Kelly Lytle Hernández is a writer with a project: to make history relevant. In her third book, Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands, that means working the seams between academia and the public, and the United States and Mexico. For Hernández, the place where all this comes together is the border, which is a landscape unto itself. Bad Mexicans tells the story of the Mexican Revolution through the lens of a U.S.-based resistance group, the magonistas. Her intention is to reframe that era more broadly. Recently, Hernández and I spoke about her work via Zoom.
This article appears in Issue 24 of Alta Journal.
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You’ve referred to the need to open history to your readers’ experiences.
With Bad Mexicans, I was writing for relatively young Latinx readers, 16 to 45, and for social justice organizers. I wanted to make sure I was telling a story where they saw themselves. Growing up, I knew I stood on the shoulders of people like Harriet Tubman and Ella Baker and Ida B. Wells. That gave me power from a very young age. Anything was possible if they could do what they did. I could certainly write a book or two, right? I want to provide examples to folks that there are radical, anti-capitalist, anti-racist possibilities and lineages to hold on to and shoulders to stand on as they move through the world. It’s a real honor to hold these stories and engage with community members about them.
It’s a reclamation in a certain sense.
Something I held close when I was writing this book was the stereotype of Mexican immigrants as laborers alone, not as political actors, not as intellectuals, not as people who have made history. I wanted to recapture that dynamic, that dimension, the idea that migrant workers, miners, and cotton pickers then and now are integral intellectuals and political actors who can advance justice for all of us. If you can make someone as powerful as Teddy Roosevelt have to send out the military to suppress your activity, you are a significant historical actor. We need to bring this story to the fore.
What surprised you most with Bad Mexicans?
What I am doing with this book is situating the story within U.S. history. That’s new, right? I’m dislodging these events from a familiar location, putting them somewhere new, and thinking about what that teaches us. Once I did the dislodging work and reframed the magonista story, I started to see all the weapons of the settler state and white supremacy wanting to suppress their organizing, and it became more clear how central they are and how we can chronicle U.S. history through their story. When we talk about suppression of radicals and labor organizers in the early 20th century, we should be talking about the magonistas. We should be talking about radical Mexican immigrants as a part of that narrative. You really can’t tell modern U.S. history without Mexico and Mexicans and Mexican Americans. But Mexican Americans have been written out of the story, so this is one way we can begin to incorporate this large and extraordinary population. We have to reckon with a deep history written into the DNA of the border around issues of freedom and race.
Bad Mexicans is a work of scholarship. But you’re also writing for the public square. How do you balance those different registers?
I’m firmly committed to engaging in the debates of the public, as you put it. I think we are fighting for our relevance. I guess we always have been, but we need to prepare ourselves to engage in the public sphere. That’s complex enough in its own right because there are many audiences. The traditional book world is one. Organizers are an entirely different audience. Then there are Mexican American readers, who have been ignored by the publishing world. So the multiple registers are also in the public square, and that’s enough work, in and of itself, to make sure a multitude of communities can see how these histories align with their own.
Why do you write?
There’s a clear arc in all the books I’ve written, beginning with Migra!, which was a history of racially biased immigration and policing in the borderlands, and continuing with City of Inmates, which involves immigration and policing in the carceral capital of the world, Los Angeles. Bad Mexicans is another story, not just of race, immigration, and the police state but also of revolution and revolutionaries. So these are all part of a story I’ve been telling about my homeland, which is the borderlands. I’m from San Diego, and I want to surface stories of interracial solidarity and revolutionary possibilities amid the current crises, which you can understand as the carceral state or the police state. •
W.W. Norton & Company BAD MEXICANS: RACE, EMPIRE, AND REVOLUTION IN THE BORDERLANDS, BY KELLY LYTLE HERNÁNDEZ
