I.
The story is told, and then told again, of a ruling party that massacred its political opponents. Once the blood had been washed from the killing place and the memories of violence all seemed to pass, the remains were gathered up into the rotunda. In time, the broken torsos of organizers would be laid on the ground beside the rotting bodies of their executioners; rusty medals still clinging in the damp. A fresh foundation was poured over all the corpses. As it seeped and hardened into the crevices, the past became a crypt, a solid block of undifferentiated time. Upon this flattened surface, a new face of the state was forged. It memorialized the grand spirit of rebellion while effacing all the tender features of the resistance. Under heavy plaques, the memories of rage were smothered, and the cherished names of the dead were pressed deep into the earth. Only then could a legacy of unity be brutely proclaimed. Writing the history of revolution means rooting the experiences of revolt out from their official commemorations. It means bending to pick the little flowers that still sprout from the commingled soil.
II.
The past retains a claim to the present. The dead still speak to the living. We strain to hear the sounds (though they grow as insistent as crows). “Not even the dead,” wrote Walter Benjamin in 1940, “will be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.” Against the encroaching fascism of his time, he recognized that “this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”[1] Though we are many lifetimes away from his famous essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” we still heed his cautious words, just as we tread softly around the same gaping maw that swallowed him.
III.
We inherit the nineteenth-century prophecies. We struggle under their weight. It was foretold that twentieth-century revolutions would march first over the paved streets of Western industrial nations. There, the most advanced sectors of the working class were meant to assume primacy. While such assemblages gathered with force and might, they often trailed rather than led the prophesied struggles. Indeed, the first revolutions of the twentieth century were “chiefly propelled by the oppressed and subaltern of the rural world,” as Adolfo Gilly observed. Rising against colonialism, imperial rule, exploitation, and/or the violence of expropriation, their steps stirred the dust over unpaved streets across the planet.[2]
IV.
While they varied in time, speed, and direction, these unforeseen revolutions shared many common features. They arose against dispossession, the commodification of “every human relationship,” and the shattering of the “previous human world.” Indeed, the last century proved again that worlds which become unrecognizable and uninhabitable, duly become ungovernable. In his 2001 “Nine Theses,” Gilly explains that the social revolutions of the twentieth century were not guided by fixed visions of alternative futures; more often, they were driven by “the intolerable conditions of the present.”[3] Gilly, like Benjamin, did not see revolutions as engines of history. Rather, both interpreted them as the times that humanity, aboard a careening train, has frantically tried to pull “the emergency brake.”[4] The insight haunts our current moment. Looking backwards from our twenty-first century—out from all its needless war-strewn rubble, glass, and bone—revolutions seem to index the times when people could simply absorb no more suffering.
V.
From Lecumberri Prison in the late 1960s, Adolfo Gilly reconsidered the history of the Mexican Revolution in a global frame. An Argentinian socialist, Gilly had passed through radical labor, peasant, and social struggles throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Through his organizing, he discovered a political language to articulate an intuitive sense of injustice. Through study, he gained the power to connect revolutionary struggles across space and time. Aboard a train to Bolivia in the late 1950s, he read The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James’ classic 1938 study, which explained how enslaved African people won their own freedom through the Haitian Revolution. While working with radical labor and peasant movements in Bolivia, Chile, and Colombia, Gilly became inspired by Indigenous traditions of anticolonial resistance; a sentiment that deepened as he read the writings of Peruvian author José María Arguedas. While in Italy, his study of Antonio Gramsci’s work helped him make sense of the South American “industrial peasantry” with whom he had organized closely. In the ferment of national liberation struggles from Algeria to Vietnam, he devoured Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, and traveled to Cuba shortly after its Revolution. In 1966, he travelled to Mexico after supporting guerrilla forces in Guatemala. He was arrested by Mexican officials and charged with subversion and sentenced to six years in Lecumberri. Not by choice but by chance, Gilly was in Mexico when the country and the world were forced to reckon with the legacy of the Mexican Revolution.[5]
This reckoning was hastened as Mexico’s “low-intensity dirty war” broke out into more public view.[6] On the eve of Mexico City’s 1968 Olympic Games, and after protracted rallies and strikes, thousands of university students gathered at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. Against growing state repression, they demanded fair elections, press freedom, assembly without aggression from granaderos, and implementation of the revolutionary 1917 Constitution’s tenets. That October day, contingents of trade unionists, parents, teachers, and fervent supporters were joined by curious onlookers from the surrounding Tlatelolco neighborhood. As the rally drew to a close, lights suddenly flared, sirens wailed, and government troops began shooting into the crowd. In the melee, hundreds were viciously murdered, and thousands more were maimed. In the aftermath of this now well-known massacre, the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) —self-described heir to the Mexican Revolution—struggled to spell its name in the blood.[7]
After the massacre at Tlatelolco, Lecumberri Prison swelled with newly incarcerated protestors. Those students would have been familiar with “El Palacio Negro,” as it was known. At previous Zócalo rallies, they had read the words of prisoners like journalist Víctor Rico Galán, who had implored the crowd in a letter, “¡Oíd al pueblo, estudiantes!” Students had agitated for the release of prisoners sentenced under Article 145 of the Federal Penal Code against “social dissolution”—the spreading of ideas which might produce “rebellion, sedition, riot, or insurrection.” They further sought to abolish Article 145 itself. In late August, thousands had marched to the prison, encircling it with lit torches and shouting up to the cellblocks, “Los vamos a sacar.” Less than two months later, protestors would be locked behind the very walls where their hopeful chants had recently echoed.[8]
Tlatelolco protestors were incarcerated alongside the renowned political prisoners of Lecumberri. Inside, they discovered that Gilly and his fellow captives had repurposed parts of the prison, including its “N-block,” for collective education, outreach, and organizing. Prisoners collaborated on intellectual activities, such as offering each other classes, co-editing publications, writing poetry, running workshops, discussing books, and planning collective actions.[9] Through different formations, they kept abreast of the world of 1968. Prisoners watched as the PRI tried to manage Tlatelolco’s aftermath, ominously declaring “everything is possible in peace” throughout the Olympics television broadcast. They noted the protests of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, African American athletes who raised their fists in Black Power salutes from the podium, defying US racism and apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia; while the Australian silver medalist, Peter Norman, stood in solidarity with them and with Australia’s aboriginal people. They watched Věra Čáslavská, the Czech gymnast, turn her head in defiance of the U.S.S.R.’s national anthem, a small act of protest against the recent Soviet invasion of her country. Prisoners followed international opposition to the U.S. slaughter in Vietnam, discussing it with their fellow prisoner, Bernard Phillip Ames, a U.S. Marine who had deserted from the war. They read, wrote, debated, and lectured together, circulating article drafts and manuscripts. In this alternative “Department of Political Science,” as it would come to be known, prisoners educated each other about politics as it unfolded in real time. At one point, they posted a sign declaring, “N-Block: Free Territory of Lecumberri.”[10]
In this moment of global reckoning, N-Block prisoners debated the Mexican Revolution. They consciously did so among its many living vestiges. Oil paint fumes may have still emanated from poorly-ventilated Cell 36. Between its narrow walls, the celebrated communist artist and Mexican Revolutionary veteran David Alfaro Siqueiros had painted furiously for years, nearly asphyxiating himself, before his release in 1964. In court, Siqueiros had loudly condemned his sentence under Article 145 as a “complete contradiction” to the “Mexico of the Revolution,” of which he remained a radical icon.[11] Incarcerated rural communist leader Ramón Danzós Palomino was still inspired by the Revolution’s most radical land reforms. Palomino, who was born amidst the Revolution in 1918, published a “call to action” from Lecumberri, writing to rural workers in Oposición, “let us honor Zapata’s memory by making the 10th of April [1970] a date of revolutionary and combative struggle against those who would detract from his ideal.”[12] The journalist Galán was a firm proponent of the idea that the Revolution had been a popular, peasant-led, workers' revolution; a notion that seems to have inspired Gilly as well. When Gilly’s friend and former teacher, César Nicolás Molina Flores, joined the ranks of the prisoners, he encouraged Gilly to write a new Marxist interpretation of the Mexican Revolution, one suitable for the then-present moment of global radical struggle.[13]
Like Gilly, Flores was an ardent Trotskyist. His prized possession was a recording of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary leader and dissident, addressing the US Socialist Workers Party from his Coyoacán home-in-exile.[14] (Trotsky’s assassin, the Spanish communist and Stalinist agent, Ramón Mercader, had himself been incarcerated in Lecumberri from 1940 until 1960). With Flores’ encouragement, Gilly began to consider the wider implications of Mexico’s Revolution in the wake of the Tlatelolco Massacre and in conjunction with the other global revolutions. Doing so meant retrieving an incendiary memory from the official history in which it had been entombed.[15]
VI.
Gilly decided to interpret the Mexican Revolution through Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1930). In those opening pages, Trotsky had observed that "the masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime."[16] His analysis centered on social drama, historical contingency, and class struggle. Gilly’s proposal to analyze the Mexican Revolution through Trotsky’s work put him at odds with the official reigning interpretations. In the accepted Mexican state version, the past was simply a prelude to the present, with the Mexican Revolution logically culminating in the production of the 1917 Constitution and the consolidation of the post-revolutionary state under the PRI. But by 1968, the PRI was struggling to retain a popular revolutionary mantle as it simultaneously mowed down protestors and tortured political dissidents. In Lecumberri, Gilly began distinguishing the Revolution from its heroic but zombified state representations. He instead identified the dynamism at the core of struggles within the revolution. Rather than seeing them as peaceably resolved within the structure of the PRI, he perceived the struggles for land, freedom, dignity, and workers’ power as ongoing. The Revolution, in his account, had not been resolved by the state; it had merely been “interrupted” by it.[17]
Gilly beheld a subterranean history of the Mexican Revolution that remained a central motivating factor for Mexican campesinos, workers, students, and artists, including global radicals like himself. He recognized that the conditions which had precipitated the revolution—mass dispossession, immiseration, despotism, uneven capitalist development, and expropriation—were not unique to Mexico but part of “las peculiaridades nacionales de este desarrollo del capitalismo” and “su integración en el moderno mercado mundial capitalista.”[18] His goal was to take the history of the Mexican Revolution out of “state ideology” and put its analysis in “interrelation with the broader world situation.”[19] Inspired by Trotsky, Gilly further recognized the potential of the Mexican Revolution to inspire other struggles around the world. Indeed, foreign radicals like him had similarly passed through revolutionary Mexico, finding unexpected political resonance with struggles they had imagined to be unique to their own national contexts.[20] If, as Gilly surmised, the Mexican Revolution had been global, and if the impulses that drove it remained alive and ongoing, then the protesters and international dissidents of his time could be seen as simply picking up the threads. And so, in the N-Block of Lecumberri Prison, Gilly attempted to seize the memory of the Mexican Revolution as it flashed up in a moment of danger.
VII.
We must turn our face to the past. We can behold the present horrifying moment not as an exceptional disaster, but as the culmination of previously unresolved catastrophes. Squinting through the official records, we can trace the courage of people who came before, a stubbornly brilliant light that occasionally flashes up across the storm of centuries. We stand to inherit their visions—those who came together, across space and across borders, to imagine an alternative future, not because they had perfected their political program, but because they also found the global condition—in all its needless terror—utterly and unforgivably intolerable. As Adolfo Gilly reflected, we might recover the memory and experience of the twentieth century’s “lightning-flash” revolutions, including the global Mexican Revolution, so that we may “illuminate the present moment of danger.”[21] With such a backwards-looking recovery, we might perceive in the past the not-yet-arrived, a remembrance of things to come, an unmapped horizon of hope that is revealed only as it is traversed.[22]