As you near the end of Kelly Lytle Hernández’s Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands, the September California Book Club selection, you might notice that it is not only a vivid story of rebels, revolution, and tyranny but also a careful excavation of the intellectual activity required to facilitate political change. Indie newspapers and journals played a central role in North America’s history during the first decade of the 1900s.
In 1900, the anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón, his brother Jesús, and Antonio Horcasitas launched a weekly newspaper, Regeneración, so named because it called for a regeneration of Mexico’s commitment to democratic principles. Early copies of the newspaper tried to avoid provoking President Porfirio Díaz, whose autocratic regime had allowed corruption to flourish, even as ordinary Mexicans fell into poverty, even as U.S. investors grew richer off the country’s resources. However, just before Díaz was sworn in for the sixth time, the paper published an article that criticized the Díaz regime under the guise of critiquing the German monarchy; soon after, Horcasitas left, and the brothers rebranded Regeneración as an “independent journal of combat.” They understood that words matter, that language can be used to undermine the dangerously powerful.
Regeneración wasn’t the first publication to fight political corruption in Mexico—a predecessor called Renacimiento had been founded to push for reform. But driven by Ricardo Flores Magón’s relentless personal and political convictions, Regeneración published particularly fierce, fearless, and sometimes incendiary critiques of Díaz. After rebranding, the newspaper swiveled to plain language to call out the regime: “authoritarian and despotic.” Over the course of Bad Mexicans, Hernández repeatedly returns to that newspaper’s resilience, and the popular support it found, as it cultivated the seeds of the Mexican Revolution and eventually served to bolster the work of the PLM (Partido Liberal Mexicano), the political party that Flores Magón and the magonistas organized to oppose Díaz. When the Flores Magón brothers fled to the United States, the newspaper’s operations went with them, and they continued agitating from beyond the Mexican border. Using words as weapons was not a lonely project. Other ink-stained men developed publications to push for change too.
During a period when Ricardo Flores Magón was in jail, one of the PLM fighters, Práxedis Guerrero, a skinny, blond poetry-writing vegetarian who was regarded by officials on both sides of the border as the leader of the Mexican revolutionists in Texas, set up a printing press. On it, he generated a short and irregular journal called Punto Rojo, made up of brief prose exhortations and quips. Hernández calls the journal “the Twitter feed of the printing-press era,” and it’s hard not to think of the extent to which activists in the United States made use of Twitter to organize and agitate during the social media platform’s healthy years. The goal of Punto Rojo was to gin up support for the anarchist movement by making its words easy to remember for people of any background. One message was “Beggar for freedom…beggar for bread…stop at once imploring and make demands instead. Stop waiting, and take!” Guerrero handed the journals out for free on the street in El Paso and sent copies across the borderlands.
Later, Guerrero would work with the Flores Magón brothers to relaunch Regeneración, penning articles that expressed the “shame, humiliation, and hunger” that hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants fleeing poverty and abuse in their country of origin faced when they came to the United States, including the humiliations inflicted by “Juan Crow,” such as the exclusion of Mexican children from white schools. His primary weapon was the pen, but unlike Ricardo Flores Magón, he understood its limitations in the face of the autocratic tactics used by the Díaz regime, and he urged fellow PLM leaders to be ready to take action.
Before Francisco Madero, another key figure in the Mexican Revolution, challenged Díaz in the 1910 presidential election, he wrote a treatise in preparation. It was about Mexican history and politics and corruption during Díaz’s reign. His national book tour allowed him to get in front of people to influence them with ideas he’d written about and to establish himself as a serious candidate and threat to Díaz’s reelection. Anti-Reelectionist Clubs were created. Madero and many of his supporters were arrested so that the election could be conducted without their votes. Madero lost in the rigged election—and started down the path toward violence.
Bad Mexicans recounts a drama that highlights the power of the press in organizing people to take action and giving them the intellectual basis for that action, but by book’s end, it also reveals that intellectual activity—all those words and ideas that stirred people up with a story different from the one the government was telling—had some limits when up against governmental power. Hernández explains, “Guerrero’s death and Flores Magón’s refusal to shift from word to deed—as well as his unpreparedness and incompetence as a military strategist—played major roles in the PLM’s quick decline as the revolution accelerated in the months ahead.”
What distinguishes Hernández’s from other, drier histories is its understanding of the personal and private dramas, the shifting alliances, that underpinned public action. A personal tragedy, slightly Shakespearean, grows toward the end of these pages. While Flores Magón is sketched throughout as one of the most fascinating leaders who brought about the Mexican Revolution, his rousing words in Regeneración did not win the economic decentralization and elimination of hierarchies for which he’d hoped. Hernández notes, and we’re taken aback to learn, unsure whether to laugh or cry or be horrified, that when PLM fighters asked for supplies, he sent copies of anarchist Communist Peter Kropotkin’s book The Conquest of Bread, which argues that capitalism thrives on poverty—let them eat books. Bad Mexicans suggests that as important as the press was to this revolution, as much as lofty intellectual ideas were able to influence ordinary people from all strata of society, the dispossessed would not spontaneously rise up on words alone.
Join us on September 21 at 5 p.m., when Hernández will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest Héctor Tobar to discuss Bad Mexicans. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
REIMAGINING PHILIP MARLOWE
Critic Paula L. Woods reviews Denise Mina’s The Second Murderer, featuring crime author Raymond Chandler’s detective character Philip Marlowe. Chandler’s estate has authorized other writers to publish Marlowe novels, but Mina, whose novels “toggle between noir’s dark humor and a contemporary feminist rage,” is the first woman so authorized. —Alta
CLIMATE OF RISING BOOK BANS
Oakland author Maggie Tokuda-Hall, author of the picture book Love in the Library, about her grandparents meeting in a Japanese incarceration camp, writes a powerful essay about being asked by Scholastic to eliminate references to racism in the book’s author’s note prior to publication. —Harper’s Bazaar
ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
Next month’s CBC author, Jennifer Egan, writes an empathetic long-form piece about homelessness in New York. —New Yorker
PAST INTERRUPTS PRESENT
Zyzzyva editor at large Laura Cogan interviews Los Angeles author Mary Otis about her debut novel, Burst, which features a conflicted mother-daughter bond. —Zyzzyva
ETHOS OF EFFICIENCY
Writer and director Cord Jefferson comments on generative AI, saying, “I hope there’s a way that we utilize the technology that isn’t all about getting rid of the inefficient human beings.” —Los Angeles Times
RESCINDED INVITATION
Actor Drew Barrymore was dropped as host of this year’s National Book Awards ceremony after she decided to bring her talk show back to the air, bypassing the show’s striking writers. (She has since reversed course.) —New York Times
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