Radicals in the Barrio

"Radicals in the Barrio is the most sweeping and scholarly research on the role of the Left in Chicano history. It is groundbreaking."

-Mario T. Garcia, author of Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930-1960

"Justin Akers Chacón recreates and gathers revealing and emotive examples of genuine proletarian internationalism. The history of struggles of Mexican workers in the United States acquire an extraordinary timeliness in this indispensable book."
-Anna Ribera Carbó, Directorate of Historical Studies, Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History

"Hundreds of books about Mexican American history and their contemporary experiences in the United States have been published since the 1960s. Until now, however, a book on the role of the Mexican American working class in the development of the U.S. Left has remained largely missing. Radicals in the Barrio is a remarkable book that fills the gap. In particular, the author has done an excellent job documenting the role of Mexican men and women on both sides of the U.S-Mexico border who played a significant role in organizing Left organizations beginning with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the early 1900s to the Socialist and Communists parties, unions, and other Left organizations up to the 1950s. The author also details the reasons for both the emergence of those organizations and their decline. In short, the book is a valuable contribution on the lessons of past that can be useful for the emergence of new Left organizations in the 21st Century."

-Dr. Carlos Muñoz, Jr., author of Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement

“Justin Akers Chacón’s Radicals in the Barrio is a broad, transnational history of the working men and women of greater Mexico. This well-documented book offers a gripping narrative of more than half a century of radical ideologies and organizing among Mexican Americans, ranging from anarchist traditions that predated Mexico’s 1910 revolution to Cold War struggles among farm, mine and other workers across a broad borderland. Two essential take-aways of this excellent book are that US immigration policies and racism structured the economic exploitation of Mexican Americans, and that their transnational labor and struggles were essential to the making of both nations.”

-John Lear, author of Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico

“Radicals in the Barrio is truly an impressive book. Justin Akers Chacón's study is the rigorous recording of a historical process that propelled social development in the United States and Mexico. The transformation of these countries is analyzed from the social struggles undertaken by men and women located at the very base of the American and Mexican societies. To understand the dimension of this research, which covers a wide period until the 1950s, it is sufficient to traverse the bibliography used. It is exhaustive, supported by an impressive documentation that includes archival sources, periodicals, testimonials, and iconography that allow Akers Chacón a critical perspective and an undeniable contribution to social history. It is therefore advisable to take a deep breath, and carefully and attentively read this exceptional book ready to better understand our past and our present.”

-Javier Torres Parés, Professor of History of at the Universidad Autónoma de México and is author of La Revolución Sin Frontera

“Justin Akers Chacón’s Radicals In the Barrio gives a comprehensive account we have of the making of the Mexican working class in t