Having recently released Ricardo Flores Magón’s Para qué sirve la autoridad (1976) and Epistolario revolucionario e íntimo (1975), the editors of Ediciones Antorcha have now continued the Magonista literary resurgence with this collection of the letters and writings of Práxedis Gilberto Guerrero. Of all the early revoltosos, one would be hard pressed to name a more active revolutionist and fervent idealist than Guerrero. An authentic déclassé, Guerrero abandoned his class and wealthy Guanajuato heritage after 1903 to work as a laborer in the Colorado coal mines and the Arizona copper fields. Named a delegado especial of the Partido Liberal Mexicano in 1907, he 2soon became a PLM Junta secretary. Active in the United States as a radical essayist and anarchist ideologue, he edited and wrote for Revolución (Los Angeles), Punto Rojo (El Paso), and Regeneración (Los Angeles). As a revolutionary soldier, he participated in the 1908 campaigns at Las Vacas and Palomas, and died at the age of twenty-eight in December 1910 at the battle of Janos, Chihuahua.
Along with an excellent chronology, this work contains many significant documents—ranging from the 1906 constitution of the Junta Auxiliar Obreros Libres (Morenci, Arizona), through Guerrero’s correspondence with correligionarios Flores Magón and Manuel Sarabia (well-edited with informative notes), to the editorials, manifestos, and fiery articles of Regeneración and other Magonista newspapers. A valuable companion to the already available biographies by Eugenio Martínez Núñez and Pietro Ferrua, this book is a welcome addition to the existing literature, and is of interest not only to Magonista faddists but to labor and intellectual historians as well. As Flores Magón noted, “Práxedis fue, pues, un proletario, y por sus ideales y sus hechos, un anarquista” (p. 15).
