International Solidarities and Militant Soul-Searching in Classical Latin American Anarchism’s Twilight: The American Continental Workers’ Association (ACAT) in 1929

• In Event: Alien, Subversive, Recalcitrant: Migrants, Exiles, and Cultural Brokers in Latin American Transnational Anarchist Movements, 1880s-1940s

Abstract

Held on the eve of momentous world-historical traumas and transitions, the first and only congress of the Asociación Continental Americana de Trabajadores (ACAT) in 1929 crowned decades of efforts by the Argentine FORA (Regional Federation of Argentine Workers) to create dynamic mechanisms of coordination between anarchist and “affinity-based” groups throughout the Western Hemisphere. While immigration to the Río de Plata region had slowed and regional and local federations of the FORA had fragmented, deportations of activists on the basis of nationality continued, as did the criminalization of proselytism (local and transnational) and the association of anarchism with treason and violence. This, in fact, prompted national police forces from all Latin American countries to hold a parallel transnational conference in Buenos Aires in the same year. In response embattled anarchist intellectuals and organizations looked to transnationalism and international networks to project their strategies and tactics into the future. Relations with the International Workers of the World, the nature of imperialism, the challenges of Marxism and nationalism, the future of indigenous peoples, migrants and rural workers, the prospects of dictatorship and war, and other questions that permeated discussions of all political forces in the galaxy of revolutionary movements in Latin America were discussed. While orthodox treatments of this event converge on its largely symbolic value and its testimony of decline, this paper will analyze it as a cathartic moment of self-reflection and criticism that prefigured new ways of imagining social revolution in Latin America and the world.

Author

• Geoffroy de Laforcade, Norfolk State University