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Selected Works of Manuel Maples Arce

Paroxismo On the way to other dreams, we went out in the afternoon; a strange adventure spoiled us in the bliss of the flesh, and the heart fluctuates between it and the desolation of the journey. In the agglomeration of the platforms the sobs broke suddenly; later, all night under my dreams, I listen to their lamentations and their prayers. The train is a blast of iron that hits the scene and moves everything. I hold her memory to the depths of ecstasy, and the distant colors of her eyes beat on my chest . Today we will pass the autumn together and the meadows will be yellow. I shudder for her! Uninhabited horizons of absence! Tomorrow will be all cloudy with her tears and the life that comes is weak as a breath. Prisma I am a dead center in the middle of the hour, equidistant from the shipwrecked cry of a star. A handlebar park snaps into the shadow, and the ropeless moon oppresses me in the stained glass windows. Golden daisies leafless in the wind. The insurrectionary city of illum
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Does Mexico Need a Fidel Castro? - Albert Weisbord

     What can the Indian or mestizo (part Indian) house-maid buy with an income of 25 cents to 40 cents a day? A pound box of chocolates a  Woolworth’s that sells for $2.00? Or a 10 cent bar of American candy selling for 25 cents? There are hotels in Mexico City advertising rooms and meals for $100.00 a day, maybe she could work for a year and spend a day at the President or Conrad Hilton Hotel. That is, provided she could get away from work, because for the 25 cents to 40 cents a day she must work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week!             Now if she will not work the 16 hours, others must. For as the advertisement in English says: “On the lake shore directly below Chula Vista is the completely untouched native village of San Antonio de Manglar … ‘Maids available,’ senora? . . si. si.”             The story is the same for the working class as a whole. Unskilled male labor about $20 to $25 a month; skilled union stonecutter, 20 to 25 cents an hour; general factory labor, a dollar a da
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The Organizing Junta of the Mexican Liberal Party to the workers of the United States November 17, 1914

     It is known that the Mexican people are in a state of armed Revolution since four years ago, but very little is known about the nature of the gigantic movement, due to the fact that the capitalistic press tries to confuse through different means the minds of its readers, pretending that all the trouble there lies in useless quarrels of leaders, a conflict between spurious ambitions, whose only object is to strive for the Presidency of the Republic.      Nevertheless, as time flies away the truth is by and by illuminating the doings that occur to the South of the Rio Grande. Those doings prove that the movement developing in Mexico is not the result of the clash of petty passions, but a social phenomena produced by the antagonism of the interests of the two classes in which capitalist system has humanity divided, that of the rich and that of the poor, that of the well-fed and that of the starving, that of the proprietors and that of  the proletarians.      If to the surface of this
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For Justice Speech - Roberto F. Magon

      Companions:      The old society, the unjust and cruel society that condemns those who work and sweat to all kinds of deprivation, and that rewards the laziness of a few with all the pleasures of life;  this corrupt society that cannot and does not want to guarantee well-being and freedom to all human beings;  This society is crumbling, this society is collapsing, this society is about to disappear;  But now dying, it still has the strength to tear from our ranks, from the ranks of the poor, those brave ones who have made the greatest efforts to overthrow it.      Raúl Palma is a worker, he is disinherited, he is a proletarian who understands that every human being, by the mere fact of coming to life, has the right to satisfy all his needs, and this simple principle of social justice, of human justice , he propagated it relentlessly, in the press, on the platform, everywhere, eager to see his class brothers free from chains.      This was his crime: to open the eyes of the worker
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November 11, 1911 Speech - Roberto F. Magon

 Comrades:      Apostles of pacifism; believers of the political action of the proletariat, as the best means to achieve economic emancipation, turn your eyes to Chicago, where four black ditches, in the ground, keep the remains of four martyrs, whose silence is eloquent testimony that  Justice will groan in chains as long as the weapon in the hand of each worker does not shine, and this formidable feeling does not boil in the robust breasts: Rebellion!      The four graves where Spies, Engel, Fisher and Parsons sleep proclaim this truth: "reason must arm itself"; and this other "violence against violence."      Do not cross your arms: do not ask. Asking is the crime of the humble: that is why he is killed! If you have to be killed for asking, it is better to take!      Listen to what those four tombs tell you: “Here we keep the remains of the best of yours. Here, in our dark entrails, sleep four generous men who dreamed of conquering the well-being of humanity by v
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Mujeres Libres Introduction

     Without pretending to be infallible, we are sure to arrive at the right time. Yesterday would have been too early; tomorrow, maybe, too late.      So here we are, in the middle of our hour, ready to follow the path that we have traced for ourselves to its ultimate consequences; to channel the social action of women, giving her a new vision of things, preventing her sensitivity and her brain from being contaminated by male errors. And we understand by male errors all current concepts of relationship and coexistence; masculine errors, because we energetically reject all responsibility in the historical evolution, in which the woman has never been an actor, but an obligated and defenseless witness.      This is not a recrimination for anyone; If the entire past of ignominy in which we were plunged hurts us, we do not dare to think, however, that it could be otherwise; We know that Humanity is making its way at the expense of its own pain and we are not interested in recalling the pas
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