The historiography of the Mexican Left includes a wide range of approaches—from traditional political histories of party formation, electoral politics, and labor unionism to the history of ideas and cultural production. Sebastián Rivera Mir reveals the role of previously neglected actors integral to the Mexican Communist Left: the publishers, editors, and translators responsible for the printing and dissemination of the written material that aimed to forge a robust communist movement in Mexico during the late 1920s and 1930s. Departing from the Communist mantra that “militar es editar,” Rivera Mir positions the material world of publishing and distribution at the center of the Left's political practice and cultural influence, particularly during the Cárdenas sexenio.

The book, moreover, skillfully employs a transnational method to examine Leftist editorial practice, following prominent communist figures not only in and out of Mexico City but also across the Atlantic and the Americas. Whereas previous publishing histories of Latin America have tended to focus on the Spain-Mexico-Argentina triangle, Rivera Mir elucidates the intimate connections between Mexican and US actors. One of Rivera Mir's principal assertions is that the concrete materiality of translation— publishing, circulation, and reading—through books, broadsides, pamphlets, and leaflets helped spread communist and anticommunist ideas. He does so while staying closely attuned to the inseparable and more deeply explored political and intellectual influences on Communist social and cultural practice.

The book consists of seven chapters and an epilogue, tracing the history of communist and anticommunist publishing from the late 1920s to 1940 through the use of a creative set of primary sources such as (auto) biographies of prominent Leftist actors, state surveillance archives, and communist publications of the era. Chapter 1, “El internacionalismo editorial en busca de América Latina,” offers a fascinating transnational lens for understanding the network of publishers responsible for circulating and presenting Marxist-Leninist ideas approved by the Comintern to a Latin American audience. Chapter 2 centers on the violent persecution of the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) starting in 1929 and its effects on Leftist publishing and organizing. While much ink has been spilled about the famous magazine El Machete, Rivera Mir documents how the imperative of clandestine organizing amid state repression compelled a turn to less costly and more easily distributed materials, such as leaflets, broadsides, and pamphlets.

Although prior to 1935 the PCM and its affiliated publishers and editors followed the proletarian revolutionary line that sought to purge Leftist cultural production of content deemed “reactionary,” “petit-bourgeois,” or “counterrevolutionary,” the Comintern's anti-fascist Popular Front program, together with Cárdenas's election, opened Communist publishing toward broader anti-fascist content and less vulgar forms of Marxism. This period marked the heyday of Communist publishing in Mexico, with numerous publishing figures being received from abroad, and several chapters hone in on the labor of key publishing houses such as Editorial Popular and Ediciones América. While Chapter 5 explores the efforts and characteristics of anticommunist publishing, Chapter 7 more closely engages the understudied publishing nexus between the United States and Mexico.

Peppered throughout the book are fascinating stories regarding communist cultural production. A few examples include the irony of Mexican revolutionary Francisco Múgica, who while administering the Islas Marías penitentiary, allowed Marxism classes and a library full of Marxist-Leninist treatises (61); the ideological turns of the militant editor and bookseller Rodrigo García Treviño and his growing alienation from the PCM (Chapter 6); and the troubled travels of the Chilean Communist typographer Elías Lafferte (169–70).

Rivera Mir's book, a fine contribution to the historiography of the Mexican Left, focuses on the often-hidden dimension of cultural production and Leftist practice—the concrete acts of translating, designing, producing, and circulating Communist material to educate not only party militants but a wider working-class public. It should be required reading for scholars seeking to better understand the social and cultural practices of the Mexican Left in the postrevolutionary period during an era of both political persecution and political opening.