Radical Border Crossers: The Industrial Workers of the World and their Press in Latin America

Abstract

Whenever I ask my students to tell me what the I.W.W. was, invariably the first answer that comes up is that it was the acronym for the “International Workers of the World.” Aside from the inaccurate redundancy, I think this answer unwittingly points to an under-appreciated truth about the Industrial Workers of the World—that it was an early 20^th-century organization with a truly global reach, filled with activists who eagerly crossed international borders in support of causes that they sometimes strategically framed as local but which clearly fit into a broad plan of worldwide syndicalist revolution linked with anarchism.