One of the quintessential goals of the American Dream is to own land and a home, a place to raise one’s family and prove one’s prosperity. Particularly for immigrant families, home ownership is a way to assimilate into American culture and community. However, Latinos, who make up the country’s largest minority population, have largely been unable to gain this level of inclusion. Instead, they are forced to cling to the fringes of property rights and ownership through overcrowded rentals, transitory living arrangements, and, at best, home acquisitions through subprime lenders. In Tierra y Libertad, Steven W. Bender traces the history of Latinos’ struggle for adequate housing opportunities, from the nineteenth century to today’s anti-immigrant policies and national mortgage crisis. Spanning southwest to northeast, rural to urban, Bender analyzes the legal hurdles that prevent better housing opportunities and offers ways to approach sweeping legal reform. Tierra y Libertad combines historical, cultural, legal, and personal perspectives to document the Latino community’s ongoing struggle to make America home.

One of the most mysterious of authors, B. Traven spent his early life in Germany as an actor and anarchist publisher using the name of Ret Marut, then emerged in Mexico as B. Traven, a literary champion of the proletariat. This work examines his career through the production of his 16 books (twelve novels, two novellas, a work of nonfiction, and a collection of short stories), to the production of the movie The Treasures of the Sierra Madre, where he emerged this time as Hal Croves. The bibliography, with 140 illustrations and 1200 entries, provides information on the publication of over a thousand editions of Traven's books. For the first time, information on the states and issues of many editions, including first editions published in Germany between 1926 and 1960, is provided. Includes an illustrated descriptive bibliography of all of the American and British first editions. An essential tool for collectors, book dealers, and librarians.

The Anarchist Inquisition explores the groundbreaking transnational human rights campaigns that emerged in response to a brutal wave of repression unleashed by the Spanish state to quash anarchist activities at the turn of the twentieth century. Mark Bray guides readers through this tumultuous era—from backroom meetings in Paris and torture chambers in Barcelona, to international antiterrorist conferences in Rome and human rights demonstrations in Buenos Aires. Anarchist bombings in theaters and cafes in the 1890s provoked mass arrests, the passage of harsh anti-anarchist laws, and executions in France and Spain. Yet, far from a marginal phenomenon, this first international terrorist threat had profound ramifications for the broader development of human rights, as well as modern global policing, and international legislation on extradition and migration. A transnational network of journalists, lawyers, union activists, anarchists, and other dissidents related peninsular torture to Spain's brutal suppression of colonial revolts in Cuba and the Philippines to craft a nascent human rights movement against the "revival of the Inquisition." Ultimately their efforts compelled the monarchy to accede in the face of unprecedented global criticism. Bray draws a vivid picture of the assassins, activists, torturers, and martyrs whose struggles set the stage for a previously unexamined era of human rights mobilization. Rather than assuming that human rights struggles and "terrorism" are inherently contradictory forces, The Anarchist Inquisition analyzes how these two modern political phenomena worked in tandem to constitute dynamic campaigns against Spanish atrocities.

The Atlantic Ocean not only connected North and South America with Europe through trade but also provided the means for an exchange of knowledge and ideas, including political radicalism. Socialists and anarchists would use this “radical ocean” to escape state prosecution in their home countries and establish radical milieus abroad. However, this was often a rather unorganized development and therefore the connections that existed were quite diverse. The movement of individuals led to the establishment of organizational ties and the import and exchange of political publications between Europe and the Americas. The main aim of this book is to show how the transatlantic networks of political radicalism evolved with regard to socialist and anarchist milieus and in particular to look at the actors within the relevant processes--topics that have so far been neglected in the major histories of transnational political radicalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Individual case studies are examined within a wider context to show how networks were actually created, how they functioned and their impact on the broader history of the radical Atlantic

The Spanish Anarchists and the Russian Revolution, 1917–24 explores the impact of the Russian Revolution on the world’s most powerful anarchist movement, the Spanish National Confederation of Labour. The monograph traces the curve of euphoria followed by scepticism that characterized anarchist reactions to the Soviet experiment in 1917–24. This book unearths the interactions between anarchists and Bolsheviks, and assesses their significance for social conflict in Spain and for the foundation of international communism. The Spanish anarchists are a window to examine the global appeal of the Bolsheviks among diverse, non-Marxist militant groups at a time of cross-fertilization for the left internationally. Through the case study of the Spanish anarchists, this book highlights how identification with the victorious Russian Bolsheviks became a rousing device and a political asset at a time of intense social effervescence, when, in the eyes of many, world revolution seemed imminent. However, for heterodox, non-Marxist forces, such as the Spanish anarchists, the Soviet model had to be negotiated and adapted to local conditions and political traditions. This book later traces the ending of this phase of cross-fertilization at a time of defeat and demoralization for the labour movement in Spain and across Europe.

The period from 1898 to 1923 was a particularly dramatic one in Spanish history; it culminated in the violent Barcelona “labor wars” and was only brought to a close with the coup d’état launched by the Barcelona Captain General, Miguel Primo de Rivera, in September 1923. In his detailed examination of the rise of the Catalan anarchist-syndicalist-led labor movement, the author blends social, cultural and political history in a novel way. He analyses the working class “from below” and the policies of the Spanish State towards labor “from above.” Based on an in-depth usage of primary sources, the authors provides an unrivalled account of Catalan labor and the Catalan anarchist-syndicalist movement and thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of early twentieth-century Spanish history.

This book analyzes the formation of a mass anarchist movement in Spain over the turn of the twentieth century. In this period, the movement was transformed from a dislocated collection of groups and individuals into the largest organized body of anarchists in world history: the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo: CNT). At the same time, anarchist cultural practices became ingrained in localities across the whole of Spain, laying foundations which maintained the movement’s popular support until the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The book shows that grassroots print culture was central to these developments: driving the development of ideology and strategy – broadly defined as terrorism, education and workplace organization – and providing an informal structure to a movement which shunned recognized leadership and bureaucracy. This study offers a rich analysis of the cultural foundations of Spanish anarchism. This emphasis also challenges claims that the movement was "exceptional" or "peculiar" in its formation, by situating it alongside other decentralized, bottom-up mobilizations across historical and contemporary contexts, from the radical pamphleteering culture of the English Civil War to the use of social media in the Arab Spring.