Tony Wood’s Radical Sovereignty is a masterful account of Latin American leftist conversations about race, nation, and sovereignty in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Mexican and Russian Revolutions had ushered in an era of what he calls “radical possibility.” In this transnational history, Wood follows the lives of activists and intellectuals—and the threads of their ideological debates—from Mexico City to Havana, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Moscow, among others.
Wood draws upon a remarkable range of archival collections spanning six countries and five languages. While others have addressed related topics, Wood’s account stands out for his meticulous research in the Russian State Archives for Social and Political History (RGASPI). Founded in 1919, Moscow’s Communist International (Comintern) aimed to spread revolution beyond Russia, and it kept detailed records. Wood’s use of Comintern meeting minutes, speeches, and publications sets his book apart and significantly enhances our understanding of the interwar Latin American left.
In this transnational history, Wood follows the lives of activists and intellectuals—and the threads of their ideological debates—from Mexico City to Havana, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Moscow, among others.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I is set in Mexico City and details the city’s anti-imperialist ferment in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. From 1923 to 1929, an international group of women and men involved in Mexican peasant leagues, communism, the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA), the Peruvian-led American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), and a vibrant left-wing press all took advantage of Mexico’s relatively open atmosphere to make the city a “gathering point” for innovative political thought in the struggle against imperialism. Wood details the activities of individuals like Julio Antonio Mella, a young Cuban who had already co-founded both the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) and LADLA by the time he was exiled in Mexico City, and Úrsulo Galván, leader of Veracruz’s largest peasant league and a member of the Mexican Communist Party. In 1923, Galván traveled to Moscow, where he addressed the Peasant International and spoke alongside Ho Chi Minh. Wood uncovers early common ground between these leftists. For instance, Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, founder of APRA, spent four months in Moscow in 1924 and was initially influenced by communism, a story easy to overlook in light of his later rivalry with Mella.
By the end of the 1920s, when the Mexican state began cracking down on the radical left, Mexico’s city’s anti-imperialists were put in a difficult position. Should they cooperate with the one state in Latin America sympathetic to their cause or should they condemn it? Peasant leagues and APRA opted to work within the imperfect confines of the Mexican establishment, while Communists rejected the state’s authority altogether. Though historians typically blame Communist sectarianism for the fissures, Wood demonstrates that ideological disagreements over states and sovereignty also divided the left. By late 1929, Mexico City’s “role as a transnational hub had ended,” writes Wood, but how revolutionary struggles should relate to existing nation-states continued to animate leftist discussions.
Part II takes readers to Moscow, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Yucatán, Havana, and Lima, as Wood chronicles the development of two different takes on the role of nations, beginning with the Communists. By 1932, Latin American Communists maintained that Black and Indigenous Latin Americans constituted “oppressed nations” and had the right to self-determination. Wood rejects the interpretation that this position was an “aberration” or a “delusion” in which Moscow applied “Bolshevik ideas about the ‘national question’ to the Western Hemisphere without regard for local realities.” Such depictions assume that Moscow issued directives to overseas parties with no room for disagreement. Although Moscow did launch its hardline “Third Period” in 1928, Wood’s research tracks a decade of debate on race, beginning with the “Black Bolshevik” Harry Haywood, who successfully urged Moscow to call for African American self-determination in the U.S. South. That pan-Africanist intellectuals pushed Moscow to recognize the importance of race-based organizing is well established, but Wood adds to the scholarship by exploring how, if at all, self-determination would be applied to the rest of the Americas.
From 1928 to 1932, Communists debated the meaning of race, nation, and self-determination at conferences in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Moscow. Some took a materialist approach and rejected self-determination, arguing that racial oppression couldn’t be solved with another bourgeois republic. Others lamented American communist parties’ lack of attention to race and supported self-determination as “a token of Communist willingness to tackle the problem.” In other words, hardly a foregone conclusion mimicking Soviet policy, communist support for Indigenous and Black self determination was actually the product of extensive debate.
Apristas, arrived at a different conclusion on the role of existing nation-states. Centering the Peruvian poet and aprista militant Magda Portal, Wood analyzes APRA’s early tension between transnationalism and nationalism as the movement embraced “continental nationalism.” Distancing APRA from Communism’s universalist pretentions—and, by implication, its Soviet nationalities policy—Portal delivered a series of speeches in the Caribbean in 1929 and called for a transnational, cross-class unity with a distinctly Latin American flair. As Wood details, however, Haya went on to “domesticate” aprismo in the 1930s by abandoning radicalism and focusing on electoral politics, rejecting internationalism entirely. In short, while both groups resisted imperialism, ARPA focused on “the conquest of power within a single nation state” at the same time that communists were seeking to “overturn and remake” existing states.
From 1928 to 1932, Communists debated the meaning of race, nation, and self-determination at conferences in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Moscow.
The final part of the book covers Cuban and Mexican applications of self-determination. Chapter 7 reconstructs how, over the course of the 1930s, the PCC adopted, applied, and eventually dropped the Black self-determination position. In 1932, the party announced support for a “Black Belt” policy in the regions of eastern Cuba where Afro-Cubans formed a majority and had the right of self-determination—to the point of separation. Wood points out that historians of Cuba have addressed the faja negra as a “passing folly, of little consequence to Cuban Communism’s larger trajectory.” In his definitive account, however, Wood argues that the policy was actually fundamental to the party’s two-pronged anti-racist campaign, calling for both self-determination and equality—with lasting consequences. The PCC expanded Black representation in its rank-and-file and leadership in the 1930s and, even after dropping the position in 1935, remained a staunch defender of Afro-Cubans. In 1940, Communists helped draft the new Cuban Constitution, writing Article 20, which stated that “All Cubans are equal before the law,” and declared “illegal and punishable any discrimination on grounds of sex, race, color, or class.”
Wood’s final chapter is a fascinating account of Mexican approaches to the “Indian question” in the 1930s and beyond. While other scholars have stressed the paternalism inherent in Mexican indigenismo as the state sought to “Mexicanize the Indian” in the 1920s, Wood details a lesser-known idea flourishing in the 1930s. A collection of ethnographers, linguists, historians, and labor leaders rejected assimilationism and, instead, promoted a “radical pluralism” in favor of Indigenous self-determination and territorial autonomy. Wood traces the Marxist origins of this pluralism, pointing to figures like the labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano and the Cuban anthropologist-geographer Jorge Vivó. Vivó had supported Black self-determination in Cuba before moving to Mexico in 1937, and both men traveled to the USSR, where they were inspired by the Soviet nationalities policy. For a brief—and overlooked—moment, Mexican officials embraced pluralism, with President Lazaro Cárdenas recognizing the Yaquis’ right to territorial sovereignty in 1937. To pluralists, Wood writes, Mexico was a “mosaic of small nationalities,” and there was “no contradiction between self-determination… and Mexican national unity.”
The questions about race, nation, sovereignty, and imperialism that Latin American radicals addressed in the interwar years resurfaced again and again in the decades that followed, as Wood explores in his epilogue. At a 1975 meeting in Mexico, the National Congress of Indigenous Peoples proclaimed their right to self-determination. Such “ghosts of autonomy” also appeared in places like the 1992 revision of the Mexican Constitution, the 1994 Zapatista uprising, and policies of progressive governments in Bolivia and Ecuador in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, Black activists in Brazil and Cuba have challenged their countries’ reputations as “raceless” and positively affirmed Black identity.
The questions about race, nation, sovereignty, and imperialism that Latin American radicals addressed in the interwar years resurfaced again and again in the decades that followed, as Wood explores in his epilogue.
Wood is careful not to overstate connections between his interwar subjects and these later articulations of sovereignty, arguing that they are resonances of interwar debates rather than direct descendants. But I would argue that the rich material in his book suggests there is connective tissue between interwar radicalism and later struggles. Consider Cuba’s short-lived Revolution of 1933. Thoroughly steeped in the notions of self-determination that Wood beautifully details, the Cuban leftists of 1933 established ideological terms of debate that animated opposition movements for decades, culminating in Castro’s 1959 Revolution. Cuba went on to lead the Tricontinental movement of Afro-Asian-Latin American solidarity. Not only did LADLA anticipate these transnational solidarities, but its members were directly involved; Raúl Roa, Cuban Foreign Minister from 1959 to 1976, had been a member of the Havana chapter.
Radical Sovereignties also contributes significantly to the history of global decolonization struggles. Latin American discussions were “driven by the same questions that fired the imaginations of anti-colonial activists in Africa and the Caribbean,” and individuals from these regions rubbed shoulders in Moscow. When I read Woods’s account of the Mexican scholar Pablo González Casanova, who introduced a concept of “internal colonialism” in 1963, I thought of Stokely Carmichael. In 1967, the Trinidadian-born, African American Black Power leader told an audience in Havana, “Our people are a colony within the United States; you are colonies outside the United States.” In other words, as Wood puts it, “the concept of self-determination went on a series of transnational journeys” between World War I and the 1960s, and those concepts continue to surface in our current moment.
Today, we often treat “imperialism” and “racism” as though they have a self-evident explanatory power: oppression, violence, exploitation, displacement, and more are explained simply by “racism” or “imperialism.” With his patient and nuanced reconstruction of leftist ideological debates, however, Wood reminds us that these concepts are not endpoints, but starting points. Interwar Latin Americans rejected simplistic definitions and, instead, spent considerable time theorizing the relationships between class, race, empire, and self-determination. In so doing, they developed a “repertoire of concepts” which should continue to inspire contemporary radical imaginations.
Frances Peace Sullivan is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean. Her book, Cuba’s Cosmopolitan Enclaves: Imperialism and Internationalism in Eastern Sugar Towns (University Press of Florida, 2025), tells the story of how company towns along Cuba’s northeastern coast became major hubs of internationalist organizing in the 1920s and 1930s.