Transnational anarchist networks and press: the forgotten role of J. C. Campos and his chronicles on the “martyrs of Chicago” in Spanish-speaking anarchism

Abstract

Anarchism in late 19th Century and early 20th Century can only be understood if considered as a transnational network, where a small number of qualified anarchists played a liason role among the various national movements in Europe and America. The present work seeks to rescue from oblivion some important figures of that network who, although very relevant in terms of their influence as opinion makers as well as builders and interpreters of a discourse which, amplified through the press, became hegemonic, are opaque because the contacts among them, although close, were secret or, at least, discreet. The work focuses on the unknown figure of J.C. Campos, a Cuban typographer emigrated to New York, whose newspapers chronicles on the Martyrs of Chicago disseminated among the Spanish-speaking anarchist movement the justification for the strategy of terrorism (“propaganda by the deed”) and bore a decisive influence on the youngest Catalan anarchist generation, an outstanding representative of which was the printer Pedro Esteve, who became the most influential Spanish anarchist in the U.S.A. Exploring the personal transnational connections and the transatlantic circulation of the discourses helps to understand the evolution of anarchism in a period when it had a considerable public presence.