From International Socialist Review, Vol.23 No.4, Fall 1962,
pp.126-127. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for
the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). The Desert
Revolution By Lowell L. Blaisdell University of Wisconsin Press,
Madison, Wis. 1962. 268 pp. $6.00. This is the first readily
available piece of research in the English language on that part
of the Mexican Revolution which most directly involved the US
radical movement, the guerilla warfare in Baja California in
1911 under the leadership of the Liberal Party headed by the
anarchist Ricardo Florez Magon. Magon is well known in Mexico as
the Great Precursor of the Mexican Revolution but almost unknown
today in the United States where as a revolutionary exile he did
much of his life’s work and in one of whose federal prisons he
died. Several years before the events in Baja California which
are the central subject of this book, Magon published the most
influential pre-revolution newspapers – printed in the US and
distributed undergrou