In her thrilling political history Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (2022), Kelly Lytle Hernández narrates the story of Ricardo Flores Magón and the magonistas, the cadre of dissidents who fomented the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917), which ended Porfirio Díaz’s three-decade dictatorship.
Díaz first rose to cultural prominence in 1862 as the gallant Liberal army general whose Zapotec unit kept invading French troops from capturing Puebla and Mexico City. “The world marveled at the mestizo general who had led Zapotec fighters to victory against Napoleon’s army,” Hernández writes. The Liberal forces resisted French incursion for five years, finally dispatching the Europeans and crushing Napoleon III’s North American colonial desires in 1867. The wealth and tributes Díaz garnered following the war confirmed and amplified his legend. They also made him thirsty for more power.
During that battle in Puebla, Margarita Magón, a local woman aiding the Liberal troops on the supply line, met Teodoro Flores among the fighters. When Díaz (with support from Mexican exiles and U.S. industrialists) took the Mexican presidency by coup d’état in 1876, Flores signed a loyalty oath and marched into Mexico City with the general’s troops. Magón followed, bringing their young sons Jesús (1871–1930) and Ricardo (1874–1922). Enrique (1877–1954), their third son, was born after the family had settled in the capital.
Díaz maintained his power by selling Mexico’s human labor and natural resources on the cheap to U.S. industrialists and other foreign investors. And those investors expected Díaz to protect their interests. He used the capital he gained “to industrialize the Mexican economy, often with little regard for the rights and wellbeing of Mexico’s poorest citizens.” Díaz ruled by “patronage, arbitration, and benevolence.… He yoked nearly all political appointments to his person, so that his approval was required to win any public office in Mexico.” The henchmen he backed across the country, the rurales and the jefes políticos, were empowered to exercise repressive and rapacious force in their states and jurisdictions.
Though Flores and Magón expected “the new president to reward their years of loyalty,” Diaz did anything but. When his pension checks were stopped, Flores reached out to Díaz for help, but the president sent his former soldier only “a signed portrait of himself in return.” Flores died in 1893, leaving the family without resources or a home.
Hernández, a 2019 MacArthur Fellow and professor at UCLA, is also the author of Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (2010) and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (2017). Bad Mexicans gains its clarity and power from the author’s previous examinations of southwestern labor practices, the carceral system, and the evolution of U.S. southern-border policies. Claiming that “the history of the United States as a global power cannot be told without Mexico,” Hernández turns this supposition into gripping narrative action when she pivots from Díaz’s treachery to the Flores Magón family history: the book becomes a kind of borderlands revenge story with proletarian intellectuals as the actors, Ricardo Flores Magón chief among them.
After his father’s death, Ricardo, like Prince Hal descending into a Mexican Inferno, drank and gambled, befriended prostitutes, caroused in brothels, failed in a series of business ventures, witnessed itinerant laborers and those captured by anti-vagrancy dragnets, wandered throughout Oaxaca, and spent time in Valle Nacional and the Yucatán labor camps, “where employers shackled convict laborers at night, fed them by trough in the morning, and worked them to death during the day.” He discovered, in other words, the “underside of Díaz’s economic development.”
Five years later, Ricardo became a radical intellectual, inspired by his reading of anarcho-communists like Peter Kropotkin. Sharing a “deep animus toward the dictator” for betraying their parents and the country, Jesús and Ricardo launched a weekly newspaper, Regeneración, that called explicitly for the nation to regenerate its commitment to the 1857 constitution—“clean elections, a free press, and term limits,” as Hernández puts it. The Flores Magón brothers accused Díaz of killing off democracy while making Mexican citizens the “servants of foreigners.”
Regeneración became the hub of a vital resistance movement. It connected the Flores Magón brothers with fellow Mexican Liberals and collaborators in Mexico City, throughout the country, and in the borderlands. In 1901, when Díaz imprisoned Ricardo and Jesús and destroyed their printing press, Enrique, among other intellectuals and journalists, kept the paper alive. The brothers would eventually become central magonistas, the movement named after them, and members of La Junta, the organizing committee of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), the official anarcho-socialist political party that opposed Díaz’s political machine. When the brothers were released from Belem Prison in 1902, Jesús retired from dissident politics. Following their radical cohort north to Laredo, Texas, Ricardo and Enrique continued their agitation and anti-Díaz editorializing from outside Mexico.
As Hernández’s protagonists cross the border, U.S. racism becomes a crucial narrative feature. On the one hand, in Laredo, the brothers found “no fences, no concertina wires, no floodlights, and no wall” because back then, the Immigration Service “rarely prevented” Mexicans from entering the United States. Díaz’s brutal misgovernment, combined with the incentives (to be deducted from future pay) that U.S. employers and labor contractors offered prospective workers, “cranked open the spigot of Mexican labor migration to the United States.” Between 1900 and 1910, an estimated 100,000 Mexicans immigrated to the United States, adding greatly to the nation’s production power.
On the other hand, the magonistas found that settlers were grinding “white supremacy into everyday life,” clearing the land of Indigenous people, and making Mexican and Mexican American residents into a “racially marginalized workforce” throughout the American West. “Mexican American activists aptly dubbed these practices ‘Juan Crow,’” Hernández explains, because of their resemblance to the ones employed against African Americans in the Deep South.
Working both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border, the magonistas began publishing Regeneración again from south-central Texas; they aimed their headlines directly at the dictator: “Porfirio Díaz Is Not the Nation.” Expanding their activist network from Mexico City to Montreal, El Paso to Toronto, Laredo to Los Angeles, San Antonio to St. Louis, they ignited strikes at U.S.-owned Mexican mines and collaborated with anti-imperialist socialists like Eugene V. Debs and Mother Jones. The magonistas reshaped North American radical activism.
Fighting to maintain control, Díaz colluded with American officials against these “bad Mexicans,” setting up an apparatus to trace and trap the magonistas and dismantle their network. Like a cousin of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Bad Mexicans illustrates how surveilling racialized others, in this case Mexicans and Mexican Americans, advanced the professionalization of U.S. federal investigation.
The magonistas established the PLM, built an army, and developed their focos (their radical cell system). By 1908, armed PLM units, launched from the focos, had begun executing raids on northern Mexican towns. But when the revolution began in 1910, revolutionaries inside Mexico, like Francisco Madero, Pancho Villa, and Emiliano Zapata, sidelined the magonistas. Even after revolutionaries ousted Díaz in 1911, Ricardo Flores Magón refused to return to Mexico, remaining, instead, in a Los Angeles commune wedded to his anarcho-communist vision.
As Bad Mexicans closes, some ironies surface: When Díaz’s rule began waning, the United States turned away from him. The French, whose imperialist invasion had given Díaz a platform to power, offered him asylum; he died in Paris in 1915. After refusing to participate in armed conflict or the new government or even return to Mexico City, Ricardo later died in a U.S. prison. Under the influence of Russian anarcho-theory, his passionate radicality triggered regime change in Mexico seven years before the Russian Revolution began. Hernández’s initial contention seems too modest: while Mexico is, indeed, integral to the history of the United States as a global power, Bad Mexicans also demonstrates that the Mexican Revolution’s history is globally significant.•
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.
