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Research article

‘In the same boat’: global anticolonialism and Indigeneity in the Mexican Revolution

Author
  • Thomas K Lindner orcid logo (Historisches Institut, Universität Rostock, Germany)

Abstract

During and after the Mexican Revolution, the issues of socialism and Indigeneity were discussed by politicians, intellectuals, journalists and political activists. The new revolutionary Mexican state was interested in these topics because Mexico had a large Indigenous population and some revolutionary factions were sympathetic to socialism. To meet internal challenges, people looked outside Mexico for inspiration and studied anti-colonial movements in other parts of the world. This article presents and discusses three case studies of anti-colonial movements – in China, India and Morocco – and how they were discussed in Mexico. The focus lies on the institutionalisation phase of the Revolution, roughly between 1917 and 1929. The article includes an analysis of these countries’ respective communities in Mexico, such as the Chinese community in northern Mexico or the Indian anti-colonialists in Mexico City, adding a social history perspective to the existing literature. The article argues that the Mexican Revolution, as perceived and constructed by many of its protagonists, was less internally focused than portrayed in historiography as global anti-colonial movements were an inspiration for the Mexican Revolution and its institutionalisation.

Keywords: Mexican Revolution, anti-colonialism, Indigeneity, solidarity, China, India, Morocco, anti-imperialism

How to Cite: Lindner, T. K. ‘“In the same boat”: global anticolonialism and Indigeneity in the Mexican Revolution’. Radical Americas 11, 1 (2026): 2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2026.v11.1.002.

Rights: 2026, Thomas K. Lindner.

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Published on
25 Mar 2026
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Special issue: Histories of socialism and Indigeneity

Introduction: the Mexican Revolution and global anti-colonialism

The Mexican Revolution was profoundly influenced by Indigenous communities in Mexico. These communities’ relationship to the Mexican state and the revolutionary project after 1910 was varied, complicated and complex.1 But despite, or perhaps because of, the presence of Indigenous communities in Mexico, many actors involved in the Mexican revolutionary project,2 such as political activists, intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats and journalists, looked outside the Mexican borders for an ‘anticolonial indigeneity’.3 Asia and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Africa became particularly attractive places for those who were looking for Indigenous anti-colonial activism that could potentially serve as a lesson for the Mexican projects of revolution and state-building. In Mexico, the violent phase of the Revolution (1910–17) gave way to a phase of reconstruction, consolidation and state-building (1917–29) which allowed time to think beyond what had been militarily and politically urgent before 1917.4 Thus, the search for anti-colonialism and Indigeneity elsewhere allowed the actors of the Mexican Revolution to sharpen their perspective on their own revolution and to see it in relation to other projects of either anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism or state-building in a world of unequal power relations.

However, both Asia and Africa were too large and diverse and as such remained conceptually vague for many of the observers in Mexico who, in addition, often had to rely on press agency reports from elsewhere.5 Asia and Africa meant different things to different actors. Many of those politically active in Mexico in the early twentieth century used ‘Asia’ or ‘Africa’ as a shorthand for what they called ‘semi-colonialism’, which they saw as occurring in Asia, Africa and Latin America. ‘Asia’ and ‘Africa’ could also simply mean ‘non-Western’ or non-European, in a sense that implied a status of victim rather than perpetrator in a global system of imperialism.6 Finally, both ‘Asia’ and ‘Africa’ could be interpreted culturally as a spiritual other to a materialistic and superficial culture that lay beneath Western political oppression and colonialism. Needless to say, these imaginings of Asia and Africa were not without their own, sometimes exoticising, problems and only in some rare cases were they based on a deep knowledge of one of several cultures or languages. In other words, both Asia and Africa were concepts that summarised and simplified complex histories and made them accessible in the Mexican context. The lens of the Mexican Revolution highlighted some aspects while ignoring others, sometimes imagining solidarities where there was scepticism, or simplifying complex relationships to fit a pre-existing frame. As is the often the case, the consequences of transnational influences are difficult to discern and transnational learning did not occur in easily traceable, undistorted or direct ways.

The First World War undoubtedly accelerated the delegitimisation of European colonial rule. It led to what has been called an ‘Afro-Asian assault on the civilizing mission ideology’7 that triggered a ‘re-imagination of belonging’8 in many colonies. The moral decline of Europe, a continent that still clung to colonies and proudly promoted the ‘civilising mission’ that went with them, was evident on the blood-soaked battlefields where civility was nowhere to be found and colonial troops in particular were quickly burned up.9 The anti-imperialist momentum generated during and immediately after the war also resonated in Latin America where US troops were stationed in three countries: Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 1919.10 In Mexico, the ongoing revolution overshadowed the war and what in other places was the ‘Wilsonian moment’,11 but many Mexican intellectuals had already accused the European powers of arrogance and proclaimed the end of European global hegemony.12 For many in Mexico, and not only those critical of colonialism, it seemed obvious that the twentieth century would be a century of decolonisation around the world. As a result, many of the actors of the Mexican Revolution, especially those who saw themselves as anti-imperialists, carefully observed anti-colonial movements in other parts of the world. These actors also reflected on and wrote about the meaning of anti-colonial movements for the new, revolutionary Mexico.

The Mexican Revolution and its relationship to the colonial world remains a topic of debate among scholars. Many historians interpret the Mexican Revolution as primarily a Mexican internal, either as a genuine popular uprising or as a complacent, authoritarian new regime replacing the old one. In his insightful comparison of global revolutions, social historian Alan Knight, for example, has reiterated that, for him, ‘the Mexican Revolution was largely self-contained’, except for a relatively small and unimportant US intervention.13 Other historians have emphasised the ideological component that linked the Mexican Revolution to other movements against imperialism or for national sovereignty. Historian John Mason Hart even calls the Mexican Revolution ‘the first great Third World uprising against American economic, cultural and political expansion’.14 Hart also stresses the role of external factors in the revolutionary outcome, especially the importance of other global events that inspired revolutionaries, such as the Iranian and Russian revolutions of 1905 and the Chinese Revolution of 1911.15 By understanding the Mexican Revolution as part of a global structure of radicalism, historians such as Anne Garland Mahler or Daniel Kent Carrasco emphasise its transnational, and potentially tricontinental, aspects.16 In general, there is consensus that no non-Mexican revolution (anti-colonial or not) directly caused the revolution, but that other revolutions certainly influenced the Mexican Revolution and its institutionalisation in the 1920s. During this decade, the state party was formed and clearly influenced by a loose adoption of socialism from southeastern Mexico.17 At the same time, as this article argues, another ideology – anti-colonial and anti-imperialist and inspired by movements in Asia and Africa – influenced Mexican politicians, intellectuals and activists. Comparable to the case of the adoption of southeastern socialism, this influence was a political style and a commitment to revolutionary reform in general terms rather than a fixed political programme.18

In this article, I will discuss three case studies: the anti-colonial movements in China, India and Morocco and how those influenced the Mexican Revolution in its ‘phase of institutionalisation’ in the 1920s.19 This analysis is based on reports of the anti-colonial movements in the anti-imperialist press, but also gives voice to the Chinese and Indian actors who were present in Mexico. Chinese merchants in northern Mexico, Indian anti-colonialists in Mexico City and intellectuals sympathetic to the idea of tricontinental solidarity all reflected on the relationship between Asian and African liberation movements and postrevolutionary Mexico. The three cases are not directly connected, but they all address the issue of Indigeneity and thus speak to each other because they allow actors to connect cases of anti-imperial solidarity to one another, similar to a concept that would later become ‘Third-worldism’. What exactly ‘Indigeneity’ meant in Mexico in the 1920s is hard to define – a complication this article (and the special issue in which it is published) tries to emphasise and analyse. A mere distinction between ‘natives’ and ‘others’ seems simplistic for the Mexican context, in which, for example, Felipe Carrillo Puerto had already criticised depoliticised appropriations of Indigenous thinking.20 But the exact degree of politicisation of the concept of Indigeneity remained as complex during the Revolution as it is today. Regarding the case studies described here, many actors seemed to have worked on the assumption that ‘native’ plus some form of emancipatory ‘politics’ was enough to speak of Indigeneity. More often than not, that equation included some sort of anti-imperialist thinking. The perspectives described in this article are rarely part of the history of the Mexican Revolution, but they allow us to situate it more explicitly within the global context of anti-colonialism and decolonisation in the early twentieth century. In a final step, the article reflects on the role of Indigeneity and shows how discussions about Mexican Indigeneity influenced the discussion of Asian and African anti-colonialism in Mexico.

Semi-colonialism and civilisation: China and Mexico

Chinese anti-colonialism was discussed ambivalently during the Mexican Revolution. The existence of a relatively large Chinese immigrant community in Mexico influenced this debate and shaped the ways in which Mexicans imagined and experienced ‘China’ in their everyday lives. On the one hand, ‘China’ became a global symbol for semi-colonialism, a term often used by communists and other anti-imperialists to denounce the influence of the USA in Mexican affairs. Yet at the same time many Mexicans, especially in the northern states, reacted negatively to the existing Chinese immigrant communities, seeing them as a threat to their own economic success.

A total of 60,000 Chinese people immigrated to Mexico between 1882 and 1940.21 Although there had been immigration prior to 1882, the US Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited immigration to the USA, made Mexico a popular ‘second-choice’ destination that had potential for later illegal immigration to the USA. By 1926, Chinese immigrants constituted the second-largest immigrant group in all of Mexico, with a total number of 24,000 people. By that time, Chinese merchants had essentially established a monopoly on groceries and dry goods in most parts of northern Mexico. The immigrants were able to use their transnational commercial connections, especially with the Chinese communities in California, to become very successful businessmen and women. But Mexico was not just a back-up plan for the Chinese who had actually tried to enter the USA; many were actively attracted by the Mexican governments. Successive ‘expert’ governments under Porfirio Díaz enacted laws and treaties that facilitated the recruitment of Chinese labourers as peasants or miners as part of a larger programme of economic modernisation.22 In practice, however, the Chinese immigrants worked as merchants, a field in which they could use their status as part of the global Chinese diaspora to facilitate transnational trade connections and undercut local merchants without such contacts.

The apparent economic success of the Chinese merchants in northern Mexico provoked envy in parts of Mexican society. Open racism became part of the vocabulary used by anti-Chinese groups to denounce the existence of Chinese communities in Mexico. Resentment, especially among lower middle-class Mexicans who had previously owned small corner stores, about the economic success of the Chinese in Mexico led to murders, looting, robberies, protest rallies and boycotts. The Mexican Revolution, by definition a time of turmoil and violence, made many of these conflicts more visible. Disgruntled revolutionary soldiers often took their frustrations to the local Chinese-owned shop and, often with the help of the local population, robbed or looted the small businesses. In May 1911, in the city of Torreón, Coahuila, alone, 303 Chinese people were murdered by Maderista revolutionary troops and what the foreign and national media quickly dubbed a ‘local mob’.23 This massacre, which killed half of the city’s Chinese immigrant community, was ‘the worst act of violence committed against any Chinese diasporic community of the Americas during the twentieth century’, as historian Robert Chao Romero has noted.24 During the more violent revolutionary years, Chinese immigrants and communities were often accused of collaborating with the old Díaz regime and at least 814 Chinese immigrants were murdered in Mexico during the revolutionary 1910s.

After the revolutionary Civil War subsided in 1917, Chinese immigrant communities remained part of national and local debates that centred around race and economic nationalism. In the 1920s, anti-Chinese propaganda promoted by Sinophobic groups became more powerful. The anti-Chinese discourse of the 1920s manifested itself in legislation in the early 1930s when the federal government issued a policy restricting the immigration of migrants who possessed less than 10,000 pesos in investment capital. At the same time, federal legislation forced every business to prove that at least 90 per cent of its employees were Mexican born. Given that small businesses were owned by Chinese immigrants and provided for the owner’s family, this ley (part of the larger Ley del Trabajo signed in 1931) specifically targeted the Chinese merchants and small business owners of northern Mexico, for example in Sonora.25

The leftist and socialist spectrum was not immune to anti-Chinese sentiment or Sinophobia.26 As early as 1906, Ricardo Flores Magón, as president of the Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal Mexicano, had explicitly included the ‘problem’ of Chinese immigration in his party’s platform, declaring that Mexican workers must be protected from Chinese immigrants who were allegedly ‘submissive’, ‘petty in aspirations’ and ‘willing to work for the lowest wage’. The manifesto concluded that ‘their competition is disastrous and must be avoided in Mexico. In general, Chinese immigration does not produce the least benefit for Mexico.’27 Often, anti-Chinese sentiment was rhetorically combined with anti-American sentiment, painting the two distinct groups as wealthy foreigners who had profited from the exploitation of the humble Mexican workers.28 This Mexican Sinophobia has been compared to European anti-Semitism – blaming a group for their alleged weakness and unbelievable power at the same time.29

At the same time that Chinese immigrants were experiencing everyday racism in northern Mexico, Mexican anti-imperialists were elevating ‘China’ to an anti-imperialist symbol of national liberation. ‘Semi-colonialism’ was the concept that linked Mexico to China and had been used frequently since Lenin had employed the term in his seminal 1916 work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.30 In Highest Stage, the prime example of a semi-colonial country was actually Argentina, but Mexican anti-imperialists (and many other leftists from the Americas) quickly adopted the concept as a way to integrate their own struggle into the global anti-colonial struggles.31 China thus became a way to talk about semi-colonialism and the oppression of Latin American countries without always having to explicitly explain what the specifics of semi-coloniality in, say Mexico, were.

When reporting on China, anti-imperialists in Mexico regularly used a discourse that juxtaposed imperialism with what was at least an implicit Indigeneity. In the case of China, the direct analogies between China and Latin America worked only partially and often required the use of ‘semi-colonialism’ as a bridging concept. Nevertheless, China was seen as an admirable anti-colonial country in which European powers were collectively pushed back by the local population. In particular, the Chinese Civil War (or, to be more precise, its first phase, also known as the First Guomindang-Communist Civil War from 1927 to 1937) was taken up by the Mexican audience and used as a cautionary tale against ideologically diverse coalitions within anti-colonialism. But even before the war, the Chinese case made Mexicans think about imperialism and anti-colonialism. The communists used an explicitly tricontinental tone to describe the situation in 1925, referring to both the First World War and the Russian Revolution: ‘The world war ... has awakened millions of people, has given them back the consciousness of their power and their needs, and they have found a guide and a flag in the Russian example.’32 For the communists, at least until the break between the Guomindang and the Chinese communists, China was an obvious candidate to throw out all of the Western or Christian powers that had hypocritically preached civilisation and brought barbarism and drugs to China. Even materialist communists adopted a discourse of ‘civilisation’ when talking about anti-colonialism in China. Apparently, and with some reason, the hypocrisy of Western powers bringing ‘civilisation’ to one of the oldest civilisations on the planet was too attractive not to point out. The reports on China very often contained detailed descriptions of brutal murders, mass executions and torture that perfectly symbolised the hypocrisy, decadence and racism of the Western colonial powers.33 Julio Antonio Mella, the Cuban communist in exile in Mexico, wrote about what he called the ‘civilizing diplomacy of Western canons’. Mella also emphasised the unfair treatment of the local population in China, explicitly using their ancient civilisation as an anti-colonial argument in 1925: ‘This great people of ancient, superior intellectual and moral civilization was a slave, a colony of the brutal capitalist civilization of the West.’ But, Mella continued, ‘the new civilization will come from the Orient’ once the ‘Oriental Revolutionary Movement’ had succeeded.34 For the Marxist Mella, the numerical power of the Chinese communist movement, combined with its ancient civilisational wisdom, would succeed over Western imperialism.

But it was not only the communists who used ‘China’ as a symbol for their own political fights and as something that vaguely meant ‘popular with large sections of the local population’. Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, another exile in Mexico City in the mid-1920s, liked to call his movement, Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), the ‘Guomindang of Latin America’, implying that a mass organisation against imperialism was possible with broad social support among the middle classes in his native Peru.35 The ‘Guomindang’ metaphor was meant to unite nationalists and socialists by implying land reform, a nationalisation of the economy and a possible alliance against the USA without redistributing the property of the Peruvian middle class. Often, however, it seems that Haya de la Torre and other Latin American anti-imperialists were simply attracted by the sheer number of those who had joined the Guomindang, writing of ‘half a million Guomindang members’.36 That number indeed sounded impressive, but had little relevancy to the political discourse in Latin America due to a very different context.

By portraying China as the ‘Yellow Hope’37 of global anti-colonialism, many actors in postrevolutionary Mexico, such as Mella or de la Torre, implied that a Chinese revolution would be a signal for Indigenous groups elsewhere. An ancient people, once a great civilisation, now the object of Western imperialism, was a relatable issue in Latin America, but potentially also in other places in Asia or Africa. Yet the existence of Chinese migrants in Mexico and the massive problems they faced during the revolutionary decades of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s were largely ignored. For many of the revolutionary actors in Mexico, China was either an imagined past (‘great civilisation’) or a great revolutionary promise (‘Yellow Hope’). Anti-imperialist solidarity with ‘China’ was not established easily and had severe boundaries at all times. In other words, the significant gaps between revolutionary theory and everyday practices were never resolved and never (as far as I can see) addressed. And still, the development of a common tricontinental mindset based on the opposition to colonialism and the appreciation of Indigenous communities was already evident in the coverage of China during the Mexican Revolution. In the cases of India and Morocco, however, these implications and allusions became more explicit.

Peasants and maiz: India and Mexico

India became an opportunity for imagining anti-colonialism in Mexico during and after the Mexican Revolution. Unlike the Chinese merchants in northern Mexico, there was no large community of Indian immigrants in Mexico, but certain individuals, such as M. N. Roy or Pandurang Khankhoje, actively shaped Mexican visions of anti-colonial resistance. ‘India’ became a catchword for expressing anti-colonial demands, visions and emotions.

The most prominent thinker to introduce Indian concepts of anti-colonialism into the revolutionary discourse in Mexico was undoubtedly José Vasconcelos. The philosopher had participated in the Mexican Revolution and was appointed director of Mexico City’s most prestigious university, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). At the university, he introduced the institution’s new slogan ‘Por mi raza hablará el espiritu’ (‘The spirit will speak for my race’). Vasconcelos was staunchly anti-American, anti-Protestant and anti-materialist, advocating a latinoamericanismo rooted in the mixing of cultures and races. In 1921, Mexican President Álvaro Obregón appointed Vasconcelos as minister of education, a post he held until 1924, and which he used to implement his extensive programme of rural education and cultural nationalism to integrate the Indigenous communities into the national education system.38 Vasconcelos is best known for his influential 1925 work La raza cósmica. In it, the philosopher argued for a biological and aesthetic blending of peoples that would ultimately lead to the creation of a ‘cosmic race’ in Mexico.39 But before La raza cósmica, Vasconcelos had already published another book called Estudios indostánicos (Hindustani Studies) – a work on South Asian and Indian spirituality. Probably written during the Mexican Revolution and first published in 1919, it can be seen as a precursor to La raza cósmica.

Vasconcelos’s concept of Latin American unity and the search for spiritual alternatives to a ‘materialistic’ West is evident in the Estudios indostánicos.40 It also helps to explain Vasconcelos’s vision of the relationship between the Indigenous communities in Mexico and global anti-colonialism. For Vasconcelos, India serves, as historian Laura Torres-Rodríguez has put it, as ‘a subtext for Latin American mestizaje’.41 In Indian spirituality, Torres Rodríguez argues persuasively, Vasconcelos found an idea of modernity based on spirituality as a strategy for cultural decolonisation.42 He integrates India into his worldview, which is based on the idea that the technologically advanced, heartless and ignorant ‘North’ colonises its southern counterpart. With this idea, and not without a certain exoticisation of ‘the Orient’, Vasconcelos actively constructs India as an anti-Anglo-Saxon space, as he writes: ‘The danger with which the North threatens the world is the danger of wanting to apply all that prolix and enslaving machinery …, that entire military-industrial system, to peoples and situations that do not even need them nor do they request it.’43 For Vasconcelos, India was attractive because it had an ancient civilisation and its current situation, with many social, political and economic problems, was caused by colonialism. In other words, India was very much like Latin America – an idea that made a political application of the philosophical question possible in the first place. The fact that Vasconcelos actively worked to integrate rural and Indigenous communities during his tenure as minister of education underscores the connection between his philosophical theories and his vision of a modern state in Mexico.

José Vasconcelos compares Latin America’s relationship with the USA to colonial contexts on different continents. For him, at least implicitly, India’s struggle for independence against Great Britain was similar to Mexico’s situation vis-à-vis the USA. Mexico thus serves as Latin America’s last bastion against the materialism and Protestantism of the USA.44 As a participant in the Mexican Revolution, Vasconcelos is interested in strengthening the revolutionary gains, especially against foreign interference from the USA. Indian vegetarianism, especially the consumption of rice, is constructed by Vasconcelos as an anti-Anglo-Saxon practice: ‘The peasants of the East, fed with rice and vegetables, are physically stronger and resist continuous work better than the carnivorous Saxons.’45 The Estudios indostánicos and his later work Indología were well received in Latin America and Mexico. Gabriela Mistral, for example, an exile whom Vasconcelos had invited to Mexico as a teacher and education reformer, interpreted the book as taking a cosmopolitan, Hispanic-American perspective, somehow between the East and the West.46 In a sense, Vasconcelos used the Western stereotype of India as a way to construct a form of cultural identity for Mexico and Latin America based on anti-Western and anti-colonial traditions.

While Vasconcelos’s vision of India had little to do with the anti-colonial struggles in the country, there were Indian anti-colonialists in Mexico. Like Vasconcelos, they linked Mexico to India and discussed the issue of Indigeneity in this common framework. The best-known Indian in Mexico in the 1910s and 1920s is certainly M. N. Roy. Born in West Bengal in 1887, Manabendra Nath Roy had participated in the so-called ‘Hindu–German conspiracy’ during the First World War, supporting the German Reich against the British Empire. Via the USA, Roy landed in Mexico during the war and, along with US radicals and Mexican trade unionists, co-founded the Partido Comunista Mexicano (PCM) in Mexico City in 1919 and became the party’s first general secretary.47 In 1920, Roy famously spoke on the ‘colonial question’ at the Second World Congress of the Comintern, a speech that earned him a reputation as brilliant anti-colonial thinker.48 Roy later claimed that ‘Mexico was the land of my rebirth’, but he never returned to Mexico after 1920. In his memoirs, Roy paints an ambiguous picture of Mexico and its relationship with India: he describes Mexico as both backwards (archaic, superstitious, illiterate) and civilised (modernist, cosmopolitan).49 Roy also referred to the supposed racial similarities between Mexicans and Indians, but does not explicitly speak of the Indigenous communities within Mexico. For Roy, it was primarily the experience of racism that united Indians and Mexicans: ‘We are in the same boat; my country is similarly stigmatised by the arrogant imperialism of the White race.’50 This common experience of racism united his own anti-colonialism and the anti-imperialism of Latin America, which was often directed against the United States of America.

Agrarian utopias and ideas about the role of rural communities in revolution linked India and Mexico. Pandurang Sadashiv Khankhoje exemplifies an ideology that could be called agrarian anti-imperialism. Born in 1884 in Wardha, Khankhoje went to California to study and became politically active in the USA. Like Roy, he had also been involved in the Hindu–German conspiracy and, like many other anti-colonial Indians in Berlin, he switched allegiance to communism or, more precisely, a vague commitment to revolution, in 1917 or shortly thereafter. He travelled to Mexico in 1924 and stayed there for nearly 30 years. Through Ramón de Negri, Khankhoje obtained a teaching position at the National School of Agriculture in Chapingo and subsequently became an influential biologist who developed new strains of high-yielding corn.51 In Mexico, Khankhoje was perceived by many radicals and anti-imperialists as an agrarian anti-imperialist, an Indian anti-colonial ally who was important because of what historian Daniel Kent Carrasco has aptly named ‘Campesino Internationalism’.52 To view Khankhoje as an agrarian anti-imperialist is not, as historian Cháirez-Garza claims, painting a ‘romanticised vision of Khankhoje’s activities in Mexico’ that uncritically depicts him as a revolutionary without error or contradiction.53 It is simply how the Indian constructed his activism and how he was perceived by many of his contemporaries in Mexico. In general, anti-colonial solidarity and South–South exchange are not constructed retrospectively by historians but were actively pursued by radicals in the 1920s.

For many in Mexico, Khankhoje represented an agrarian anti-imperialism that could link Mexico and India. As such, he held classes for peasants and gave lectures, such as at the opening of the Agricultural School ‘Emiliano Zapata’ in Chapingo in 1928, where he spoke about wheat farming alongside the anti-imperialist Swiss journalist Federico Bach.54 Tina Modotti’s telling photographs of Khankhoje and his corn crops are also not a retrospective construction but show Khankhoje as a scientist, passionate about corn and crop cultivation. As a final example, Diego Rivera’s painting El Pan Nuestro depicts Pandurang Khankhoje with a red star on his shirt breaking bread – symbolically feeding the people of Mexico, especially the peasant and Indigenous communities which are represented by a female figure in Tehuana dress. The mural was completed in 1928 and can still be seen today in the Secretaría de Educación Pública in Mexico City. What is important here is how Modotti, Rivera and other influential interpreters of the Mexican Revolution saw Khankhoje: as an ally who embodied agrarian issues and anti-colonialism.55 But beyond Khankhoje as an individual, whole groups of organised peasants inspired by the Russian and Mexican revolutions relied on an ideology that combined Indigeneity and ‘Third-worldism’ into an amalgam that could be called agrarian anti-imperialism.56 Solidarity between colonial and postcolonial countries was an important part of this ideology and India, through comparison and solidarity, was an integral reference point for this agrarian-based anti-imperialism.

‘As Indigenous and heroic as our races’: Morocco and Mexico

The Rif War in Morocco, which lasted from 1921 to 1926, was an issue for many politicians, intellectuals and state officials during the institutionalisation of the Mexican Revolution. For many, it was used as an opportunity to express and enact solidarity as part of a global anti-colonial coalition. The topic of Indigeneity was explicitly discussed when anti-imperialists wrote or spoke about the Rif War, and this discourse on the subject reveals much about the perception of Indigenous communities in Mexico and globally, as well as about the politicians, intellectuals and activists themselves. The war was both an occasion to reflect on the role of Spanish colonialism in the twentieth century and an opportunity to engage in a discourse on race and Indigeneity in anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa, but also in the ongoing political fights in Mexico.

During the Rif War, local Riffian forces under rebel leader Abd el-Krim al-Khattabi fought Spanish and French colonial troops in the mountains of northeastern Morocco. Abd el-Krim had proclaimed an independent Rif Republic, partly as a reaction to the Paris Peace Conference, which maintained European protectorates in Morocco after the war. The rebel leader, and his global image, were central to the campaign for Riffian independence. In Mexico, as in many other parts of the world, Abd el-Krim became a celebrity and the face of global anti-colonialism in the summer of 1925.57 He was able to tell the world about his struggle, using his charm and knowledge of the history of colonialism to integrate his people’s cause into the larger narrative of global anti-colonialism. Western media were open to exoticising Abd el-Krim as a wise ‘Berber’ and descendant of the Visigoths of North Africa.58 Speaking in his Berber dialect, Arabic, Spanish and French, Abd el-Krim portrayed himself as a man of culture fighting against the atrocities of a Western ‘civilisation’. The Rif leader used his knowledge of Latin American history to launch a campaign to win over Latin American public opinion. He responded to an invitation from the Buenos Aires-based Unión Latinoamericana to attend the centennial celebration of Peru’s independence, which he had received along with the Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, in what could be interpreted as an act of tricontinental thinking. Abd el-Krim ultimately declined the invitation, but offered himself as the perfect anti-imperialist ally for Latin Americans, citing the heroes of the Latin American independence movements.59 He framed his people’s struggle as a liberation struggle against European imperialism and white supremacy in general, claiming that Europe was corrupt and had lost the right to impose its will on other countries. The rebel leader dreamed of ‘our own Ayacucho’, referring to a battle won against Spanish colonial forces in South America.

The responses to Abd el-Krim’s call for solidarity show that Latin Americans in Mexico and elsewhere were more than willing to support the Riffian rebels and embrace a rhetoric of Indigenous liberation struggle. José Carlos Mariátegui was one of the intellectuals who introduced Abd el-Krim to the Latin American public. Although Mariátegui wrote from Lima, his magazine Amauta was distributed in Mexico and influenced the transnational circles of anti-imperialists there.60 Mariátegui, who praised Abd el-Krim as an heir to Bolívar and San Martín and as a role model for young Hispanic Americans, once again used the language and the concept of civilisation: ‘Western civilization feels threatened by Abd el-Krim.’61 The focus of the ensuing publicity campaign quickly became postrevolutionary Mexico. In May 1925, La Antorcha, a magazine edited by the intellectual and former education minister José Vasconcelos, portrayed Abd el-Krim as a brave anti-colonial hero who deserved every ounce of Mexican solidarity: ‘Republican America would betray its very reason of existence, if it were to hypocritically turn a blind eye towards the fight that the admirable Riffians maintain against the decadent imperialisms of the Mediterranean, unfortunately represented by Latin people.’62 In this reasoning, history obliged Latin Americans to support anti-colonialism, at least morally, even if it meant opposing the Spanish and their culture. The reference to ‘Latin people’ is due to Vasconcelos’s ideological uniqueness, but also hints at how many (white, Catholic) Mexicans perceived themselves in the 1920s.

Indigeneity and a discourse of civilisation played a significant role in the reception of the Rif War in Mexico. The communist Rafael Carrillo wrote an angry article denouncing the methods of the Spanish Foreign Legion in Mexico, claiming that the Spanish consuls had already recruited thousands of young Mexican men into the Spanish colonial army. For Carrillo, the youth were being indoctrinated by the Spanish authorities into believing that they were fighting for ‘civilisation’ and ‘the liberty and honour of the white race’ when in fact they were merely supporting a war of plunder and European imperialism.63 The young Mexicans who travelled to North Africa were thus portrayed as traitors – seduced traitors, but traitors nonetheless – to the cause of Mexico, Latin America and anti-colonialism. The imperialist Spaniards were often contrasted with the wise leader of the Rif rebels, Abd el-Krim, and his ‘civilised’ behaviour.64 By mentioning, for example, the many languages he spoke, press reports emphasised that the Spanish claim they were the ones bringing ‘civilisation’ to Morocco was nothing more than imperialist propaganda.

Haya de la Torre, who promoted his APRA as the ‘Guomindang of Latin America’, took a keen interest in the Rif War and explicitly connected it to questions of race and Indigeneity. He loudly denounced the Spanish leftist intelligentsia for not denouncing the war crimes committed by Spanish colonial troops in Morocco.65 For Haya, as for Mariátegui, the Rif rebels were an Indigenous race that needed to be defended and supported precisely because of this status. Resisting the conquest of Spanish troops was a duty for Latin Americans.66 Haya sharpened his own concept of Indoamerica by studying the Rif War, allowing him to highlight the precolonial elements of his communal vision, but he also linked the issue of Indigeneity to anti-colonialism. For him, the Indigeneity of Latin America became most acute when contrasted with the United States of America. For example, Haya de la Torre referred to a rumour about the presence of American air force pilots among the volunteers in the Spanish colonial troops in Morocco. Haya’s theory was that the Rif War, American imperialism and Mexico were directly linked – through Indigeneity. Haya wrote that ‘the Yankee pilots want to learn how to eradicate indigenous peoples in a mountainous, passionately defended region. Killing indigenous populations in the plains is of no interest to the Yankees: Mexico as well as all desirable countries in the Americas are mountainous.’ For Haya, it was clear that Morocco was a symbol: it was ‘nothing less than the repetition of our past and the announcement of our future.’67 Haya thus echoed Abd el-Krim’s speculative idea of a common racial origin for Arabs and Latin Americans. In any case, Moroccans and Mexicans shared a common ground when it came to opposing foreign imperialism, and that was enough of a basis for solidarity between the two.

The Rif War and the Moroccan independence movement in general were viewed with interest and sympathy in Mexico. Anti-imperialists of various ideological backgrounds, in particular, used the case to express their solidarity with global anti-colonialism and to sharpen their understanding of what imperialism was, how it worked and what it meant for ‘local’ people who opposed it. The basic idea that Europe was a continent in decline, an idea symbolised by the struggling Spanish Empire, was always visible in this discussion. Mexican and other Latin American thinkers admired the ‘wise Arab’ Abd el-Krim and his anti-colonial struggle. The role of Indigenous communities in national liberation struggles was explicitly addressed as transferred, at least on a discursive level, to the Latin American context. Indigeneity was thus seen as an integral part of the global anti-colonial movement.

Conclusion: global anti-colonialism and Mexican indigenismo

In Mexico, many important actors of the Revolution thought about and imagined alliances with anti-colonial and Indigenous movements in Asia and Africa, thus integrating support for global anti-colonialism into the revolutionary repertoire. In this process, the examples of China, India and Morocco played a key role in providing examples and inspiration for a future Mexico that continued its revolutionary path. More generally, anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia provided an opportunity to think about ways to resist a more resourceful imperial power. In most cases, this power was explicitly or implicitly named: it was the USA, the power that had twice invaded Mexican territory during the Revolution.68 Due to its proximity to the USA, it was believed that concrete and practical lessons from anti-colonial fights elsewhere would be useful if the northern neighbour decided to invade Mexico once again. This anxiety was not based on fear and fiction alone. In the spring of 1927, the Mexican–American conflict over natural resources became extremely tense and many observers, including many newspapers in both countries, expected a new Mexican–American ‘oil war’.69 In the summer of 1927, the conflict was resolved, costing American Ambassador Sheffield, a ‘Cold War’ anti-communist avant la lettre, his job and making Mexican President Elías Calles move to the political right.70 In other words, anti-colonialism elsewhere sharpened public opinion about the interference of foreign powers in the project of the Mexican Revolution.

In addition to this anti-imperialist impulse, intellectuals, politicians and activists in revolutionary Mexico also discussed the issue of Indigeneity through the lens of global anti-colonialism. The concept of ‘civilisation’ was widely used to highlight both the precolonial achievements of the Chinese or Indians as well as the continuing Western racism against these peoples. This discourse had particular significance in Mexico, and for the Mexican Revolution, as it linked anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa to a Mexican project that was incorporated into the new revolutionary state: indigenismo. The newfound appreciation of Indigenous Mexican cultures and the celebration of the mestizo went hand in hand. Both included a rejection of Eurocentric racism and relied on a better integration of Indigenous communities into the state. This movement, like the revolution itself, was a way of nation-building, forjando patria, as Manuel Gamio articulated it.71 Vasconcelos’s thoughts and actions make this synergy very clear: he was an admirer of ancient Indian civilisations, reported sympathetically on the Indian anti-colonial movement, saw himself as an anti-Anglo-Saxon anti-imperialist and, as minister, he had initiated a programme to integrate Mexican Indigenous communities into the state. In this way of thinking, Mexico was comparable to India and vice versa. Both nations were made up of ‘brown’ peoples who had experienced conquest and oppression. The mestizo, the result of ‘racial’ mixing, became the symbol of revolutionary Mexico and, in Vasconcelos’s words, ‘the bridge to the future’.72 Mestizaje was thus the dream of a twentieth century that was characterised by decolonisation and emerging nation-states in Latin America, Asia and Africa. The new revolutionary governments in Mexico rhetorically embraced indigenismo and anti-racism, but the example of the Chinese community in northern Mexico showed that racism could not be easily eradicated by changing state doctrine. Transnational solidarity was never achieved easily and always had its own limitations and internal contradictions.

The actors analysed in this article are too few to be representative of revolutionary Mexico as a whole. Those who were interested in global anti-colonialism, especially people like José Vasconcelos, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, Julio Antonio Mella, Ramón de Negri, Jacobo Hurwitz and, at times, even Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles, were well-connected though, for example to José Mariátegui in Lima or Alfredo Palacios and Manuel Ugarte in Buenos Aires, thus creating transnational networks of anti-imperialism. Many of the members of this generation of intellectuals and political activists created an ideology that was based on anti-imperialist thinking and contained the seeds of tricontinentalism.73 The idea that Latin America shared many characteristics and histories with Africa and Asia was based on a sense of solidarity and would become much more prominent during the Cold War and the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement.74 Its origins, however, go back to earlier times – in the case of Mexico specifically, to the reception afforded anti-colonialism and Indigeneity during the Mexican Revolution.

Declarations and conflicts of interest

Research ethics statement

Not applicable to this article.

Consent for publication statement

Not applicable to this article.

Conflicts of interest statement

The author is co-editor of the special issue Histories of socialism and Indigeneity for this journal. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.

Notes

  1. The role of Indigenous communities in the Mexican Revolution is disputed. Some, like social historian Alan Knight, only see a major contribution after 1920 because the Revolution was ‘fought on the basis of considerable Indian participation’ but ‘in the absence of any self-consciously Indian project’, thus the Indigenous communities more or less took part ‘anonymously’. Yet most scholars agree that after 1920, indigenismo and a pre-Hispanic revival became part of official state philosophy and were integrated into the new (post)revolutionary nationalism. See Knight, ‘Racism, revolution’, 76–7; Barnet-Sánchez, ‘Indigenismo and pre-Hispanic revivals’, 42–4; see also Álvarez Cuartero, ‘Elvira Carrillo Puerto’ and Osten, ‘For the government to become good’ in this special issue. ⮭
  2. I will be using the term ‘revolutionary’ (and not ‘postrevolutionary’) Mexico in this article to refer to Mexico between the end of the Civil War in 1917 and the end of the reconstruction phase of the Revolution in 1929. ⮭
  3. There were, of course, significant actors within Mexico who had their own understandings of Indigeneity. Felipe Carrillo Puerto was probably the most prominent. For an overview, see Osten, ‘For the government to become good’; Booth, ‘The revolutionary road’. ⮭
  4. For this periodisation see, for example, Buchenau, ‘The Mexican Revolution’. ⮭
  5. See Vega Jiménez, ‘Press (Latin America)’. ⮭
  6. That interpretation gained particular momentum after the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–05 which showed that the supposed ethnic, cultural or technological supremacy of European powers was a myth rather than a fact. See Aydin, ‘A global anti-Western moment?’. ⮭
  7. Adas, ‘Contested hegemony’. ⮭
  8. Krautwald, Lindner and Nakao, ‘Fighting marginality’. ⮭
  9. Among the French fighters from Senegal – the tirailleurs sénégalais – for example, the casualties were two or three times higher than in other French regiments. See Leonhard, Pandora’s Box, 139–41. ⮭
  10. McPherson, The Invaded. ⮭
  11. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment. ⮭
  12. For an example, see Gamio, Forjando patria. For an interpretation of the war in Latin America more generally, see Goebel and Tato, ‘Making sense of the war (Latin America)’; Rinke, Latin America and the First World War. ⮭
  13. Knight, Bandits and Liberals, 197. See also Knight, ‘The ideology of the Mexican Revolution’; Knight, The Mexican Revolution. ⮭
  14. Hart, Revolutionary Mexico, 362. ⮭
  15. Hart, Revolutionary Mexico, 187–234. ⮭
  16. Garland Mahler, A Wide Net of Solidarity; Kent Carrasco, ‘Breath of revolution’. ⮭
  17. Osten, Revolution’s Wake. ⮭
  18. See Osten, Revolution’s Wake, 261. ⮭
  19. From 1917 to 1929, to be more precise. See Buchenau, ‘The Mexican Revolution’. ⮭
  20. See Booth, ‘The Revolutionary Road’. ⮭
  21. Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico, 1. ⮭
  22. For example, the Treaty of Amity and Commerce that was signed in 1899 and legally opened the borders of both countries for the other’s citizens. ⮭
  23. For example, ‘Chinese slain by mob in Mexico’, The Spokesman Review, 26 May 1911. ⮭
  24. Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico, 149. ⮭
  25. For a more detailed analysis of the situation in Sonora and Sinaloa, see Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans. ⮭
  26. For further Mexican Sinophobic campaigns and resistance to it by Chinese Mexicans in the 1930s and later, see Gónzalez, Paisoanos Chinos. ⮭
  27. Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal Mexicano, Programa del Partido Liberal Mexicano y Manifiesto a la Nación, Saint Louis, 1 July 1906. ⮭
  28. See Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico, 156. ⮭
  29. See Knight, ‘Racism, revolution’, 97. ⮭
  30. Lenin, Imperialism. ⮭
  31. See, as an example, Nearing and Freeman, Dollar Diplomacy. ⮭
  32. ‘El imperialismo en China’, El Libertador 4 (July 1925), 1. ⮭
  33. As an example, see Larry, ‘La masacre imperialista en China’, El Libertador 7 (February 1926), 14. ⮭
  34. Julio Antonio Mella, ‘El Kuo Min Tang y la revolución China’, El Libertador 8 (April 1926), 11. ⮭
  35. Haya de la Torre, Obras completas; Haya de la Torre, ‘De Haya Delatorre a José María Zeledón’, Repertorio Americano 4 (28 January 1928), 63–4. On Haya de la Torre and the Guomindang, see Planas Silva, Mito y realidad, 57. ⮭
  36. ‘Los obreros de China contra el imperialismo’, El Libertador 3 (June 1925), 2; Mella, ‘El Kuo Min Tang y la revolución China’, 11. ⮭
  37. Jacobo Hurwitz, ‘La esperanza amarilla’, El Libertador 12 (June 1927), 27, 29. ⮭
  38. Kay Vaughan, ‘Nationalizing the countryside’, 145. ⮭
  39. Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica. ⮭
  40. As a comparison to how concepts of ‘Asia’ and ‘Africa’ worked in other (anti-colonial) movements, see Baldwin and Makalani, Escape from New York. ⮭
  41. Torres-Rodríguez, ‘Orientalizing’. ⮭
  42. Torres-Rodríguez, ‘Orientalizing’, 78. ⮭
  43. Vasconcelos, Estudios indostánicos, 26. Translation by the author. ⮭
  44. Torres-Rodríguez, ‘Orientalizing’, 83. ⮭
  45. Vasconcelos, Estudios indostánicos, 153. ⮭
  46. Gabriela Mistral, ‘Hispano-americanos en París. José Vasconcelos Indología’, Repertorio Americano 22 (11 June 1927), 9–10. ⮭
  47. For Roy and his involvement in Mexican communism as well as his ideological transformation, see Kent Carrasco, ‘M. N. Roy en México’; Goebel, ‘Una biografía’. ⮭
  48. Goebel, ‘Geopolitics’, 488; Kersffeld, Contra el imperio, 23. ⮭
  49. Roy, Memoirs, 62. ⮭
  50. Roy, Memoirs, 62. ⮭
  51. For a much more detailed biography and analysis of Khankhoje’s time in Mexico, see Soto Laveaga, ‘Largo dislocare’; Kent Carrasco, ‘De Chapingo a Sonora’; Ortiz Wallner, ‘South–South exchange networks’. ⮭
  52. Kent Carrasco, ‘Pandurang Khankhoje’. ⮭
  53. See Cháirez-Garza, ‘Biographical illusions’, 7. ⮭
  54. ‘Reapertura de la escuela agrícola “Emiliano Zapata”, de Chiconcuac, Méx.’, El Machete 128 (25 August 1928), 4. ⮭
  55. For a helpful view on the Ghadar Movement and its links to both Mexican and North American radicals, see Kent Carrasco, ‘Breath of revolution’. ⮭
  56. Historian Melgar Bao sees a clear tradition of Bukharin-inspired communism among the peasants of Latin America which led to an emphasis on ‘Eastern and agrarian issues’; see Melgar Bao, ‘Anti-imperialist league’, 10. ⮭
  57. See his face on the cover of New York’s Time Magazine: Time. The Weekly News Magazine 6, no. 7 (17 August 1925). ⮭
  58. See ‘Foreign News: El Riff’ in the same volume of Time Magazine: Time. The Weekly News Magazine 6, no. 7 (17 August 1925). ⮭
  59. ‘Mensaje de Abdel-Krim a los pueblos de la América Latina’, Repertorio Americano 10, no. 16 (29 June 1925), 3, 4. Abd el-Krim’s letter was then republished in Renovación in Buenos Aires and other magazines such as the Costa Rican magazine Repertorio Americano. ⮭
  60. For Mariátegui and his transnational networks, see Morgan, ‘Navigating the twilight’. ⮭
  61. See Mariátegui, Figuras y aspectos, 234–8. ⮭
  62. ‘Un aplauso a Abd el-Krim’, La Antorcha 33 (16 May 1925). ⮭
  63. Rafael Carrillo, ‘La próxima ofensiva en Marruecos’, El Libertador 8 (April 1926), 3. ⮭
  64. See, for example, ‘Marruecos’, Revista de Oriente 3 (August 1925), 6–7. ⮭
  65. Haya de la Torre, ‘Hispano-Americanismos Literarios’, El Libertador 4 (July 1925), 16. ⮭
  66. Haya’s perspective on Morocco mirrored the perspectives of the Spanish conquistadors vis-à-vis the Indigenous population in the Americas. In their ignorance, the Spanish conquerors described the unknown peoples in categories they knew from the wars against the ‘infidel moors’. Gruzinski, What Time is It There?, 132–44. ⮭
  67. Haya de la Torre, ‘El asesinato de un pueblo’, El Libertador 7 (February 1926), 6–7. ⮭
  68. Those two incidents were the occupation of Veracruz in 1916 and the so-called Punitive Expedition of 1916–19 to catch Pancho Villa. See, for example, Katz, Pancho Villa, 566–70. ⮭
  69. T. R. Ybarra, ‘The oil war in Mexico grows more intense’, New York Times, 10 April 1927. ⮭
  70. For the whole conflict, mainly about anti-imperialism, national sovereignty of revolutionary Mexico and oil, see Lindner, A City Against Empire, 62–5. ⮭
  71. Gamio, Forjando patria. ⮭
  72. Vasconcelos, ‘Latin-American basis’, 83. ⮭
  73. For the concept of tricontinentalism, see Pitman and Stafford, ‘Introduction’; Garland Mahler, Tricontinental to Global South. ⮭
  74. For the argument that this tricontinental thinking had its roots before the Cold War, see Lindner, ‘Tricontinentalism’. For a similar argument about Argentina, see Bergel, El Oriente desplazado. ⮭

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