Exile & Utopia

Abstract

The ampersand between the terms “exile” and “utopia” transforms a feeling of loss of home into a hope for a better world. That is the general trajectory of my illustrated book, Exile & Utopia, which traces a group of Mexican revolutionary journalists in the early twentieth century (1904-1906) as they flee repression and surveillance through Mexico, the US, and Canada, and attempt to organize an (ultimately failed) revolution. In the lead-up to the centennial of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, I re-traced this transnational precursor movement, and with my book I challenge the circumscriptive character of national histories, as well as the very notion of ‘revolution’. Over the past two years (2008-2010), I travelled across North America, photographed the erased historic sites where the exiles lived, hid, and worked, assembled a narrative based on primary source documents including intercepted correspondence and detective notes, rendered abstract ‘diagrammatic drawings’ that chart the growth and/or constriction of their solidarity networks, and produced a book composed of these three ‘traces’ (photographs, text, and drawings). The lines of flight I trace in Exile & Utopia resonate with my own experience coming of age shuttling between southern Mexico and the American Midwest, and provide a prehistory to emergent transnational solidarity networks in our own era.