Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty was a Greek tailor and socialist who was an early activist in Mexico's mid-nineteenth century campesino movement, foreshadowing the Mexican Revolution in 1910.
Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty was born on October 14, 1828 in Athens, Greece to a member of Greek nobility and his Austrian wife. Rhodakanaty's father died during the Greek war for independence against the Turks, and his mother took him to Vienna. In 1848, Rhodakanaty traveled to Budapest to assist in the failed Hungarian uprising of that year. He traveled next to Berlin where he was exposed to the ideas of Hegel, Fourier, and Proudhon. In 1850, he visited Paris specifically to meet Proudhon after reading the latter's What Is Property? While in Paris, he learned of a plan by the Mexican government to encourage agricultural settlements. Inspired, Rhodakanaty began to make plans to organize a socialist colony in Mexico.[1]
In 1861, the same year he arrived in Mexico, he wrote Cartilla Socialista and began propagating the ideas of contemporary European thinkers, particularly Fourier and Proudhon. He published other radical essays, such as Neopanteísmo, founded journals, and established a school in peasant country. To support himself, he found employment at a school in Mexico City, and began to organize like-minded students.[1] A circle of followers emerged, including Santiago Villanueva, Francisco Zalacosta, Julio Chávez López, and José María Gonzales. These people and others would later form a nucleus in the early Mexican labor and peasant movements.[2]
Rhodakanaty is also known as the first Elder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico.[3]