Tending the Fire

Abstract

In 1910, Antonio Rodriguez, a ranch hand in Rocksprings, Texas, was lynched and burned by a mob of white men. For historians of Texas, this is an all-too-familiar tale of Anglo violence against Mexicans, but in Bad Mexicans Kelly Lytle Hernández immediately transports us to Mexico, where people staged protests, tore down American flags, and shouted “Mueren los yanquis!” (Death to the Yankees!) in response to the brutal racist violence. Porfirio Díaz, the long-standing president of Mexico, sent security forces to squash the protests and muzzled the press, insisting that they cease to comment on the anti-American protests. This opening episode reveals Lytle Hernández's methodology. She will take us on a journey that weaves back and forth across the US-Mexico border to tell a story of a transnational anticapitalist movement at the birth of revolutionary Mexico.Historians, as Benedict Anderson intimated, are the clerics of the nation, telling the origin stories of a particular country with reverence and awe. We have been penitent and sober priests, but in our religious zeal we have forgotten that there is a world outside our temple. Kelly Lytle Hernández may be the antipreacher we have been waiting for to introduce us to this new world beyond nations and borders by bringing us back to the future with a compelling narrative about a plucky band of anarchist Mexicans living in the United States and declaring war on capital, authority, and the Church. In this transnational history, the nation remains in the frame, but other stories that cross and spill over borders come into focus. Putting Ricardo Flores Magón and the magonistas at the center rather than the Mexican Revolution or radical organizing in the US West requires us to take off our national blinders and put on our progressive lenses.Bad Mexicans, Kelly Lytle Hernández's latest in a series of groundbreaking books, forces us to confront Mexican and United States history in tandem, showing how labor struggles and political battles were not contained by the physical land border or even the boundaries of imagination of anarchists like Ricardo Flores Magón. The story of Flores Magón and the PLM has been told by historians in Mexico and elsewhere who see them as precursors of the Mexican Revolution and by Chicano historians who see them as exemplars of the fight against Anglo oppression. Lytle Hernández weaves the strands of these stories together, linking up their labor radicalism in Mexico to their work with socialists and anarchists in the United States and their strident condemnation of Anglo racism.It is fortuitous and a bit odd that Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) declared 2022 the year of Ricardo Flores Magón. A major avenue in Mexico City is named for Flores Magón, and so are several schools, libraries, and plazas. So at least in Mexico, Ricardo Flores Magón has not been forgotten, but he has been domesticated and co-opted. Flores Magón was rebranded by his former comrade and congressman Antonio Díaz Soto as the “precursor of the revolution, the true author of it, the intellectual author of the Mexican Revolution” (306). In 1945, Ricardo's body was moved to his final resting place in Mexico's Rotunda of Distinguished Men, the final act in the sanitization and co-optation of his memory into a state project that had, at that point, become more institutional than revolutionary. In a similar manner, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa were posthumously lauded as heroes even though they were condemned in their lifetimes as bloodthirsty bandits by newspapers and politicians. In the United States, the memory of the magonistas remains more subdued: kept alive in Chicano and anarchist circles, but largely absent from US history texts and public memory.Lytle Hernández seeks to establish a prominent place for the magonistas in US and global history. As she puts it so eloquently, “In the process of confronting the Díaz regime in Mexico, they rattled the workshop of US empire, challenged the global color line, threatened to unravel the industrialization of the American West, and fueled the rise of policing in the United States” (308–9). But this story does not have a Hollywood ending. Rattled though they were, US empire, racism, and industrialization triumphed in the 1920s, while Ricardo ended up dying in his cell in Leavenworth Penitentiary in 1922.In the historiography of the Mexican Revolution, there has long been a vigorous debate about the importance of the magonistas in the course of the revolution. Historian Alan Knight has expressed skepticism about the weight of these radical anarchists who spent the decade of Mexican revolutionary combat far from the action, on the US side of the border.1 While Knight acknowledges their role in the Cananea and Rio Blanco strikes, he is somewhat more dubious that they played anything but bit roles in the actual fighting after shots were fired in 1910. Juan Gomez Quiñones and John Cockcroft, to name just two historians, gave much more weight to the importance of the magonistas in the Mexican Revolution.2 They point to some of the more radical elements of the 1917 Mexican Constitution and draw a direct line from the magonistas to this foundational document. The issue, however, is whether these radical elements of the Constitution were implemented at the time, or ever, as Lytle Hernández acknowledges. While historians debate ad nauseam the question of whether the Mexican Revolution ended in 1915, 1920, or 1940, or was simply interrupted, as Adolfo Gilly suggested in 1971, there is no doubt that more than a century since the Mexican Revolution, the country has not even been close to living up to the “anticapitalist, free love, no property, and no Church” fantasy of the magonistas.3 Even the 1917 Constitution, for all its radical promise, was not an anarchist document (can any constitution be anarchist?), and perhaps not even socialist. I can imagine poor Ricardo throwing up a little when AMLO, a self-declared Christian, pronounced 2022 the year of Ricardo Flores Magón.Just who were these protagonists of the Mexican Revolution? Lytle Hernández describes them as “migrants, exiles, and citizens; farmworkers, sharecroppers, miners and intellectuals” (308). Yet the broader conception of the men who fought in the Mexican Revolution as the working class or the “aggrieved masses” (6), as the author refers to them, is somewhat vague and hints at more commonality between the various factions of the revolution than was, in fact, the reality. Although Villa, Zapata, and Magón, and Madero for that matter, all agreed on the goal of toppling Díaz, they had very different programs and represented different constituencies. The alliance between Zapata and Madero quickly broke down in the fall of 1911, and they became bitter enemies. Zapata and Villa, though aligned briefly, were unable to hold together their wobbly coalition when they seized Mexico City. And the magonistas’ absence from the scene meant they never had to test their solidarity with Zapata or Villa. I have a hard time, however, imagining the Zapatistas entering Mexico City with their Virgen de Guadalupe banners held high having much in common with the urbane anti-Church and anticapitalist magonistas. Knight has attempted to disaggregate the working class into agraristas, serranos, urban artisans, and industrial workers. To put it another way, they represented the Great Tradition and Little Tradition, one representing urban, literate artisans and factory workers, the other the rural, largely illiterate and agricultural workers.4 These two working-class factions of the revolution would fight each other in 1915 when Carranza organized urban left-wing workers from the Casa del Obrero Mundial into Red Battalions to fight against Villa and Zapata.5 Would Ricardo Flores Magón have sided with the card-carrying anarcho-syndicalist workers of the Red Battalions or joined the peasant fighters in the countryside? Either way, the conceptualization of the Mexican Revolution as the working masses fighting against the capitalist elite glosses over major divisions within each of these groupings, and these were not merely armchair debates: they were decided on the battlefield with bullets.The impact of the United States on Porfirian Mexico and the course of the Mexican Revolution is another one of those perennial debates that keeps Mexicanist historians in business and grad students up at night. Given the transnational focus of the book, Lytle Hernández seems to highlight US influence à la historian John Mason Hart.6 There is ample evidence of US investments in the country, and plenty of political chicanery too, from US ambassador Henry Lane Wilson orchestrating Francisco Madero's removal from power in 1913 to the invasion of Veracruz in 1914 to General Pershing's invasion of Chihuahua in 1916, but, as Alan Knight has argued, ultimately the United States failed to steer the course of the revolution. The persistence of radical elements in the 1917 Constitution like Article 27, which allowed for communal ejidos and for the expropriation of subsoil rights by the state, in the face of strong US objections, speaks to the limits of US power. The radicalization of the revolution under President Lázaro Cárdenas, including massive land distribution and the expropriation of the oil industry, also provides evidence that the United States didn't always get its way south of the border. US imperialism has weighed and continues to weigh on Mexico, but sometimes we end up granting the US empire too much power by not recognizing its limits.One curious aspect of the PLM story is that its leaders mostly stayed in the United States after the bullets started flying in Mexico during the revolution, Práxedis Guerrero being an important exception. Given all the repression from police, military, and state agents in the United States that Lytle Hernández so aptly describes, it is surprising that they stayed. Did they make a calculated decision that they could be more effective from north of the border? Did they fear a quick end to their lives in a country wracked by violence? Or did they simply change the focus of their political struggle?The 1915 Plan de San Diego (PSD) rebellion and the race war that followed in its wake shed some light on these questions, at least for some of the PLM sympathizers in South Texas. The PSD document itself suggests that the magonistas had drifted from a class-based revolt to one based on race, calling as it does for the killing of every white male over sixteen, but there are some intriguing questions about the authenticity of the plan itself, given that the original has never been produced. The PSD stands out among all the other rebellions in the Texas borderlands, many of which called for revenge on white oppressors, as a bizarre projection that may have been more a representation of white fears than an actual Mexican political program. Some white Texans were killed in the uprising, and many more—hundreds, perhaps thousands—of Texas Mexicans were brutally murdered in reprisal. But elite Texas Mexicans like J. T. Canales also participated in the vigilante posses to put down the rebellion, raising questions about the class and racial divisions among Mexican Americans.7 One leader of the 1915 revolt, Anicieto Pizaña, was a PLM adherent, but the PSD seems far from the kind of class-based radical politics of Ricardo Flores Magón. With its intellectual leader locked up at McNeil Island Prison at the time, it may be that magonismo was developing in ways that Ricardo would not have expected or welcomed.The questions about how to characterize the protagonists of the Mexican Revolution and how to weigh the impact of US empire may be beside the point for the intended audience of this book. Bringing to a wider audience in the United States the cinematic story of Ricardo Flores Magón and the magonistas helps us to understand the Mexican Revolution's importance to this country and also helps us to acknowledge the transnational roots of a labor struggle against capitalist exploitation in both countries that continues to this day.What lessons can activists in the United States derive from this history? Perhaps the story of Bad Mexicans can inspire people engaged in radical transnational organizing. Or perhaps it can serve as a cautionary tale of the dangers when exiled intellectual leaders become too disconnected from the everyday battles in their home countries. Either way, telling and retelling this history, like tending a fire at night, as Lytle Hernández put it, helps to keep the embers warm, waiting for a rush of oxygen to ignite the flame again.