Edited by Amparo Sánchez Cobos, María Migueláñez Martínez, and Kirwin Shaffer. PM Press, November 3, 2026.
By Tom Goyens
September 15th, 2026
From the Publisher:
For the first time, the transnational lives of influential Latin American anarchists are brought together in a single, illuminating volume.
Spanning the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth, this collection follows the militant writers, organizers, and agitators who crisscrossed the Americas and Europe, shaping local struggles while forging regional, hemispheric, and trans-Atlantic networks of resistance.
A remarkably diverse group of women and men navigated vastly different political terrains: the bustling port city of Buenos Aires, the Indigenous highlands of the Andes, the violent US–Mexico borderlands of the Mexican Revolution, the Cold War landscapes of the Cuban Revolution and the Chilean military dictatorship, and beyond. Migrants, exiles, and fugitives, they built movements across borders while sustaining a vibrant anarchist media world, from newspapers and magazines to radio and even television.
More than a collection of biographies, this book offers a wide-ranging exploration of how to write the lives of activists. Its chapters move from classic cradle-to-grave narratives to critical examinations of anarchist autobiographies, probing where they illuminate truth, where they distort it, and how these texts themselves became tools to evade or confound state surveillance. The volume also opens essential conversations on gender, foregrounding anarchist women and revealing the often-overlooked roles women played in the political and literary worlds together with their male counterparts.
Bridging Latin American, European, and North American historiographies, this book demonstrates how transnational and biographical approaches deepen our understanding of anarchism’s complexity, creativity, and enduring global impact.
About the Editors
Amparo Sánchez Cobos holds a PhD in history and is a senior lecturer at the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) in Castellón, Spain. Her research focuses on the history of Cuban anarchism in the early twentieth century and on slavery in nineteenth-century Cuba. She is the author of Colonialismo y Esclavitud según un Reformista Español, Cuba en Ramón de la Sagra, and Sembrando ideales: Anarquistas españoles en Cuba (1902–1925), and coeditor with Steve Palmer and José A. Piqueras of State of Ambiguity: Civic Life and Culture in Cuba’s First Republic. She lives in Castellón, Spain.
María Migueláñez holds a PhD in contemporary history from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and is an associate professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Her work focuses on the political and cultural history of Argentine and transnational anarchism, as well as utopian literature, intellectual history, and the history of anarchist publishing. Her recent publications include “The Translators of Anarchist Print Culture between Europe and the Río de la Plata,” in Avances del Cesor. She is also coeditor of Anarquistas editoras: biografías políticas en femenino and Anarchist Women Translating Ideas: Multilingualism and Intermediality. She lives in Madrid.
Kirwin Shaffer is professor of Latin American studies in the Global Studies Program at Penn State Berks in Reading, Pennsylvania. He has authored four books on Caribbean anarchism and transnational resistance, including Anarchist Cuba: Countercultural Politics in the Early Twentieth Century; Black Flag Boricuas: Anarchism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the Left in Puerto Rico, 1897–1921; Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion; and A Transnational History of the Modern Caribbean: Popular Resistance across Borders. With Geoffroy de Laforcade, he coedited In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American History. His current project is The World through Anarchist Eyes: Latin American Anarchism and Global History.
PM Press, November 3, 2026.
ISBN: 9798887441191
416pp.
