La Jornada: Red Star over Mexico addresses the links of the Chinese revolution with national politics

The attraction and surprise of the Chinese revolution in the 1950s, recorded by the writer Elena Poniatowska, has returned: “to be in China is to be in the future,” said journalist Luis Hernández Navarro, in an interview for his book Red star over Mexico (edited by Para Leer en Libertad), which will be presented on August 15.

Part of the relevance of this text, the author said in an interview, lies in the fact that “China is back in fashion”, since “it has fought and managed to defeat extreme poverty for millions of people, and developed its productive forces and technology in an impressive way. China is sexy for many young people today.”

Red star over Mexicocommented Hernández Navarro, “it allows us to see the figures, those links that unite the time of the Chinese revolution in October 1949 and our days, people who spread it and kept it alive in the Mexican imagination, sometimes more or less, although today’s China has many different characteristics than those it had in 1949.”

The title takes up the kind of biography of Mao Tse Tung entitled red star over china, by Edgar Snow, in a “way of saying how the influence of the Chinese revolution reaches Mexico,” said the coordinator of Opinión de The Day.

The book refers to “Maoisms in the sense that in our country there was never a single organization that grouped this current of thought, of political action; with different expressions that never converged into a single group.”

A photo album of key figures in Maoism

The volume is “a kind of photo album, with landscape, of key figures in Mexican Maoism or in the rapprochement with China, of their circumstances and the movements they formed. It is not a linear history of this political current,” adds Luis Hernández.

“Important moments of the struggle in Mexico appear, under the thesis of how this current and the people of whom I make portraits express a kind of underground river in the popular movements in Mexico, which from time to time emerge and find a channel of organization,” he explains.

It is an approach to the construction of popular movements from below that distinguishes phases such as “that of knowledge and rapprochement with Popular China, the breakup in 1963 of the international communist movement and what happens after 1968,” the writer reviewed.

In the text there appear “very interesting women, such as doctors Esther Chapa – if there is a key figure in the links between the Chinese revolution and the movements in Mexico it is her – and Paula Gómez Alonzo, also fundamental.”

The historical journey of Red star over MexicoIt began in 1949, a few months after the triumph of the Chinese revolution, with the visit of Vicente Lombardo Toledano. The current of this figure of the Mexican left was important in the dissemination of Chinese publications, through the Popular Socialist Party (PPS) and the Universidad Obrera de México. That road was closed in 1963, when the Sino-Soviet conflict became official.

Also attending a peace conference in the Asian country in 1952 were Elí de Gortari, Paula Gómez Alonzo, Rafael Méndez Aguirre, Edelmiro Maldonado and José Rogelio Álvarez. A later and larger delegation included the writer Fernando Benítez. It is followed by stays by the muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Xavier Guerrero.

Some of these intellectuals and politicians founded the Mexican Society of Friendship with Popular China, with the axes of building relations between both peoples and for China to be recognized in Mexico and in the United Nations, whose place was then held by Taiwan.

Leave the universities to organize the people

Luis Hernández highlighted the period from 1949 to 1963 as “very intense in the field of popular democracy. For example, there are people like Guillermo Haro, who later became Elena Poniatowska’s husband.”

The author stated that in The universe or nothing: Biography of star Guillermo Haro, the writer stated: “the emotion of the Chinese phenomenon is not only hers (de Haro); it is shared by Mexicans, French, English, the entire world. The greatness of China, its numerical superiority, the Chinese collective triumph, the strength of the peasants who turn their land into an immense rice field, the mystique of its government make it talked about.”

In that “first moment of travelers, literature and artistic exchange” former presidents Lázaro Cárdenas and Emilio Portes Gil visited China.

Starting in the 1960s, there are two relevant figures: Federico Emery, from the Marxist-Leninist Movement of Mexico, and the engineer Javier Fuentes, who go to China to receive political-military training. They signify the rise of armed Maoism.

Hernández Navarro expressed that around the assault on the Madera barracks there were those who had readings of Maoism and not only Cuban inspiration, such as Álvaro Ríos, and important figures from the artistic world such as Judith Reyes, one of the first protest singers.

Maoism influenced Jaramillism and the railway union movement, especially after 1968, with the “enormous proliferation of Maoists and ‘going to the people’. A part of the youth movement comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to leave the universities and go to organize workers, peasants, settlers, and so they do.”

After October 2 at the Polytechnic, the movement is led by a majority of Maoists, who later found ejido unions, participate in struggles of miners, metallurgists and popular colonies in Monterrey, Durango and other places, and accompany indigenous movements.

“Everyone seeks to create a front, a party, they talk in the abstract about the armed struggle, but they do not converge, until 1987-88, when the Democratic Current of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas arrives and sweeps away most of these organizations built from a class, internationalist and direct action perspective. The democratic, civic and electoral movement ends up destroying them,” he says.

Hernández Navarro affirms that Maoisms had results basically due to “the idea of ​​going to the people, starting from the point of view that only the people are the driving force that makes world history, and by developing large mass organizations that have an assembly operation, collective leaderships that demand direct action and negotiation around it, in the logic of trying to build popular power from below.”

Accompanied by Jesús Vargas and Roberto Rico, Luis Hernández Navarro will present Red star over Mexico on August 15, at 5 p.m., at the Festival to Promote Reading and Hidalgo Culture, in Tizayuca, Hidalgo.