In A Wide Net of Solidarity, Anne Garland Mahler traces the impact of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA,Liga Antimperialista de las AmÉricas) on racial justice and anti-extractive struggles from the early twentieth century to the present. Founded in 1925 in Mexico City by a group of multinational activists, LADLA brought together trade unions, agrarian organizations, and artist groups across fourteen chapters in the Americas, with highest activity in the Greater Caribbean and United States. Within two years, LADLA activists joined the League Against Imperialism, formed at the 1927 Brussels Congress, where they met with US Black activists and anticolonial leaders from Africa and Asia. Drawing on extensive archival research, Mahler uncovers LADLA’s role in fostering Black, Indigenous, and immigrant-led resistance movements while positioning these struggles within a broader hemispheric and global struggle against the racialized accumulation of capital. By unearthing LADLA’s multiracial analysis of capitalist exploitation as well as its emphasis on mutual solidarity across difference, Mahler shows us how the organization provides vital insight for social movements fighting racial and economic injustice today.
Abbreviations ix
Introduction. Redes: Politics and Aesthetics in the Extractive Zone 1
I. Weaving a Wide Net: Relational Solidarities and Hemispheric Globalization
1. A Photography of Relation: LADLA, Indigeneity, and Tina Modotti’s Visual Language of Liberation 35
2. Against Latin American Regionalisms: The 1927 Brussels Congress and LADLA’s Hemispheric Globalism 67
3. “Por la igualdad de todos los seres”: Sandalio Junco’s Afro-Latin American Perspective on Black, Immigrant, and Indigenous Struggles 92
4. Relational Poetics: LADLA-Cuba and Regino Pedroso’s Afro-Chinese-Cuban Writing 125
II. Knots in the Net: Ladla’s Limits and Entanglements
5. Ethnic Impersonation and Masculine Erotics: James Sager / Jaime Nevares and LADLA-Puerto Rico 155
6. Hands Off Nicaragua and the Sandino Fantasy: Navigating Nationalism, Internationalism, and Antifascism 184
7. Remembering LADLA: The Caribbean Bureau and the Rise of Latin American Extractive Fictions 218
Epilogue. Twenty-First-Century Redes 247
Acknowledgments 255
Notes 259
Bibliography 319
Index 351
Anne Garland Mahler is Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, author of From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of The Comintern and the Global South: Global Designs/Local Encounters.
