In the summer of 2005, I worked for an anarchist labor organization in the city of Tehuacan, Puebla in Mexico, then the blue jeans manufacturing capital of the world. This organization (the Tehuacan Valley Human and Labor Rights Commission) took great influence from an indigenous anarchist insurrectionary from Oaxaca named Ricardo Flores Magon. Magon and his Partido Liberal Mexicano were the first to take up arms against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz and was the intellectual predecessor to the later, much more famous Emiliano Zapata, with his party's slogan: Land and Liberty. Though many people, including random folks on the bus and bluejeans factory workers alike, knew who he was, the dozen or so bookstores I went to in Mexico didn't carry books by or about him.

Neither was he easy to track down in the US. Books on the Mexican Revolution barely mentioned him, and I could only find one book about him in English. The internet at that time yielded only a handful of translations of his works, mostly on obscure anarchist websites that frequently went offline. As soon as I heard that AK Press was going to put out a larger body of translated RFM works, I ordered it immediately.

Having recently returned from another trip to Mexico, the situation has definitely changed. With the Oaxacan uprising in 2006 and the newsworthiness of such organizations as the Zapatista-Magonista Alliance and CIPO-Ricardo Flores Magon, the people who had been carrying the torch of Ricardo Flores Magon's legacy have created an enthusiastic renewed interest in the folk hero's influence on Mexican history. At the 25th anniversary celebration of the EZLN, dozens of pamphlets, pins, CDs of radio programs, patches, and banners with his likeness were on display.

The first third of the book gives the historical context for Ricardo Flores Magon's writings with a biographical sketch, not just of Magon, but of the history of Revolutionary Mexico. These were some of the most informative pages in the book. starts in the early 1800s with Miguel Hidalgo, progresses through the time of Benito Juarez, and lands us in the era of Porfirio Diaz. Finally, we are given a 70 page, fairly thorough biography of his political organizing that can, at times be a little too "...and then this happened. And then this happened."

Ricardo Flores Magon's essays are pure, distilled anarchist agitational propaganda. The metaphors are so rich that it is difficult to sit down and read more than one essay at a time, but set it down for any extended period of time and you start fiending for it.

Genuinely arousing lines abound:

"Let us rise, and with the shovel that now serves to pile up gold for our masters, let us split their skulls in two, and with the sickle that weakly cuts off ears of corn, let us cut off the heads of the bourgeoisie and the tyrants. And above the smoldering embers of this damned system, let us plant our banner, the banner of the poor, to the cry of Land and Liberty!
Let us no longer elevate anyone; let us all rise! Let us no longer hang medals or crosses on the chests of our leaders; if they want to be decorated, let us decorate them with our fists. [...:]The hour of justice has arrived, and in place of the ancient cry, the terror of the rich, "Your money or your life!" let us substitute this cry: "Your money and your life!" (217 "The Intervention and the Prisoners of Texas")

"The law is a brake, and with the brakes on we'll never arrive at liberty. [...:] The tyrant dies from stab wounds, not from articles of the legal code." (241 "Outlaws")

"Between bandit and bandit, I prefer the one who, dagger in hand and with a resolute spirit, jumps out from some thicket by the road shouting "Your money or your life!" I prefer this one, I insist, to the bandit who, sitting down at his desk, coldly, quietly, calmly drinks the blood of his workers." (243 "Bandits!")

But some of Magon's rhetoric would make the most battle-hardened insurrectionary anarchist blush and close the binding in public places:

"How far is the ideal, how far! A mirage in the desert, a phantasm of the steppes, the twinkling image of a star reflected in a lake. First was the bottomless abyss separating humanity from the promised land. How to fill this abyss? How to plug it? How to reach the inviting beach that we divine is on the far shore? Defending the abyss are prejudices, traditions, religious fanaticism, the law. In order to be able to cross this abyss, one must vanquish its defenders until the abyss is filled with blood and then sail over this new red sea." (190 "Liberty Equality Fraternity")

"Let's suppose that the number lost in this evil war is a million; this would signify that a million families that they find themselves without protection because their men were so stupid that they preferred to march to the slaughterhouse to defend the interests of their exploiters rather than to go to war in defense of the interests of their class. That such lambs die is a good thing. There's no lack of men who are obstacles to the desire for liberty of the other individuals of their class[...:] that means we'll encounter fewer obstacles in our struggle for the destruction of the present system." (295 "The World War")

I am really glad that the editors of this volume decided to end the book with some of Ricardo Flores Magon's stories, didactic as they were, because I think this is where Magon's philosophies and rhetoric come across with the least pretension. The final essay, New Life is a great look into the future of the triumph of the Social Revolution and the ease with which an ungovernable working class will bring to birth the new world from the ashes of the old.

One of the most useful parts of this book for readers who want to read more about the Mexican Revolution will be the bibliography, where there are long lists of resources about different aspects of the themes introduced in the book.

The book's design is impeccable. Everything seems to work very well, both with the very modern sans serif typeface and its contrast with the serifed paragraph font and the italics and script, the bold lines at the bottom of the page, the black stars and the grey bars, the incredible woodcuts from Mexican revolutionary artist Jose Guadalupe Posada. I might have wanted more left and right margin to fit my thumbs in, but this is nitpicking when the rest of the book is so beautiful and functional. ( )