A book by Aaron Johnson Ortiz. The ampersand between the terms “exile” and “utopia” transforms a feeling of loss of home into a hope for a better world. That is the general trajectory of my illustrated book, Exile & Utopia, which traces a group of Mexican revolutionary journalists in the early twentieth century (1904-1906) as they flee repression and surveillance through Mexico, the US, and Canada, and attempt to organize an (ultimately failed) revolution. In the lead-up to the centennial of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, I re-traced this transnational precursor movement, and with my book I challenge the circumscriptive character of national histories, as well as the very notion of ‘revolution’.
