Decentering Internationalism: Spanish Anarchist Solidarity with Mexico During the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War

Abstract This article explores how Spanish anarchists responded to Mexico during the first years of the Mexican Revolution and during Spain’s own revolutionary experiment in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). It first examines the representation of the Mexican Revolution in the Spanish anarchist press and the emergence of debates regarding Mexico’s Indigenous peoples between those anarchists who maintained Eurocentric cultural hierarchies and those who were open to non-European examples—a debate that was sharpened by the cataclysm of World War I in Europe. The second half of the article explores how anarchists amplified Mexico’s antifascist solidarity with the Spanish Republic in the late 1930s, when its fellow European democracies had abandoned it. This further decentered the anarchist worldview and enabled reflection on the two countries#x2019; postcolonial relationship. As a case study, the article highlights an early example of a major European working-class movement looking to a former colony first for revolutionary inspiration and later for antifascist solidarity, several decades before the “Third Worldism” of the global sixties. However, rather than assuming that this kind of decentered international solidarity is an inevitable outcome of radical politics, the article foregrounds the nuanced and contested terms on which it was articulated.