If I hadn’t written the posts about Los Angeles in 1907 for the 1947project in 2006, I would have never heard of Ricardo Flores Magon, who was arrested in Los Angeles, along with Librado Rivera, Antonio Villareal and L. Gutierrez De Lara, on charges of trying to overthrow the Mexican government. Magon, Rivera and Villareal were arrested Aug. 23, 1907, at 111 E. Pico St., according to The Times.

So, unlike most people, I recognized the name Ricardo Flores Magon on the book languishing in the pile of discards from the book review section put out for the staff and decided it deserved a second chance.

“The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon” was written by Claudio Lomnitz, the Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University  and published by Zone Books, which is distributed by the MIT Press. It retails for $34.95 and is available from Amazon for $25.79.

It was praised by Samuel Brunk in Times Higher Education, but otherwise seems to have been mostly ignored. Neither the Los Angeles Times, nor the New York Times reviewed it. Possibly there may be some reviews in the scholarly press down the road.

Here is a two-part video of Lomnitz discussing the book.

Here are a few sample pages: