Dr Alberto G Garcia

  • Home
  • About the Author
  • Images
    • Dr. Alberto G. Garcia & Family
    • Dr John H. Kellogg – Chicago
    • Mexican History 1889 – 1962
    • Austin & Texas History 1900-1962
    • Hermeticists, Rosicrucians, and Yogis
  • Contact Brad
  • Blog

AMERICAN FASCISM and ANTIFA

March 18, 2021 by Brad Rockwell

PART II

Fascism has reared up in Austin, Texas, and throughout the US as a powerful force.  What occurred in January 6, 2021 was a fascist attempted autogolpe.  Lessons from the anti-fascism of Austin’s Dr. Alberto G. Garcia Antifa during the first half of the 20th Century provides insight as to how fascism grew and was successfully confronted in the US in the past. 

The Anti-fascism of Austin’s

Dr. Alberto G. Garcia

In Part I, I demonstrated how fascism and anti-fascism are part of our families and backgrounds as estadounidenses.  A disturbing family secret that I uncovered was that some of my in-laws in Illinois, as owners of The Texas Company, were powerful supporters of Hitler and fascism.  Promoting fascist governments in other countries has been a component of US foreign policy since 1919.   

While researching my biography of Austin’s first Mexican American physician, Alberto G. Garcia, I learned that he was an early and influential anti-fascist.  He fearlessly fought the proto-fascist Ku Klux Klan when it took over Austin in the early 1920s, and beginning in 1932 he strongly spoke out against international fascism and those in the US who supported it.  He was the head of the Austin branch of El Congreso, formed in 1938 to promote HIspanic civil rights and combat fascist organizing among Mexican Americans in the Southwest.  His and El Congreso’s accomplishments I recount in The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia.

Dr. Alberto G. Garcia with his family in 1922 (Austin History Center)

In my biography, I show Dr. Garcia creating and managing Austin’s first Spanish-language newspaper, La Vanguardia, where he documentated and denounced racist terror.  This was at a time when pro-Ku-Klux-Klan Southern Baptists had made inroads in the Mexican American community.  From their pulpits Baptist preachers issued proclamations like: “Above all else, Jesus Christ was a Klansman.”  The pastor of the Elgin, Texas, Baptist church collected tithings for the Ku Klux Klan.

By 1922, the Austin Klan members controlled key aspects of city and county government and held meetings at the East Fifth Street building where cotton export companies and the Austin Country Club had their offices.  Klan crosses were burned on Newning Avenue in South Austin, the street where Dr. Garcia and his family resided.  The rumored Grand Cyclops of the Austin Klan lived next door to Dr. Garcia.  Yet he was not intimidated by Klan violence.  He rescued Klan victims who had been tarred and feathered.

The Austin Klan was beaten back by: journalistic denunciations and exposure; prosecutions of Klan terrorists; an Austin judge who convened a grand jury investigation; pressure from the Mexican government; national advocacy by the NAACP; a bit of muscle used to clear the Klan from the streets; and public disgust.  Austin’s Shelton family produced three brave, anti-Klan lawyers.  To combat the Klan violence and intimidation, the Sheltons relied in part on the tough, poor, white community of cedar-choppers who lived on the edge of town in the rural hill country.  They were a law unto themselves and were adept at keeping government law enforcement out of their communities.  The Austin-area cedar choppers hated the Klan because they knew most of the Austin police were members.  My book recounts an incident where a Klan mob at the Travis County Courthouse was single-handedly dispersed by one cedar chopper named Buck Simpson, who happened to have been the most decorated U.S. soldier in World War I.

Ten years later fascism was rising in Europe and wherever there was fascism there were anti-fascist organizations.  In 1932, a German working-class organization formed as part of a social democrat, union and communist popular front first took on the name Antifa. That same year Dr. Garcia was very publicly outspoken in his opposition to the fascism that was rising in Europe and the United States.  Most in the US at this time were oblivious to the magnitude of the Nazi and fascist threat.

German Antifa in 1932. How many of these people survived Hitler’s violence and concentration camps?

In part 1 of this blog, I explain how a great uncle of mine and his niece and their company Texaco, supported fascism and gave vital assistance to Nazi Germany and General Franco in Spain.  They were not unique.  Within the US, men were organizing Silver Shirts, Khaki Shirts, the Black Legion, and other fascist and Nazi groups. 

Dr. Garcia wrote in the Dallas Morning News that fascism was the result of insecurity born of spiritual weakness: 

Fear of Bolshevism, Socialism and all radicalism that champions the underdog.  Fear of [non-white races.] American will be invincible and unafraid only when her spirit is purified.  Black shirts, brown shirts, night shirts and other shirts are merely the Fascist bundling of scattered terrors, and who harbors this terror, harbors it to his own destruction.

Right, justice, love—those alone can save the world.  Justice, right, and love alone inspire fearlessness and courage and insure life.

The DuPonts, Morgan bank interests, and other oligarchs formed the American Liberty League.   Irénée DuPont declared that the American Liberty League should include “all property owners … the American Legion and even the Ku Klux Klan.”   The Liberty League would become a component of a botched effort by the DuPonts and J.P. Morgan interests to foment a fascist coup against President Roosevelt.    Morgan Bank director Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy not only helped found the American Legion but had been decorated with the Italian Commander of the Crown by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.   In 1935, the National Vice-Commander of the American Legion traveled to Rome to pin a medal on Mussolini and declare him an honorary member of the American Legion.  Due to the support of DuPont, Morgan and other wealthy underwriters, the American Liberty League raised more money than the Democratic Party in 1935.  President Roosevelt called them out and was able to use public distaste for the oligarchs and their Liberty League to gain voters.

Dr. Garcia not only denounced fascism but as with the KKK called attention to the religious or spiritual underpinnings of fascism.  He called out the Catholic Church and others who were complicit in fascism’s growth.  The floor of the Cathedral of Tampico in Mexico was inlayed with Swastikas. 

Catholic clergy with fascist dictator Franco and his paramililitary blue shirts.
Swatikas in floor of Tampico Cathedral.

A fascist group in Mexico called the Sinarquistas was initiated and funded by German Nazis and Spanish and Italian fascists in 1937.  Sinarquistas attacked democracy as a “Judeomasonic plot” and defended the Catholic Inquisition.  They gained many adherents in Mexico but were outnumbered by the union members, intellectuals, and government officials who were strongly anti-fascist.  Mexico moreover enjoyed a good relationship with President Roosevelt.  The Sinarquistas began promoting fascism in the Mexican American communities in the United States, sometimes with the help of local Catholic churches.  A broad coalition of US Hispanic groups (including unions, church groups, liberals, socialists and communists) was formed beginning in 1938 to combat this fascism and to promote human rights.  The name of this group was the National Congress of Spanish-Speaking People and was referred to as El Congreso.   In Texas and California streets, dance halls, bars, and other social spaces, El Congreso members confronted the Sinarquistas and denied them venues in which to organize.  Guatemalan American union organizer Luisa Morena toured Texas to organize chapters.  She convinced Dr. Garcia to head the Austin chapter of El Congreso.  The Emmanuel Methodist Church on East Avenue where Dr. Garcia and his wife Eva were officers aided in the formation of a small local of an international union which had been a member of El Congreso. 

Members of the Austin local of the CTM, an El Congreso-affiliated union, formed with the help of Eva and Alberto Garcia’s Emmanuel Methodist Church. (Austin History Denter)
Mexican CTM union in the Mexico City Zocalo, denouncing the Sinarquistas.

US police considered El Congreso to be their enemy.  They spied on El Congreso but El Congreso was committing no crimes.   El Congreso was targeted by vigilante violence from which the police provided little protection.  In San Antonio, the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, the Baptist Church and others formed a mob outside the Municipal Auditorium where local El Congreso labor leader Emma Tenayuca was scheduled to speak.  The mob burned an effigy of Mayor Maury Maverick (an El Congreso supporter), threw bricks through the windows, entered the building, and forced Tenayuca to flee the building and her home in Texas. 

Mob storming the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium to shut down meeting featuring El Congreso labor leader Emma Tenayuca in 1939.  (UTSA library collection)
Luisa Moreno, the Guatemalan American leader of El Congreso.

The scourge of fascism in Europe was put down by resort to the violence of war.  Three of Dr. Garcia’s children joined the US military to wage war against fascism.  Two sons liberated a concentration camp in Germany.  A daughter piloted military transport planes and worked as an anesthesiological nurse, evacuating soldiers from various theaters of World War II. 

Dr. Garcia and his family in 1941, on the eve of World War II. Pilot and nurse Maria, back row far left, joined the Air Force where she flew transport planes and attended to injured soldiers being evacuated from Africa and India. Second from her left, John, served in General Patton’s army as did his brother Ronnie standing to his left.

The January 6, 2021 Coup Attempt: Fascism in Contemporary America

January 6, 2021 was the culmination of an attempted coup, or more precisely an autogolpe, to kidnap and possibly murder members of the United States Congress and prevent an elected president from taking office.  The leader of this operation, outgoing President Donald Trump, was a notorious non-reader of books; but one book he kept by his bedside long before he was elected was a collection of speeches by Adolph Hitler.   This botched January 6 autogolpe is analogous to the failed beer hall putsch sloppily executed by Adolph Hitler in Germany in 1922.  The German authorities and the world failed to take Hitler seriously.  Hitler was given a short sentence and released after serving less than a year in prison.  If Hitler had been imprisoned for 20 years, World War II would not have happened. 

As with Nazi Germany, fascist efforts in the US are supported by some of the wealthiest people in America.  Oligarchic money has poured into the Republican Party which has become a party of fascism—a party that has not only been supporting the nullification of a national election that kicked President Trump out of office but a party that holds its affiliate CPAC convention on a stage in the shape of an Odal rune, a symbol worn by German Nazi SS member and venerated by US neo-Nazis.  Billionaire hedge fund owner Robert Mercer and his daughter have put an enormous amount of funds into fascist organizations and candidates, including the right-wing social network Parlor and Cambridge Analytica.  Mercer also owns Centre Firearms, a company that claims to “own the nation’s largest private cache of machine guns.”  The rally that urged Trump supporters to take the Capitol and block Biden’s ability to take office was largely funded by Julie Jenkins Fancelli, an heiress to the Publix Super Markets Inc.  In this she was working with Austin’s right-wing media personality Alex Jones. 

Alex Jones rides a military vehicle to an anti-mask rally at the Texas Capitol in 2020.

The activities of Donald Trump were financed to the tune of $90 million dollars by Sheldon Adelson, the chairman, and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Casino.  Adelson also financed the Republican Attorney Generals Association (RAGA) which sent robocalls ahead of the January 6 event encouraging Trump supporters to march on the Capitol.   Koch Industries have been huge supporters of RAGA and of politicians who have taken the position that Biden should not be allowed to take office because the election was stolen.   

Part 1 of this blog post used Austin as an example to show that police and law enforcement offer protection against fascists that is unreliable at best.  Commonly police forces support fascist groups and their goals, as do elements of the military.  Many of those participating in the assault on Congress were police officers.  The head of the Proud Boys group that helped lead the attack, Enrique Tarrio, was a longtime informant for federal and local law enforcement.  He was arrested for possessing illegal weapons in Washington DC, a couple days before the attack on Congress.  The head of the Chicago police union publicly expressed sympathy for the attackers.  De-funding and reforming police departments would appear to be essential steps in blocking the rise of fascism.  Austin, Texas, has moved in this direction as a result of a grassroots campaign after repeated abuses by the police department. 

Militaries often have supported fascist movements.  Hitler was working for German military intelligence when he was ordered to infiltrate the small German Nazi Party.   Thomas Caldwell, who was arrested and accused of being a leader of the Oath Keepers fascist group and leading them in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, is also a consultant for the US government who holds a top-secret security clearance.  Caldwell previously worked as a section chief for the FBI from 2009 to 2010 after retiring from the Navy, where he handled top secret security measures beginning in 1979.  After the January 6 attack, the Pentagon acknowledged the presence of fascist white supremacists among its ranks.  The Pentagon report did not give percentages, because it does not know, but it gave examples, such as the co-founder of a neo-Nazi group called Atomwaffen Division who has “bragged about sharing his white supremacist views while in the military.” 

After he lost the election, President Trump in November appointed Brigadier General Anthony Tata as the Pentagon’s Acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy.  Tata had been a Fox News regular who referred to former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader.”   Trump also appointed as Acting Secretary of Defense, a military special operations soldier with CIA connections named Christopher Miller.  The US military has acknowledged that operatives like Miller engage in psy-ops and unconventional warfare “to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government … by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force….”  Former three-star general and former Director of National Security for Trump Michael Flynn openly called for Trump to impose martial law and nullify the election of Joe Biden.  Alarmed, all ten living former defense secretaries in a January 3, 2021 signed an open letter, stating their opposition to a military coup overturning the election results, and warning officials who would participate and specifically naming Miller, that they would face grave consequences if they violated the constitution.

An attempted coup did happen three days later on January 6 and Christopher Miller indeed did play an essential role in assisting it.  The main reason the coup almost succeeded was that the Capitol was left undefended from a mob that included violent fascists who were answering the call to stop Congress’s certification of the election results. Even in a peaceful demonstration by left groups, there as a matter of course would be a significant well-equipped national guard, police and military presence. There are reasons that the Capitol was left undefended on January 6. Two days beforehand, Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller issued memos prohibiting the deployment of D.C. Guard members with weapons, helmets, body armor or riot control agents without his personal approval. On January 5, Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy issued a memo placing additional limits on the District of Columbia National Guard. Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the DC National Guard, later explained: “All military commanders normally have immediate response authority to protect property, life, and in my case, federal functions. But in this instance, I did not have that authority.”  Miller and McCarthy directly caused a delay of three hours after the Capitol was breached, allowing the insurrectionists to come within minutes of kidnapping and murdering members of Congress.  In the Pentagon room while Secretaries Miller and McCarthy were delaying the delivery of protection to Congress members in the Capitol building, was the brother of Michael Flynn, Lt. General Charles Flynn. 

President Trump’s Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller. The photo was taken while Miller was serving in the Special Forces in Afghanistan.

Protection of the American public against the further growth of fascism through coups or other military actions require full investigations of Christopher Miller, Ryan McCarthy, Lt. General Charles Flynn, Anthony Tata and other high-ranking military officials.  Those involved in planning or aiding and abetting the attempted coup need to be criminally prosecuted.  This includes elected officials within the Republican Party.  White supremacists and other fascists need to be removed from the military.  And the military needs to be downsized and restricted. 

Solutions

Fascism is a form of class war.  Fascism is funded by the wealthy and finds support within the middle class.  Forty percent of the Capitol insurrectionists arrested since January 6 are business owners or hold professional jobs.  The power of the oligarchs, professionals, and business owners must be counterbalanced by democratic anti-racist working-class organizations that are wholly independent of wealthy oligarchic interests and funding.  This would include unions.   Dr. Garcia was involved in these kinds of efforts.  Unions and Antifa groups like El Congreso helped prevent the spread of fascism within the United States. 

Coalition work with a broad group of organizations (conservative, liberal, and Left) against fascism is necessary.  Dr. Garcia promoted labor unions and was not afraid to work with communists and the Austin Chamber of Commerce to secure his democratic and civil rights goals.  Reporter Molly Ball has documented how in 2019 a high-level political strategist for the large AFL-CIO union foresaw that Trump would refuse to concede an election if he was the loser.  The union strategist assembled a large coalition of liberal left groups and reached out to conservative anti-fascists to create an ambitious behind-the-scenes effort ensure that the election would run in a way that could not effectively be undermined by Trump.   In 2020, the US Chamber of Commerce joined and financed these efforts in the belief that Trump-inspired disruption of the election would be bad for business.  This broad coalition did essential work to ensure the integrity of the 2020 election so that the results of the election could not be questioned by the right or the left.  But, as history has shown, the US Chamber of Commerce cannot be counted on to be an enemy of fascism.  It is not so clear that the Chamber of Commerce would have actively opposed Trump’s autogolpe if Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic Party nominee and election victor.

History has demonstrated that grassroots mobilization against fascism is vital where fascists are active.  Fascists need to be denied venues with which to organize, to intimidate people, and to display and perpetuate their violent, oppressive, and racist relationships.   This was also a primary strategy used by anarchist groups in the 1980s to stop neo-Nazi influence over the youth subcultures in Texas and elsewhere.  It was also used by El Congreso. 

Some of the origins of fascism arise out of fundamental values and components of US society.  Trump’s Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller had openly stated that the role of the US military is to maintain an “American dominance in the world that allows Americans to enjoy what it is we love in our society….  Americans will not happily accept a decline in our standard of living so that others elsewhere can have more.”  This is the perpetuation of wealth disparity laid out as the central goal of the US State Department and military in the secret but influential State Department 1948 memo PPS/23.   

As far back as 1921, Dr. Alberto G. Garcia, writing in Austin, Texas, warned of the corroding effect on the United States of this imperialism.  He prophesied on the pages of his newspaper:

[W]e see American magnates interested in monopolizing oil, the trade of countries that have undeveloped industries, etc.  And, when they do not achieve this by peaceful means, they seek the political and military intervention of the United States to accomplish their ends.  This is the origin of imperialism.  Imperialism offers vision of the military expansion of the country that covers all the Americas and the entire world.  It offers powers, riches, glories, submissions from other nations and races.  And in the soul of some, the illusion overwhelms the love of freedom, paralyzing the current that has always given force and virility to this country. 

When the majority of the American citizens let themselves be dominated by this idea of military expansion, the decadence will begin, because the reason to be for the American nation will be dead.    

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia: physician, Mexican revolutionary, Texas journalist, yogi (2020); Brad Rockwell, unfinished manuscript history of Texaco; James Stout, A Brief History of Anti-Fascism, Smithsonian Magazine (June 24, 2020); Nigel Copsey, Militant Antifascism: An Alternative (Historical) Reading, Society (May 2018);  Michael J. Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth (2018); Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep (2017); Stanislav Vysotsky, American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism (2021); Scott Crow, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (2011); Chauncey DeVega, CPAC veers into neo-Nazi fantasy: Was it deliberate? That hardly matters, Salon (March 2, 2021); Alanna Durkin Richer & Michael Balsamo, Navy vet, FBI section chief charged in US Capitol riot, Radio.com (Feb. 9, 2021); Ellie Kaufman & Oren Liebermann, Pentagon report reveals disturbing details about White supremacists in the ranks, CNN (February 25, 2021); Jeremy Kuzmarov, Will New Pentagon Chief Use Psyops to Save His Boss?, Covert Action Magazine (Nov. 11, 2020); Col. Ty Connett & Col. Bob Cassidy, Village Stability Operations: More than Village Defense, Special Warfare Magazine (US Army JFK Special Warfare Center and School, July-September 2011); Alex Deep, Village Stability Operations and the Application of Special Warfare Across the Contemporary Global Operating Environment, Small Wars Journal (April 7, 2014);      Ashton Carter, All 10 living former defense secretaries: Involving the military in election disputes would cross into dangerous territory, The Washington Post  (January 3, 2021);     Luke Broadwater & Michael S. Schmidt, Officials Put ‘Unusual’ Limits on D.C. National Guard Before Riot, Commander Says, New York Times (March 3, 2021); Paul Sonne, Pentagon restricted commander of D.C. Guard ahead of Capitol riot, Washington Post (Jan. 26, 2021); Dan Lamothe, Paul Sonne, Carol D. Leonnig &  Aaron C. Davis, Army falsely denied Flynn’s brother was involved in key part of military response to Capitol riot, Washington Post (Jan. 20, 2021); Igor Derysh, How one billionaire family bankrolled election lies, white nationalism — and the Capitol riot, Salon (Feb. 4, 2021); Robert Pape & Keven Ruby, The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists, The Atlantic (Feb. 2, 2021); Shalini Ramachandran, Alexandra Berzon & Rebecca Ballhaus, Jan. 6 Rally Funded by Top Trump Donor, Helped by Alex Jones, Organizers Say, Wall Street Journal (Feb. 1, 2021); Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, Follow the Money Behind the Capitol Riot, Brennan Center for Justice (Jan. 25, 2021); Brendan O’Conner, The Capitol riot wasn’t a fringe ‘uprising’. It was enabled by very deep pockets, The Guardian (February 18, 2021); Molly Ball, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, Time (Feb. 4, 2021). 

Filed Under: Austin Texas History, Mexican History Tagged With: Alex Jones, Antifa, Benito Mussolini, Christopher Miller, CTM union, Dr. Alberto G. Garcia, El Congreso, Emma Tenayuca, fascism, imperialism, Ku Klux Klan, Liberty League, Luisa Moreno, Mexican American history, Nazis, neo-Nazis, Robert Mercer, Sinarquistas, Texas journalistm, Texas medical history, Thomas Caldwell, Trump autogolpe

Pedro Friedeberg

December 27, 2020 by Brad Rockwell

Triptiko Triptiko Triptikstiko

A Surrealistic path from Austin to Mexico City to San Miguel de Allende.   

In The Life and Times of Alberto Garcia, I note Dr. Garcia’s probable contact and influence with University of Texas student Anita Brenner.  In my last blog post, I described how 17-year-old Anita Brenner’s experience with the occult, perhaps at the home of Dr. Alberto Garcia, caused her to leave the University in 1923, after her freshman year, and return to Mexico.  A voice at this séance predicted great things for her in Mexico, and with astounding swiftness the teenaged Brenner made friends with the artistic and political luminaries of the day.  Anita over the decades had an immense influence in making the world aware of Mexican art and in securing refuge for those persecuted for their race or their political beliefs.  

Mexico City architectural student Pedro Friedeberg during the 1950s worked for Anita Brenner’s magazine Mexico This Month. She encouraged him to quit architecture school and become an artist.  A few years later, in June of 1966, she featured him on the cover of Mexico This Month.   

The author of the world’s first surrealistic manifesto, André Breton, came to consider Pedro Friedeberg and Frida Kahlo the only two great surrealists in Mexico.  Only Pedro survives.

André Breton, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky. Pedro Friedeberg’s mother served as a translator for Trotsky while he lived in Mexico.

Pedro’s recent comments on architecture perhaps prove the sagacity of Anita Brenner’s career advice:

“I admire everything that is useless, frivolous and whimsical. I hate functionalism, post modernism and almost everything else. I do not agree with the dictum that houses are supposed to be ‘machines to live in’. For me, the house … is supposed to be some crazy place that makes you laugh.”

Architecture degree or not, Pedro Friedeberg in 1961 did design a lotus house for Edward James surrealist compound in the mountain jungles of eastern San Luis Potosi.  The roof was lotus-shaped because James instructed Friedeberg that the house “should close during the day because the sun is so hot, and at night it should open so you can see the stars.”

Lotus House designed by Pedro Friedeberg for Edward James

Pedro’s parents were Jews who fled fascism in Europe and arrived in Mexico in 1939.  “I was born in Italy during the era of Mussolini, who made all trains run on time. Immediately thereafter, I moved to México where the trains are never on time, but where once they start moving they pass pyramids.”

His mother was a leftist who loved glamour.  The gardens of Pedro’s family home in Mexico City were designed by the architect Luis Barragan.  He recollects: “At an early age I was influenced by theosophy, Catholicism, atheism, Eastern customs and religions.  I was always fascinated by religious architecture: cathedrals, Aztec pyramids, synagogues, Gurdjieffian temples, and so on.”  But now he claims no interest in religion.  “I’m not really mystical,” he says.

In 1959, Pedro got his first gallery show, at Galeria Diana in Mexico City.  Today, Galeria Casa Diana in the colonial town of San Miguel de Allende permanently has his art on display.  Before I was aware of Pedro’s prominence and history, I was a regular visitor to this small and beautiful gallery that used to be the residence of him and Diana.  It is next door to the entrance to the bull ring that dominates a block near the center of this old colonial town.  Coming from the street into the gallery, Spanish colonialism meets Mickey Mouse, 21st Century pyramids, and op art.  The space invites transformation.  A couple years ago, on the Day of the Dead, I went to the gallery to silently gaze in the eyes of strangers and to be taken blindfolded through a vocal musical improvisation—all organized by a young Burning Man impresario.

            This is how Pedro Friedeberg greeted me one time at his gallery. 

Pedro Friedeberg

I once brought Dr. Alberto Garcia’s granddaughter Kay to Galeria Casa Diana.  At the time, I was not aware that Anita Brenner had in 1923 been invited to Dr. Garcia’s parties for Mexican students at his home in the south Austin neighborhood of Travis Heights.  Nor was I aware of the personal prophecy given to Anita during a séance at the home of Dr. Garcia or some other Austin occultist.  And I was not aware of Brenner’s role in encouraging and promoting Friedeberg. 

Dr. Alberto G. Garcia’s granddaughter Kay at Galeria Casa Diana

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia: Physician, Mexican Revolutionary, Texas Journalist, Yogi (2020); Alan Grabinsky, 10,000 Hard-Boiled Eggs and the Art of Pedro Friedeberg At 82, the Mexican artist isn’t done collecting junk in his irrational house, Tablet Magazine (May 4, 2017); Pedro Friedeberg: Inventor of alternative realities (April 12, 2019), https://www.christies.com/features/In-conversation-with-Pedro-Friedeberg-8677-1.aspx; Philip Alvaré, Hands Down, Pedro Friedeberg’s Mexico City Home Is a Surrealist Delight\The eccentric artist’s abode is a veritable cabinet of curiosities, Introspective Magazine (February 16, 2020); Tessel M. Bauduin, Surrealism and the Occult (2014); Patrick Lepetit, The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism: Origins, Magic, and Secret Societies (2014); Laurinda S. Dixon, review of Guggenheim exhibition Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897, Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, Vol. 16 (Autumn 2017). 

Official website of Pedro Friedeberg:

Pedro Friedeberg

Filed Under: Austin Texas History, Brad Rockwell, Mexican History Tagged With: Anita Brenner, Dr. Alberto G. Garcia, Edward James, Frida Kahlo, Luis Barragan, Pedro Friedeberg, San Miguel de Allende, Surrealism

The Texas Séance that Transformed the Life of Anita Brenner

November 2, 2020 by Brad Rockwell

As a 17-year-old in the year 1922, Anita Brenner enrolled in the University of Texas.  Her experience of Austin had quite an impact on her and motivated her to return to Mexico, the country of her birth.  There, with renewed confidence and the mentorship of J. Frank Dobie, she immediately embarked on a broad range of activities that would quickly gain her international acclaim and influence.  Austin’s Dr. Alberto Garcia’s role in this has been briefly alluded to in my book The Life and Times of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia: physician, Mexican Revolutionary, Texas Journalist, Yogi.  Here I provide a fuller account of how Austin’s occultists, including perhaps Dr. Garcia, changed Ms. Brenner’s life. 

Childhood witness to the Mexican Revolution in Aguascalientes

As a child living in her birthplace of Aguascalientes, Mexico, Anita’s nanny, Nana Serapia, opened her eyes to the world of spirits and ghosts.  When Anita was five years old, the Mexican Revolution broke out following the celestial displays of Halley’s Comet and the Centennial Comet.  Anita remembers Nana telling her that these comets heralded terrible things to come. Under the leadership of the Spiritist and yogi Francisco Madero, however, the victory of the Mexican Revolution over the dictator Porfirio Diaz was swift.  The year after Halley’s Comet, when revolutionary leader Francisco Madero set foot in Mexico City as the newly-elected president, an earthquake shook the ground and put cracks in the National Palace which had been the headquarters of the tyrant Diaz.  Nana told Anita that this earthquake meant that a wicked era was over.  Madero participated in séances and engaged in a type of automatic writing; through these activities, spirits had predicted his unlikely ascendency to the presidency and also predicted his later downfall.

President Madero was assassinated less than two years after assuming office, by generals in league with the United States Ambassador.  The Mexican Revolution started back up again to oust a new dictatorship.  Anita’s childhood eyewitness accounts of the revolution as seen from her parents’ home in Aguascalientes were quite vivid.  Her father was a Jewish immigrant from Latvia and had been successful enough to own and operate a ranch.  Anita became an admirer of Pancho Villa after his army, the Division of the North, arrived in Aguascalientes.  She was ten years old. 

They came confident still, singing ballads of their triumphs…..  The Division of the North traveled in the manner classic to Mexican revolutionaries.  Troop trains scrambled and trudged in ceaselessly, bristling with soldiers, gorged to the windows with women and spoils that spilled out on the roof and the ground…. 

They camped in front of our house, a soldier to a tree.  His woman unrolled the blankets and spread a petate on the roots, drove nails into the trunk for hats and dug out a niche for an image.  If you adventurously walked the avenue you had to be careful or you’d step on somebody’s baby and dive into somebody’s stew.  Sometimes when the women quarreled … they rolled over and over in the dust, their hands buried in each other’s hair, biting scratching, dirty skirts flying and beads scattering, till the men, tired of this amusement (which didn’t end, like a cock-fight) roughly pushed them apart. 

There was always the sound of bugles and the shuffled march of sandaled feet; always the smell of scorching frijoles and prickling chile, always the rattle of gossip, always the patter of women’s hands making tortillas and never a moment there was not the wail of a new child and the haunt of an old song……

A great tourist hotel across a field from our garden was turned into a hospital.  One day we had the medical staff and some officers to lunch.  The doctors, odorous of their make-shift calling ate hardboiled eggs out of the shells with their knives, and told tales…tales of limbs gangrened and hacked off in the quick, without anesthetics (there were none) with a flip of a machete ……

This last paragraph gives a flavor of what the practice of medicine was like for Dr. Alberto Garcia during the Revolution.  He worked in field hospitals serving Venustiano Carranza’s army two years earlier, in 1913, at a time when Pancho Villa was aligned with him. 

Anita Brenner attends the University of Texas in Austin

The Mexican Revolution continued without resolution, and Anita Brenner’s family fled to San Antonio, Texas.  This was a year after Dr. Alberto G. Garcia and his family had fled to Austin from Mexico on a horse-drawn wagon.  Starting from scratch, Anita’s father sold plants and sundries, slowly building a large nursery and the San Antonio’s first major discount store.  He became the owner of the Continental Hotel. 

Anita Brenner, photograph by Edward Weston 1924

When Anita was 17, she enrolled in the University of Texas in Austin, starting the fall semester of 1922.  She was very unhappy there.  Austin’s government was in the process of being taken over by the Ku Klux Klan, with its hatred of Mexican immigrants and Jews.  Landlords operating rooming houses, refused to rent to Jewish UT students.  She was a social outcast, later writing: “I was a lonely, absurd awkward person.  I felt ugly and stupid.  I was ignored.  I resented and hated everything.  A bewildered, unhappy nobody.”    

Ku Klux Klan on Congress Avenue, Austin, 1921

There were bright spots that highlighted Anita’s intellect and presaged her future careers.  Anita took an English writing class from folklorist J. Frank Dobie and he became her lifelong friend.  She also joined the staff of the UT student newspaper, the Texan.

Four years earlier, Dr. Alberto Garcia also had taken journalism classes at UT and had also written for the Texan.   He then created La Vanguardia, a weekly that was the first Spanish-language newspaper in Austin.  La Vanguardia ceased publication a year before Anita Brenner arrived in Austin.  Anita certainly would have known about La Vanguardia.  And Dr. Garcia was well known for his fearlessness in resisting the Ku Klux Klan, for his supportive coverage of the Magonistas, Zapatistas, and other Mexican Revolutionaries, and for his denunciations of United States imperialism. Like Anita, Dr. Garcia had experienced the Mexican Revolution first-hand.  It is hard to imagine that Anita Brenner and Alberto Garcia would not have met each other. 

The homesick Anita Brenner would have found solace at Dr. Garcia’s large two-story 19th-Century home on Newning Avenue in South Austin at the literary and social events hosted by him and his wife Eva for Mexican students at UT and St. Edwards College.  Dr. Garcia provided coverage of one of his parties the year before in his own newspaper: “the informal social gathering of young Mexicans from the university and young ladies from the Mexican neighborhood of Austin at the home of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia” was initiated by the singing of the Mexican National Anthem.  “Other Mexican songs were sung by some of the young people in attendance.  Tamales, atole, and capirotada bread pudding were served.”  Dr. Garcia may have provided Anita Brenner with her first introduction to vegetarianism. Dr. Garcia had been raised in the home of America’s most influential vegetarian, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, and received his initial medical degree from Dr. Kellogg’s medical school.  Later in life, Anita too would become a vegetarian.

Alberto and Eva Garcia with their children, 1922

Voice of a Prophetic Spirit

  • OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
The home of Alberto G. Garcia, 1214 Newning Avenue, Austin, Texas

After the end of her second semester at UT, Anita Brenner attended a séance at a home she later vaguely described as being at the edge of town.  Dr. Garcia’s home was on the other side of the River from UT and most of the rest of the town, surrounded by empty wooded lots and a mere nine blocks from the southern city limits. Some of the neighborhood public school students arrived barefoot from shacks along the creeks and hills outside the City limits; they were children of the clannish cedar choppers who spoke an Elizabethan English dialect.  Dr. Garcia indeed lived at the edge of town.

Dr. Garcia probably was one of Anita’s few trustworthy social contacts.  It is possible that the séance took place in the Garcia home, and if so, it would have been appropriately discreet for Anita not to identify the eminent Garcia’s as the hosts.  Dr. Garcia had long been an astrologer and now was initiating a serious but secret life-long interest in such things as yoga and magic rituals evoking spirits and gods.

            Anita arrived at the séance after it had begun.  A voice called out to her:

You do not believe, and your pain is greater because you have no faith.  Your heart is rebellious, and you set your own spirit as the only reality. 

Today life is terrible for you, you are a rebel in futility.  But you shall go to a strange land, and there many men will want you, and you shall see many things that only lofty spirits know.  You will reach truth if you have faith….  Through your hand you will tell to the world many radiant things, for you have the gift and need only your faith.  Peace be with you.

When the séance was over, Anita went home and immediately made arrangements to leave Austin.  She returned to her family in San Antonio, and after her 18th birthday moved to Mexico City. 

               Within weeks of arriving in Mexico City, Anita wrote to Austin friend Geraldine Aron about her new community of artists, “sculptors, writers, socialists, musicians, poets …. No snobbishness, prejudice, of any sort—racial, monetary, apparent.”    Among her many Mexico City friends and acquaintances were the painter Jose Clemente Orozco, Mexican Feminist Party founder Elena Torres, balladeer Concha Michel, and Maria Sandoval de Zarco, the only practicing female lawyer in Mexico.   Friends Edward Weston and Tina Modotti used her as a model in some of their iconic photos.  She developed a close and long-standing friendship with Diego Rivera, and later became friends with Frida Kahlo. 

Rivera had deep connections to the spirit world.  Present at his birth was his mother’s uncle, a Spiritist.  In the 1920s, Rivera was a member of the Mexico City Rosicrucian lodge, and as Anita Brenner noted, Rivera’s “sister is a clairvoyant and he believes in apparitions and ghosts.”  The sister was a folk healer and performed limpia ceremonies on Anita to remove evil spirits. 

Anita Brenner, photographed by Edward Weston, 1924. This photo has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Whereas in Austin, Anita had been a wallflower, many men in Mexico did want her professionally and personally, as predicted by the Austin spirit prophet.  “That love is free is a matter so accepted that no one ever thinks to bother to state so,” she wrote. The prominent artist Jean Charlot pursued Anita and she enjoyed flirtations and seductions with boyfriends.  Not that she was the most attractive or alluring woman in Mexico City.  In a diary entry she expressed envy of Tina Modotti and the diffuse joy Tina received from her “numerous cohabitations.” 

Tina Modotti, photograph by Edward Weston 1923.

After a lunch with her friend Concha Michel, Anita wrote the following:

We have the same philosophy, which recognizes sex as the key to things, and the plane upon which woman’s position is placed—and should be.  Since it is creative energy, it is for her to direct it.  To be able to do so, she herself must be physically pure.  Therefore vegetarianism.

Like Concha, Diego Rivera, Edward Weston, Mexican Communist Party head Rafael Carrillo, US Communist exiles Bert and Ella Wolfe and others (including Dr. Alberto Garcia) with whom she broke bread, Anita became a vegetarian

Anita Brenner, photograph by Tina Modotti 1926

In Mexico City, Anita Brenner became a prolific journalist, an art critic, and an assistant to Manuel Gamio, who was the top anthropologist in Mexico and a Rosicrucian.  At the age of 21, three years after leaving Austin, Anita Brenner began researching and writing a pathbreaking book that when published three years later would become both influential and acclaimed.  Idols Behind Altars celebrated and explained to the world Mexican art and its underlying indigenous spirituality.  One of the Mexican artists Anita wrote about was Fermin Revueltas, who had attended St. Edwards College in Austin for one semester in 1917. Another book followed—a history of the Mexican Revolution called The Wind That Swept Mexico.

Anita went to Columbia University in New York in 1927 where she became friends with fellow student Margaret Mead.  Anita earned a Ph.D. in anthropology under Franz Boas (the leading anthropologist of the era) – all without first ever having received a college undergraduate or master’s degree. 

In 1929, while a New York student, she picked up a Bible to see what it might have to say about the ancient history of Chaldea and Babylonia.  Spontaneously, out of nowhere, Anita was seized by a profound transcendent experience. 

I had the queerest of sensations, which mentally were translated into question and answer, much as this: Question: But what exactly must I do with my abilities….  Answer: Pick up the thread of uncompromising spiritual and ethical thought, which means fight against almost everything in modern thought around you … which also means keep yourself as pure and lofty of mind as you can.  [The experience] grew and grew and I had feelings of faintness and a tremendous sensation of being out of the world….  If I had seen anything “supernatural” I would not have been in the least surprised.  That was my mood….  And then I got a sensation of reluctance, because I realized the full implications of what the proposal was … and I nearly said aloud, “No, no, I am just an ordinary normal craftsman,” and I got burning sensations in my mouth … and not until I “submitted” did it stop; after which I was thoroughly exhausted.       

Anita continued spiritual pursuits.  After her friend and former Pancho Villa lieutenant Manuel Hernandez Galvan was murdered, she contacted him and carried out a conversation with him through a Spiritist automatic writing technique. 

In June of 1926, Diego Rivera had come over to her Mexico City apartment and the two had a long talk.  She wrote, “At midnight I was exalted and converted.”  She had become a revolutionary.  In 1932, Anita read the Bolshevik Leon Trotsky’s autobiography: “What a book and what a man. Inevitably getting more and more interested in things Marxian.”  The next year Anita interviewed Trotsky in Paris where he had gone to avoid Stalin’s assassins.  Trotsky predicted “a great war (I do not speak of a small preventative war)” initiated by a rearmed Germany.  And the transition from capitalism to socialism, prophesied Trotsky, would be measured in generations, not years.

From New York Anita Brenner devoted herself to international efforts to get a fair trial for nine African American boys convicted by an all-male and all-white jury in Alabama of raping a white woman.  In reversing the convictions, the U.S. Supreme Court established new precedent in recognizing both the constitutional right to counsel and the unconstitutionality of the exclusion of African Americans from juries.  

In 1933, Anita was interviewed by a female journalist who wrote that the petite, “vivacious, dark-haired Anita Brenner looks more like a college girl than a full-fledged author, registered anthropologist with a Ph.D from Columbia.  She greets her guests in green lounging pajamas, topped with a brightly flowered coat.  She bubbles with girlish enthusiasm, talking eagerly and shaking her short curls.”  That same year, Anita Brenner went to Spain as a war correspondent for The Nation and the New York Times Magazine.  The newly-established democratic government of Spain was threatened by fascist and other right-wing forces.  She found in Spain a country similar to Mexico, but in a continuing state of revolutionary transformation.  The Leftist government was supported and armed by the government of Mexico.  She wrote:

The most thrilling thing in Spain are the workers.  Revolution and all that really means something here.  Makes all our [United States] intellectuals’ committees and the ILD look awfully silly, because from this perspective it is plain that we were doing everything in a vacuum, and all the people who were doing it were miles away from being workers.

The genocide perpetrated by General Franco’s fascist forces (and fueled by Texaco oil and equipped by Adolph Hitler’s Germany) took a horrific toll on the Spanish democratic forces.  If this were not enough, Anita Brenner (now pregnant in 1936) took note that Joseph Stalin’s Communist newspaper Pravda had announced from Moscow: “As for Catalonia, the purging of Trotskyites and the Anarcho-Syndicalists has begun; it will be conducted with the same energy it was conducted in the U.S.S.R.”  Anita publicized the clandestine prisons and the assassinations managed in Spain by Stalinist operatives like Tina Modotti’s lover Vittorio Vidali. Anita exposed some of the activities of her former friend Tina Modotti as a Stalinist agent.

Returning to New York City in 1938, Anita and her husband threw a famous Day of the Dead Halloween Party attended by Frida Kahlo, philosopher-educator John Dewey, artist and designer Isamu Noguchi, and the ghostly Whittaker Chambers who had just left the Communist Party and was hiding out, fearing assassination.  During this time, Anita was also writing a column for Mademoiselle magazine. 

Frida Kahlo, photograph by Anita Brenner

Anita Brenner defended and sought refuge for many socialists targeted by Stalin and Hitler.  She played a critical role in helping protect Stalin’s greatest opponent, Leon Trotsky.  When she learned that Trotsky’s latest country of asylum had a new government with a Nazi SS Minister of Justice, she contacted Diego Rivera and convinced him to petition the President of Mexico to grant Trotsky asylum.  Asylum was granted and Trotsky moved into Diego Rivera’s and Frida Kahlo’s home in Mexico City.  Following an affair with Frida Kahlo, Trotsky moved into his own compound, where one of Stalin’s agents finally breached his security and killed him with a pickaxe as he worked at his desk. 

Leon Trotsky in his Mexico City home, at his desk where he was later assassinated

Anita Brenner never forgot Austin.  The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas holds a first edition copy of Anita Brenner’s 1943 book The Wind That Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution.  The book is autographed by her and inscribed to J. Frank Dobie. 

John Lomax (who popularized Ledbelly, Woody Guthrie, and Muddy Waters) with J. Frank Dobie.

The racism, anti-Semitism, and parochialism of Austin during the years 1922 and 1923 had made Anita miserable.  Yet an Austin séance she attended showed her a way out, filled her with confidence, and instantaneously propelled her into a future unforeseeable to anyone outside of the spirit world. At the séance, a spirit’s voice acknowledged her deep alienation in Austin and called her to greatness in another land where “many men will want you, and you shall see many things that only lofty spirits know” and “tell to the world many radiant things.” Whether she heard this voice in Dr. Alberto Garcia’s home or heard it in the home of one of the Spiritualists, Theosophists, Rosicrucians, Hermeticists or Oddfellows inhabiting Austin during those years, the prophecy turned out to be both accurate and transformative for Anita Brenner.

In the last years of her life, Anita returned to her family farm in Aguascalientes and revived it.  After her death, Anita was not forgotten in Aguascalientes.  Some years after her passing, an apparition said to be her was reportedly observed, according to her daughter, “about three feet off the ground…playing with children at the low-income housing project built on the farm’s orchards.  [S]he instructed the children to plant trees, to love and respect the earth.” 

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia (2020).  Susannah Joel Glusker, Anita Brenner: A Mind of Her Own (1998); Margaret Hooks, Tina Modotti (1993); Mexico Modern (Albrecht & Mellins, eds., 2017); Austin City Directory (1922).

#AnitaBrenner #AustinTexas #JFrankDobie #MexicanRevolution #DrAlbertoGGarcia #TinaModotti #Edward Weston #Frida Kahlo #DailyTexan #LeonTrotsky #Spirits #seances

Filed Under: Austin Texas History, Mexican History Tagged With: 'Leon Trotsky, aguascalientes, Anita Brenner, Diego Rivera, Edward Weston, Frank Dobie, Frida Kahlo, Ku Klux Klan, Mexican Art, séance, Tina Modotti

Recent Posts

  • SCOTTISH SECOND SIGHT
  • AMERICAN FASCISM and ANTIFA
  • AMERICAN FASCISM and ANTIFA Part I
  • Yui Sakamoto — another San Miguel de Allende Surrealist
  • Pedro Friedeberg

Categories

  • Austin Texas History
  • Brad Rockwell
  • Mexican History
  • Primitive Capital Accumulation
  • Second Sight
  • Uncategorized
  • Yoga

About the Author

Brad Rockwell is an attorney who divides his time between Austin, Texas and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Before law school, his advocacy with the Paddlewheel Alliance contributed to the permanent construction shut down of Indiana’s Marble Hill nuclear reactor. Brad also taught public-school in Michigan, worked in many Midwest factories, canvassed door-to-door in Chicago, and worked at Wheatsville Co-op in Austin, Texas. As a volunteer with Austin ACORN he helped design a lifeline electric rate structure for the City of Austin’s electric utility. Read More…

Copyright © 2023 · Dynamik Website Builder on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in