California Book Club host John Freeman and author Kelly Lytle Hernández started their conversation about Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by talking about the events that instigated the history related in the book: Porfirio Díaz’s rise to the presidency of Mexico in the 19th century. Hernández explained that after Díaz came into power by coup d’état in 1876, he realized he was in control of a “severely indebted nation” that was rural and “not plugged into the global economy.” Díaz wanted “a development path similar to the United States, which means land dispossession from Native peoples, the development of wage labor and global local markets” in order to bring capital into the country. As he took these steps, he became a dictator.
Freeman commented that one of the stories the book tells is of competing networks, the competing network of capital and the competing network of revolutionary meaning and feeling. He asked Hernández how quickly Díaz had cracked down on newspapers, since it seemed as though it took a bit before he realized he couldn’t have people criticizing him and his tactics.
Hernández responded that the suppression of speech came both fast and slow. In the mid-1880s, Díaz defined criticism as the crime of libel, and that was the beginning of his war against the press. However, she elaborated that unlike other dictators, initially Díaz would try to “bring people into his circle, rather than first going to persecution or suppression.… He would work with newspapers, even the critical ones so long as they criticized his underlings or people beneath him and not of the regime writ large,” but in the 20th century, that changed and he cracked down more significantly on them.
Hernández went on to talk about the leader of the people at the core of Bad Mexicans, Ricardo Flores Magón. Flores Magón did not hold his tongue and went after Díaz directly in his newspaper, Regeneración, calling him a tyrant, a dictator, a despot. “Nobody else was writing this directly against the Díaz regime,” Hernández said. “And so it’s the magonistas and the people who were in their ambit who become the targets of severe suppression. Their offices are being raided; their printing presses are being smashed. They’re being incarcerated for very long periods in a really god-awful prison in Mexico City.” Hernández described the differences between Flores Magón and his two brothers, who were also part of the movement, and summing up Flores Magón’s personality, she said, “The guy that goes after Porfirio Díaz is also the guy that will go after his brothers and some of his best friends and try to cut them down as well.”
Hernández set the stage for the Flores Magón brothers printing Regeneración. She told the audience that in the early days of the newspaper, the Flores Magón brothers had set up shop in the legal office of the oldest brother, Jesús, which was spitting distance from the president’s office. As soon as the legal offices would close for the night, the brothers would pull out the presses and start typing and writing.
Freeman noted that one of the fascinating figures (among a multiplicity of fascinating figures) was Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza. Hernández described her as an autodidact and a labor organizer who’d been arrested so many times in Mexico that she’d begun signing, in the slot for her name, “sedition and rebellion.” She would end up becoming an anarchist and with her strong personality was able to stand up to and challenge Ricardo Flores Magón. While she came north to the United States with the revolutionaries, she eventually had a blowup with Flores Magón. Hernández added, “The person who will take on the tyrant is the person who will slash some of his closest allies.”
Special guest Héctor Tobar joined the conversation and asked Hernández how this story fits in with the work she’d already done in writing about the apparatus of surveillance, policing, and incarceration in the United States. He noted that in Bad Mexicans, Hernández discusses that one of the first cases handled by the newly created Bureau of Investigation—later to be known as the FBI—was one featuring the magonistas.
Hernández responded that most of her career had focused on the carceral state. In her last book, she wrote about the magonistas in a single chapter while discussing mass incarceration in Los Angeles because she wanted to talk about the ways in which incarcerated people can lead social movements and revolutions. With Bad Mexicans, she said, she was taking decades of extraordinary research by Mexican scholars and others around the world and putting it in the context of the U.S. She wanted to “acknowledge the centrality of policing Mexican radicals to the formation of the FBI, the counterinsurgency superforce of the United States that would go on for the Red Scare to bring in Emma Goldman to suppress Dr. King [and] the Black Panther Party. We could go on and on and on.”
Freeman asked whether there was any part of her upbringing that brought her toward the kind of research she did for Bad Mexicans. Hernández, who is African American, said that her family gave her a deep appreciation and love for Black history and culture. “I was coming out of high school knowing all my heroes…and I just felt so strong and powerful, like I was on the shoulders of incredible women and people and organizers who had changed the world, so…why can’t I?” She added, “I don’t know how I would get out of bed in the morning when I was 18 years old if I didn’t know those stories of power, of brilliance, of adaptability, of love, of subterfuge.… I guess I was always a historian. That really kept me alive and made me see the possibilities in the world.”•
