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This dissertation examines the social and political relations that emerged between Mexican laborers and Spanish political refugees between 1939 and 1959. Following the collapse of the Second Spanish Republic (1936-1939) and the ascension of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), Mexico granted 20,000 Spaniards political asylum. The initiative marked the first time and only time in world history that a formerly colonized nation granted political asylum to inhabitants of its imperial metropole. As Mexican campesinos and workers navigated, defined, and challenged the parameters of their country’s social revolution (1906-1940), their acceptance or rejection of Spanish exiles depended on their communities’ historical relationships to land, radical thought, and the Mexican state. My dissertation therefore examines specific sites of Spanish settlement to determine how encounters between local populations and refugees challenged the Mexican state’s conceptions of class, race, and citizenship. Using archival sources collected from Mexico, Spain, the United States, and the Netherlands, my dissertation analyzes the ways workers and peasants from both countries shaped their sociocultural viewpoints and ideological convictions through their respective struggles for land, autonomy, and democracy. I argue that for many Mexican peasants and industrial laborers, the exiles were not descendants of the Spanish colonizers that previously exploited their nation, but rather as allies who invigorated the ideals and possibilities of the Mexican Revolution through their own radicalism and civil war. My reading of the Mexican Revolution as a key moment in twentieth-century global, rather than a regional, revolutionary struggle—a flashpoint for intense debates regarding equality, decolonization, and transnational solidarity—is enabled through a mapping of social relations between Mexicans and Spanish immigrants prior to, during, and after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Subsequently, this research explores the transnational formation of radical social consciousness, the politics of exile within postcolonial contexts, as well as the impact of social revolution on notions of belonging, difference, and community.

This thesis focuses on anarchist movements in the Mexican port city of Tampico from 1910 to 1945. Contrary to the objectives of the Mexican government, Tampico's anarchist communities resisted the institutionalization of revolutionary dissent. They utilized a variety of radical ideologies specific to the Huasteca region's social and cultural conditions to develop worker solidarity throughout the petroleum industry. By analyzing this specific geographical space, a counter-narrative of the Mexican Revolution and its precedence is formed by assessing the significance of working class community interests in contrast to those of the post-revolutionary nation-state. The purpose of this thesis is to explain the historical context in which anarchism formed in Tampico before and during the revolution. Secondly, it assesses the impact of anarchist consciousness amongst the region's petroleum workers throughout the 1920s. The thesis concludes with an examination of the institutionalization of labor conflict and its ramifications on radical movements in Tampico and throughout Mexico. My purpose is to provide insight into the port city's social, cultural, and political developments during the post-revolutionary period to problematize both the notion of the Mexican nation-state as well as worker's resistance to such manifestations