The Escuela Magnético: Spiritualism and Pan-Hispanism in the Borderlands of the Living and Dead

ABSTRACT: In the early twentieth century, a new religious movement from Argentina called the Escuela Magnético Espiritual de la Comuna Universal (EMECU) spread throughout the Americas. Scholars have taken a passing interest in the group because Nicaragua’s revolutionary leader Augusto Sandino was a member. However, the organization has remained poorly understood, and its internal records largely inaccessible. A major recent acquisition of EMECU documents by the University of Texas at Austin’s Benson Library has allowed me to reconstruct the members’ beliefs and practices. I argue that Magnetic Spiritualists’ concepts of immortality and spirit communications were inspired by international Spiritualism and popular science, and that the movement sought to create a pan-Hispanic society based on communist ethics, gender complementarity, and transnational citizenship. Documents from congregations in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands show that EMECU beliefs about necromancy, traditional healing, indigeneity, and borderless civic communities spoke to the distinct concerns of Hispanic North America.