I <scp>nternationalism</scp> , <scp>the</scp> M <scp>exican</scp> R <scp>evolution</scp> , <scp>and the</scp> U <scp>ses</scp> <scp>of</scp> H <scp>istory</scp>

How can the lessons of past struggle inform movements for political change today?This is a question raised, in ways both implicit and explicit, by three recent books-Kelly Lytle Hernndez's Bad Mexicans, Christina Heatherton's Arise!, and Dan La Botz's Riding with the Revolution-that return to the era of the Mexican Revolution to explore currents of cross-border radicalism.While the chronology, scope, emphasis, and form of each book differs, they all ask how the complex and multifaceted struggle that constituted the first major social revolution of the twentieth century inspired solidarities and reactions both across the border and around the world.Lytle Hernndez's book is a gripping narrative history that argues that Mexican revolutionary struggle played a key role in the history of the United States; Heatherton's is an interdisciplinary theorization of the transnational "convergence space" (18) opened up by the revolutionary moment; and La Botz's is an encyclopedic compendium of various sectarian and sectoral foreign engagements with Mexico's revolutionary process.Reading the three together and comparing these different analyses of radical pasts puts one into a political and strategic, as much as historiographic, frame of mind.On a rapidly shifting terrain structured by global crises that refuse to hew to national boundaries, each author invites readers to consider how past histories of internationalism inform today's struggles to build new movements and political cultures adequate to the shared challenges we face.All three books return to the radical milieu of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), led by a group of young intellectuals-including Camilo Arriaga, Juan