Anarchism seeks to recreate society, and the history of anarchism inevitably concerns dreams, struggle, and defeat. This compelling ethnohistory of the uprising in Casas Viejas — one of the stepping stones to the Spanish Civil War — chronicles more vividly than ever before the dreams of those who struggled and were defeated in that classic example of anarchist rural rebellion.
Anthropologist Jerome Mintz is concerned here with the processes and human dimensions of revolution and repression. The circumstances and events examined are the means by which he interprets the lives of the Andalusian campesinos (rural workers and peasants) at a moment when they were swept up by a new ideal. Mintz' analyses the violence of the events and their subsequent distortions. His findings overturn previous theories concerning the organization and leadership of the anarchist movement.
Based on three years of field research, this study of rebellion is itself part of a revolution in historical method which uses personal narratives and life histories to re-examine the past. The new, primarily oral data, from uneducated or illiterate narrators, challenge histories based on the views of educated elites.
As Mintz writes: "The introduction of these new sources in the study of issues of social and political history can evoke a change in perception as radical as that stirred by the Impressionist movement in painting — now as then, the image of the world is bathed in fresh-light, which lends to scenes a dimension and scope previously unrealized."
The tragedy of Casas Viejas has never been more movingly described, its place in history so unerringly established. This is a book that will be widely read and discussed.