No Dam Can Hold This Furious Ocean: Power, Joy, and Anarchism

A trans anarchist from Yucatán puts festivity, love, and art at the heart of revolution.

First published in Spanish in 2024, Alf Bojórquez's No Dam Can Hold This Furious Ocean combines memoir, history, and political theory to poetically explore relations between urban squatters and Indigenous Mayan land defenders; between European anticapitalist revolts and the Yucatán carnival festival; and between her own life as a young, trans skater punk in Yucatán, Mexico, and those of anarchism's famous rebels of the past.

An attack on the racism and machismo that have narrowed the message and reception of anarchism, Bojórquez deftly places her own experience in audacious dialogue with the lives and writings of Bakunin, Marx, Le Guin, and many others. In her contact with the struggles of Indigenous anti-state communal movements, Bojórquez shows how breaking inherited social bonds can simultaneously embrace long-standing radical traditions of creative world-making.