About the Author

I have written a dozen books of history and politics, but this is my first novel that draws both on history and on my own personal experience.

I was born in Chicago in 1945 but from the age of 11 grew up in Imperial Beach, California, which sits on the shore of the Pacific Ocean and shares a border with Tijuana. My interest in Mexico dates from my first encounter at that time, going with grandfather to Tijuana to get haircuts, buy gasoline, soda pop, tortillas, and meat. I went to junior high school in the border town of San Ysidro and to Mar Vista High School in Imperial Beach with fellow students some of whom crossed the border from Tijuana every morning.

After studying at Southwestern Community College and graduating from San Diego State College in 1968, I was for three years a graduate student in Literature at the University of California at San Diego studying with Frederick Jameson and auditing classes with Herbert Marcuse. In 1969, I joined the International Socialists and read Max Shachtman and Hal Draper, both former Trotskyists, whose ideas greatly influenced my views. During the late 1960s, I became an anti-war activist and in the 1970s a labor union activist and for a while a community organizer in a Spanish-speaking community in Chicago.

Later in the 1990s, after returning to graduate school in History, I received a Fulbright Fellowship for my doctoral dissertation “‘Slackers’: American War Resisters and Communists in Mexico, 1917-1927” (University of Cincinnati, 1998.) While doing research for my dissertation, I lived in the Coyoacán neighborhood of Mexico City, not far from the fortress-home of Leon Trotsky and the Blue House of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, both of which had been turned into museums. For twenty years, from 1994 to 2014, I edited the union publication Mexican Labor News and Analysis. Over the years I wrote several books about Mexico’s labor and social movements, as well as books on other topics. I am an editor of New Politics: An Independent Socialist Journal.

This novel is an attempt to understand and come to grips with Leon Trotsky and his legacy.

I now live in Brooklyn, New York with my wife Sherry Baron. We have three wonderful sons and three fantastic granddaughters.