Gilly: Intellectual and Activist-Writer

ADOLFO GILLY HAS died. He was one of Latin America’s deepest thinkers, most brilliant writer-activists. While Gilly was one of the best known leftwing public intellectuals in Latin America, far too few of his works have been made available in English, aside from his well-known and highly regarded analysis of the Mexican Revolution, La revolución interrumpida, written during a six-year stint in Mexico’s Lecumberri prison.

Verso books also just published his Paths of Revolution, a rich selection of Gilly’s essays showing the breadth of Gilly’s revolutionary activities and accompanying journalism, from Cuba to Bolivia to Guatemala and Mexico. One of Gilly’s many gifts was his ability to explain theoretical concepts in accessible and attractive language without “vulgarizing” ideas, but rather enhancing understanding. Adolfo Gilly spent many years in what others on the left thought was a rather crazy sect, the Posadistas, and he emerged with a profound respect for the passionate militancy of comrades, even when they spouted nonsense.

I was always impressed with Adolfo’s politics, his kindness, his sardonic humor — and his artistic sensibility. One of the talks Gilly gave at the 1987 conference at the Museo-Casa Trotsky, organized by Olivia Gall, was a brilliant explication of Vlady’s Kibalchich’s (Victor Serge’s son) tryptich, three huge panels on the theme of Trotsky’s death. I was sitting with Vlady in the audience and was mesmerized by Gilly’s understanding of Vlady’s art, whose explanation was ever clearer than Vlady’s own.

Adolfo died in the same month as Sieva Volkov, Trotsky’s grandson and Gilly’s friend. It is hard to take in.

Suzi Weissman

Gilly: Historian, Teacher, Mentor

by TODAY ADOLFO GILLY left, a great among the great historians of the revolution and the post-revolution in Mexico.

Our dear teacher also left. The first time I took a class with Gilly was when he came to Mexico from Italy to give some classes at UNAM, before the Mexican government decided to grant him naturalization. The classroom of the Faculty of Economics in which he taught was packed. Every time he referred to something very critical about Mexican politics, he told us “if I say this, they’re going to apply number 33* to me” … but, he laughed, “there you go.”

Later I attended, over several semesters, his seminar on the History of the Mexican Revolution in the FCPYS postgraduate course. Adolfo was a great teacher, perhaps the best of all the teachers I had at that time and have ever had.

Today my mentor Gilly also left, who closely followed the process of my doctoral research on Trotsky in Mexico. I was lucky to have his wisdom, his hopelessly critical spirit, his ironic gaze, his strong passion for history and politics, his rigorous opinions, his scolding, and his incessant recommendations and warnings.

Years later, when Adolfo spoke of Friedrich Katz, who had published his monumental Pancho Villa, he referred to him as “my commander Katz.” At that point he himself was already writing the biography of General Felipe Ángeles.

The last time I saw him I referred to his Argentine origin. He scolded me: “Argentine me? No way, I’m Mexican!”

Dear Adolfo, we are going to miss you very much, we are going to miss you always.

*El 33” refers to the 33^rd Constitutional Amendment, which states that a foreigner can be expelled from Mexico if his or her presence in the country is considered “inconvenient.”

Olivia Gall