Library of Congress - Insurgent Americana: Radical US Intellectuals and the Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was the first major anti-imperial revolution of the twentieth century and occurred in a nation that shares a large and porous land border with the US. Yet histories of the American Left have rarely treated the Mexican Revolution as an important rupture or challenge to the thought of US radicals, whose trajectory has ordinarily been narrated through their encounters with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. This major research project will interrogate the reception of the Mexican Revolution among the Anglophone US Left, broadly conceived to include 'New Negro' intellectuals, white journalists, and political leaders of various stripes. It will examine the ways that ingrained assumptions about race and historical development framed understandings of the Revolution north of the border, how such assumptions were challenged by it, and what role revolutionary Mexico (beyond its celebrated muralists) played in the cultural Left of the interwar period. Insurgent Americana moves forward a developing scholarship on the transnational and global significance of the Mexican Revolution by foregrounding its place at the centre of political thought among Anglophone North Americans through the middle decades of the twentieth century. The project will result in two major outputs: a monograph (intended for submission to Duke University Press), and a digital exhibition on the visual culture of the US Left’s solidarity with revolutionary Mexico.