Caritina Piña Montalvo personified the vital role played by Mexican women in the anarcho-syndicalist movement. Sonia Hernández tells the story of how Piña and other Mexicanas in the Gulf of Mexico region fought for labor rights both locally and abroad in service to the anarchist ideal of a worldwide community of workers. An international labor broker, Piña never left her native Tamaulipas. Yet she excelled in connecting groups in the United States and Mexico. Her story explains the conditions that led to anarcho-syndicalism's rise as a tool to achieve labor and gender equity. It also reveals how women's ideas and expressions of feminist beliefs informed their experiences as leaders in and members of the labor movement.
A vivid look at a radical activist and her times, For a Just and Better World illuminates the lives and work of Mexican women battling for labor rights and gender equality in the early twentieth century.
About the Author
Sonia Hernández is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University and the author of Working Women into the Borderlands.
Praise For…
"For a Just and Better World is a well-written and detail-rich narrative with a robust theoretical framework and creative analysis of a complex world. . . Sonia Hernández provides a much-needed map for readers to find both the women and the engendered anarchism integral in this story of a collective quest for a just and better world." --Southwestern Historical Quarterly
"Sonia Hernández's new book is an engaging story that unites a traditional focus on anarchist labor initiatives with a study of the roles that women anarchists played in the gendered and transnational politics stretching from the Gulf of Mexico and northward toward the Mexican-US border from before the Mexican Revolution to the end of the Lázaro Cárdenas era." --Hispanic American Historical Review
"A significant and solid contribution to gender-labor history, the history of women, the history of Latinas in the United States, and transnational history. Hernández puts the political biography of the anarcho-unionist leaders at the center and examines their political trajectory. She also intertwines their stories with the most important changes in anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, mutualism, trade unionism, and the labor policies of the new Mexican state."--María Teresa Fernández Aceves, author of Mujeres en el cambio social en el siglo XX mexicano
