Obrero Espirita, El.
Periodico Mensual. Organo del Circulo Espiritista "Amor y Progreso".
Hacia Dios por el Bien y la Ciencia
1906--1913? Weekly, monthly quarterly, bimonthly
H. Cuautla, Morelos, Mexico; El Paso, TX; Mexico, D.F., Mexico.
Language: Spanish.
Editor: Victor Villar.
Publisher: Circulo Espiritista "Amor y Progreso".
1/1, November 1906. Free of charge.

The journal was the work of Victor Villar, a Spanish-born merchant, and his wife, Matilde Rivera, a "speaking and writing medium" who also edited (as Matilde R. de Villar) the feminist Despertador Mental and Helios. They are said to have started the journal in 1899, the same year that they formed the Spiritualist Center "Amor y Progresso" in Cuautla (in Morelos, south of Mexico City), but the issue for November 15, 1910, notes that the journal was just entering its fifth year -- despite the fact that the masthead for that issue lists it as "Ano VI, num. 55," clearly a typographical error for "Ano V"). The journal was probably begun in response to the Primero Congreso Nacional Espirita held in Mexico City in April-May 1906 in which Villar figured as founder of the Circulo Espiritista "Amor y Progreso" with no mention of this journal. The journal combined a standard spiritist approach with "estudios psicologicos" (psychical research), and reform. All of the spiritualist journals in Mexico that had any political slant at all were of the left in the years surrounding the spiritualist and occultist Francisco I. Madero's election to the presidency of Mexico in 1911, and this journal was no exception as is evident from the name of the society it represented, "Love and Progress" -- progress being a code word for the left in Mexico as in much of the rest of the world. On Madero and his relationship with Arnoldo Krumm Heller, see the note under Cruz Astrl. The journal is said to have been published from El Paso, Texas, September-November 1910-February-May 1911 when Madero was in exile, and from Mexico City in 1912 when Villar was forced by the civil war to move there from Cuautla. The journal carried typical Kardecist discourses by mediums and also articles on "Notable Mediums," "filosofismo Espirita," and regular news of spiritualist activities and growth around Latin America. Matilde R. went on to edit Helios and the feminist Despertador Mental.