Announcing the Special Guest for ‘Bad Mexicans’

In his latest, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino,” Héctor Tobar writes, “From the very beginnings of United States history, the violence required to maintain the unequal, race-centered social order of the United States has transformed the people in whose name those acts are carried out. Put another way, acts of genocide, enslavement, and exploitation eat away at their perpetrators and enter their collective subconscious.”

Too often, the history of California, which is full of resistance and unexpected solidarities, has been suppressed in favor of an individualist mythos, one that favors settlers who came west and built capitalist hierarchies. The mythology leads us to empty conversation about, among other things, the border that the West shares with Mexico. It’s a dialogue that breaks down into abstractions and pat commentary about the law, boundaries, and procedure. But who keeps the complex history, the history of ordinary people, that gave rise to the conditions in which we now live?

With Our Migrant Souls, Tobar, who is also a professor, relates stories that too infrequently receive our collective attention, some of them his and his family’s, some of them his Latinx students’. The stories are tied together by reflection on migrations and identity. He emphasizes Latinx as an identity that’s often subject to negative stereotypes and that lacks some of the interesting specificities of the many communities that share this larger umbrella label, this larger mythology that discounts their participation in U.S. history. Tobar explains, “A farcical and inhuman history turned us into ‘brown’ people and ‘Hispanics’ and ‘illegal aliens’ and ‘spics.’… We can begin the exploration of our ‘identity’ by understanding the connections between this larger story and the communities that have formed us.”

In Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands, Kelly Lytle Hernández brilliantly homes in on the tapestry of history that drove increased migration from Mexico into the United States more than a century ago. It’s a story of invasions, of a regime that chose to defer to the craven desires of U.S. investors (a group that Hernández calls “a who’s who of robber baron America”) rather than develop strong plans to address the needs of the people, a choice that carried all the racial baggage of Mexico’s own racial hierarchy.

While he doesn’t expressly address the motley global history of the magonistas, the contemporary conversation that Tobar meditates on in his book rests in part on that larger story, which Hernández could only tell by sharing the lives of memorable personalities. Who can forget, for instance, the contrast between Porfirio Díaz and Ricardo Flores Magón that Hernández surfaces through colorful detail? Díaz was all action and strategy, though he wept over slaughtering even his enemies—he was a man whose mentor said, “If we’re not careful…Porfirio could kill us while crying.” Emboldened by a personal grudge against Díaz, Flores Magón was a verbally ruthless journalist, animated by radical, intellectual ideas, and his harshly uncompromising stances, both political and personal, snuffed out his final attempts at action and wrote him out of the revolution to which he’d been a key party.

We’re pleased, then, to welcome Tobar to the conversation with Hernández and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss Bad Mexicans. Tobar is a previous CBC author, whose novel The Barbarian Nurseries was the featured book in December 2021. Tobar’s other books include The Tattooed Solider, The Last Great Road Bum, and Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free, which was a New York Times bestseller and adapted into the film The 33.

Tobar’s short stories have been selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2016 and 2022. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction for 2023–2024. Tobar has been a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and its bureau chief in Buenos Aires and Mexico City and has contributed to the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, National Geographic, and the New York Times opinion pages.

Every large, sweeping story is made up of many smaller stories, individual lives and personalities. As critic John Berger wrote, “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.” The mythology of California has long excluded some of its most vibrant and fascinating and, yes, difficult stories. No longer. Don’t miss what we anticipate to be an intellectually cutting-edge discussion among consummate storytellers about California’s founding, history, and stratification before and after the Mexican Revolution.•

Join us on September 21 at 5 p.m., when Hernández will appear in conversation with Tobar and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss Bad Mexicans. Register for the Zoom conversation here.

the junta organizadora of the plm in 1910

El Hijo del Ahuizote

GLOBAL HISTORY

Critic Walton Muyumba (The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism) explores the domestic and international elements of the Mexican Revolution in Bad Mexicans. —Alta

counterpoint llc

EROSION OF CIVIL LIBERTIES

Scott Dickensheets interviews author Tod Goldberg about his latest, Gangsters Don’t Die, the conclusion of the Gangsterland trilogy. —Alta

Marissa Leshnov

CHAMPION OF BOOKS

Paul Yamazaki, book buyer at City Lights Bookstore and a CBC selection panelist, will receive the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. —Los Angeles Times

Jason Holley

“IMPECCABLE TEXAS BONA FIDES”

Tracy Daugherty’s biography Larry McMurtry: A Life insists that “McMurtry’s deep knowledge of and frequent disdain for [Texas] was a combustible mixture that fueled his writing.” —Texas Monthly