David L. Ulin: Greetings everybody. I'm David Ulin. I'm the book's editor of Alta Journal and I want to welcome you to tonight's edition of the California Book Club. Excuse me. Tonight our California book club host John Freeman, will be in conversation with Kelly Lytle Hernández, the author of Bad Mexicans, talking about this remarkable piece of history. And we'll get started in a few minutes.
Before we get started, I do want to introduce California Book Club. For those who don't know it or here for the first time, Alta Journal. Alta is a quarterly print publication with a dedicated web presence devoted to the culture, history, life of California and the west. We do a big traffic in books. It's a big focus here with book reviews and book coverage and coverage around the California Book Club and other things like that as well. And the California Book Club is a monthly meeting of books that selection committee and Alta selection committee has determined to be part of the kind of new California canon, grew out of an essay that our host John Freeman wrote for Alta a couple of years ago. And it really is a way to talk about and showcase the multi-varied writing of California, which is in my opinion, and I think many of our opinions here are the epicenter of where American literature is taking place.
Tonight in addition to Kelly and John, we have a special guest, my old colleague from the Los Angeles Times old friend and colleague, Hector Tobar. He'll be coming in to talk to Kelly and then he and John and Kelly will have a round table at the end of the conversation. I want to thank our partners and I'm going to name them for you. Book passage, Book Soup, Books Inc. Bookshop, Bookshop West Portal, Diesel: a bookstore, Green Apple Books, the Huntington USC Institute on California and the West, the Los Angeles Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, Narrative Magazine, Vroman's Bookstore, and Zyzzyva.
California book clubs, monthly events that feature continuous content leading up to each club meeting, everything is always free. If you haven't had a chance to check out the online content around Kelly's book and around other California book club writers, please do. You won't want to miss it. We have essays from many contributors reflecting on the works, essays related to the books and the themes that the books address in the case of Bad Mexicans and all books. But you can hear an excerpt from Bad Mexicans and more. All of this is included in our weekly California book club newsletter, which is also free so please sign up. And every California Book club episode we've ever done can be viewed on our website, so check them out. If you're a teacher, they're really useful resource for teaching. If you're a reader, they're a really useful resource for reading.
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John Freeman: Thanks, David. Hello everybody. It's nice to be back here. When we started this book club, the whole idea behind it was not just to read new books in the canon of California literature, but hopefully to Red Dream the story of California and in some ways by extension that of the Americas. And I think one of the great things that we have going for us within California is some of the best historians in the world. And our guest tonight, Kelly Lytle Hernández is one of them. She grew up in San Diego in the Claremont area, got her bachelor's from UCSD and her PhD from UCLA where she's now a professor of History, of Urban Studies, and African-American studies. You might know her as the author of Migra!, but also a City of Inmates, a book about basically the mass incarceration.
The book we're going to talk about tonight is Bad Mexicans, which is an extraordinary look at the Magonista's who take their name from Ricardo Flores Magon, who was a revolutionary, a newspaper writer and editor who stood up to Porfirio Diaz with his brothers and others. And then because they were imprisoned and harassed crossed over into the US and then agitated for revolution from within the United States, and in the course of telling their story and their buildup to revolution, I think Kelly has managed to recast the story of that revolution within a cross border tale. It's a story of colonialism, of revolution, of labor. There's very strong women revolutionaries within it. It crosses over with lynch laws. It is just a dazzling work of research and narrative. Kelly, it's such a pleasure to have you here tonight.
Kelly Lytle Hernández: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor, and thank you for sharing this book with your audience.
Freeman: Yeah, I can already tell from... We're 66 comments in, I think they love it. Before we jump into the characters of this book, of which there are many, one of the things I think that sets up the scale and the pressure of revolution is just what you lay out in terms of how much Mexico under Diaz had given over Mexican mining rights, railroad rights, and basically land rights to a very small group of American capitalists. Can you talk a little bit about that and why he did it and how quickly it happened?
Hernández: Yes, absolutely. So that's the baseline for this story. To understand what happens in the United States, you got to go back into Mexico and learn about the infancy of US imperialism in Mexico. So it's after Diaz comes to power in 1876, he realizes he's in control of a severely indebted nation that is rural. It's not plugged into the global economy at all. And he's looking north at the United States saying, "That's my north star. I would like to pursue a development path similar to the United States." Which means land dispossession from native peoples, the development of wage labor, and global markets. And to do that, to bring in the capital to do all that, he invites in US investors and European investors to come and build up industries.
So Diaz and his troops and his police officers will remove indigenous folks, and campesinos, rural families from the land so that capitalists can build railroads, they can build industrial agriculture, they can begin mines and begin to plug Mexico into the global economy. So Diaz is quite intentional. He has a plan, he has relationships with US, grant and others to make this all possible. And it does run very quickly. And one of the ways he's able to do it so quickly is that he really controls the levers of government. He becomes a dictator. All railroad contracts have to go through him personally, and he simply is directing the development of the Mexican economy according to his interests.
Freeman: And at the time when people were dispossessed of their land, it seems like one of the things, the story the book tells is of competing networks. You have the competing network of capital and the competing network of revolutionary feeling and information as it travels first hand to hand, mouth-to-mouth, across oral spaces, but then these newspapers arise. And how quickly did he crack down on newspapers? Because it seems like it took a little bit and then suddenly he realized, "Ah, I can't have people speaking back to me."
Hernández: Yeah, well, it is fast and it's slow. In the mid 1880s, he basically defines it to be a crime of libel to speak against any government agents. So that is the beginning of this war against the press in Mexico. But Porfirio Diaz had a particular way of governance of being a dictator that he liked to bring people into his circle, rather than first going toward persecution or suppression. He would try to co-opt people and bring them in. So he would work with newspapers, even the ones that were critical. So long as they were critical of his underlings or people beneath him and not of the regime writ large or himself. He might let some stuff slide, because he could move people around in those positions, but retain control and continue on the path.
And it's really not until, well, the late 19th century, but escalating into the 20th century when he begins to crack down more significantly. And the people at the core of this book who are led by this man named Ricardo Flores Magon, who does not hold his tongue right, he goes after Diaz directly. He calls him a tyrant, a dictator, a despot. He says that Diaz has made Mexicans the "servants of foreigners." Nobody else was writing this directly against the Diaz regime. It's the Magonista's and people who are in their ambit who become the targets of severe depression, their offices are being raided, their printing presses are being smashed, they're being incarcerated for very long periods in a really godawful prison in Mexico City. This is where Ricardo Flores Magon most likely picked up a severe lung infection that you would more or less would carry with him the rest of his life. So it's that suppression really escalates around the Magonista's and their direct attacks on the Diaz regime.
Freeman: What else can you tell us about Magon and his brothers?
Hernández: Oh, fabulous characters, historical characters. So Ricardo Flores Magon is the middle brother. His older brother, Jesus and his younger brother, Enrique, joined him in this campaign to begin and maintain this rebel newspaper. And they're wildly different personalities. So Jesus, the eldest brother is a lawyer. He's working his job by day, and then he's running this newspaper by night. He's definitely a social advocate. He wants to see reform in Mexico, and he's brave. But Ricardo, the middle brother, is just dogged and he has this charisma, this energy, but he's also acerbic. He would go after anyone. So if the guy who goes after Porfirio Diaz is also the guy who will go after his brothers and some of his best friends and try to cut them down as well.
And then you have the little brother, Enrique Flores Magon, who was a jokester. He was a clown, but he adored Ricardo in particular. And he followed him everywhere and really spent his entire life trying to support Ricardo's vision. And then even after Ricardo passes, making sure that the movement is remembered and that Ricardo is permanently honored in Mexico. So you have these three brothers who are at the center of this campaign, but they're not the only ones. There are other incredible characters. I'm sure we'll get into them, but this is very much a family story. The Flores Magon family had come together originally, the mom and the dad had, the story goes, fought alongside Porfirio Diaz when he was trying to eject the French troops from Mexico during the occupation, the French occupation of Mexico. So they began their family in support of Porfirio Diaz, but when they moved from Mexico City from Oaxaca, but Porfirio Diaz does not set up the father with a job and protect his pension. And this is a trigger for the family to slide into a downward spiral of poverty.
So the family really blames what Porfirio Diaz for poverty that they experience in Mexico City. So the Flores Magon brothers disagree with the politics and the policies of Porfirio Diaz, and they also have one hell of a grudge against him personally for what he did or didn't do for their family.
Freeman: That moment when they start their newspaper, I think it's 1904 or five or so, can you take us there? It's very thrilling. It's like you could see the rolling dolly shot as this group of ink stained revolutionaries are putting together this document which says everything, which quite a few people are thinking and saying, but aren't saying that loudly or they're definitely not publishing it.
Hernández: Yes, absolutely. I mean, to talk about the boldness here. So the Flores Magon brothers set up shop in Jesus's legal office, which is literally right across the street from the president's office. They could have spit into each other's offices if they wanted to through the windows. They're really working all day on legal cases so they can pay the bills. And then as soon as the legal office closes, they pull out the printing presses and they start typing and writing.
And Ricardo Flores Magon was known for really crouching over getting close to the piece of paper with his pen and writing with these very curly, elegant strokes. And he was known for writing feverishly that you could not stop him, that he was just constantly writing copy. And Jesus was the more moderate one. So it's a pretty extraordinary time in their lives. And all of these rebels, poets, writers, minor politicians are gravitating toward Ricardo's Pen in Mexico City, and they all want to come and be a part of this campaign, this boldness, this directness that is coming out of that corner office in [foreign language 00:15:01] there in Mexico City. So it's a pretty extraordinary time.
Freeman: You have a section you can read from it?
Hernández: I do, yes. So the section I'm going to read tonight is in 1901, when the liberals across the country, the reformers across the country are organizing for a conference and the conference is held and there's all kinds of musical performances and poets are speaking and political speeches, and people are keeping them rather tame because there are Diaz spies all around the building and inside of the audience. So no one is tackling the Diaz regime directly. They're just talking about this or that piece of the administration. And this is the moment when Ricardo Flores Magon really makes his mark as a revolutionary.
When Ricardo Flores Magon took the stage at the Teatro de la Paz, he likely wore a [foreign language 00:16:04], a baggy black suit with a crisp white dress shirt and a wide black tie. [foreign language 00:16:09] with curly black hair flopped a top his chubby brown face defined only by his dark, swollen, darting eyes. Confident he projected his voice at the end of his speech speaking aloud, an idea that shot up to the rafters and shocked the nation's reformers."
'The Diaz administration is a den of thieves,' he bellowed. Stunned, the attendees hissed. The nation's clearest voices reform Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, Juan Surabia, Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara, Camilo Arriaga and others had all questioned this or that aspect of the Diaz regime. The mine owners, the crooked judges, [foreign language 00:16:52], but no one had disparaged. The president's rule outright, and no one had questioned the legitimacy of the reign, to do so was a crime. The hissing grew louder rushing from the rafters down to the stage as if to stuff the words back into Flores Magon's mouth, but it was done. Before anyone could fully imagine what those words would ultimately reap he repeated the charge, "The Diaz administration is a den of thieves." They knew what he meant, Porfirio was a thief, a thief of land, a thief of wages, a thief of life, a thief of democracy. Flores Magon met their caution by bellowing for a third time, 'The Diaz administration is a den of thieves.'
A few eyes peaked above the fog of caution, then the theater broke into stomping and applause. Sitting on stage watching the commotion. Camilo Arriaga looked out at the audience and wondered, 'Where is this man taking us?' But he already knew. Ricardo Flores Magon had torn the veil of legitimacy covering Diaz's long, harsh rule, and there'd be no looking away, no turning back. Mexico was on the road to revolution.
Freeman: I love that scene. It's just by saying the truth out loud, it somehow renders the brazenness of a kleptocracy a little bit vulnerable because people are watching it. They create this newspaper, Regeneración, together. Camilio Arriaga is part of it. And was Juana Mendoza part of it or was she sort of in the orbit? I found her a fascinating figure. She has her own feminist journal. Can you tell us a little bit about her?
Hernández: Oh, I would love to tell you a little bit about her. I think she's someone who, everyone should know her name, one of Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza. And she was this extraordinary autodidact from the mountains of Durango. She became a labor organizer around the mines, in particular where her husband was working, and she had already had one or two children by this time. She didn't know when she was born, but she ended up being arrested so many times in Mexico that she figured out a date to put on all of her jail records. And rather than signing her name on her jail records, she would simply put in the spot for her name, sedition and rebellion. The woman was badass, so she would end up becoming an anarchist. And she started her own anarchist feminist newspaper Vesper. No, she's not writing for Regeneración, I can't imagine she ever would.
She is this really strong personality who stands up to and challenges Ricardo Flores Magon, when it looks like Ricardo Flores Magon is going to throw his hat into the ring to run for president against Porfirio Diaz, it's Juana who stands up and says, "We're here not to replace one tyrant with another. As an anarchist, we're here to tear the whole system down and to fight for principles, not for individuals." She's a powerful person, powerful voice in the movement. She does come north with the revolutionaries when they come to the United States, but she has a pretty phenomenal blowup with Ricardo Flores Magon. And we learn a lot about his character in that blowup because again, the person who will take on the tyrant is the person who will slash some of his closest allies. And she ends up going back to Mexico.
Now, this is important. Ricardo Flores Magon never returns to Mexico. He imagines himself as an intellectual who leads a revolution in this case from afar. Juana goes back, she's in Mexico City, she's continuing to agitate. As the eve of the revolution comes, she's putting together these urban plots in Mexico City against Diaz. When the revolution begins, she joins Emiliano Zapata's rebel army, becomes a colonel in the army and helps write his infamous [foreign language 00:21:00], and she would spend the rest of her life agitating for indigenous and women's rights. She's incredible, incredible woman at the heart of the story. Unfortunately, as with so many women, we don't have enough of her archive. Many of the Vesper newspapers have been lost. I wish we could write more as historians about her, but I invite people certainly to use her imaginations about what this woman was doing and how she was acting and how she was organizing alongside the men at the time.
Freeman: There's a lot of strong women in this book, some of which Magon encounters across the border. Mother Jones, who even says this man is a tiny bit unrealistic... Not unrealistic, she says he is... What was the adjective that she used about him when she...
Hernández: I don't remember. Yeah, but when you have Mother Jones telling you you're pushing it a little too far, says a lot, right?
Freeman: Yeah. So going back it's 1901 when that scene that you just read happens and that they launched this newspaper, it quickly gets a lot... Diaz tries to ignore it. It's like he's ignoring the Tweets. And then eventually he sends some people to Magon's mother, after he puts the Magon brothers in prison and to sort of argue with her, and this could be an apocryphal story, but what does she say? When these possible two henchmen come in to say, "We could let your son go free if they would just maybe be quiet."
Hernández: So this is a story that Enrique Flores Magon would go on to tell after his brother had died. Historians are not sure if it's totally true, but it's telling us that the mother supported their organizing. So while Ricardo and Jesus were in prison, their mother was very, very sick. So Diaz sent an agent to her house to said to say, "If you can convince them to really stand down and more or less join my administration and support the work, then I'll let your sons out so they can come and see you before you die." And I don't remember her direct quote off the top of my head, but she more or less tells them to suck it, that they got to go.
She's not falling for this. She supports her children and that they can really just turn around head out the door, and she would rather die without seeing her sons than ask them to sacrifice their principles. And it's an incredible story that this is how these three rebels remember their mother, that this revolution is really something that is given to them as part of their family tradition, and it's part of what powers them forward in this movement together.
Freeman: So they start the newspaper, they get arrested, they get put in jail, Magon gets sick, and they get let out. And at some point they realize they got to go, they got to leave and sort of agitate from afar. Can you take us back in time to the period when they crossed the border to tell us what crossing the border meant and what they thought might await them on the other side?
Hernández: Sure. So the brothers take the train north, that's how you would travel. It took about three days and they have to cross the entire... Well, not... But much of Mexico. And they're really able to, for the first time, see the north. Go through the mountains where all these mines are, head through the north, where all these new industrial farms are being built, head into the desert and the borderlands where in due time they're going to be able to raise an army. And they arrive at the bridge there in Laredo, Texas. And when you arrive in 1904, this is a time when mass Mexican immigration is just beginning to the United States. This is a time before there's any lights or wires or many border guards. The border guards were there and this time are really almost singularly looking for Chinese immigrants, are really simply waving Mexicans through the border.
The United States government doesn't even begin to count the number of Mexicans entering the country until 1907. So they're really entering at a time just of an open border for Mexican immigrants in particular, they still however were concerned. They knew that Diaz had spies and operatives everywhere, especially in the United States, wherever there was a consular office, he more or less had a member of his government there looking for him. They were concerned that when they arrived at the border, that some agents would've been notified that they left Mexico, although they tried to do it quietly. They were fearful that someone would've been notified and perhaps pulled them off a train, and who knows what could have happened to them then.
That was not the case as far as we know. They crossed very easily. And by that evening, they were meeting at the home of a comrade and beginning to organize how they were going to relaunch their rebel newspaper, Regeneración from Laredo, Texas, which is smack dab on the border. And then simply be able to just mail or hand the newspaper south of the border for distribution to foment descent against Diaz in Mexico.
Freeman: What was a printing press like at that time? Because they move around so much and they're shutting down and relaunching the newspaper in so many different locales. In modern times, you think, this is not a 3D printer. This is like a big setup.
Hernández: It's a big setup, but this is a testament to the networks that they're building. So among Mexican-Americans in the United States who had a pretty thriving, vibrant Spanish language press already by the turn of the 20th century and among the many Mexican immigrants were beginning to migrate to the United States in search of work, the Magonista's had already been read here north on the border. They were already well-known characters. People had been reading their newspaper up in San Antonio, Laredo, Los Angeles, wherever Mexican immigrants were in the United States, they had already been reading Regeneración.
So when Ricardo Flores Magon and all his folks show up, they show up infamous already. So what they're able to do is not necessarily bring their printing presses with them, but they tap into this Spanish language press that's already established across the country. So they're utilizing and borrowing and sometimes purchasing new equipment, whether they're in Laredo, San Antonio or St. Louis or Los Angeles or Chicago. They're all over the country. But very soon as we get into the story, you'll see that they're living on the run and they're not taking the equipment with them. They're tapping into this really tight and vibrant Spanish language press that's already in place. And rebel press, labor organizers and others, socialists, they're tapping into all of that.
Freeman: Well, this is as good a time as any to bring in our special guest, Hector Tobar, because he's written a couple books, six, but one of them I love very much called Translation Nation, a kind of reversed journey around the US in 2005, in which I'm sure he spent quite a bit of time in communities with Spanish language newspapers. But his latest book is Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meaning of Things. And Héctor, it's time for you to ask a question of Professor Hernández. I'm going to duck out here.
Héctor Tobar: Thanks so much, John. Always an honor to share a stage with you. One of the great voices in American letters, John Freeman. Thank you, John. Yes. So Kelly, one of the things I was struck by in reading this extraordinary book, which really is, if you haven't started it yet, a page turner. I read it in two days and I'm usually a very slow reader, was that how this story fits in with the work you've done already, a lot of pioneering work you've done on writing about the apparatus of surveillance and policing and incarceration in the United States. And I was impressed by the way that kept on coming back into the story. We're looking at the early stages of the birth of this immigration apparatus, of this deportation apparatus. One of the joys of reading the book is that... Well, it's not a joy, but also kind of a thing that hurts, is reading the birth of all of these different institutions now, which are so dominant in American life.
And I was stunned when I got to the point where we realized that one of the first cases, the newly created Bureau of investigation later to be known as the FBI. One of the first it pursues is of these Mexican radicals and trying to do the bidding of the Mexican government and get these Mexican radicals in prison. And I thought, "Oh my God, there is this continuum between Flores Magon and the Magonista's and the Bureau of Investigation going after them in the 1910s. And then later, the harassment of the Civil Rights Movement in a Martin Luther King." And I'm wondering what insights you gained into that whole, something you've dedicated so much of your career to specifically from this project, what more have you seen about the American structures of policing and incarceration? So that's my first question.
Hernández: Oh, well, thank you, Héctor. It's a penetrating question, and thank you for connecting all of the work. So most of my career has been dedicated to studying race and immigration and policing regimes, the carceral state, mass incarceration. And in my last book, I wrote about the Magonista's as a singular chapter of that story about the rise of mass incarceration in LA. And in many ways it didn't fit in that book, but I shoe boarded in because I've always wanted to write about them. But I also wanted to talk about the ways in which incarcerated people can lead revolutions and social movements. And they're an incredible example of that. But I think it's that history of work that made it possible for me to lift up that particular dimension of the story. And I think one of the reasons why that's important is that our colleagues in the university system have often spoken about the Magonista's, but they're not really even sure how to fit them into the American story.
We know they're important, but how do they fit into the American story? I'm teaching the US History Survey. I want to talk about these really cool people, but I don't know how to fit it in which goes writ large for Mexican-American history when people are teaching the general survey. What I'm doing with this book is taking decades of extraordinary research by scholars in Mexico and the United States to some degree around the world on the Magonista's. And I'm flipping it, I'm putting it within a US context, and I'm giving people hooks and links about how do we connect the Magonista's to the American story and what is more part of the American story than policing and racial violence. So that's why making sure to lift up and acknowledge the centrality of policing Mexican radicals to the formation of the FBI, the counterinsurgency super force of the United States that would go on for the red scare to bring in Emma Goldman to suppress Dr. King, but aim the Black Panther Party. We can go on and on and on.
What does it mean as organizers? What does it mean for our students, when they learned that the FBI cut their teeth on trying to track down Magonista's and failing. Magonista's was successful. So this is how we sort pull the story, hook it into the US context themes that we're familiar with, but also unveil the centrality of Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans in the American story. And I hope that this is a gateway story for many people like, "Yo, if I didn't know Mexicans were at the birth of the FBI, if I didn't know Mexico was the place of the infancy of US imperialism, if I didn't know that more than 500 Mexicans were lynched in the history of the United States, mostly in Texas. What else do I not know? I got to start reading." And thank God our colleagues have written lots of great books. There is lots to read. It's an extraordinary rich field.
Tobar: Yeah, and I would agree with you a hundred percent. I think shifting our thinking to think about the way the histories of these supposedly two different nation states are really interwoven in countless ways and to treat both of the stories as central, and not to think of one as a corollary to the other. And it's something that I've always felt in my own sort of working with young people especially, is that how necessary it is to teach Mexican history to American, United States young people. That people should grow up in the schools knowing who Emiliano Zapata was and Ricardo Flores Margo. And I'm wondering, what do you think we lose about ourselves? What do we lose about ourselves as citizens by not knowing Mexican history and not knowing this tradition, these traditions and how these things are interwoven? What do we lose when we deprive young people of that history?
Hernández: That is such a powerful question. I like to go back and forth on this because we see it in the classroom all the time. I see it in the tears of students when they first begin to learn this history, feel the pain of how robbed they've been, and that they have felt a drift, unanchored, unseen. And then when they begin to feel that power of being seen, it's tears of their broken heart. But it's also joy that something new is coming, a new discovery. I certainly could just speak in my own experience. I grew up in the borderlands in the eighties and the nineties, I'm from San Diego, California. And I was not taught this history at all. I'm African-American, and I was taught that in the classrooms that Mexicans were almost anthropological. That species that you see at the Museum of Man, no history there, no present. That's sort of the sense that I got. And clearly it's false, wrong, racist, all of those things.
What would it have meant for me as a child growing up in that area to have learned the story of the Magonista's. Of these powerful intellectuals, migrants, workers who are organizing to make a better world for all of us and who changed the conditions of the world in which I live. So that I think is really, really important for all of us to learn, all of us to learn Mexican history, Mexican-American history. Just one last thing is that I write in this book about over the course of the 20th century, the major origins of immigration to the United States shift from Europe to Mexico, that Mexico is now the number one sending country over the course of the 20th century to the United States more than any other country. That migration has changed who we are as a people and the story we tell about who we are as a people has not caught up by any means. It's now false. This is an important history for all of us to learn.
Tobar: Yes, Flores Magon is a character of United States history and he deserves to be in that pantheon as well. And speaking of Flores Magon... Oh, my God, what a... You had the respect to the reader to give us a complex portrait of this man. This is not hagiography, this is, he was this wonderful, incredible hero. They come off as so naive about what we would call in today, operational security, for example. He has this really dark third and final act in which he alienates so many of his supporters and essentially retires to a commune in Los Angeles. And yet he's still harassed by the authorities. He becomes irrelevant really, to these dramatic events that are happening in Mexico.
First of all, I just want to say how impressed I was by your discipline and your commitment to the craft of the historian to present all of this to us. And I just wondered, at the end of this, spending what I know had to be years, and you just said many years, how did you feel about the man? What was it like to be in his head for so many years? I know he's the main cast member, really, but how did you feel about him at the end?
Hernández: Well, let me tell you this, I think I entered this project having been filled with that hagiography.
Tobar: Wow.
Hernández: Having a deep admiration for the man. And as I'm reading through the letters and the primary sources and getting to see the way in which he undercuts other members of the movement in really vicious, vicious ways. Clearly, I lost sort of an interpersonal respect for him, but still maintained a deep respect for his bravery, his courage, his intelligence when it came to standing on that public stage and challenging Porfirio Diaz. I also am involved in social movements, and I was writing the final piece of this book in 2020 as the world came to a standstill around the movement for Black life in particular, racial justice more generally. And I certainly had my own front row seat to movement activity and actors and got a bit of a better understanding of someone like Ricardo Flores Magon and how complicated it is and how important it's to tell the full story. And I simply, I think, again, Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza is another extraordinary historical figure, and I could not honor her without acknowledging the struggles that she had with Ricardo Flores Magon.
Tobar: Well, I have one last question here before I hand you back to John. And this is my favorite kind of question about this, because Emma Goldman has this great cameo in this book. The great anarchist, Emma Goldman, "If I Can't Dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution," et cetera, et cetera. And you mentioned that he has this meeting, which I think just everything indicates that this was a transformational meeting for Ricardo Flores Magon, and yet you are disciplined enough not to speculate. What do you putting on your intuition as a human being, as a scholar and as an activist, what do you think that conversation was like? And wouldn't it make a great stage play?
Hernández: Oh, that's a wonderful idea. I hope you write it. What were they... So they met in St. Louis maybe a couple of times as she was coming through town and he was living there. I don't know what they spoke about. I know that she was working on this essay, what I believe. That may have been pieces. She's really pulling together and clarifying her own feminist anarchist though. They may have shot that together, maybe they talked about some of those ideas together. Of course, Mexican women during this time... I didn't write enough about this in the book, after you finish a book and you close it, you are like, "These things I'd rather go back and do again."
One of them is that in these Mexican bookshops, like the one that was here in Los Angeles, you would've found a considerable amount of literature on abortion, and about marriage and not doing it. So I think that he might have had something to add to that conversation because he was really involve with all these anarchists Mexican women who are writing and sharing all this literature at the time. So I'm fascinated by the conversations they might've had, but I don't know what they were. I think as the historian, I'm too archivally grounded.
Tobar: Well, thank you so much. Thank you for indulging me my fantasy and curiosity. So thank you. Thank you.
Hernández: Thank you.
Freeman: Thank you, Héctor. Oh, that was a wonderful conversation. This is such a literary movement in many ways. A lot of newspapers, there's poets involved, Peracisa Geruero was a sort of blonde, vegetarian poet and ended up being part of the movement later in the book. And I think there's a continuum between this and the Brown Berets growing out of conversations at bookstores in California in the late 1960s. But to come back to some questions from the audience, we have an amazing question from a person named Alani Clark who says that... And Anselmo Figueroa, who wound up going on trial and going to prison with Ricardo Flores Magon in Los Angeles is her great-great-grandfather and is revered as a hero in her family. And she said that this book allowed me to learn more than I've ever known about my courageous anarchist ancestor, and thank you for that gift. She's curious how you track down dramatic anecdotes like the one that opens up chapter 20 when Figueroa knocks on Job Herriman's door near midnight to ask him to defend Magon and his comrades in court.
Hernández: Yeah. That is, first of all, it's an honor to meet you, even if it's just through the chat. What an incredible genealogy you carry. So the question's really a research question. Well, again, I have to say and fully credit that there are decades of scholarship and scholars who've been working on the Magonista's. Certainly since the 1920s in Mexico, Mexican scholars were going out and interviewing people who either were Magonista's or who had known Magonista's and preserving those oral histories. And then certainly as you get into the Chicano movement here in the United States, Juan Gomez Quiñonez, and others start to publish on the Magonista's in English and in Spanish.
Using those stolen letters is a big source. But also those oral histories that were taken with the early Magonista's and their friends and their descendants, Deborah Weber and others who have done some of this really hard work of rescuing this archives that it wouldn't be destroyed. So that's where you find a lot of this. Many people have written on the Magonista's. Claudio Lomnitz has an incredible book of return of comrade, Ricardo Flores Magon and many others. It's reading the secondary sources certainly, but also getting into all those stolen letters and the oral histories that were taken with people where you find those little tidbits.
Freeman: You just said a very interesting word, stolen letters. So when Magon came across the border and started making the newspaper here and was on the run, there was a kind of period when they were being surveilled, but they could communicate by mail. The Mexican council was constantly in touch with local sheriffs. It seems like the US Neutrality Act protected them for a bit because they weren't yet advocating for political violence. They were actually just speaking their mind. And one of the fascinating things about Bad Mexicans is watching the law enforcement create or manipulate laws to basically put people in prison or get them deported. So can you talk a little bit about the evolution from consular and spy watching to the hiring of private detectives to keep the Magonista's on almost 24-hour surveillance? And how elaborate were there codes in writing? Because I think the story of how their letters were broken into is pretty remarkable.
Hernández: So when the Magonista's first arrived in Laredo, Texas, it only takes a couple of days and they realize that they're being watched and they absolutely are being watched by friends of the Diaz regime. They very quickly moved to San Antonio, which is a little further from the border. Laredo right there on the border, they were afraid that they would just be kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken down to Mexico. They go up to San Antonio and they relaunch their rebel newspaper. But one day somebody stumbles into the office and the story goes that they attempted to stab Ricardo in the back. Enrique tackles the person to the street, and they brawl for a moment... Excuse me. But then the Magonista's move and they go to St. Louis.
They really relaunch their newspaper, get a lot of attention, but are arrested. Diaz sends an agent up from Mexico to charge them with libel. They're arrested, and when they get out of jail, they jump bond and they disappear. At least Ricardo Flores Magon does, and his brother, they go to Canada, they go to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, everywhere. They're living on the run, at least [foreign language 00:47:38], the leaders of this movement. To stay in communication, they got letters and they're sending letters to each other constantly. I mean, they're spending hours of their days writing letters, organizing campaigns, writing and sharing essays so that it can be published. And they very quickly find out that their letters are arriving [foreign language 00:48:00], or violated. So they realized that the Diaz agent had hired a private detective to work with the US Post Office and The Dead Letter Office to open up their mail, copy down the letters, stick the letter back in, and send it on its way, hoping that the Magonista's won't figure out that they were being watched.
They did figure it out. They began to write in secret codes, and they again, would spend hours devising these secret codes and these ciphers. So it would be symbols, it would be... They were changing them all the time, so they knew how closely they were being watched. It's an incredible archive of letters that are written in English and in Spanish and in secret code. And you have multiple secret codes and key codes. You have one in the book that you can use to crack the letters. It's a really pretty stunning archive to work with. So that's what I mean by the stolen letters that takes us to the front lines of this revolution and as far our last question is those kinds of letters that take... Because where I can talk about how they feel, not just what they did, because they're saying it in a letter, they're professing their love or their fury about someone or something going on.
Freeman: You come from a family of academics. Your father was provost of UCSD and was a professor of music, right?
Hernández: That's right.
Freeman: And I'm curious, growing up, you were talking about not having stories like the ones that you're telling in this book, but you must have had other stories about the value of education and research. And is there anything that you could tell to the readers here that was part of your upbringing that you think maybe tuned you towards the kind of research that you're doing here?
Hernández: Yeah, absolutely. So my family poured into me everything and certainly gave me a deep appreciation and knowledge and love for Black history and culture. And I was coming out of high school knowing all my heroes, Harriett Tubman, Ella Baker, everybody. And I just felt so strong and powerful. I was on the shoulders of incredible women and people and organizers who had changed the world. So why can't I? Not that you're going to become this great person, this Frederick Douglas, but if they could overcome or fight and struggle the conditions against which they did, it's my responsibility to do my little part to try to make a better world. And of course I can try. I felt very, very powerful because of that.
Now, I didn't learn these stories, certainly not in K through 12 in the curriculum, which is where we all should be learning it. But the way in which my family poured into me makes me understand what it means to not have that. My goodness. 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. Those are the things for me... I guess I was always a historian that really kept me alive. Made me see the possibilities in the world. I think as an academic, certainly my father poured into me, but my entire family in terms of [inaudible 00:51:29] people who say service is the rent that you pay for living right, and that it is your job to do something good with your life or to try, that's what they gave me. And they gave it to me with a very strong appreciation for Black life and Black history.
Freeman: That's beautiful. Esmeralda Del Rio asks, "What book has influenced your career as a historian and writer?"
Hernández: There have been so many. I will simply say, I think one of the finest historians living and working today is the extraordinary Tiya Miles. You have not read her work. She's currently based at Harvard University. Her first book, I think is Ties That Bind, is this extraordinary excavation of Black slavery enslavement in the Cherokee Nation. And we're talking about taking little tidbits of evidence and providing enough context that they all make sense to us, stores of blood and matrilineally and belonging. I strongly recommend checking out all of Tiya's work. I think you've had Natalia Molina on, I think her most recent book. You may be covered. Basically an extraordinary historian working today. I've got John Hope Franklin right behind me. So you want to talk about who lays the foundation? There are just so many, that's such a hard question. We could be here all night answering that question.
Freeman: Oh, that's great. I had a question from another person in the audience who asks, "This is such a great an illuminating book. Why not put Gutierrez Mendoza on the cover?"
Hernández: That would be lovely. In some ways it becomes a permission issue. We don't actually have many photos of her. I wish that we did. That's a good question. This is a title that I really wrestled with, I'm sure you can imagine. Clearly I was inspired to write this book the moment that Donald Trump said, "Bad Ombres," because I felt he was stirring a pot of racial violence with that language that people don't know or recognize or knowledge because they don't know the history of that language and how it's been used to whip up anti-Mexican violence. This book, in some ways is a talk about the origins of that anti-Mexican violence and some of the most extraordinary massacres in US history. At least one of the most extraordinary massacres in US history, which targets Mexicans in South Texas and the mid 1910s. So this is a book where the title and the image work together on the cover. We certainly were looking for something that had this deep pride, this deep power so that when people saw the title, they'd understand that the irony, the sarcasm, the work that is happening with this title.
Freeman: I went and looked up images of copies of Regeneración, and sometimes they had pictures on the cover, and it would be both the editors and it would be marks or sort of people that they admired. And was that a style to have a bunch of pictures instead of having a design magazine cover with a random image that would be like, here's us and here are the people we admire?
Hernández: Yeah, absolutely. They're putting themselves in the story of history, one thing. Two, they're using visual language to communicate with a population that is not highly literate as this magazine is circulating through Mexico. So all of that is happening. They also, and I talked about this a bit in the book, is they had borrowed a particular newspaper that had a strong visual culture or comics, political comic's history. They picked up that component and brought it into their work. And those covers get better as the years go on, as you go into the 1910s in particular, when they're on the run and [inaudible 00:55:55] stuff out, it is pretty text heavy and they're just doing everything they can to cobble it together. But it's in the later years that those visual covers become much more striking.
Freeman: So you're in Los Angeles, and this book has several loops within Los Angeles, and I wonder if we can sort of edge back towards that and bring Hector back in for any other additional questions from the audience or that he would like to ask of you. Can you bring us back to the question that Alani Clark asked and sort of set the scene for the ways that socialists in Los Angeles and some anarchists were brought into or made aware of the cause of revolution in Mexico?
Hernández: Sure. So you had a really powerful group of Anglo American socialists working here in Los Angeles with Joe Perryman at the center of their community, Joe had run for vice president alongside Eugene Debs at the turn of 20th century. They are already organizing job is by 1910, going to run for mayor and is really close to winning before the LA Times bombing. And this community didn't really know much about politics in Mexico. You understand that the US press was littered with travel literature about Mexico. In particular describing Mexico as really the treasure house of the United States and of Europe, that this is where you would go and make a lot of money, really.
That was the image that most people would've had and that they would've had an image of Diaz being a very benevolent leader, perhaps a little long-term, but benevolent. It's the rival of the Magonista's and conversations with Mexican organizers that helped to shatter that mythology of the Diaz regime. And this is really important. Again, this is the work Devra Weber, who has gone back and found that certainly in Los Angeles, many of the members of the IWW were Mexican. I think we have an image of being a sort of white male organization, but in the border region, it's Mexican radicals who are really holding the IWW together.
And in Los Angeles there's two clubs, two socialist clubs, sort of a white socialist club and a Mexican socialist club. And it's around this issue when Ricardo Flores Magon is arrested in LA that, and [foreign language 00:58:27] goes and taps the white club and says, "You guys got to get involved in this, and let explain why. This isn't just about Mexico. That guy who owns the LA Times, who is at the center of the anti-labor union campaign here in Los Angeles and around the country, well, you want to know one way that he makes a lot of his money? Is he owns about 800,000 acres down in Diaz's, Mexico. And if you go and you shut down all these guys, these capitalists in Mexico and their operations there, you're going to cut off their funds that they then pour into the anti-labor movement here in the United States."
So they start to tie together in certain crude ways. That you got to help us because that'll help you. And then these relationships start to form and these commitments start to form. And they certainly last in some cases for decades. So LA is on fire in the early 20th century with labor activity, and Mexicans are certainly at the center of it. Mexican railroad workers go on strike the extraordinary phenomenal [foreign language 00:59:30] is in town, and she leads a group of women who are supporting the strikers here in Los Angeles. It's this environment, LA becomes the primary place where Mexicans are beginning to settle when they come north of the border. Many of them are bringing rebellious spirits of organizing traditions with them to Los Angeles, and they're organizing socialist clubs that join the IWW, leading the IWW and they're Magnolista's.
There's an incredible bookstore in downtown LA that stays open late until the night so that day workers can come in and read and debate and discuss the ideas of the day. And this is the environment that literally Ricardo Flores Magon comes into in the sense that when he comes into LA undercover and tries to look for a hideout, where does he first go? He hides out in that bookstore is where he is living. This is the LA story. So when you think about it's not shocking that they come to LA and LA becomes really their headquarters and revolution after Ricardo Flores Magon arrives here.
Tobar: I absolutely love those passages about the [foreign language 01:00:35] Bookstore and I'm not entirely embarrassed, but somewhat embarrassed to say I had no idea that this bookstore existed. I did not know. I spent the morning going through these old Sanborn insurance maps of LA that you can get on the library looking at San Fernando Street. "Oh, where was this bookstore?" And realizing that I now run across the street in the park that's across the street from the LA State Historic Park is where this neighborhood was the same neighborhood where Flores Magon was hiding and he jumps out of the back of the building. It's just this incredible section of Los Angeles whose history has been forgotten in the public history, sometimes known as Sonora town, part of it more towards the edge of the plaza. To me, that's one of the joys of reading your book, is that it hints at this milieu that has been absolutely forgotten and erased and was actually never even present in much of American media cultural production.
You look at movies from the 1910s and twenties, and you don't see Mexicans with books and Mexican intellectuals. And yet not only is there that, there's the scene where... That incredible scene so cinematic, I don't want to give too much of it away for people who haven't read it yet, where they come to arrest Flores Magon in the neighborhood in what feels like the beginnings of South Central Los Angeles to me, the way you describe it, and this huge crowd shows up. And of course there's this incredible fight that lasts for almost an hour as you put it. And I just really felt like, oh, this is the LA that I know now that's also not represented in the media.
I always put working class intellectuals in my novels and nobody ever really notices or comments on that fact, but they're people that I know. And to see them have also this past, to know that there's also a continuum of that. Not only is there not a continuum of these apparatuses of oppression and surveillance, there's also this continuum of struggle. And I would just like to know too, if there's anything more that's been written about this bookstore, about that milieu in Los Angeles.
Hernández: Yes. Well, I certainly would point you to a fairly recent book by Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, who I think is at Emory University now on Mexican Masculinities, and she talks quite a bit about that bookstore and has great photos from inside the bookstore. She was able to interview descendants and get access to photos. So check out that, I think Archiving Mexican Masculinities is the title of the book.
Freeman: There's a question from the audience that it sort of relates to something that Hector said, which is that this book is a page turner. It really is propulsive, and it's unusual in that regard. Obviously you have a lot of your main characters on the run, and so there is that sort of built in bit of tension. And there's also the buildup to the revolution and Madero who begins his campaign as a book tour, and he decides to write a book because he receives a message from the spirits. You couldn't make some of this stuff up, and it just keeps going. And Christie Toronto asks, "What do you read for relaxation? "And I want to add to that question by what do you read to know how to make a page turner? Because whatever you're reading or whatever you're watching, it's definitely sinking in.
Hernández: Yeah, well, I read Héctor's books. That's one thing I do. I'm glad that came across that way because I definitely was working toward that. My goal for this book, lots of academics have written about the Magonista's. I really don't have much new to say about the Magonista's. I might put them in some new context, that I might've done. But the basic information here, other scholars have written about. What I was trying to do with this book is I knew how dramatic and cinematic it was and important it was. I wanted to make sure I reached another audience that I wanted to make sure that your person who's generally curious about nonfiction, curious about US history, would be able to pick up this book and be excited to read Mexican-American history and learn something new.
So it's like my own little smuggling operation. I've taken this incredibly dynamic story and put inside of it sort of the origins of US imperialism and Mexican migration to the United States, the beginnings of the story of racial inequity as it applies to Mexicanos in the borderlands, the story of policing in the United States and its origins or its formations through the policing of Mexicans and Mexican immigrants. [inaudible 01:05:30] all that histories of the post office, which you think is dry and boring until you get it in this context. So that is what I was very much trying to do, is I tried to set it up in little bites that people could take of the detective tail along the way. You are right, as I was writing this book, I spent a lot of time going back to the sources like, "This couldn't have happened. I just don't believe they did all of these things, or they evaded all of these shenanigans." But all of it's right there in those decades of scholarship that has been published piece by piece along the way. And there's so much more.
The Mexican Revolution is such an untapped resource for Hollywood and for us scholars, the characters we haven't even talked about, Kosterlitzky, who is this Russian emigre to Mexico who becomes Porfirio Diaz as number one henchman, who ends up fleeing Mexico during the revolution, comes to Los Angeles and becomes a spy for the FBI. And he's the one who turns against the Magonista's, but he also is doing all kinds of spy work in Los Angeles. LA during the Mexican Revolution would be a great, great film or TV series. So I don't know what... I'm reading lots of things. I read widely fiction, nonfiction, science writing, I enjoy quite a bit. But I think like everybody here, I take note of a great writer and I make sure to follow them in whatever they publish regardless of the subject matter, so I can learn the craft, I must say.
Tobar: I think reading widely is just great advice to any young writer especially, is just to think about... Just to follow your curiosity wherever it goes, because that's definitely what's going on in this book. I love the post office section, and I love too, the way the post office hesitates, "Oh, no, we cannot give you those letters. That would be breaking federal law. Well, maybe we can find a way around it." But all of that because you just really, you get a sense both of how powerful the apparatus of the state can be, but also how its weaknesses and how human it is. It is composed of human beings and it's composed of these conflicting orders and ideals. So I love following your curiosity into these places, and I think that's definitely one of the joys of this book.
Freeman: Oh, man, we could keep going for a while. And I have so many more questions for you, Kelly and Héctor. It's been really lovely to have you here to join in, but we're kind of running out of time and for some two last final questions. If you could say the name of that bookstore again for people in the audience, because I think you have some budding historians who are thinking, "Ah, small institution history."
Hernández: It's escaped me. I think Héctor had it at the tip of his tongue.
Tobar: It is the [foreign language 01:08:49] Bookstore, [foreign language 01:08:49], I remember, because it's my mother-in-law's name. And yeah, and it was located near what's now today known as Dogtown, where the pound is one of the... It's over there just north of La Placita. And that neighborhood now is any sense of the history is totally erased, which is one of the horrible things about Los Angeles. There's so much of our history is around us, and I really wanted... In Edendale, you mentioned Edendale. Edendale is this little chunk of Echo Park. It's right where the two freeway ends, and that has a really rich, radical history. I wrote about it once in the Los Angeles Times, but I did not know that Ricardo Flores Magon lived in a commune there. I did not know that. There's so much to appreciate and admire.
Freeman: The book is Bad Mexicans, Kelly Lytle Hernández, it was just absolutely fabulous talking to you and talking to you again, Héctor. I think David's got some outro messages. Thank you again. This has been a wonderful conversation.
Hernández: Thank you everyone, I appreciate it.
Ulin: Thanks to all three of you. This was a fantastic conversation. I do want to let everybody know that this interview has been recorded and will be available at californiabookclub.com, if you want to revisit it or recommend it to your friends. Next month's book in the California Book Club is Jennifer Egan's novel, The Candy House. So please join us on October 19th for that discussion. And just another reminder about the Alta membership, altaonline.com/join, or again, the $3 digital membership, please participate in a two-minute survey that will pop up as soon as we end the event. I want everybody to take care, stay safe and we'll see you all next month. Take care, have a good night everyone.•
Kelly Lytle Hernández Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernández
