The disenfranchisement of a group of people oftentimes begins with the usurpation and degradation of their homeland by those world powers that seek geographic and economic dominance. With Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands, the September California Book Club selection, Kelly Lytle Hernández is, perhaps, one of the few American historians to chart a sociopolitical history of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) that centers the border as an infrastructural and violent technology—a colonial and imperial tool for control—at once artificial and made real through hegemonic coercion.
The creation of an ever-shifting Mexico-U.S. border confounded and destabilized the communities who inhabited the spaces on both sides, thereby making those communities ripe for extractive labor schemes. Following the Mexican-American War in 1848, white Americans desired the lands of Indigenous and Mexican peoples. “To clear Mexicans from the land, settlers used other tactics, beginning with debt,” Hernández writes. “In Texas, the settler-dominated state legislature raised land taxes to a level that the region’s cash-poor ranchers could not afford, forcing many Mexican landholders either to sell valuable parcels to finance tax payments or to slip into delinquency, which allowed sheriffs to auction off their properties cheaply.”
This displacement was also key to the deracination of Mexicans within their homeland, which led to the mass migration of Mexicans to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. After Porfirio Díaz secured his illegitimate presidency via a coup d’état in 1876, he dispossessed native Mexicans of their lands for easy financial gain. Hernández notes that “tens of thousands of U.S. investors rushed in, ranging from the Rockefellers to one-pick miners, making Mexico the first country where U.S. citizens made significant foreign investment. U.S. citizens soon controlled key sectors of the Mexican economy: railroads, oil, and mining. By 1900, they owned 130 million acres, amounting to one-quarter of Mexico’s arable land.”
When people are stripped of the ties to their home, poverty is often the outcome. People become desperate to earn enough money and sustenance to survive in a new and increasingly harsh reality, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation. Indeed, President Díaz worked to “guarantee pliant labor.”
The financial desperation of an exploited people is fertile ground for the creation of a hierarchical social order. The exploitation was not contained by Mexican borders. The U.S. investors who had come in “saw Mexico as a satellite, a source of raw materials for U.S. industries and trade. They built mines, extracted petroleum, and invested in large agricultural enterprises. They did not invest in producing the basic food commodities Mexicans needed to live.… The average rural family struggled to earn enough to eat.”
In addition to the brazen economic exploitation by outsiders encouraged by Díaz, there were other social consequences. “U.S. settler citizens expected Mexico’s labor migrants to bow to the settler order,” Hernández states. However, the first step to any revolution is not necessarily discontent itself but rather people demonstrating the bravery to organize this energy toward empowering others to reclaim what’s been lost.
Enter the magonistas, whom Díaz called “bad Mexicans.” They were “poor men and women, mostly miners, farmworkers, and cotton pickers, many of them displaced from Mexico when President Díaz gave their land to foreign investors.” Brothers Jesús and Ricardo Flores Magón organized a grassroots movement for the freedom of all oppressed Mexicans in Mexico and the United States.
“Across the American West, Mexico’s labor migrants struck for higher wages, challenged the tenets of Juan Crow, and even joined the magonistas. When they did, the consequences could be brutal.”
Such consequences included white Americans lynching Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Bad Mexicans begins with the 1910 murder of Antonio Rodríguez, which catalyzed the Mexican Revolution. Hernández argues that the birth of the magonistas’ cross-border revolutionary movement forever bound the histories of Mexico and the United States and informs the nature of today’s discourse on U.S.-Mexico political and border relations and labor organizing at large.
“The riots in Mexico that followed Rodríguez’s lynching were not merely a protest against yet another incident of racial violence in the United States,” she writes. “They represented a rebellion against the unchecked power of U.S. citizens, namely Anglo-Americans, over Mexican lands and lives on both sides of the border.”
Hernández stages the mutual allyship that existed across different geographies to suggest that the history of the Mexican Revolution will always remain incomplete without considering the networks of solidarity and resistance that pulsed through the United States and Mexico. In this way, Bad Mexicans is not just a book about the great central figures who propelled a movement but also a book that captures a people’s history: their risk, bravery, and collective vision.•
Join us on September 21 at 5 p.m., when Hernández will appear in conversation with a special guest and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss Bad Mexicans. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
CINEMATIC GAMBITS
Culture writer Chris Vognar writes about movies that, like Bad Mexicans, tackle the Mexican Revolution. —Alta
PERSONAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY
CBC editor Anita Felicelli reviews author Myriam Gurba’s latest book, Creep: Accusations and Confessions. —Alta
SEPTEMBER RELEASES
Here are 16 exciting new books by authors of the West being published this month. —Alta
DEEP LISTENING
Poet Matthew Zapruder interviews poet Victoria Chang, the winner of the second annual Chowdhury Prize in Literature. — Air/Light
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