Arise!: Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution
By Christina Heatherton
Excerpted from Arise!: Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution by Christina Heatherton, published by the University of California Press. © 2022
How to Make a Map
Small Shareholders and Global Radicals in Revolutionary Mexico
In the age of the New Imperialism, the world was turned inside out. The dark slumbering core of the earth was flooded with light, wrenched by fiery blasts, then hacked and dragged, bit by craggy bit, to the surface. From the forced mouths of mine shafts, its innards were scavenged. Silver, copper, and zinc were dredged out of Mexico; gold was wrested from the Yukon lands of the Klondike; and diamonds were plucked from the bowels of South Africa. From deposits of unburied iron, a new exoskeleton of rail fused together across the horizon. Railways screamed over continents with the velocity of finance, tearing new pathways of commerce and trade, and bruising the land around it. Coals disgorged from the mines of West Virginia, Colorado, and Manchuria were made radiant with fire and fed, inexhaustibly, to furnaces. Skies blackened with the spew of smokestacks. Ash drifted onto windowsills. Ash was coughed up from throats. Where forests had been felled and burned to make charcoal, this era reached deep beneath tombs, down past the ancient muck and humus to grab the earth’s vital forces. Oil that had coursed through subterranean veins was transfused into the lifeblood of modern industry. Rubber ran like devil’s milk from Congolese vines into waiting Belgian ships, becoming tires, wire insulation, and machine belts, the sinews of industrial production. From the ground, grains were coaxed to even heights over gridded fields, sheathed into uniform bushels, then loaded into gaping containers. Over rails, roads, ship lines, and pounded copper wires, goods were moved, tracked, and transubstantiated into value. This new geometry of motion was animated by global capital, but it was built and shaped by disciplined muscle. Hands, arms, backs, and thighs were lowered and bent, again and again, becoming pulsing metronomes of economic time. From the dark center of the earth at the turn of the century, capital came dripping with dirt and blood from every pore. How, some wondered, could it be otherwise? The world had been turned inside out. Could it also be turned upside down?[1]
Surely Internationalism
Across the windswept expanse of the Sonora Desert, where the Colorado River snakes through the Mexicali Valley and slips down jagged rocks before it spills into the Sea of Cortez, there, where the US border looms like a mirage, an Okinawan immigrant named Shinsei “Paul” Kōchi found internationalism. Shipwrecked and shoeless, Kōchi walked for miles in a daze. He stepped gingerly on thorny scrub and walked reverently around the discarded canteens and dried bones of those who had come before. It was to them, the “numerous and nameless,” that Kōchi dedicated his reflections in Imin no Aiwa (An Immigrant’s Sorrowful Tale). Following the river north, Kōchi searched for food, warmth, and shelter with a small band of survivors from China, Mexico, and Japan in December 1917. Worldwide, millions had fled their countries, compelled by starvation, debt, dispossession, political repression, and the ravages of the First World War. Immigrants who were not allowed to enter countries “with dignity through the front door” routinely risked their lives “breaking in through the back gate.” Those who perished were often “buried in the sea” while others “left their bones to dry on the empty desert.” As Kōchi observed, the “tragedy” of these journeys came not from heedless risk nor naïve adventurism but “a contradiction born precisely out of modern capitalist society.”[2]
For many like Paul Kōchi, the world of 1917 was at once tragic and aflame with possibility.[3] At twenty-eight, he and his “comrade” Seitoku Miyasato had set sail for Mexico, escaping arrest and political persecution at home. The two friends hailed from Nakijin Village in Okinawa, the largest island in a South Sea chain annexed by Japan only decades prior. Despised by mainland Japanese, Okinawans struggled against accusations of being “backwards” southerners in need of centralized political rule, strengthened work ethic, linguistic assimilation, and the abandonment of their “savage” cultural traditions.[4] Kōchi and Miyasato were active in an underground reading group of village teachers opposed to Japanese despotism. Authorities blacklisted members upon discovering their copies of Daisan Teikoku, a journal critical of the government. Fearing repression, the pair planned to escape Okinawa, leaving their young families behind. Convinced they would return after a brief sojourn, they boarded a steamer at the port in Naha. Once aboard, Kōchi noted the “inexpressible feeling” that welled up in his fellow passengers as they looked upon the possible “last sight of their homeland” and of their loved ones. As the “unfeeling” ship set sail, Kōchi and Miyasato watched their young wives and children disappear, “looking permanently abandoned,” as the harbor receded.[5] The men stood together on the deck, “arm still linked to arm,” until their “mountain home sank beneath the horizon.”[6]
Internationalism, for Kōchi, began with a sense of identification. In Hawai’i, where the ship refueled, he felt profound kinship with the Indigenous Kanaka Maoli dockworkers loading and unloading cargo. He observed the first-class passengers’ delight as they threw coins at young Hawaiians, compelling them to dive into the waves chasing the sinking pocket change. He recognized that Hawai’i, “in its climate, customs, products, as well as its recent history,” was like Okinawa: a remote chain of mountainous islands inhabited by people whose language, culture, and sovereignty were all threatened from the mainland. Hawai’i, like Okinawa, was also dominated by sugarcane cultivation, a commonality that would have been apparent to the nearly ten thousand Okinawans who labored in the Hawai’ian sugarcane plantations at the time. Kōchi listened and felt profoundly moved by the musical resonance between the two cultures: “That heart-tugging farewell Aloha Oe was, in fact, the farewell song to the fleeing king of Hawaii. (Our famous Sanyamā was just such a song for the king of Okinawa.)” Such connections only deepened throughout his journey.[7]
As the ship briefly docked in Southern California’s San Pedro harbor, Kōchi, Miyasato, and all the other Asian passengers found themselves trapped aboard. The 1917 Immigration Act and similar diplomatic agreements prevented immigrants from the so-called “barred Asiatic zone” from entering the country. Kōchi railed against these laws and against the nativism fomented during the First World War that kept Asians from ever setting “one foot down” on US soil.[8] A flurry of indignation overtook the passengers. One Japanese man jumped overboard, desperate to reach shore. Passengers looked on in horror as the man drowned in the cold waters of the Pacific. Despondent in his confinement onboard, Kōchi stared at Catalina Island off the California coast. Slowly he began to reappraise his situation. He considered the long, violent history of US settlement and Indigenous dispossession that drove Native people like the Tongva “into the mountain recesses” to starve. He realized that if the same exclusionary nativism that was applied to him had also been “radically applied” to the United States, no settler would be allowed to set foot in the country. Kōchi condemned US immigration laws and observed that the national boundaries they maintained were themselves illegitimate. Considering the intertwined histories of racist immigration laws and rapacious settler colonialism, Kōchi imagined internationalist bonds forged through shared rage: a web of refusal seething within and against national borders.[9]
With five hundred immigrants from Japan, India, and China still aboard, barred from entering the United States, the steamship Anyōmaru chugged south, destined for Brazil. While many in the upper decks sailed leisurely towards exotic lands and thrilling business ventures, most passengers had been coerced onboard by the churning transformations of the global economy. Since the late nineteenth century, countries newly pulled into the frenzy of modern finance saw intensified investment in extractive industries and commercialized agriculture. The subsequent evisceration of communal land holdings and subsistence farming practices had uprooted millions of peasants, including those en route from the “barred Asiatic zone.” Many of the Anyōmaru’s passengers were bound for contract work in the Caribbean and throughout Latin America, often following labor recruiters’ promised jobs. Japanese and Okinawan immigrants sought to join compatriots in Brazilian mining communities. Along with Chinese counterparts, they also sought contracts in places like Peru and throughout the Caribbean. The swirling chaos of colonialism and war also produced its own global circuits, dragging colonial soldiers, particularly from India, onto foreign battlefields. As their labors were conscripted into war economies, their ranks expanded in what Priyamvada Gopal describes as a “world-wide belt of insurgencies.”[10] Radical Japanese students who called themselves “comrades of the four seas” invited Kōchi and Miyasato to join them in Cuba. The two friends had other plans. A ship’s porter had hinted about the possibility of sneaking into the United States through Mexico. This is what the pair resolved to do once the ship docked in Oaxaca.[11]
From the moment their “feet touched down” in Mexico, Kōchi and Miyasato were immediately conscious of being “immigrants owning nothing but our bodies.” They were detained and quarantined in harrowing conditions along with other immigrants.[12] The men looked on in horror as a prisoner from India was stripped and then doused with sulfur, his money belt stolen in the process. As they shared with him their meager funds, the man thanked them for being “Buddhas in Hell.” A few days later, several dozen Asian immigrants, including some of their fellow Okinawan villagers, joined their cell. The area was “well-known for its searing winds,” which blew through the barred windows day and night, creating “sandstorms” inside the jail.[13] Covered in the same dust, Kōchi understood his fellow prisoners as “convicts banished to Siberia in Tsarist Russia,” a timely comparison given that Russian people had recently overthrown that Tsarist regime during the Bolshevik Revolution. The experience was not lost on the men. Given their travels, confinements, and commitments, Kōchi declared retrospectively that he and Miyasato were already “internationalists.”[14]
Released from prison and into the heat of the Revolution, Kōchi and Miyasato (along with their Spanish-speaking countrymen) raced toward the US border. The men traversed a convulsive landscape, dancing to guitars in Mazatlán and narrowly escaping bandits as their train hugged the western coast through Culiacán. They launched a small boat out of Guayamas. For a week, they sailed north up the inlet of the Gulf of California. In a disaster, the boat caught fire, forcing all passengers to jump overboard. When they reassembled on shore, they discovered that only thirteen of the original passengers remained. Shipwrecked in the Sonoran Desert on December 2, 1917, the small group had next to no supplies. They collected “snow waters” from the Colorado River in rusty tin cans. They ripped strips of cloth and tore out their trouser pockets in vain attempts to protect their feet from sagebrush, cacti, and the cold. A crumbling biscuit was shared among the men. Tearing down the shore, Kōchi called out for his friend. His cries of “Miyasato! Miyasato!” were swallowed by the sea. The group was forced to press on.
In his travels throughout northern Mexico, Kōchi continually discovered and rediscovered internationalism. His group was saved by an Indigenous Yaqui family, who fed the men, gave them shelter, and offered them homemade leather shoes. The warmth of the family reminded him of home. He encountered a French trader who smuggled him to the border under a pile of hay to avoid the eyes of Mexican guards. This kindness, he said, “was surely internationalism.” When Kōchi finally reached the border, it was a group of Chinese immigrant workers who met him. Wrote Kōchi, “It seemed that for them we were all immigrants travelling the same road and they understood our situation from their hearts. This ‘class consciousness’ cuts across race and nationality and promotes mutual understanding which, if preserved and extended, would make the deserts bloom.”[15]
Paul Kōchi’s story demonstrates how the uprooted, dispossessed, and despised of the world came to know each other in shadows, in the tangled spaces of expulsion, extraction, transportation, debt, exploitation, and destruction: the garroting circuits of modern capital. Whether crammed in tight ship quarters; knocking together over the rails; sweating and swaying in the relentless tempo of industrial agriculture; inhaling the dank air of mine shafts; hearing each other breathing, coughing, fighting, singing, snoring, and sighing through thin walls; or corralled like livestock in jails and prisons, the contradictions of modern capital were shared in its intimate spaces. Within such sites, people discovered that the circuits of revolution, like the countervailing circuits of capital, were realizable in motion, often through unplanned assemblages. Roaring at their backs were the revolutionary currents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, currents that howled from the metropolitan hearts of empire and wailed across the peripheries of the global world system. Standing before them, in the middle of its own revolution, was Mexico. From the vantage point of these struggles, the new century did not simply portend the inevitability of urban revolts and insurgencies at the point of production, but an epoch of peasant wars, rural uprisings, anti-colonial movements, and, of course, the Mexican Revolution. Mexico, as both a real country and an imagined space of revolution, would become a crucible of internationalism for the world’s “rebels” like Paul Kōchi.[16]
Paul Kōchi’s Imin no Aiwa presents internationalism as nearly an inevitable phenomenon. By narrating his path from Okinawa to the United States through Mexico, Kōchi describes how travel along the contradictory routes newly limned by capital and imperialism enabled him to acquire a radical global consciousness. In describing his encounters with Indigenous people and other immigrants along the way, he offers a sense of how such consciousness could be produced through the contradictory social spaces of ships, trains, boats, in detention, and through covert passage across Mexico towards the US border. Kōchi’s story offers an important perspective into the relationship between the political economy of the period and the formation of a revolutionary consciousness. In this, Kōchi was not alone.
The transformation of the global economy certainly set the stage for the development of an internationalist consciousness. But if all that was required for internationalism were the conditions of a hard journey, the world would be full of internationalists. As significant as Kōchi’s travels were, there were far more people who lived during the era of the Mexican Revolution, who even came to Mexico at the time, who did not become internationalists. This was particularly true for the fortune hunters who arrived seeking land, fame, or wealth in the country in spite of the many radical possibilities presented by the Revolution. This was also true for many Asian immigrants like Kōchi, particularly Chinese immigrants who suffered extraordinary violence and repression at the hands of state and non-state actors. The paths of those who came, saw, but chose moderate or outright reactionary paths reveal some of the fetters inhibiting the making of internationalism. This chapter explores both these possibilities and barriers.[17]
In the era of its Revolution, Mexico represented multiple configurations of space: it was simultaneously a fixed place on the map, a place made meaningful relative to the places it bordered or was connected to through roads, rails, and ports, and it was also an imagined space, upon which multiple competing fantasies were projected. The chapter considers the experiences of radicals who lived in, traveled to, or found themselves in Mexico during the during the fighting phase of the Revolution, 1910–20. The collective act of making new worlds, as they discovered, required a reckoning with the seductions of nationalism, the social relations of imperialism, and the spatial imaginaries of capital. Internationalism, in other words, had to be forged, not simply found. To do so, as this chapter shows, it had to compete with the enticements of the color line, the racist and gendered fantasies of the New Imperialism.
SOURCES
[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, [1976] 1990), 926; Rosa, Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, 2003); David Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 70; John Tully, Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011); Arthur Conan Doyle, Crime of the Congo. (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1909); Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972).
[2] Quotes come from Paul Shinsei Kōchi, Imin No Aiwa (An Immigrant’s Sorrowful Tale), trans. Ben Kobashigawa (Los Angeles: Privately printed, 1978). There are minor differences between this version and the version written in June 1938 and republished as Shinshei Kōchi, “Sad Tale of an Immigrant: Dedicated to the Souls of the Departed,” in History of the Okinawans in North America, trans. Ben Kobashigawa (Los Angeles: Okinawan Club of America and the Asian American Studies Center, University of California, 1988), 524–540. Where relevant, these differences will be noted.
[3] In the 1978 publication of Imin no Aiwa, Kōchi describes setting off: “At four in the afternoon on September 2 in the 7th year of the Taishō era (1918), we rebels boarded the Taigimaru bound for Kobi” (19). But the 1988 edition describes the graffiti Kōchi scribbles on the wall of the Salina Cruz detention center as a note signed “November 1917” and later a message on a rock dated “December 1917” (528, 532).
[4] On “backwardness” and “savage” and for debates on Okinawa’s colonial status, see Alan S. Christy, “The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa,” in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani E. Barlow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 141–70, and Julia Yonetani, “Ambiguous Traces and the Politics of Sameness: Placing Okinawa in Meiji Japan,” Japanese Studies 20, no. 1 (2000): 15–31. For a discussion of Japan in the context of Gramsci’s “Southern Question,” see Harry Harootunian, “Some Reflections on Gramsci: The Southern Question in the Deprovincializing of Marx,” in Gramsci in the World, ed. Frederic Jameson and Robert M. Dainotto (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 140–57.
[5] Kōchi, Imin No Aiwa, 20; Chushichi Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, 1825–1995 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000) 192; Chushichi Tsuzuki, “The Changing Image of Britain among Japanese Intellectuals,” in The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations 1600–2000: Social and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Gordon Daniels and Chushichi Tsuzuki (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 17–40.
[6] Kōchi, “Sad Tale of an Immigrant,” 526.
[7] Kōchi, Imin No Aiwa, 21, 33; Mamoru Akamine, The Ryukyu Kingdom: Cornerstone of East Asia, trans. Lina Terrell, ed. Robert N. Huey (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), 140; Richard Siddle, “Colonialism and Identity in Okinawa Before 1945,” Japanese Studies 18, no. 2 (1998): 121–22; James E. Roberson, “Singing Diaspora: Okinawan Songs of Home, Departure, and Return,” Identities 17, no. 4 (2010): 430–53; J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Edith Mitsuko Kaneshiro, “‘Our home will be the five continents’: Okinawan Migration to Hawaii, California, and the Philippines, 1899–1941” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999), 116; Adria L. Imada, “‘Aloha ‘Oe’”: Settler-Colonial Nostalgia and the Genealogy of a Love Song,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, no. 2 (2013): 35–52; Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (New York: Verso, 2015), 35–67.
[8] Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 18.
[9] Kōchi, Imin No Aiwa, 33. For intertwined histories of immigrant exclusion and settler colonialism see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Boston: Beacon, 2021). On refusal to consent to colonial mappings and occupations of territory, see Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 128. Mahmood Mamdani suggests placing US settler-colonialism into a “global-historical” standpoint as a precursor to decolonization in Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 98–99.
[10] Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019), 209.
[11] Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Edith M. Kaneshiro, “Communists, Christians, and Japanese Imperial Subjects: Okinawan Immigrants within the Japanese Diaspora, 1899 to 1941,” in Studies in Pacific History: Economics, Politics, and Migration, ed. Dennis O. Flynn, Arturo Giráldez, and James Sobredo (London: Routledge, 2018), 170–87.
[12] Kōchi, Imin no Aiwa, 23. Since there is a discrepancy over the date of the voyage, the nature of the quarantine is unclear. If the trip occurred at the end of 1917, the quarantine would have been for typhus. If it occurred at the end of 1918, it would have been for the Spanish Flu pandemic. See Ryan M. Alexander, “The Fever of War: Epidemic Typhus and Public Health in Revolutionary Mexico City, 1915–1917,” Hispanic American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (2020): 63–92; Ryan M. Alexander, “The Spanish Flu and the Sanitary Dictatorship: Mexico’s Response to the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” The Americas 76. no. 3 (July 2019): 443–65.
[13] Kōchi, Imin no Aiwa, 23.
[14] Kōchi, “Sad Tale of an Immigrant,” 528.
[15] Kōchi, Imin No Aiwa, 35, 39.
[16] For the debates about the disjuncture between nineteenth-century revolutionary political predictions and twentieth-century revolutionary conditions, see Cedric J. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 153; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2007), 174; Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), 207–9; Mike Davis, “Old Gods, New Enigmas,” Catalyst 1, no. 2 (2017): 7–40. For a discussion of the insufficiency of the “transnational” designation, see Arif Dirlik, “Performing the World: Reality and Representation in the Making of World Histor(ies),” Journal of World History 16, no. 4 (December 2005): 391–410. Dirlik notes, “Ethnic and diasporic spaces are prime examples in our day of such spaces that are often described, somewhat misleadingly in my opinion, as ‘transnational’ spaces. Such spaces preceded in their existence the emergence of nations; they may not be of equal significance to all parts of the nation, in which case they may help undermine its unity and homogeneity, and they are quite likely to outlast the nation as we have known it” (397).
[17] For many Asian immigrants like Kōchi, especially many Chinese people, the question of internationalism in relation to the Mexican Revolution was a vexed one. East Asians were unevenly incorporated into state-building and capitalist development projects. As Jason Oliver Chang notes, Chinese immigrants were largely regarded as disposable labor or motores de sangre (engines of blood) under the Porfiriato and then later reimagined as threats to the state and killable subjects at different points during the Revolution. See Jason Oliver Chang, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880–1940 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 8, 71–87; Robert Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012); María Elena Ota Mishima, Destino México: un estudio de las Migraciones Asiáticas a México, siglos XIX y XX. Mexico D.F.: Colegio de Mexico Centro de Estudios de Asia y Africa, 1997.
Christina Heatherton is an American Studies scholar and historian of anti-racist social movements. She is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Human Rights at Trinity College.