Trotsky in Tijuana: A new novel by Dan La Botz

Dan La Botz in conversation with Alan Wald and Suzi Weissman

Who was the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky? What did he believe and do? What was his legacy? Dan La Botz’s new novel. Trotsky in Tijuana, examines these questions in fiction. The novel’s premise is that Trotsky was not assassinated in August 1940 but survived and was relocated to Tijuana where he lived on until 1953 dying on the same day as his rival and political opponent Joseph Stalin. We learn of Trotsky’s past and watch him live on into a future he never knew, dealing with new political situations, with a new lover, with his wife, and with his old friend Victor Serge, being called to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy. You can learn more about the book by clicking this link trotskyintijuana.com and browsing the site.

DAN LA BOTZ formerly taught at the School of Labor and Urban Studies of the City University of New York. In the 1970s, he was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). From 1994 to 2014, he was the editor and principal writer of Mexican Labor News and Analysis, a publication supported by the United Electrical Workers Union (UE), a U.S. union, and the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT), a Mexican labor union. He is a member of both Solidarity and the Democratic Socialists of America and a co-editor of New Politics (newpol.org). In 2010, he was the Socialist Party candidate in Ohio for the U.S. Senate. He is the author of a dozen books on labor, social movements, and politics in the United States, Mexico, and Nicaragua, most recently the non-fiction books are What Went Wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis and Le nouveau populisme Américain Résistances et alternatives à Trump.

 ALAN WALD, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, is a cultural historian of the United States Left from the 1930s to the1950s. He most recently authored a trilogy about Communism and writers from the University of North Carolina Press: Exiles from a Future Time, Trinity of Passion, and American Night. His book The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s has become a classic of literary and cultural studies. He is a member of the socialist organization Solidarity and an editor of the journals Against the Current and Science & Society.

 SUZI WEISSMAN is Professor of Politics at Saint Mary’s College of California and an editor of Critique and Against the Current. Her books include Victor Serge: A Political Biography, and she is currently Co-Producer of the Lindy Laub and David Weiss film about Trotsky, The Most Dangerous Man in the World. She broadcasts the weekly public affairs program Beneath the Surface with Suzi Weissman on KPFK, and the Jacobin Radio podcast.