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

Alf Bojórquez

Translated by Jean Mondegrín

Release date: August 1, 2026

ISBN: 979-8-9997930-6-5

Festivity has always been and remains one of our most powerful political weapons.

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 Yucatan carnival festival — and between her own life of as a young, trans skater punk in Yucatan, 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 an audacious dialogue with the lives and writings of Bakunin, Marx, LeGuin, and many others. In her contact with 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.

Alf Bojórquez is a trans and non-binary writer from Yucatán. Alf is a radio artist and public educator who has conducted workshops in Latin America, the United States, Europe, Morocco, and the Philippines. She is a 2024 winner of the Moving Narratives Award for artists with a social impact, awarded by the Prince Claus Fund and the British Council Arts. She is the author of the novel Pepitas de Calabaza (Fondo Blanco, 2023). Her second novel, Cocamex, is set in a contemporary Mexican revolution taking place in an alternate timeline. This is her first book to appear in English.

Jean Mondegrín is a translator and editor who has lived and worked in Canada, South Korea, the UK, and Brazil, and is currently based in Mexico City.

Praise for No Dam Can Hold This Furious Ocean:

“When I first learned about anarchism, I was sitting around a campfire with some teenage friends, secretly drinking mezcal after a town meeting in Ayutla, in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca. I didn't understand much about what it was, but from then on I had a lot of questions. I vaguely felt there was something linking that word to the tequios, the community work, that we had been doing since elementary school. Since then I have searched for that connection, but anarchism always felt somewhat distant, perhaps too urban and excessively academic, once again obscuring the close relationship I sensed between something like punk and the communal spirit of the Sierra… But then, someone who knows how to weave arrived, and my teenage suspicion found, in the fabric of this book, the words it needed. By weaving together the threads between our mountain experience and anarchism (which I had always read as something European), this work shows how both can be the warp and weft of the same fabric. Radically opposed in climate, Yucatán and Siberia find common ground in this book.”
—Yásnaya Aguilar, Ayuujk (Mixe) linguist and philosopher, author of A We Without A State.