Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

John Dewey’s time in Mexico not only coincides with one of the most important global political events in the twentieth century, the acquittal of Leon Trotsky, but also one of the first times in history that citizens of postrevolutionary Mexico and citizens of the United States acted together in concert, proclaiming one another’s equal rights, privileges, honors, duties, and freedoms. Together they partook in a ritual of justice that they believed had the authority to exonerate Trotsky of his charges. This paper restores a heretofore forgotten moment of citizens acting as a global public across the reigning divide in other citizens’ fractured world imagination and draws from archival evidence collected at the Archivo General de la Nacion and at the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico.