Anarchism and Transnational Networks in North and South America

The transnational turn in labour and migration studies has produced stimulating developments in the history of the anarchist and radical movements in the North and South Americas and has raised a considerable number of methodological and epistemological challenges, most of which are dealt with, or emerge, in Marcella Bencivenni, Travis Tomchuk and Kenyon Zimmer's works and in the collection of essays edited by Geoffroy de Laforcade, and Kirwin Shaffer.¹

A fundamental feature brought to light by transnational studies is the significance of the networks that cosmopolitan anarchist communities established across national borders and the role that political and economic migration played in their creation. At the same time, recent studies have challenged the view of an anarchist movement that radiated from Europe to other continents and have emphasized the role of native-born militants in the emergence and shaping of libertarian and radical movements in colonial and postcolonial countries.² These questions are central themes in Zimmer's and Tomchuk's monographs and in the essays collected by de Laforcade and Shaffer. In their works, Zimmer and Tomchuk discuss the impact of socio-economic conditions in the United States on Italian migrants and question whether militancy emerged as a reaction to harsh living conditions for migrants or if it was instead due to forms of politicization experienced before migration. The contributions presented in In Defiance of Boundaries show how the relationships between domestic and foreign anarchist movements in Latin America were also extremely variegated. Northern Peruvian anarchists not only engaged in class struggle but identified race as an equally significant aspect in their fight against capitalist exploitation in the sugar enclaves. They "appealed to and opened spaces in their movement for the region's Afro-Peruvians, Mestizos, Zambos, Asians and Indigenous inhabitants."³ On the contrary, the Panama Canal zone investigated by Shaffer "was entirely an immigrant anarchist endeavour in which anarchists operated as a completely foreign entity within a neocolonial context."⁴ An ulterior significant issue that has emerged in the studies on the transnational anarchist movement is the interconnection and interdependence between local experiences across national boundaries. This is a fundamental theme in most of the contributions presented in In Defiance of Boundaries, which deals with the relationship between local experiences in Latin America and how they were linked with other experiences across continents, and Tomchuk and Zimmer have also structured their research around specific places and towns that hosted organizational centres of anarchist groups in North America and Canada, bringing to light many similarities and differences between these areas of anarchist militancy.

Another key element in the investigation of transnational networks, which all these works have considered and analyzed, is the anarchist press. Newspapers served as organizational tools, propaganda vehicles, and cultural mediums. In an investigation into the organization, circulation, and themes developed by the Italian sovversivi radical press in the United States, Bencivenni notes that "newspapers represented the primary medium of communication" and provided an "essential transnational network of regular contacts and information for radical leaders, organizers and workers."⁵ A thorough review of the Industrial Workers of the World (iww) press in Latin America allows Anton Rosenthal to argue that this organization "was an international movement within syndicalism" that influenced workers across borders from Spain to Australia, and "a key instrument in the propagation of its ideas was a decentralized but well connected press in small and large cities throughout Latin America … that was linked in a variety of ways to its predecessors in the United States and Australia."⁶ It is therefore not surprising that one of the...