but often overlooked interlude, before Cuba, and before even Russia, where socialist demands were being worked out in practice and in a political language not yet fully born? Standing at the threshold between past and present, at the borderlands of the First World and the Third, what can the Mexican Revolution teach us about not only Mexico, but also about revolutionary change more broadly?
In this 12-week course, we will approach the decade-long Mexican Revolution as “a tiger unleashed” (in the words of Díaz), whose ramifications continue to be felt not just in Mexico, but across the Western hemisphere. Through selections from key historical analyses by John Womack, Adolfo Gilly, and Christina Heatherton, we will study the radically unpredictable unfolding—and long-term reverberations—of this process with an eye to the following questions:
- What is the relationship between freedom and equality, between formal independence and substantive social transformation?
- What is the relationship between socialism and decolonization?
- Is revolution fundamentally a question of looking forward or of plumbing the past for insight and inspiration?
- How did such a rebellious process become ultimately institutionalized into a decades-long dictatorship, and what does this tell us about the relationship between revolutions and institutions more generally?
This is a hybrid seminar. Philadelphia-based participants are welcome to meet in-person in West Philadelphia, while remote participants will be able to contribute to the conversation via Haymarket's YouTube channel. The primary text for much of this course will be John Womack's Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, which is available as a PDF here in English and here in Spanish, and in a computer-generated audiobook here.
This is the fourth in a series. Our previous seminars on Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois, The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James, and the work of Frantz Fanon can be accessed on Spotify, YouTube, and Haymarket Books.
***Register through Ticket Tailor to receive information about each week’s assigned readings, as well as in-person and virtual meeting details. Each event will also be recorded.***
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This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.