On this day, 24 February 1915, during the Mexican Revolution, Amelio Robles Ávila, a transgender officer in the Liberation Army of the South, led by Emiliano Zapata, intervened in close combat in Salto de Valadez and Mazatlan, Guerrero. His unit battled against a column directed by colonel Zenón Cerrato, beginning the fight at 12 noon and ended in victory at 6:30 PM.
Robles Ávila recounted that when he first joined the fighting: “it was nothing but madness, but later I learned what a revolutionary stands for and I defended the Plan of Ayala”. The Plan of Ayala was a revolutionary 15 point programme authored by Zapata, which called for the overthrow of the government and for the radical redistribution of wealth, land and property.
While Zapata’s peasant army originally allied with Venustiano Carranza, the relationship soured after Carranza took power and failed to implement promised improvements. According to Robles Ávila, “Carranza was just a mystifier of the revolution and I fought against Carranza.”
This battle was just one of at least 70 he took part in over the course of the revolution, and years after the fighting ended he became the first recognised transgender Mexican army veteran.
Learn more about Robles Ávila on our Stories web app including timeline and sources: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/tag/8681/amelio-robles-%C3%A1vila
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February 23, 1918: Founding of the Soviet Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army.
“On the one hand, the bourgeois-landlord troops restore in practice, everywhere that they go, the injustice that prevailed under the Tsars, the oppression of the poor, especially of all those who speak a different language or belong to a different nation or religion. In Avdat village the inhabitants are Muslims, so – at them, chase them, crush them, rob them and cut them up! That is the principle of action of the dishonorable counter-revolutionary bands.
“The conscious revolutionary Red forces are not like that. They know that the working people, whatever nation they belong to, are their brothers. They know that people must be divided not by nation but by class. All honest working people form one family, whatever language they may speak and in whatever place of worship their fathers may have prayed. All oppressors, exploiters, parasites, aggressors, regardless of nationality, are enemies of the working people. The task of the soldiers of the Red Army, their sacred task, is to defend the poor against the rich. This is what distinguishes our army from all other armies in the world.”
- Leon Trotsky, “The Sacred Task of the Red Army” (1920)
Photo: Trotsky aboard his armored train during the Civil War
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FUCKING TERRIFYING! Anyways please spread this, Shabbat is this Saturday
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