“Bad Mexicans – Race, Empire & Revolution in the Borderlands,” by Kelly Hernandez, 2022
This is the history of the Magonistas, a group Hernandez asserts were the radical spark that started the Mexican Revolution against the dictator Porfirio Diaz due to their militant activities on the U.S. and Mexican borderlands. This review cannot do justice to the books extensive detail and fascinating story, but it will trace the main lines.
The Magonistas are named after their main leader, Ricardo Flores Magón, who started opposing the Diaz dictatorship in Mexico City, then fled across the border into the U.S. in 1904. Magón read Kropotkin, worked with the IWW and was an anarchist intellectual. In the U.S. his group gathered arms, volunteers and made propaganda, hunted by the forerunner of the FBI. This was because of their proletarian politics and numerous raids into Mexican territory.
The U.S. opposed the Magonistas because they threatened the mines, oil, land and railroads U.S. businesses owned in Mexico – its first large-scale imperial investing adventure, around $500M in 1907. The U.S. was in a tight relationship with Diaz, who had given U.S. capitalists carte blanche. They both wanted the Magonistas gone, as did the southern U.S. segregationists, who had initiated “Juan Crow” laws and lynchings of Mexicans.
DIAZ DICTATORSHIP
Hernandez' describes the long rule of Diaz, who controlled Mexico from 1876 to 1911. A hero of the battle of Puebla and a 'modernizer' from the Liberal Party, he challenged Catholic theocracy and the Mexican color 'casta' system of Euro-Mexicans. Diaz then used murder by the rurales, censorship, electoral fraud and patronage to rule. His modernizing involved liquidating bandits, getting loans to build railroads to the U.S., privatizing land and allowing robber baron capital to flow into rubber, steel and oil. Mexican capitalists also participated in the land grab and became fabulously wealthy too.
Against this formidable array, Magón and his two brothers began agitating, writing for a newspaper in Mexico City called “Regeneración.” After they took direct aim at the dictatorship, their printing presses were destroyed and they were sent to Belem Prison several times. Eventually all the dissident press was outlawed. In 1904 the group understood that writing was not possible in Mexico and some headed to Laredo, Texas, to begin another phase of the struggle.
BROWN BELT
The borderlands' 'brown belt' was a haven for various anti-Diaz activists, including indigenous Yaqui and Apache. The U.S. side is where Mexican labor built the U.S. economy. Magón quarreled with some over anarchism versus socialism or bourgeois democracy, and with others against radical lesbianism. The group finally got money to restart Regeneración from the wealthy Francisco Madero. The Magonistas were hounded from Laredo to San Antonio to St. Louis and finally to Montreal by U.S. police and Diaz agents. In the process they formed the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) and established 'focos' among supporters in Mexico and the U.S.
The crunch came in 1906 in Cananea, 40 miles south of the border, at a copper mine owned by an opportunist gringo. The PLM inspired a strike against a severe wage cut, toxic air, a company store and poor housing. The miners were met with refusals to negotiate, then fire hoses, then guns – over 40 were killed in cold blood, along with two white mine supervisors. This 'race' war was really a class war and Diaz sent his most feared Colonel to deal with it. A large group of Arizona Rangers headed south too, ignoring a government order that U.S. troops not enter Mexico unless asked. The strike was put down, its leaders sentenced to 15 years, but the incident was the first crack in the wall. This foreign gringo invasion in favor of a massacre started to turn the tide against Diaz.
The PLM and Magón issued a radical 52 Pt. Program for Mexico, though it was not an anarchist one re Church, state or property. One of its key demands was to return land to campesinos and the indigenous. It was distributed across Mexico, including to a new Regeneración subscriber in Morelos named Emiliano Zapata. PLM military units were formed, mostly of miners, campesinos and migrant laborers. Magón's anarchist style was “prepared spontaneity.” He assumed that armed attacks would then spread throughout Mexico. They did not.
THE UPRISINGS
At a signal from Magón, uprisings began in September, 1906. The town of Jimenez was raided and the mayor and police locked up, while city funds were seized. That success was temporary and attacks on 5 other border towns failed. Some PLM fighters were caught and deported back to Mexican 'justice' – a first U.S. use of deportation outside the Chinese. Attempts at extradition failed due to the political nature of their actions. Another raid on Cuidad Juarez in October 1906 failed due to informers.
Private detectives hired by Diaz penetrated the U.S. Post Office and began reading coded and ciphered Magonista mail. This led to arrests of key figures in Mexico and attempts at rendition, kidnappings and people going underground. Magón was now always on the run. He was finally jailed in 1907 in Los Angeles after a crowd of Mexican workers prevented his kidnapping. In trial he and 2 others were defended by a Socialist defense counsel, but jailed for 3 years for violating the Neutrality Act for planning attacks.
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| Magonistas in Baja, 1911 |
In June 1908, the PLM led a successful attack on Viesca, near Torreon, deep in Mexico, then fled. There was a bloody attack on Las Vacas across from El Paso, torpedoed by informers, and another failed foray into the small border town of Palomas. The new U.S. “Bureau of Investigation” arrested Magonistas who had participated in the raids based on seized letters. Yet by 1910 the PLM had established more focos throughout the border. In late December 1910 Magoninstas launched their last actions – a failed attack on the small town of Janos and the successful seizing of Mexicali, Tijuana and a few other small towns in Baja with the help of the IWW. Hernandez pictures this latter as somewhat absurd, as they declared an anarchist commune under the slogan "Land and Liberty." It was dominated by IWW anarchists with little support from the locals, and held on for some months in a chaotic fashion.
THE END
In 1908 Diaz, in a fit of incipient nationalism, began giving oil concessions to European capitalists, started taxing U.S. mining operations and in 1910 the State began buying up some railroads. This angered U.S. capitalists and the U.S. government and eventually ended their support for Diaz. A magazine series came out about labor slavery in Yucatan and turned many U.S. civilians against Diaz too. The burning of a Mexican worker in Texas by racists enraged all of Mexico. Madero had 'lost' the 1910 election and went to the U.S. and formed a new organization. He collected guns and eventually launched an attack on Casas Grandes, then Cuidad Juarez with the help of Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco. This successful battle, along with the mobilization of Zapata's forces south of Mexico City, led to the resignation of Diaz.
Magón refused to give up his extreme anarchist politics, pushed many former allies away, was jailed a number of times and finally died in Leavenworth Penitentiary. His body was eventually returned to Mexico City in the “Rotunda of Distinguished Persons,” a hero of the first phase of the Mexican Revolution.
The involvement of left-wing gringos in the Mexican revolts was used by the liberal Madero to attack the PLM as unpatriotic. The Magonistas – and this book covers many of them individually - were internationalists, even though many Mexicans viewed all gringos with suspicion. Generally laborers across Mexico and in the U.S. supported the PLM. Although their rebellion was somewhat inept, mostly defeated and early, all of insurgent Mexico, including Madero's forces, were inspired by their audacity and politics. Like the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, they foretold the future - a military defeat but a political victory.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Drug War Capitalism,” “NAFTA 2” or “USMCA,” “The Latino Question,” “Frida Kahlo,” “Viva Zapata,” “The Dawn of Everything,” “Dallas Buyers Club,” “Lacuna” (Kingsolver); “Tropic of Chaos” (Parenti); “Juan Crow,” “In Dubious Battle” (Steinbeck), “Mayans MC,” “Pancho Villa Underground Railroad,” "Easter Rising."
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
January 30, 2023
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