When revolutionaries spring to mind, one’s next thought is not, typically, of stamps. Or literary journals, or poetry, for that matter. Yet one of the great heroes of Kelly Lytle Hernández’s riveting history of the magonistas, the rebels who ignited the 1910 revolution in Mexico from within the United States, is not the gun but the plain old post office. Before hashtags and Twitter threads, it was by letter that a revolution’s ideas traveled, and the magonistas sent letters in droves. They had to. Due to the cozy relationship between the regime of Porfirio Díaz and U.S. capitalists, Mexico was able to delegate its harassment of the magonistas to local U.S. law enforcement, who chased Ricardo Flores Magón and his cohorts across the borderlands in Texas, Arizona, and California for nearly a decade. Astonishingly, out of the missives magonistas sent on the fly, newspapers were made, printed, and smuggled back into Mexico, from Coahuila to Monterrey.
In time, their letter codes were cracked, and many of the magonistas were jailed, sent back to Mexico on trumped-up charges, or killed. Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands tells the remarkable, disturbing story of how, in tracking the magonistas, the United States and Mexico pioneered the full register of techniques now deployed by the U.S. along its southern border and on frontiers around the world: deportation, extraordinary rendition, black sites, and high-tech surveillance. Back at the turn of the 20th century, this meant simply opening—illegally—the revolutionaries’ mail and directing security contractors (think Pinkerton agents but worse) to keep watch over the magonistas wherever they went, from Los Angeles to St. Louis, for 24 hours a day. Out of this heritage grows companies like Blackwater.
This is an astoundingly well-told book, and because of the volume of letters at its core, Hernández can provide us—more than a century later—with an almost front-row seat to the revolution. Back and forth, north and south, as we follow Flores Magón, his brothers, his compatriots, and their U.S. sympathizers—from Ida Tarbell and Mother Jones to Jack London—their insurrection moves from a fringe movement to a cause célèbre. Researching this evolution must have required a staggering amount of archival work, but Bad Mexicans wears Hernández’s efforts lightly. It is not a data dump, or a book about revolutionary strategy, but a vivid tale of how a group collectively seeks liberation, told in the voices of its central protagonists.
Chief among the book’s voices, though, is that of the group’s antagonist, Porfirio Díaz himself. He was a poor child, brought up by a single mother, who clawed his way into the military when a coup seemingly happened every month. Following decades of chaos, Díaz maneuvered to secure the presidency of a debt-ridden and exhausted country. His promises to the nation were stability and growth, and on these he delivered. He quickly bought back Mexico’s debt on capital markets, cracked down on bandits, and hard-wired Mexico into the global economy. Within decades, Laredo and El Paso were connected to Mexico City by rail, and this in an era before passports, before extensive paperwork needed to be filed to cross into the United States.
Along the way, however, Díaz essentially gave the rights to Mexico’s resources—its mines, its railroads, its oil, its land—to a very small group of U.S. capitalists. He needed their wealth for the country to grow. The results were mind-blowing. By 1910, 80 percent of Mexican railroad stocks were controlled by Americans. Oil was even more concentrated. Edward Doheny might have been known as a Los Angeles oil tycoon, but most of his wealth came from Mexican soil. As a result, for many of the great robber barons at the turn of the century, Mexico was their treasure chest. Meanwhile, these rights to resources were being taken from Mexican citizens, especially the Indigenous, who had been disenfranchised from their own land and often even wound up working on haciendas where they’d once lived.
To enforce this vast transfer of wealth, Díaz used the power of the word and the fist. The latter is expected, but the former less so from a man who’d grown up as he had. In a remarkable passage, Hernández describes the president’s day in his prime. He often rose at 6 a.m. and, after a bath, dedicated several hours to dictating letters. Following a break, he read some newspapers and then went back to more letter writing. Astonishingly, he responded to every letter ever sent to him and in the course of his presidency sent some one million in return. “In homes across Mexico,” Hernández writes, “a drawer held a letter from the president.”
Increasingly, what these homes didn’t hold was criticism of him. Although he claimed the presidency promising never to run for reelection, Díaz reversed this position and didn’t look back. To ensure his victories, he resorted to tighter and tighter restrictions on free speech. By 1882, as Mexico’s economy had risen, he’d convinced Congress to pass a law that defined criticism of the government as libel. And this was dangerous. Not only had he quickly built a system of patronage, in which all governors owed their fortunes to him, but he had also created a set of shock troops, the rurales, who roamed the country and often shot Díaz’s victims in the back, “a technique permitted under the ley fuga, the law of flight,” Hernández writes, which other historians have called Mexico’s version of the lynch law.
The magonistas—led by the brothers Jesús, Enrique, and, most enduringly, Ricardo Flores Magón—had the temerity to say what was happening in public. The brothers were, in essence, born to the impossible odds of their task. Their parents had met carrying munitions for the troops during the siege of Puebla, when a small group of Mexican soldiers held off Napoleon’s advancing army. Ricardo and Jesús studied law, but Ricardo read the most widely, taking in Peter Kropotkin, whose theories of mutual aid have been crucial to revolutionary movements around the world (and formed the central idea of Rebecca Solnit’s California Book Club selection, A Paradise Built in Hell, which challenges the notion that in crisis, social order breaks down and people fight one another rather than help).
Ricardo Flores Magón also read Emma Goldman, but he didn’t need to look to the United States to find female socialists or revolutionaries. Bad Mexicans is full of portraits of women who took part in incendiary change, such as Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, “an autodidact from the mountains of Durango,” as Hernández describes her. “She was the daughter of a landless rural blacksmith and, like many among the rural poor during the nineteenth century, she never knew her birthdate.” She lived with her husband, who was a miner, and her three children, one of whom would die during infancy. Over the course of Bad Mexicans, she launches her own feminist anarchist literary journal, leaves the north, comes to Mexico City, and participates in many of the most crucial turning points along the road to revolution.
There were more, some girlfriends and wives, some gun smugglers and sundry others. Hernández records Flores Magón’s attitude toward the role of women as mixed, even as he depended on them for sustenance and often safety. They were also involved in crucial ways with the circulation of his newspaper, Regeneración, which began in 1900 and called out the need for reform in Mexico. These calls landed the Flores Magón brothers in jail, which only bolstered their credibility and their determination to speak out. By 1905, the continued threat of imprisonment meant they had to move the newspaper to the United States, and thus began their life on and off the run. For as soon as the Díaz regime could, it called on its U.S. counterpart to shut down the organ that was disseminating revolutionary fervor into the population.
It would not be easy—Ricardo Flores Magón’s followers were strong and determined. New presses were often made available to them. Railway workers could carry the newspapers far and wide quickly and have them distributed within hours in major cities across the United States. A range of people were involved in the magonistas’ cause: They were landed; they were poor. They were college-educated; they were day laborers.
As Bad Mexicans chronicles the growth of this movement, it draws a few key aspects of Mexican migrant labor at the turn of the century into focus. Mexican labor had of course built much of the United States, and yet in 1900, many Mexican Americans suffered under “Juan Crow,” a system of stigmatization and discrimination that assumed many shapes, from limits on where they could eat and drink and sit and travel in public to threats to their very life and safety. Hernández makes clear that they knew their rights and how unfair this treatment was, often in cases that revolved around violence.
Several lynchings of Mexican men ignite riots and protests across this book, but just as many court cases underscore the growing clarity among Mexican laborers of their rights within the United States. One of the most memorable in the book involves Gregorio Cortez, a farmer who, after a violent encounter with Texas lawmen over a crime he hadn’t committed, went on the run and eluded up to 200 horseback riders for 10 days before finally being captured. A posse formed and stormed the jail where he was being kept, but a local Mexican newspaper, La Crónica, run by Jovita Idar and her family, kept his story as front-page news and with the pressure of the media saved his life. Later, with the power of a good lawyer, he also gained his freedom.
Hernández makes plain that in taking their revolution on the run, the magonistas were not just doing what was necessary but tapping into old myths becoming new again in the United States about bandits who thumbed their noses at power. In many cities, Spanish-language newspapers that circulated there ensured that whenever magonistas were arrested, held a rally, or were led from a jail, a crowd of well-wishers came out to greet them and cheer them on in their fight against what was essentially a Goliath: the full weight of the U.S. government.
They occasionally wound up with money on their side. Camilo Arriaga, who was part of the Regeneración newspaper from its earliest days, brought a crumbling family fortune with him. Later, Práxedis Guerrero, who was born on a hacienda, joined their cause and helped to keep the paper alive, as the political platform that it spread became increasingly focused on the removal of Díaz. In Los Angeles, the paper was restarted with the help of well-to-do socialists. Ultimately, these connections came in handy when a member of the cadre in Los Angeles, Anselmo Figueroa, was able to call on someone he’d met at a local socialist meeting—Job Harriman, one of the most famous prosecutors and socialists in the United States—to defend Flores Magón and three magonistas, once they’d finally been caught and arrested.
Bad Mexicans shows how often this diversity of input cut both ways. While Flores Magón’s girlfriend was able to smuggle missives out of jail by offering to wash his underwear, their communications, in time, were shut down, and new and more-extreme tactics, including violent raids, had to be relied on to keep revolution alive, none of which were enormously successful but which, in their accumulation, created a drumbeat of worry among U.S capitalists and politicians. Guerrero proved that he was far more than a well-to-do poet, covering these violent raids in dispatches for Regeneración and eventually taking part in them himself. Unlike Flores Magón, he would die of a bullet for the cause. Flores Magón would live to see Díaz turned out of office, before succumbing to long-standing sickness—probably exacerbated by neglect—in prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.
So much of what makes the United States terrifying is on display in its 19th-century forms in this book: the greed of U.S. capitalists and the speed with which the U.S. government will break its stated principles to defend their wealth; the way the U.S. Border Patrol has created terminologies of illegality to punish laborers who keep both countries running and in so doing also shuts down legitimate criticisms of the way labor is being treated; the way prisons have evolved to backstop this approach; the deep cost this grind has on the lives of citizens.
And yet there is also something tremendously hopeful about watching a few thousand men and women using not much more than words to call into account one of the most powerful regimes of the 19th century. Díaz might have escaped to France with some of his wealth, but he had to do so under tremendous armed guard and duress, and he died four years later. The rights he worked so hard to deny people are enjoyed now by a few more today, thanks to the men and women in these pages, whom Hernández has written about with intensity, as if lives depended on them, which is right, because they do.•
Join us on September 21 at 5 p.m., when Hernández will appear in conversation with California Book Club host Freeman and special guest Héctor Tobar to discuss Bad Mexicans. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
