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The Anarchists of Casas Viejas
Personal narratives and oral data give new insights into the futile peasant uprising at Casas Viejas just before the Spanish Civil War
352 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 1982
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 14, 2024
5 stars for the quality of research but 3 stars for how much I liked the book - so a compromise of 4. I don’t know if it was the writing style or the topic itself, but I found a significant part of the book rather boring.
April 16, 2012
When I was sixteen, writing angry papers on the extended metaphor of the ear in Hamlet, the inescapable, permanent nature of grief and despair in Poe’s The Raven, and Tolstoy’s rejection of the moral legitimacy of the state, my English teacher handed me this book. I still remember the weight of it in my hands.
“You need to read this,” he said.
He was right. I went home and did not put the book down until I had read every last word. The Anarchists of Casas Viejas did not simply inform me. It rearranged the furniture in my head about government, freedom, and the stubborn human hunger for self-determination.
Many writers have shaped how I see power and the individual: Tolkien, Godwin, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Thoreau, Proudhon, Stirner. This book still holds its own distinct place among them.
Jerome Mintz spent years in the village formerly known as Casas Viejas (now Benalup), living among the people whose parents and grandparents had lived through the 1933 uprising and the massacre that followed. He listened. He recorded. He let the campesinos speak in their own voices instead of forcing them into someone else’s theory. The result is one of the most carefully researched and humanely written books I have ever read. Mintz corrects the record on almost every point that academic and political narratives had gotten wrong, especially the romantic or dismissive treatments that turned real people into symbols. What remains is something rarer: actual men and women who believed, for a few hours, that they could take their lives into their own hands.
The book is under-appreciated. It should be required reading for anyone who cares about freedom, the uses of power, or the stubborn human refusal to accept that the way things are is the only way they can be. It is not a romance of revolution. It is a clear-eyed account of what happens when people who have almost nothing decide they will no longer wait for permission to live differently, and what the state is willing to do to stop them. That lesson stayed with me.
I have read many books since high school. Very few have stayed as close to the bone. This one still does.
“You need to read this,” he said.
He was right. I went home and did not put the book down until I had read every last word. The Anarchists of Casas Viejas did not simply inform me. It rearranged the furniture in my head about government, freedom, and the stubborn human hunger for self-determination.
Many writers have shaped how I see power and the individual: Tolkien, Godwin, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Thoreau, Proudhon, Stirner. This book still holds its own distinct place among them.
Jerome Mintz spent years in the village formerly known as Casas Viejas (now Benalup), living among the people whose parents and grandparents had lived through the 1933 uprising and the massacre that followed. He listened. He recorded. He let the campesinos speak in their own voices instead of forcing them into someone else’s theory. The result is one of the most carefully researched and humanely written books I have ever read. Mintz corrects the record on almost every point that academic and political narratives had gotten wrong, especially the romantic or dismissive treatments that turned real people into symbols. What remains is something rarer: actual men and women who believed, for a few hours, that they could take their lives into their own hands.
The book is under-appreciated. It should be required reading for anyone who cares about freedom, the uses of power, or the stubborn human refusal to accept that the way things are is the only way they can be. It is not a romance of revolution. It is a clear-eyed account of what happens when people who have almost nothing decide they will no longer wait for permission to live differently, and what the state is willing to do to stop them. That lesson stayed with me.
I have read many books since high school. Very few have stayed as close to the bone. This one still does.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews