A Spirit of Revolt (Conrado Alvillar and the Rank-and-File Wobblies of the 1927-1928 Colorado Coal Strike)

A tale of solidarity in the Colorado coal fields.

A Spirit of Revolt examines the lives and histories of mine workers who were at the center of an understudied statewide strike led by the Industrial Workers of the World in Colorado from 1927 to 1928. The book explores the biographies and genealogies of union activists from southern Colorado, roughly half of whom were Spanish speakers. These miners' stories are contextualized within broader histories of colonization, migration, exploitation, and resistance that shaped their communities. Mine worker and anticapitalist union organizer Conrado Alvillar plays a central role, a talented artist whose paintings were displayed in union halls across the state and whose articles, in both Spanish and English, were printed in the IWW press. Alvillar was deeply troubled by violent state and vigilante repression and by how racism divided the working class, thus fueling his optimistic faith in the revolutionary potential of industrial unionism, the organizing philosophy of the IWW. To better understand the collective intellectual efforts of Alvillar and the other strikers, this book explores the intersections and contradictions between industrial unionism, the broad labor movement, and other revolutionary ideologies.