In A Wide Net of Solidarity, interdisciplinary scholar Anne Mahler reconstructs the history of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (Liga Antimperialista de las Américas, LADLA), an organization that was founded in Mexico City in 1925. Her book, which seeks to recover a largely forgotten experiment in transnational anti-imperialist organizing in the interwar period, is much more than an institutional history. The book intervenes in broader debates about how anti-imperialist politics have been imagined, organized, and sustained across national, racial, and ideological divides. Working with trade unions, agrarian organizations, and other popular groups, LADLA built a hemispheric network opposed to U.S. and European commercial and military expansion, while also envisioning alternative social relations to extractive economies.
Central to Mahler’s argument is the role of artists and writers in this project, not simply as producers of cultural representations but as organizers and theorists of solidarity embedded in the League’s everyday political work. Figures such as Tina Modotti, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Regino Pedroso treated extractive zones as sites of political possibility, using them to imagine a new global community shaped by shared material conditions and experiences of imperial violence. Mahler terms this intertwined political and aesthetic project a “politics and poetics of redes,” a framework that allows her to track both the ambitions and the limits of LADLA’s project.
Drawing on archival sources and the literary and artistic production of LADLA’s members, Mahler argues that the League articulated a form of transnational political organizing she terms “hemispheric globalism”: a bottom-up, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-fascist project explicitly opposed to U.S.-led Pan-Americanism. Unlike contemporaneous regionalist ideologies such as mestizaje, indigenismo, or Indoamericanism, this vision was premised on the necessity of transnational solidarity and rooted in shared yet distinct experiences of U.S. imperialism among Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and working-class communities across the Americas.
Mahler further demonstrates that LADLA’s analysis of imperialism pushed beyond political economy to theorize race as an important dimension of capitalist accumulation.
LADLA sat at the nexus of interwar intellectual and political currents. Indeed, its history provides insights into debates concerning the relationship between national liberation and socialist revolution, and between struggles for sovereignty and class struggle. Although influenced by Marxism-Leninism and connected to organizations affiliated with the Soviet-led Comintern, LADLA was not an orthodox Communist party. It combined anarcho-syndicalist elements, local anti-colonial traditions, and a decentralized structure to sustain a united front strategy, allowing LADLA to mediate in practice between nationalist and Communist currents both within Latin America and globally.
LADLA predated the 1955 Bandung Conference and the 1966 Tricontinental Conference—both pivotal moments in the formation and articulation of a unified Third Worldist project. Its history thus illuminates earlier forms of anti-imperialist solidarity and raises broader questions about regional specificity and internationalism, such as: how did Latin America’s experience of U.S. imperialism differ from, yet overlap with, European colonial domination elsewhere? Scholarship on anti-imperialism has tended to privilege theoretical frameworks that emerge from the colonial and postcolonial conditions of Africa and Asia. LADLA complicates this narrative by foregrounding Latin America’s distinct historical trajectory, marked by earlier formal independence alongside an early and sustained encounter with “Yankee imperialism.” This positioning casts the region as a laboratory for forms of economic and political domination later globalized after World War II and reinserts it into the genealogy of twentieth-century anti-imperialist thought.
Mahler argues that LADLA’s understanding of imperialism centered on extractive industries—plantations, mines, refineries, and oil fields—which structured raw-material-exporting economies and constituted a shared “extractive geography” uniting workers and farmers across the hemisphere. These sites functioned as mechanisms of imperial domination where foreign capital, comprador elites, and authoritarian states converged in the exploitation and policing of Black, Indigenous, and immigrant labor. The extractive zones also served as subjects of art and literature, including Carmen Lyria’s Bananos y Hombres (1931) and Ramón Marrero Aristy’s sugar plantation novel Over (1939). Mahler argues that LADLA’s framework anticipated key insights of dependency theory and offers an important prehistory to contemporary theories of extractivismo, while also opening space for a racial analysis of imperialism that went beyond purely economic accounts.
Mahler further demonstrates that LADLA’s analysis of imperialism pushed beyond political economy to theorize race as an important dimension of capitalist accumulation. The League at times framed anti-Black racism as an imposition from the United States, which downplayed Latin America’s own histories of slavery and racial hierarchy. This position was significantly refined by figures such as the Cuban communist Sandalio Junco. Junco articulated a form of Black internationalism situated between race-based and class-based subjectivities, drawing comparisons among Black, Indigenous, and Chinese immigrant experiences under racialized regimes of labor and extraction. Rooted in the specific conditions of Latin America, this intervention expanded LADLA’s hemispheric framework by incorporating Indigenous dispossession and anti-Black racism into its understanding of imperialism, while also contributing to broader theoretical debates about the relationship between race and capitalism.
The questions that preoccupied LADLA’s members about the relationship between class struggle and national liberation, and about how distinct historical experiences of domination might be related without being collapsed, are strikingly relevant today.
In one of the book’s most compelling chapters, Mahler examines the “Hands Off Nicaragua Campaign,” which crafted an image of Nicaraguan revolutionary leader Augsto Sandino as a transnational symbol for a broader anti-imperialist struggle. The fantasy of Sandino proved central to the campaign’s initial success, enabling unprecedented fundraising and the rapid expansion of local LADLA chapters. As a mobilizing strategy, the elevation of Sandino condensed diverse grievances into a recognizable and emotionally resonant figure, allowing LADLA to project an expansive vision of solidarity.
Yet the very symbolic power that fueled the campaign also revealed its limits. The effort to deploy Sandino and the Nicaraguan struggle as a unifying frame—linking the United Fruit Company, U.S. interventions in the Panama Canal Zone, racialized labor policing, and struggles against dictatorship and fascism across national borders—proved difficult to sustain in practice. Although campaign slogans proclaimed that “new Sandinos will arise throughout the Americas” and that “Sandino has no borders,” the idealized figure of Sandino could not coherently unify these disparate struggles beyond the level of rhetoric. Elevating a singular, charismatic male figure foregrounded unresolved tensions between nationalism and internationalism and between heroic leadership and LADLA’s decentralized organizational ideals. As Mahler shows, the breadth of vision articulated through the Hands Off Nicaragua Campaign could not be translated into a sustained or replicable political practice.
In her conclusion, Mahler notes that a century after LADLA’s founding, its anti-imperialist worldview may appear distant from the present. Yet the global resurgence of the right, ongoing genocidal violence, and renewed geopolitical contestation suggest that anti-imperialism is anything but obsolete. Indeed, the questions that preoccupied LADLA’s members about the relationship between class struggle and national liberation, and about how distinct historical experiences of domination might be related without being collapsed, are strikingly relevant today.
An anti-imperialist politics is only as effective as its analysis of imperialism itself. As Mahler’s book demonstrates, the ambition to link struggles across regions and scales must be balanced against the risk of overextension, in which analytical specificity gives way to an ever increasing list of struggles and causes unified more by rhetoric than strategic coherence. The challenge, then, is not whether anti-imperialism should serve as a unifying framework, but rather how attention to the concrete mechanisms of actually existing imperialism might refine our understanding of what is shared across struggles—and what is not. LADLA’s legacy thus lies less in offering a ready-made model than in clarifying the conditions under which transnational solidarity can remain both expansive and grounded—capable of connection without erasure, and of vision without abstraction.
Abigail Kret is an artist and writer whose work focuses on the history of left-wing movements in the late 20th century.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article referred to LADLA as the “All-America Anti-Imperialist League,” a translation that the author does not use in her book. In addition, Cuban poet Regino Pedroso was incorrectly identified, as was the author of the novel Over. This article was updated on January 19, 2026.