From The Transmetropolitan Review
In the interests of fostering physical print media, the full pamphlet is only formatted for printing.
Introduction
The involvement of Italian anarchists in the Mexican Revolution of 1910 is a moment in history that remains obscure not just to contemporary anarchists, but also to academic historians. Beyond this, the actual history of the Mexican Revolution is insanely complex and refuses to fit neatly inside any ideological boxes, including anarchist ones.
Nevertheless, vast areas of northern and southern Mexico achieved near total anarchism for various lengths of time, although the state tamed most of them by 1920. This assertion is backed up by numerous volumes of recent scholarship, but information traveled slowly in 1911, the year several dozen Italian anarchists crossed the border into northern Mexico to fight in a revolution.
Responding to calls printed in the Spanish language Regeneración, the Italian language l’Era Nuova and Cronaca Sovversiva, as well as in the IWW’s Industrial Worker, three groups of Italians traveled to Los Angeles before crossing the border into liberated Tijuana. These groups entered Mexico by May 1911, having traveled from vastly different parts of the United States.
The first group of Italian anarchists came from Kansas, known as the November 11 group, which had connections to the United Mine Workers District 15 branch and its Italian language newspaper Il Lavoratore Italiano, as well as the Cronaca Sovversiva. As can be surmised, most of these anarchists were miners, specifically coal miners, and they included Ernesto Teodori, Guglielmo Galeotti, John Longo, Guglielmo Pasquini, Aristide Paladini, and Demetrio Magnani. Joining them was Filippo Perrone, who was part of the Cronaca group in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The second group was from the Pacific Northwest and included members of the Stirner group from Vancouver, B.C., as well as members of the Seattle Social Studies Circle. This was seemingly the largest group, and among them were Sebastiano Messaglia, Battista Baldovin, Martin Vaccaro, Pietro De Sanctis, Carlo De Colò, G. Albiero, G. Bergia, Michele Bombino, Michele Cipriani, Vincenzo Cipolla, Domenico Marino, Giuseppe Piccirillo, Michele Ricci, Sam Rizzo, Joe Russo, and Virgilio Lancelotti. Joining them was Antonio Rodia and his brother Sabato Rodia, who would go on to construct the famed Watts Towers. As they traveled south, the group gathered Adolfo Antonelli in San Francisco, along with Bartolomeo Bertone, who traveled there from Cedar Point, Illinois.
The third group was centered around the l’Era Nuova newspaper from Paterson, New Jersey and included Ludovico Caminita and Vittorio Cravello, although the names of those who joined them was never preserved. This group likely numbered a few dozen, and they assembled in Los Angeles awaiting the other Italian anarchists. In total, these three groups numbered no more than 100 fighters, and as you will see, all of them were ill-equipped for the battle ahead.
As these Italian anarchists prepared to cross the border into Tijuana in early May 1911, the forces of hacienda owner Francisco Madero were fighting to seize Ciudad Juarez from federal control. However, Madero had no military experience, and two of his commanders, Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco, decided to ignore his orders for a temporary ceasefire with the federal soldiers, and the battle they initiated led to sacking of Juarez on May 10, 1911.
There were few if any anarchists present at the fall of Ciudad Juarez, and nearly all of them had been expelled from the column on April 16 by Pancho Villa under orders from Madero. These fighters were allowed to keep their weapons and join whatever column they chose, so long as it wasn’t the one headed to Juarez, which Madero wanted all to himself.
The day before his forces took the city, the anarchists seized Tijuana on May 9 and raised the flag of Tierra y Libertad over the small border city, its population no bigger than 500 people. This was the third city seized by the Mexican Liberal Party, or the PLM, which had taken Mexicali on January 29, followed by Tecate later that April. With the seizing of Tijuana on May 9, the anarchists controlled most of the border between California and Mexico. However, the PLM relied on a member of the Oakland IWW named Jack Mosby to lead the invasion of Tijuana, along with soldier of fortune Carl Ap Rhys Pryce. In fact, of the 250 fighters who took Tijuana, only around 20 of them were Mexican.
Pryce was anything but an anarchist, and he ran casinos in liberated Tijuana to raise money for buying weapons, given the PLM had no immediate access to guns or easy ways to smuggle them. It was into this Tijuana that the Italian anarchists arrived, having not even fired a shot, and they appear to have only brought a dozen rifles between them, probably less.
Despite this, the anarchists were able to help loot the homes of the rich, and as explained in the Cronaca Sovversiva, the rebels did not have the least hesitation to plunder the first house that they came upon, but not only did they not dare to touch anything in a church, stealing from the good lord, but they almost raised their arms against the Italian who had dared to profane the house of God. As you can see, the atheist Italian anarchists quickly encountered the folk-Catholicism of the Mexican peasants, and it became one of many points of conflict in the days ahead.
On May 17, 1911, a five day ceasefire was called by Madero when it was learned that the dictator Porfirio Díaz agreed to resign. The very next day, Madero forced Pancho Villa to step down as a rebel commander, indicating he wasn’t pleased with this bandit’s autonomy. Three days later, on May 21, the Treaty of Ciudad Juarez was signed, formally ending the dictatorship, with a provisional president to serve until free elections could be held.
At this point, the Italian anarchists in Tijuana had been idling there for at least twelve days, unsure of what to do. While food and water was communal among the insurgents, there were no projects of social transformation taking place, just a simple military occupation. The junta of the PLM remained on the Californian side of the border, as did Ludovico Caminita, who crossed into Tijuana once in a trip by car which lasted no more than a day.
Some of these Italian anarchists took a longer view of the conflict, such as Adolfo Antonelli, former publisher of the Nihil newspaper, who would later write about the invasion of Baja that the second aim of the expedition was training in guerrilla warfare and the potential for the survivors to be good military leaders, if the movement in Italy should mature.
Meanwhile, a few days after the Treaty of Ciudad Juarez was signed, an anarchist writer named John Kenneth Turner decided to leave Tijuana after participating in its liberation, and he wrote a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle announcing this fact. Many anarchists saw this as Turner relinquishing their victory in Baja to Madero, and he was condemned in the pages of Regeneración by his comrade William C. Owen.
Soon after that, soldier of fortune Pryce, along with a grifter named Dick Ferris, decided to announce that Baja would secede from Mexico and become its own republic, leading to accusations of filibusterism from Madero, who believed these gringos were manipulating the anarchists to cede territory to the US.
Things got even worse when Adolfo Antonelli declared himself head of the division on May 30, and apparently eight Italians crossed into the US that same day in disgust, and those who remained did so only because they did not have the money for the trip back to Los Angeles. It is likely that those eight Italians were part of the Kansas group, and they would soon write a statement about the invasion.
Two days after they departed, Antonelli decided he’d had enough and crossed back into the United States, the same day Jack Mosby of the Oakland IWW was put back in command of the PLM division, and his first act was to expel the grifters Pryce and Ferris, although matters only got worse for the Baja uprising.
The first blow was on June 6, 1911 when the new revolutionary governor of Chihuahua announced that Madero’s new revolutionary federal troops would march west to tame rebel Baja. In the announcement, the governor asked for those who wished to help pacify the country to join the one thousand ex-federal soldiers who are about to leave the City of Chihuahua, so that together you may throw the rabble of anarchists and filibusters out of the Baja California territory, for they are threatening to separate the peninsula from our nation’s soil.
The second blow fell on June 14 when the junta of the PLM was arrested for violating US neutrality laws. Three days later, on June 17, the anarchist rebels holding Mexicali surrendered the city to Madero. Federal soldiers eventually surrounded Tijuana, and the two forces clashed on June 22, with Jack Mosby in command of less than 200 fighters, who faced off against a force of nearly 600. The rebels lost around thirty men in the subsequent battle, with the federales losing the same number, and the survivors either fled into the countryside or crossed the border into the US where they were arrested like Jack Mosby, who went to prison along with the PLM junta.
But what of the Italian anarchists? While several dozen of them likely fought in what is now known as the Second Battle of Tijuana, members of the Kansas group wrote a letter to the Cronaca Sovversiva printed in the June 17 issue advising their Italian comrades not to come fight in the Mexican Revolution.
This infamous letter, known alternately as the Kansas letter or simply the comunicato, triggered a massive conflict in the anarchist movement, one which spread across the world. In every language, anarchists were trying to find the truth of what was happening in Mexico, and month by month, the language grew more insulting and venomous, as well as racist.
The worst example was an article in the August 19, 1911 issue of the Cronaca entitled The Mexican Storm, in which the famed anarchist Luigi Galleanidevoted nearly half of that issue to belittling the revolution, going so far as to write that for a population that reaches in all probability fourteen million, seven million are pure Indians, four mestizos, two Creoles, half a million Negroes, Zambos, mulattoes, it is clear that for Mexico there is no possibility of a movement with an openly social revolutionary character, if the most lively, most numerous and most diligent of the population are not interested. This was followed on September 2 by an article titled Do They Really Want It? where Galleani once again devoted an entire front page to badmouthing the revolution without having been there himself.
In response to this, two anarchist conventions were called at the end of 1911, one held in Brooklyn by the pro-revolution l’Era Nuova, and the other held in East Boston by the Cronaca. The following pamphlet contains the formal write-ups from each convention, as well as the communications leading up to them, including the original comunicato from the Kansas group. While they’re worthy of being translated in English for their historical value, Galleani’s polemics will not be included here.
As mentioned, the comunicato triggered a chain of events which led to a general lack of anarchist support for the Mexican Revolution. So much doubt and ill will was engendered through this conflict that the greatest indigenous uprising in the world was effectively ignored by the anarchists in the US and Europe. Even those anarchists who wished to support the Mexican Revolution could find few avenues to do so, and the struggle became dominated by generals, ranks, and laws.
After the arrest of the Los Angeles junta, the PLM viewed President Madero as their enemy, and they continued their rebellion through every means available, along with their native Yaqui allies. Had the Italian anarchists of the Cronaca Sovversiva not initiated their conflict with l’Era Nuova and the PLM, the waning uprising in Northern Mexico could have been bolstered by hundreds if not thousands of anarchist fighters, and the PLM would not have made their fateful alliance with Pascual Orozco.
While the Italian anarchists of the Cronaca were preparing for their East Boston convention, the rebel Colonel Antonio Rojas rode with 25 fighters to loot a mine in Chihuahua on December 16, 1911, and he refused to acknowledge Madero as president. This was the first serious anti-Madero rebellion in the north, but Rojas and his men were captured, along with the PLM rebel Blas Orpinel and his crew. Had these isolated bands been backed up by hundreds if not thousands of anarchists, a true liberation of the north might have been possible.
As it was, the anarchist rebellions continued, with Captain Juan I. Martinez and his rebels seizing Ciudad Juarez on January 31, 1912, all of them shouting viva Zapata, who was far away in the south and unable to help them. A few days later, on February 2, rebel fighters in Chihuahua City took over the barracks, disarmed the police, and began on assault on the prison where Antonio Rojas and Blas Orpinel were being held. After an intense gun battle, the prisoners were eventually released.
At the time of this daring raid, Pancho Villa was living in Chihuahua City and had no reason to trust Madero, the hacienda owner who’d asked him to leave his army. This was the moment where Villa could have been recruited into a grander cause, but this was not to be, and he eventually joined Madero in fighting the rebel army of Pascual Orozco, which included many PLM and Yaqui fighters.
At that point, the PLM was willing to work with anyone against Madero, and they took positions in Orozco’s rebel government alongside oligarchs and hacienda owners, something which further isolated the PLM from anarchists. Once again, had the PLM been able to rely on serious international anarchist support, they would have never joined Orozco’s rebellion against Madero, nor would they have fought and died fighting the army of Pancho Villa when the rebellion was put down.
Another military commander who helped put down Orozco’s uprising was Victoriano Huerta, who took power after Madero was assassinated. Huerta would become the common enemy which firmly united Villa and Zapata, leading to them sacking Mexico City in December 1914. This was the height of the revolution, and for all the above reasons and more, anarchists were involved in almost none of it. Despite this, certain villages and cities in southern and northern Mexico experienced years of true freedom during the revolution, and for the first time in centuries, many indigenous lived a life free of slavery, a freedom they learned to defend with guns and dynamite.
On that note, let it be said than an immense amount of material on anarchists in the Mexican Revolution currently remains untranslated into English. The pages of l’Era Nuova and Regeneración constitute the bulk of this historical material, and we would like to encourage other anarchist historians to help bring these vanished stories to light. In this manner, our anarchist history will become grander and more complex, serving as an example and lesson to the anarchists who come after us, the ones who may even write about our own deeds, having read about them in some dusty archive.











Comments
Wondering what's the source for the PLM allying with Orozco
Frost (not verified) Tue, 05/05/2026 - 09:10
Wondering what's the source for the PLM allying with Orozco (not that The Transmetropolitan Fictional Review usually sources things). From what I've seen so far, it's not mentioned in the PLM newspaper, the Magon reader, the Lomnitz or Hernandez books. In March of 1912, Ricardo Flores Magon in Regeneracion was calling Orozco a traitor to the revolution and urging resistance against him. Regeneración was reporting that Orozco had banned the paper in the State of Chihuahua and was trying to disarm the people, to which Regeneración urged resistance.
orozco
guerito (not verified) Wed, 05/06/2026 - 10:55
In reply to Wondering what's the source for the PLM allying with Orozco by Frost (not verified)
The PLM as an organization never officially joined Orozco's rebellion, but its members like José Inés Salazar and Emilio P. Campa certainly did:
https://liberteouvriere.com/2024/09/14/the-first-proclamation-of-anarch…
It was also precisely in March 1912 that a group of PLM supporters, including Salazar, supported Orozca as their military commander during the rebel occupation of Ciudad Juarez:
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2396&cont…
papers
guerito (not verified) Wed, 05/06/2026 - 11:10
In reply to Wondering what's the source for the PLM allying with Orozco by Frost (not verified)
Magon also had no idea what was going on in Mexico until one to two weeks later. For example, in the March 30, 1912 issue of Regeneracion, Ricardo Flores Magon calls Orozco's army the 'revolutionaries' and is pretty happy that Orozco crushed the federales in Corralitos.
In the March 9, 1912, issue…
Frost (not verified) Wed, 05/06/2026 - 19:25
In reply to papers by guerito (not verified)
In the March 9, 1912, issue of Regeneracion, Magon has multiple articles denouncing Orozco (fully aware, at least, that he had rebelled against Madero) and even calling for violence against him. Later on Regeneracion said it hoped the government would defeat Orozco because that would free up any revolutionary or potentially revolutionary forces under him. The March 23 issue has Magon on the front page with an article called The Traitors, all about Orozco. The Transmetropolitan Review article is highly deceptive in not mentioning any of this.
In the exact same issue…
Frost (not verified) Wed, 05/06/2026 - 20:57
In reply to papers by guerito (not verified)
In the exact same issue Magon has an article calling Orozco a "miserable bourgeois" and "dog of capitalism", explaining the difference between him and those who fly the red flag. To call Orozco's army revolutionaries does not mean that Magon thought Orozco was the right kind of revolutionary. Magon distinguished between political revolutionaries and economic/social revolutionaries. He wanted the forces under Orozco to rebel against him. World's apart from Magon allying with Orozco. You don't normally publicly call for militant resistance to someone you're allied with. Did some racist Italian anarchist make shit up about Magon allying with Orozco or what?
maybe chill out?
my name is chungus (not verified) Wed, 05/06/2026 - 23:43
In reply to In the exact same issue… by Frost (not verified)
pretty sure this trans-fiction review you have a bone for said the PLM would work with anyone against madero but here you are shidding yr pants about them saying magon sided with orozco. pretty sure a bunch of PLMs joined orozco (and carranza lol), pretty sure magon liked to call oaxacan natives 'blacks.' pretty sure you can clearly read, so maybe read good next time. try reading some fiction, it will relax your shiddy ass.
I'm chill already, that's…
Frost (not verified) Thu, 05/07/2026 - 15:02
In reply to maybe chill out? by my name is chungus (not verified)
I'm chill already, that's why my name is Frost, I just don't keep my mouth shut when pathological liars like yourself and the Transmetropolitan Reviewer talk shit. Pretty sure Magon being racist or transphobic or anything else doesn't excuse a white American anarchist from concocting lies about him for no reason other than he can. If you love lying so much, go be a Stalinist or a Trot.
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