Edición y comunismo: Cultura impresa, educación militante y prácticas políticas (México, 1930–1940)

Abstract

Sebastián Rivera Mir explores the overlap between a Leninist “doctrina del libro”—the belief that spreading Marxist theory led to revolutionary transformation—and Mexico's broader print culture in the 1930s (p. 42). In this carefully researched and elegantly written volume, the world of Communist publishing radiates out from the books themselves to a complex web of editors, printers, vendors, and readers. It was truly transnational, as were parallel editorial traditions throughout Latin America. Europe in general and Moscow in particular were central: for much of the period, the vast majority of Communist books circulating in Mexico were theoretical texts written by Russian (Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov) and European Marxists and published in Spain. Even as production moved to Mexico in the 1930s, decisions in Moscow often determined which books were published. Thus, the early militant posture of the Comintern's Third Period, its shift to an antifascist Popular Front strategy, and subsequent Soviet purges and the short-lived Soviet-Nazi alliance in the late 1930s inevitably shaped editorial efforts in Mexico. The world of Mexican editorials was also peopled by militants from Europe, Latin America, and the United States, some sent by national Communist parties, some seeking political refuge, and some drawn by the cultural effervescence of Cardenista Mexico. And in turn, Mexican publications crossed porous borders and offset the earlier influence of Spain.The author inserts Mexico's “edición comunista” within a national history and print culture that goes back to nineteenth-century liberalism. The central institutional actors are Mexican: the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the Universidad Obrera de México, the Secretaría de Educación Pública, and unions like the Unión de Obreros de Artes Gráficas. So too are his three case studies, the “no tan rojo” Ediciones Frente Cultural, the PCM's own Editorial Popular, and the semimaverick Editorial América (p. 85). Rivera Mir suggests multiple ways that Mexicans made European texts their own: the decisions of Ediciones Frente Cultural to publish books from a variety of socialist traditions; the golden age of quantity and quality of Marxist book production under Lázaro Cárdenas; the interventions of editors and translators in the prologues, footnotes, and texts of European authors; and the eventual decision of the PCM's Editorial Popular to focus on national affairs and texts written by their own leaders.Nowhere is the narrative richer than in the author's re-creation of editorial networks and the people who participated in them, “desde libreros a escritores, pasando por traductores, dibujantes, distribuidores e impresores,” people who often “se transformaron en activistas incansables” (p. 16). We learn how editor Carlos Rojas Juanco worked without pay and often without eating, and how the young Benita Galeana, then barely literate, sold Communist publications in the Mercado Hidalgo and the Carolina textile factory (a rare glimpse of women in a print world dominated by men). One short chapter re-creates an even more understudied world of print, that of conservative militants and their publishers. The parallel worlds of Communist and conservative print were often antithetical: Luis Islas García left the PCM youth organization to become a militant Catholic and author of anti-Communist books. Rivera Mir makes clear that the world of edición comunista contained all the contradictions of global Communist culture in the 1930s, as when a book by Nikolay Bukharin disappeared from the Ediciones Frente Cultural list of titles in newspaper ads after he was purged in the Soviet Union. Particularly interesting is Rivera Mir's profile of militant bookseller Rodrigo García Treviño, who in his brief role as editor of Editorial América insisted on the right to dissent from the flip-flops of PCM policy.This book about books re-creates the world of edición comunista and also hints at its limits. For example, Rivera Mir observes that many of the books that he painstakingly tracked down had uncut pages or margin notes only in early chapters. The Communist ideal of a militant readership was sometimes at odds with a membership, rural and urban, with limited time and literacy to digest dense Marxist texts (consider the unread books on my shelves). These theoretical books seem mostly divorced from the better known and undoubtedly more accessible forms of Mexico's radical print culture, periodicals like El Machete and illustrated pamphlets and posters. Future research might explore the extent to which editors, press operators, and vendors of these distinct forms of Communist publication overlapped. Similarly, to what extent were prints, songs, and stories, often linked to forms of popular culture, able to convey changing Communist doctrine while balancing indoctrination with the urgencies of socialization and the appeal of nationalism? Edición y comunismo provides a pioneering model and new directions for research on radical print culture.