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In 1935, the Mexican Ministry of Public Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública, in Spanish) launched the Biblioteca del Obrero y Campesino [Library of Workers and Farmers]. Its purpose was, among others, to occupy a space in the rapidly expanding left‑wing book market. Its first volume was Marx, a biography of the German thinker, written by José Mancisidor. With this, it began to compete with the collections of Ediciones Frente Cultural (EFC), the publications of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, LEAR), the texts of the Universidad Obrera (Workers’ University), Editorial Masas, and with many other small initiatives that had sprung up since the beginning of the Cárdenist era. This article analyzes how these numerous initiatives, which all sought to make space for themselves among the readings of Mexican leftist militants, activists, and sympathizers, were intertwined.

First, however, it is important to examine the relevance of recovering the history of popular collections, especially those from the first half of the twentieth century in Latin America. If we go by the general description of many of these collections, we can see that they were published sporadically, they were developed in unstable markets, and they usually resulted in a great commercial disappointment. What is more, by grouping texts in collections, the publishers only watered down the political and ideological projects of the originals. It is therefore a story of few successes and many failures. Nevertheless, although popular collections during this period represented somewhat marginal and quixotic efforts, their existence reflects the core of the editorial space and its political constitution—but this is only apparent if we consider the ways in which they go against the grain of mainstream publishing at the time. Thus, describing collections and retrieving catalogues is only the beginning of our task. To stop there merely satisfies the desires of collectors, without explaining the social and political forces that shaped the publishing industry at the time. Indeed, the recuperation of catalogues only corroborates what we already know: that the collections responded to the negotiated interests of the actors involved, that they always had ambiguities, and that the book order reflected a way of perceiving political processes.[1] Studies of other types of print objects have addressed this over and over again, especially in the analysis of programmatic editorialism associated with magazine and newspaper research.[2] On this level, in order to recognize what the promoters of these collections proposed, it would be sufficient to compile the innumerable declarations of principle and observe how they were scarcely fulfilled.

However, a collection is far more than its catalogue. The history of popular collections is the history of a vision of how a group of publishers, politicians, and militants believed they could conquer the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of readers. Catalogues hardly tells us anything about those readers, however. We barely glimpse them behind the editorial decisions, although they are clearly present behind each publishing failure. But at the same time as the history of popular collections is a story of political ideas, it is a journey through the practices, the daily activities, and the conjunctural decisions of all those involved in the editorial processes. Perhaps this double appeal, both to the ideas and to the mechanisms that materialize them, is what often transforms the history of popular collections into an account told from a privileged viewpoint, of some processes related to the construction of a specific political and literary culture. And therein lies the importance of analyzing this type of print.

From a historiographic point of view, there are different ways to approach the subject. The books The Culture of the Publisher’s Series and La colección. Auge y consolidación de un objeto intelectual have opened up a whole range of themes, problems, and methodological approaches.[3] Here it is relevant to emphasize that both collections respond to the particular tensions that existed at the time of their emergence. They highlight, among other elements, the new versus the old, the commercial versus the altruistic, and the national versus the transnational. Interestingly, the texts emphasize the need to overcome the perspectives that consider these dyads as irreconcilable elements; on the contrary, they propose a roadmap that acknowledges how those elements that may seem incompatible can actually function in a complementary way. The edited collections are situated within a complex web of discourses, and balancing the importance of each of the components is a difficult task for historians to achieve. In the (somewhat grandiose) words of John Spiers, “The series is one geological accumulation of past lives and cultures.”[4] One of the many functions they have had, in his opinion, was to represent dominant cultures, acting as gendarmes of the canon; at the same time, they have sustained ideas of social change, while constituting the discursive limits and deciding upon the categories of the debate. Mexican left‑wing publishers understood this situation, at least in part, when they developed and circulated popular collections. They recognized that a single book could not do as much as a complete collection, which emphasized the whole over the individual.[5] Let us now see what other elements contributed to the idea of making popular collections during the Cárdenas administration.

“An Exceptional Moment”

In Mexico, when talking about the history of publishing during the twentieth century, it is usual to automatically recall the efforts made by José Vasconcelos and his group of collaborators in the early 1920s. This impulse seems to have been widely established by the middle of the following decade. Perhaps that is why the principal figures involved in leftist publications made explicit statements, trying to dissociate themselves from any Vasconcelian genealogy. Their position was affected by the shift to the political right of the former Secretary of Education, but also by the characteristics of the collections promoted under his mandate.[6] These collections, which implied a high budget, were focused on classical literature, and were buying by middle‑class readers. As Nicolás Pizarro Suárez pointed out in a programmatic text on the function of revolutionary writers in Mexico:

En todos los puestos de libros viejos de México, por unos cuantos centavos, pueden adquirirse las obras de la literatura clásica que, de 1921 en adelante, editó la Secretaría de Educación Pública. Estas ediciones costaron una enorme cantidad de dinero a la nación y evidentemente fueron destinadas a la pequeña burguesía.[7]

Pizarro Suárez does not reject the need to print texts representing the “cultural heritage of humanity.” This, in his opinion, was extremely important. Rather, his criticism points out that the Vasconcelian proposal was aimed at an elitist public; therefore, the poorest sectors were left without access to the most prominent thinkers. For this reason,

es necesario que todos los escritores no reaccionarios creen una nueva [literatura] que sea genuinamente popular, con una alta calidad artística; pero al lado de esta tarea, es también urgente la de hacer llegar a las verdaderas masas obreras y campesinas una cultura fundamentalmente elemental, que les permita empezar a leer y escribir.[8]

In broad terms, these two variables—the creation of a new literature and the needing for a wider distribution—defined the popular collections established by the left. Although to this we must add something that Pizarro Suárez also noted: the critical need to support the efforts of the government, especially when both the clergy and big capitalists were attacking the socialist education that had been implemented by Cárdenas.[9]

However, the editors of the 1930s did not reject past collections wholesale. For example, the Cvltvra collection was seen as an important precedent.[10] Although its later developments, especially some of the works of the publishing house that its owners founded, were linked to the Mexican right, and did not leave leftist militants satisfied. Nevertheless, it is interesting to look closely at some of the people linked to the Cvltvra project, because they were important within the editorial scene as a whole. Xavier Icaza, one of the promoters of Cvltvra, was involved in various editorial efforts of the left, including magazines and other projects founded to spread Marxism. At the same time, he maintained close ties with commercial publishing companies, such as Botas and Patria,[11] and he also developed projects with Manuel Gómez Morín and other representatives of right‑wing sectors.[12] This type of insertion in the publishing world, eclectic and heterogeneous, was not unique, and responded to the precarious conditions Mexican publishers faced during this period. For that reason, we even find traditionally anti‑communist sectors, such as the linotype union, working together with militants from the Mexican Communist Party (PCM, in Spanish), or printing their organs of communication.[13] Only with the passing of the decade, the growth of this field of work, and the advent of the Second World War would political positions become insurmountable barriers to cooperation for those involved in the publishing industry. This is relevant for the popular collections of the left during Cardenism because they were clearly born of these eclectic processes and transversal dialogues, from which, very much in line with the popular front policy promoted by the Comintern, only openly fascist sectors were excluded. A certain dogmatism was beginning to arise, which in some cases could provoke confrontations, though in general it scarcely surpassed the limits of public debate among the participants of the publishing world.[14]

Despite this, the recovery of the editorial past by certain leftist sectors during Cardenism was still limited to the revolutionary period. Even the active participation of Enrique Flores Magón did not lead them to make any efforts to retrieve previous publications.[15] There is no mention of nineteenth‑century socialist texts,[16] or of what Buffington has considered one of the most important elements in the consolidation of the identity of Mexican workers during the Porfiriato: the cheap satirical press.[17] The Graphic Workshops of the Nation (Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, in Spanish), meanwhile, an institution that dated back to the 1880s, reconstructed its own history to suggest that it actually emerged in the 1920s, at the beginning of post‑revolutionary politics.

This sense of disconnection with the pre‑revolutionary past accounts for the feeling among many publishers in the 1920s that they were embarking on a wholly new endeavour. The autobiography of Enrique Navarro Orejel, the owner of a bookstore bearing his name and one of the main leftist publishers during the 1930s, offers an illustrative example. According to data rigorously obtained by Jorge Fuentes Morúa, this publisher began his work in the middle of the first decade of the century.[18] However, Navarro’s own account claims that he only started to connect with the book market in the 1920s, skipping all his previous activity. In the case of his later company, Ediciones Frente Cultural (EFC), whose first titles were produced in 1934, Navarro muddled the past again, this time advertising the business as if it had been born in 1927. In this way, he positioned EFC as the oldest publisher dedicated to Marxist leftist themes. This was a common advertising strategy, and was clearly resembled other statements made by Navarro’s colleagues around the same time.

Indeed, as Fréderic Palierne proposes, this kind of publisher’s manifesto was a dominant model, and all those releasing leftist series in the 1920s explicitly used this rhetorical tool.[19] Editorial México Nuevo even launched a brochure in which it explained its intentions, developed its work plan, and invited writers and artists to send their contributions. We do not know how or where this statement was distributed, but it is important to note that its launch reflects the initiative’s intention to be rooted in the Mexican cultural mood of the time:

Desde hace muchos años se ha venido hablando del problema que en México constituye la imposibilidad práctica en que se encuentran los escritores y artistas para publicar sus obras. Se han hecho diversos intentos, provenientes así de la iniciativa privada como de la oficial, para terminar con esta grave situación. A la postre, dichos esfuerzos han fracasado y el escritor sigue en su precaria condición, privado de estímulo y expuesto, en el mejor de los casos, al abandono en manos de las contadas empresas mercantiles interesadas en la edición de libros.[20]

It was emphasized that the invitation was open to all writers and artists, except those promoting fascism, and that the initiative had sufficient resources. Some state entities had pledged their support, along with a promise not to intervene politically in the operations of the new company. Its signatories were the Technical Proletarian Council of the Graphic Workshops of the Nation, the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists,[21] and the Permanent Commission of the National Congress of Writers and Artists—that is, workers and independent groups linked to broad sectors on the Mexican left.[22] To their statement they also added some context about the editorial climate at the time, emphasizing the deleterious effects of “fascist aggression” on the book industry:

Creemos que el momento es excepcionalmente oportuno para el triunfo en nuestro país, de una empresa de esta índole, por el golpe mortal que la agresión fascista ha dado a la antes espléndida labor editorial española, que hasta hace poco proveía de libros a todos los países de habla castellana.[23]

These lines give us a sense of the scene in which the popular collections of the Mexican left began to emerge. A vacuum created by the Spanish Civil War,[24] state‑driven educational processes that increased literacy and books availability, the crystallization of a demand for greater publishing venues for writers and workers in the field, new experiences that gave rise to book‑length projects, incipient commercial strategies, and the need to foster heterogeneous and inclusive spaces, among other factors converged to strengthen those small efforts that aimed to conquer the minds and hearts of Mexican readers.

Batch, Library, Collection

One of the important forces behind the rise of popular leftist collections was the accelerated shift from publishers’ limited ability to supply individual books to their more powerful capacity to distribute full “libraries” or “collections.” In August 1935, the Communist Party was internally confronted with the problem of dissemination. An editorial of El Machete pointed out that “hasta ahora estos esfuerzos editoriales han sido poco enérgicos, poco orientados y dispersos.”[25] At that time, some of the tentative early initiatives undertaken by individuals or groups sympathetic to communism could be considered “editorial sprouts.” Among these publishing houses were Editorial Gleba, Cimientos, Cuadernos de Pedagogía Proletaria, Ediciones de la LEAR, Ediciones Defensa Roja, Ediciones Espartaco, Editorial Dialéctica, Ediciones FER, Integrales, and Ediciones Frente Cultural. Most of them were only incipient enterprises encouraged by the beginning of the Cárdenist political regime. For example, Ediciones FER in 1935 had only one volume, while Ediciones de la LEAR had printed two texts, both with the collaboration and technical support of Librería Navarro.

However, by the middle of 1936, some of these initiatives were already beginning to offer “libraries.” The Library of Workers and Farmers, which I have already mentioned, reflects the interest of the Cárdenas government in this area, but other alternatives were quickly added, such as the Student’s Library of the Universidad Obrera, the Library of El Nacional (whose volumes had to be bound by the readers themselves), and the Teacher’s Library, among others. In the commercial circulation of these popular collections, the name most often chosen was “library.” This reveals that the books’ materiality was a key part of the advertising strategy for these publishers, and also indicates their belief in the need for libraries in the Mexican education system—a subject that was under general discussion at the time.[26]

Perhaps one of the most interesting cases of this rapid transition during Cardenism from single volumes to full “libraries” was Ediciones Frente Cultural, which developed a whole theory for its publications. For example, they advertised brochures, which were no more than 64 pages and generally measured 20 cm x 14 cm, as if they were thick volumes that could be integrated in a family library or the library of a political organization (see Appendix 1). EFC director Enrique Navarro preferred to call the groupings of books in section A of the company’s catalogue (“Principles and Elements”) “batches” rather than “libraries”, however. This representation is interesting because it reveals, more than the reality of the publications, how the publishers imagined their own works, the importance they gave to them, and their aspirations in the medium term. On one hand Navarro overvalued his brochures, portraying them as large books. And on the other hand, when the publisher offered a group of his booklets, contradictory he called it “batch”, which refers to a random and cheap bunch of publications.

If we follow their publicity throughout the Cárdenas era, we can see how EFC moves from listing their left‑wing publications as “novelties,” to including small and isolated depictions of the books’ covers, to grouping the books in a “batch,” to then considering them a “library,” and finally to naming them a “collection.”[27] In fact, in several cases, EFC collections emerged as a posteriori denominations, rather than being designed as such from the beginning.[28] For example, “Organizaciones, maestros, trabajadores ¡Todos! Pidan la biblioteca Ediciones Frente Cultural 1938. 27 obras con valor de $15.00 por sólo $12.00,”[29] said an advertisement that appeared at the start of 1939. The grouping of the books did not respond to a thematic issue, but to the date of publication, and the main motivation was the commercial strategy.

The Daniel Collection, perhaps the publisher’s most widely recognized among leftist militants, emerged after the death of Daniel Navarro Orejel, co‑founder of EFC and the company’s main link to communist and union militancy.[30] But contrary to the director’s own declarations, the books and pamphlets that comprise this collection were those that Daniel had edited before his death and not those that were launched with the money that he had willed for this purpose. The prologue to Karl Kautsky’s Los orígenes de la religión written by Navarro was abruptly interrupted:

Hasta aquí, las líneas que nuestra administración encomendara a nuestro compañero DANIEL NAVARRO OREJEL (1897–1939) co‑fundador y poderosa columna de esta empresa, en la que tuvo a su cargo el puesto responsable de gerente de distribución. La voz de nuestro compañero ha callado para siempre. Con su ejemplar vida de batallados años, tenaz y modesto, nos ha dejado todos sus ahorros destinados a la publicación de una serie especial de obras de carácter social, cuya edición está preparando ya esta misma Empresa.[31]

Lenin’s book La guerra y la humanidad inaugurated this collection. But the also collection inspired a new way of working for the publishing house, which now surveyed a broad group of people in order to discover which books they thought were best. The introduction of Lenin’s text explains the details of this process:

Dos jóvenes catedráticos universitarios, dos maestros de escuelas secundarias e internados indígenas, y tres estudiantes normalistas y preparatorianos; forman el grupo de personas al cual sometimos, para su examen, una colección de veintitantas obras sobre los más variados aspectos de la guerra.[32]

The idea was that the new initiative would take advantage of the political and social processes that Mexico was going through, but that it would also be useful for teachers and students, ensuring that it would have a safe market.

In order to clarify the positions of the selection committee, EFC decided to make public the criteria upon which books were eligible for the collection. First, all of the books had to include an analysis that would lead the reader to conclude that all wars are caused by the private ownership of the means of production. Second, they should all maintain that war would occur more and more frequently if the advance of monopoly capitalisms were permitted. And finally, the drafts had to focus on the inevitability of these confrontations due to the conflicts generated by capital. EFC articulated its objectives as follows:

Servir a los pueblos de América, impulsar su cultura y organización, señalarles la senda de las grandes luchas sociales, como medida previa para alcanzar su verdadera independencia y completa libertad económica y social, —sin prejuicios ni sectarismos—son los propósitos y es la misión que se ha impuesto esta casa en su labor editorial.[33]

These international objectives were also behind another initiative that EFC launched in parallel to the Daniel Collection: the Nueva Cultura Collection. In this case the initial strategy was to group three or four brochures, which were already in circulation, into a book of more than 200 pages. This allowed them to gather works of a particular author, or on a special subject. However, the prices originally posted on the front and back covers confused buyers, who expected to receive the compilation for the price of a single brochure. The publisher therefore had to explain repeatedly that this was just a mistake caused by the rush to launch the new books.

After this unsteady beginning, the new popular collection started to print its own texts, works selected specifically for this purpose, without resorting reprints or pastiches of brochures. Most of the new texts were around 300 pages long, and the series even included among its volumes the first version of El Capital published in Latin America.[34] These cheap editions sought to bring the Marxist classics closer to the popular sectors. Among them, in addition to Marx’s seminal work, we find works by Pinkevich, Shirokov, Kautsky, and Plekhanov. Their advertising highlighted in particular the reach of the collection: “Pídalos en todas las librerías del continente.”[35]

In sum, one thing is very clear: the existence of Librería Navarro was a principal factor in sustaining EFC throughout the decades of its existence. Between this collection and its affiliate, one could find practically all texts printed by by the Mexican left, and indeed a large portion of those printed in all of Latin America. They also shared translations with other initiatives, even if they were not necessarily part of the same political project.[36] This eclecticism allowed the consolidation of EFC, and it was an approach almost all publishers—across the political spectrum—eventually adopted.

Beyond Partisan Boundaries

One of the paradigmatic examples of this opening towards other political perspectives among publishers on the left was the publication of Aníbal Ponce’s work, Educación y lucha de clases, by Editorial América in 1937. This text was written by Ponce in his home country, Argentina, during the Third Period, the name given by the Communist International to the stage when capitalism would finally fall. Also known as “class against class,” during these years, 1928–1935, this interpretation implied restrictions for any ties of the parties with bourgeois and petty‑bourgeois sectors, and also favoured the Bolshevization of militants, rejecting any intellectualism as social‑democratic—or, as they denounced it, as social‑fascist—residue.

Editorial América launched Ponce’s book in a totally different context. The imminence of the Second World War had opened the International to accept any alliance of anti‑fascist forces; in Mexico, for the communists Cardenism began to represent the best opportunity to build a wide cooperation with this aim. Besides, discussions about socialist education program were an ideal field to produce these meetings, and many of militant communist teachers became the main promoters of Cárdenist policies. The concept of the Popular Front was spreading through all the interstices of the Mexican left.

Ponce’s book became a bestseller. In less than a year three reprints were issued, and booksellers reported almost unanimously that it was the bestselling book in 1938.[37] However, if one looks closely at its pages, one finds a series of statements that were in fact deeply critical of what was taking place in Mexico. Ponce rejected the notion that any type of education coming from the state could be considered “socialist”; on the contrary, he argued that in the best of cases it could only strengthen the plans of the national bourgeoisie. According to Ponce, the inter‑class alliance that was behind a teachers’ state would only serve to disorient the true role of teachers in the revolution: to build proletarian education, avoiding the reformist path. Educators, students, and especially the education unions of the period made this book one of their favourite readings, even though it contradicted all their political practices. The flourishing of books dedicated to all these subjects was one of the variables that explained this publishing success. Actually, the local production (and distribution) of literature continued to be reduced in relation to the demand.

In any case, the production figures for popular books of the period, possibly inflated, are spectacular. Talleres Gráficos de la Nación claimed to have printed more than 12 million copies of their titles. Not only did EFC begin to distribute its collections throughout Latin America, but Editorial América did so as well, and with an outstanding appreciation by the militants:

Lo notable—resalta uno de sus lectores en Chile—es que la calidad de esa literatura era bastante elevada. El hecho de que haya llegado a mis manos cuando yo tenía entre quince y veinte años, me evitó tragarme toda una literatura del llamado «marxismo vulgar», la que antes y después de esos años ha constituido la fuente principal para entrar en contacto con esa ideología, y que más ha contribuido a deformar que a formar políticamente.[38]

To achieve this quality of work, Editorial América partnered with Universidad Obrera, which allowed it to have access to originals printed by European academic institutions, and also to orient its collections toward the students of those institutions. For example, Introducción a la sociología was written by A. Cuvillier,[39] a professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and translated by Rafael Llamosa, a professor at the Universidad Obrera and the Instituto de Preparación de Profesores de Secundaria. Likewise, Método dialéctico y ciencias humanas:A la luz del marxismo was translated from the French, one of the first work born of that country’s communist movement that reflected the scope of Marxism, bringing together the main intellectuals of the party.[40] This collection of study texts for university students had particular characteristics so that they could be used for this purpose. Its content, text markers, design, images, and fonts aimed to help the student achieve a better understanding of the subject matter.

The Librería Ariel served a complementary function to Editorial América. The circulation of books through the store, which was owned by the director of the publishing company, helped guide the selection of new works to be published.[41] We can find this triple articulation, educational space—publisher—bookstore, graphically in the Librería’s publicity materials, (see Appendix 2), particularly in an advertisement that appeared in Futuro, a magazine linked to Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the Confederation of Workers of Mexico (CTM), and Universidad Obrera. This advertisement shows works from various currents of Marxism grouped together, including some classics of the aforementioned Third Period, and from the European and Latin American left. No Mexican work is advertised. However, the two that are framed were manufactured in Mexico, and as months went by, Editorial América’s catalogue of “Current Revolutionary Books” would quickly grow, in large part due to the success of Educación y lucha de clases.

The competition among leftist publishers pushed different actors to offer a wide variety of reading materials, and in this regard, Librería Ariel and Editorial América seemed to be the experts.[42] They sought to emphasize that their booklist covered all aspects of being a good militant. In other words, according to their catalogues, their works would appeal to someone who was familiar with the main approaches of revolutionary theory, especially—but not solely—the work of the movement’s forefathers,[43] and who also knew in detail what was happening with the Spanish Civil War and, finally, who wanted to learn about Latin American social issues. This positioning is evident in Librería Ariel’s advertising, and also among other publishers, either through their own titles or through their dissemination of other companies’ collections. Even the official publisher of the Mexican Communist Party presented its publications by emphasizing their educational and revolutionary appeal.

Editorial Popular was created in middle of 1937, with the goal of promoting cheap books and pamphlets for the proletariat. It quickly established its Popular Collection and its España Collection, and created Editorial Morelos for promoting literature, although this branch it privileged texts by exiles living in Mexico.[44] Editorial Popular’s approach highlighted the need to maintain a balance among publications, in order to form well‑rounded revolutionary militants. To this end, and especially through the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, it urged its specialists to create literary works that drew on international theories and treatises; only thus would communism take root among the Mexican workers and farmers.

In any case, the popular collection of this partisan enterprise did not forget that published materials, according to the Leninist proposal, were to be the scaffolding of of the Communist Party. For this reason, the company’s published works focused on partisan activities and on explaining the political positions of their leaders. Even the distribution and sale of the texts played a part in strengthening the PCM. One of the most important aspects of publishers’ efforts to launch popular collections to the market was their concept of who the consumers of their products would be, although in this case it was also relevant who their sellers would be. Two of the three promoters of Editorial Popular, the Venezuelan Salvador de la Plaza and the Mexican Frenchman Leon Bataille, proposed that the books should be distributed for free, since this would increase their accessibility to readers without resources.[45] However, the American Alexander Trachtenberg held a very different position—that what is free is worthless—and his stance ultimately prevailed:[46] the books were sold, though at a very low price. This ensured that those who obtained them were indeed committed to the cause, and at the same time provided extra income for the militants who would act as distributors.

At the same time as the publishers were working to strengthen their collections and libraries, they had to keep sight of the fact that their ideal reader was still being defined. There are no historiographical works for this period on how the reader was trained. But as Freja Cervantes has outlined for previous years, readers began gradually to turn away from serialized materials, brochures, and magazines and toward booklets and books instead, which required a different approach. This transformation was not straightforward and in no sense was it homogeneous. How accelerated was this process among leftist readers during Cárdenism? If we compare the pamphlets that were made in early 1934 with the books that were released in the early 1940s, we can see important differences. But a sharp line should not be drawn. It is enough to focus on some of the collections distributed by El Machete (see Appendix 3), an official publication of the PCM, to perceive the difficulty to trace a line of continuum between publications throughout the 1930s. In this case, the newspaper advertised to its readers “The most beautiful romance and adventure novels,” among which we find works of classic Spanish authors, as well as some Russian authors, but none from the canon of communist literature that had been growing since the revolution of 1917. In fact, the books on this list had been published as part of the Colección revista literaria, novelas y cuentos [Collection of Literary Magazines, Novels, and Short Stories] in Madrid by Editorial Dédalo, a commercial company with no links to communism. When a selection of these books were received in Mexico, the directors of El Machete were pleased to be able to distribute it. Their reasons for doing so were probably at least in part financial: as Luis Alberto Romero and Leandro Gutiérrez argue in their analysis of cheap books in Buenos Aires,[47] the Argentinian publishers would have been eager to distribute “romance and adventure” novels because they were very good sellers. Though monetary justification appears like the most probable explanation, the reasons behind the decision of selling these magazines, novels, and short stories, remain unknown.

Thus, the body of literature published and distributed by the Mexican left was shaped at least in part by objectives unrelated to their ideological principles. The publishers sought to engage with the political, cultural, and marketing perspectives that were involved in each collection and each editorial project, even if these were not particularly partisan. Literary critics, in their turn, denounced the inconsistencies and lack of coherence that inevitably characterized this approach. For example, although Pizarro Suárez complimented the Biblioteca del Obrero y Campesino, in 1936 for the important work it had done in expanding its readership, he was nevertheless very critical of some of the volumes in the series: “Es francamente malo y desorientador el de G. D. Cole, Lo que Marx quiso decir. Cuando este folleto apareció, extracto de un libro grande, ya su propio autor rectificaba sus antiguas concepciones equivocadas sobre el marxismo.”[48] Debates around Marxism were growing increasingly nuanced, and as Suárez’s comments suggest, this was at least in part a result of the rise of popular collections.

Conclusions; or, “What Is Read in Mexico?”

In 1939, the communist newspaper La Voz de México conducted a survey among diverse actors in the publishing world. Its only question was “What is read in Mexico?” The answer that intellectuals, booksellers, and writers used to give was “pornography.” Most were adamant that during the 1920s, so‑called pornography was the only thing Mexicans read. However, in the same way, those in the book trade recognized that by the end of the Cárdenist era, the nature of what people read had changed, at least a little. Socialist texts had gained ground, and Marxist books were among readers’ favourites. The popular collections undoubtedly contributed to this process of reconfiguring the taste of these particular consumers. But let us not exaggerate their effects. A few pages ago, I considered a possible explanation for the success of Aníbal Ponce’s Educación y Lucha de Clase in Cárdenas’s Mexico, despite its lack of context in that country. But it seems to me that another possibility is that the book was scarcely read, that its buyers barely skimmed it, and that in many cases people acquired it simply in order to be able to present themselves as part of a community of readers and supporters of this type of literature.[49] Although it is difficult to prove this hypothesis definitively, it has been true of other works, and the abundance of books from that time that are still unopened point strongly in this direction.[50] This case serves as a reminder that it is necessary to relativize the impact of these collections among Mexican readers.

Historiographic research has generally highlighted the importance of the relationship between the publisher in charge of the collection and the authors of the works that comprise it. This relationship was minimal in the cases reviewed here, which entailed primarily the publisher’s selection of certain works without regard to who held the rights, either to the originals or to the translations. Perhaps ironically, although these Mexican publishers sought to inspire a revolution, they did not themselves possess any property. The lawsuit between Editorial América and B. Traven on the issue of La rebelión de los colgados offers a glimpse the tensions of this particular dynamic between authors and publishers, although in that case, the dispute occurred between the translator, Pedro Geoffroy Rivas, and the German writer of the book. On another occasion, the EFC claimed that they had been unable to find the Spanish owner of the publishing rights because of the Civil War in Spain. However, they offered to pay whatever was necessary if the author ever appeared.

Thus, the dispute over red hearts was part of a broader process of negotiating authorship, finding readers, and, finally, professionalizing the work of the publisher in Mexico. The conjunction of these developments resulted in collections that were unstable but rich, and whose limits were opened by creativity more than they were closed by the dogmatism that elsewhere defined the Latin American left.