Violeta Miqueli's Direct Action Against State Violence

Violeta Miqueli Mayoz de González (Key West, 1891- New Jersey, 1972) was an educator and an active member of Cuban-American, Spanish-American, and anarchist groups in the United States. She organized direct action and wrote for Spanish-language periodicals in Key West, Tampa, New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Barcelona. Miqueli addressed the state’s systemic violence against workers in her writing: difficult access to education and healthcare, prosecution of dissenters, and disadvantaged legal defense for the poor. Like other anarcha-feminists of her time, she developed strategies of care to protect the people when the state did not. She contributed to workers' dignified education and health care and fostered solidarity among state prisoners. She also provided alternative sources of information to fight the state’s systematic oppression through her publications in the anarchist press. This essay accompanies Miqueli’s digital exhibit in “Fighting Fascist Spain—The Exhibits” (FFSTE)¹ but further interprets her direct action by building on archival, anarchist, and feminist historiography. It explores how anarchafeminists disseminated alternative visions of society using the state’s tools of freedom of association and the free press to fight against the state's structural top-down violence.