Seeking Revolution in the US-Mexican Borderlands

Abstract

The revolution that began in Mexico in 1910–11 generated pivotal transformations in Mexico and North America. Political wars and social insurgencies mixed to forge a new Mexican regime that promised—and partially delivered—radical land redistributions, unprecedented labor rights, and resource nationalizations that brought new possibilities to Mexicans and newly complex and always contested ties between Mexico and the United States. The Porfirio Díaz regime, which ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1911, had mixed political closures with often predatory liberal development. Postrevolutionary Mexico was no utopia, but popular pressures forced changes that benefited many—while driving others north in search of work and new lives, building an expansive Mexican America on once-Mexican lands.1Attempts to understand the origins, conflicts, and consequences of Mexico's decade of revolution persist and evolve, long shaped by political polarities, shifting ideologies, and changing interests in Mexico, the United States, and beyond. We now see the decade of revolution that began in 1910 not as a singular process but as a mix of contradictory conflicts—social and political, cultural and gendered—grounded in Mexico yet always engaging US interests and powers, always tied to larger global challenges marked by the First and Second World Wars and, between them, the Great Depression.2Kelly Lytle Hernández's Bad Mexicans now offers a culminating new analysis of the roots and limits of Mexico's revolution in borderlands that by 1910 were becoming ever more transnational. Focusing on Ricardo Flores Magón and the movement he sparked, she brings new understanding to key political conflicts that preceded the revolution and marked its beginnings.The political and ideological efforts of Flores Magón and the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) are long recognized. The year 1968 proved pivotal: James Cockroft published Precursors of the Mexican Revolution, bringing the PLM to the center of transnational historical conversations;3 John Womack followed with Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, detailing the agrarian insurrections that surged south of Mexico City as PLM challenges waned in the North.4 And Luis González y González offered Pueblo en vilo, the history of a town steeped in religion that stood aside from the revolution swirling all around—to later rise against “revolutionary” powers in the 1920s.5Also in 1968, the Mexican regime killed hundreds of protesting students at Tlatelolco, then hosted the Olympics to proclaim the nation's global emergence; there, on the global stage of Mexico City's Olympic Stadium, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists to protest US racism. That year demanded new understandings of the inseparable histories of Mexico and the United States—and the revolution that tied them together in enduring contradictions.It was also in 1968 that Adolfo Gilly, an Argentine held in Díaz's Lecumberri Penitentiary for running guns from Chiapas to Guatemalan rebels, began to open a new chapter in understanding the Mexican revolution—then five decades past. He read Cockroft, Womack, and González y González—and wrote La revolución interrumpida in his cell. Published in 1971, it detailed revolutionary aspirations and limits, real gains and broken promises. It remains the most-read account of the revolution.6New studies followed in waves: Arnaldo Cordova's La ideología de la revolución mexicana challenged political myths;7 Rodney Anderson returned to the PLM and labor in Outcasts in Their Own Land.8 The 1980s brought more: Friedrich Katz set revolution within global power struggles in The Secret War in Mexico.9 Francois-Xavier Guerra returned to the Díaz regime and its fall.10 Alan Knight offered a massive political synthesis in The Mexican Revolution.11 I explored agrarian bases in From Insurrection to Revolution.12 John Hart's Revolutionary Mexico linked US power to Mexican political factions and popular movements.13 Then, in the 1990s, Katz's Life and Times of Pancho Villa appeared, paralleling Womack's Zapata to illuminate a popular leader and powerful movement;14 Jonathan Brown's Oil and Revolution took energy to the fore;15 and Jennie Purnell explored why some communities pressed agrarian goals and others rose against the new regime as Cristeros in the 1920s.16 And Gilly's return with El Cárdenismo linked social reforms, oil expropriation, and US power to rethink regime consolidation in the 1930s.17As the new millennium began, scholars turned to Mexico City in times of revolution: John Lear delved into the subject of workers;18 Katherine Bliss focused on prostitution and public health;19 Pablo Picatto explored crime and the urban underworld.20 Then came new perspectives on key Gulf regions: Myna Santiago returned to oil, land, and labor in The Ecology of Oil;21 Aurora Gómez Galvarriato brought new depth to understanding industry, labor, and revolution in Orizaba, Veracruz.22Since 2010, innovation has returned to the borderlands, the PLM, and the binational, political conflicts that marked revolutionary times there. Claudio Lomnitz's The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón offered newly detailed biographies of the diverse participants in the PLM and their complex interactions with Anglo-Americans including John Kenneth Turner, Ethel Duffy Turner, and others.23 Lomnitz details radical energies driving divisions that limited coordination and mobilization. He revived interest in a multifaceted movement that flourished from 1906 into 1911, honored by many in search of radical change, feared by two regimes, then receding in 1911—as revolution surged across Mexico. Flores Magón was revered while held but not contained in US prisons.Simultaneously, Sonia Hernández published Working Women into the Borderlands, reminding us (again) that neither hard labor nor political activism was exclusively male and showing the resonance of PLM visions and visionaries among women pressing their interests in trying times before, during, and after the revolution.24 Gabriela González followed with Redeeming La Raza, on Mexican American political life in south Texas from the era of the PLM to World War II.25 She details the rise and enduring influence of movements that defended ethnic rights without directly challenging the Anglo establishment. Early south Texas leaders, men and women, heard PLM radicals, yet rarely joined them. Some—notably Leonor Villegas de Magnón—backed the reformist faction led by Venustiano Carranza.26 Political movements in Mexican south Texas kept PLM radicals at distance.In The Violence Never Leaves You, Mónica Muñóz sets that moderation in context. She offers a detailed, often painful new understanding of Anglo violence in south Texas.27 Too many Mexicans faced brutalities imposed by Texas Rangers and Anglo mobs. Muñoz shows the years of Mexico's revolution as a deadly time in south Texas: people struggling to survive faced crushing violence. Political and popular resistance faced devastating impositions. When Sonia Hernández delivered For a Just and Better World the next year, we learned of radical women across the border in Tamaulipas pressing revolution while their south Texas sisters and brothers faced brutal repression.28Kelly Lytle Hernández's Bad Mexicans now delivers a culminating, integrating, and transforming new analysis of the rise and fall of the PLM in the borderlands, focusing on regions from El Paso to Los Angeles. Her previous studies shed new light on the Border Patrol and detailed a long history of incarceration in Los Angeles.29 Building on the authors noted here and many others, and on new research in archives of power in the United States and Mexico, she generates a powerful new narrative of the rise, expansion, and exhaustion of the PLM and its attempts to provoke revolution.So much is new: an unprecedented portrayal of the Díaz regime's ability to engage in political espionage, on its own and in concert with US allies—matched by new detail on PLM radicals’ ability to share information and propaganda, news and plans, from hiding and in prison, across vast distances and against adamant adversaries. Bad Mexicans also brings new light to the 1906 conflict at the Cananea copper mines and new insights into many less-famous incursions into Mexico.Another revealing aspect of the book is that Lytle Hernández shows Mexican and US officials working to keep semblances (or masks) of legality in separate and joint efforts to repress PLM activists—a notable contrast with the crude violence in south Texas. Radical activists took advantage of covers of legality to deflect repression and struggle on. The result is a powerful new understanding of radical actions and state powers in the borderlands on the eve of revolution.The political-ideological passions, underground lives, and survival skills detailed by Lomnitz and Lytle Hernández drove the PLM's rise and diffusion across the borderlands. The divisions emphasized by Lomnitz and the binational espionage and repressions uncovered by Lytle Hernández limited the movement's reach and impact as revolution exploded across Mexico.New analyses bring new questions: Why did Flores Magón and the PLM generate wide engagement among radical ideologues in Mexico, the United States, and the borderlands, yet never provoke mass mobilizations, while thousands joined Villista risings just across the border and thousands more rose in Zapatista communities south of Mexico City?The new studies focused on the borderlands suggest new understandings of exploitations and repressions in Mexico and Mexican America. We have long presumed that Porfirian Mexico was more exploitative of its working peoples, men and women, and more repressive of political and popular resistance than its state and federal counterparts in the United States in the years before 1910. Might we now ask whether exploitations and repressions were more parallel than we thought across the border, and whether US repression was more effective—and, in Texas, more brutal? Did that limit mobilizations north of the border, where the PLM focused so much effort, while risings spread to drive revolution across Mexico?Larger questions remain. Cockroft, Lomnitz, and Lytle Hernández show the PLM emerging from historic Mexican liberalism, with some proceeding to anarchism, others turning to socialism. That trajectory brought separations from cultures enduring in many Mexican communities. Mexican liberals long focused on attacking Church power, properties, and cultural influence. Yet the landed power of the Church broke in the 1767 expropriation of the Jesuits; its financial power dissolved in the fight against Napoleon before 1808. When the 1857 constitution brought liberals to power, the Church was materially weak—and culturally pervasive. Still, liberals attacked. A half century later, PLM anticlericalism and religious skepticism assaulted truths cherished by most Mexicans.Beyond anticlericalism, liberals attacked the historic political and land rights of Indigenous communities. The pivotal founding document of Hispanic liberalism, the 1812 Cádiz Constitution, long unseen or ignored by anglophone scholars, ended Indigenous republics’ self-rule and aimed to end corporate control of the lands that sustained families, community governance, and religious life.30 From 1867 into the 1870s, Mexico's Zapotec yet liberal president Benito Juárez pressed privatizations of community lands, provoking risings that led to slow implementations under Díaz. Privatized land became salable and subject to debt seizure, concentrating in the hands of a favored few—often proudly liberal.31 Across central and southern Mexico, people grounded in community ways knew liberalism for anticlericalism, the denigration of popular religious customs, and assaults on community land rights. The PLM found little support there.From the Bajío north, commercial ways and private properties, great and small, had ruled since Spanish times—grounded in deep and enduring religious cultures.32 Hispanic Catholic ways persisted through the nineteenth century, at times focusing popular resistance.33 Under Díaz, Mexico's borderlands boomed with railroads and US investment—until a sharp downturn drove dislocations and unemployment beginning in 1907. Still, PLM calls for resistance found limited resonance among rural majorities.The political risings of 1911 on the Mexican side of a porous border responded to Francisco Madero, rebel son of one of the most powerful landed, banking, and industrial families of Mexico's North. The mass risings that backed Madero were mobilized by Pancho Villa, a wrangler, muleteer, and smuggler who moved among the people and honored the religious visions that informed their lives. Leonor Villegas de Magnón, who headed reformist Carranza's medical service, called Villa “the people's choice.” South of Mexico City, risings preceded Madero's call, led by Zapata, also a muleteer and grounded in communities living through land concentrations while surrounded by sugar estates rapidly mechanizing, thus eliminating labor. Distressed people steeped in local religious cultures rose to reclaim lands and community rights, risings that Zapata linked to Madero. The only Zapatista uniform was an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe pinned in the hats of guerrilla fighters.34While Flores Magón and much of the PLM leadership sat in US prisons, the risings led and personified by Zapata and Villa made the Mexican revolution revolutionary.Both backed Madero to oust Diáz in 1911; Villa held loyal to Madero, while Zapata broke away when the landlord-reformer refused to deliver community land rights. When Victoriano Huerta and the federal army (backed by US ambassador and former Guggenheim company lawyer Henry Lane Wilson) deposed and killed Madero in 1913, Villa and Zapata reunited in opposition to a militarized revival of the old regime. They broke its power in 1914, only to face the anticlerical, reformist forces led by Carranza—backed and armed by the United States and funded by oil revenues peaking during World War I.Soon separated in southern and northern homelands, Zapata and Villa were politically weakened. Yet their demands could not be ignored: Carranza enshrined land and labor rights in the Constitution of 1917—and blocked implementation. Zapata remained in resistance until Carranza had him murdered in 1919. When Álvaro Obregón deposed Carranza in 1920, he allied with surviving Zapatistas and delivered land to their communities to consolidate rule. Villa still threatened in northern borderlands—until Obregón oversaw his assassination in 1923.Obregón promised land reform to impose his successor, Plutarco Elías Calles. Yet Calles rejected land and labor reforms, setting anticlericalism as his core program. He provoked widespread risings in which Cristeros demanded cultural autonomies, but he learned that the only way to mobilize force against them was to deliver land to loyal communities. The Calles-Cristero conflicts of the 1920s revealed deep religious commitments and powerful demands for land in communities across Mexico.35Only in the Great Depression did Lázaro Cárdenas consolidate the postrevolutionary regime by delivering the land rights demanded by Zapatistas and Villistas, granting labor rights to workers in new industrial sectors, nationalizing oil to challenge capitalist powers, and, as World War II loomed, gaining FDR's sanction.36 And still he faced opposition in regions steeped in religious tradition.37 Then in the 1940s, as defense minister in his successor's cabinet, Cárdenas set Mexico to back the United States with workers, copper, cloth, and soldiers during World War II. Mexico and the United States were locked together in a common contested history.38The studies of the PLM culminating in Bad Mexicans reveal the integration of Mexican and US power and political resistance in run-up to revolution in 1910–11. They document the movement's collapse in the face of binational repression as popular risings spread across Mexico to shape a new North America. Most PLM ideologues failed to engage popular visions and goals; they were marginalized in the conflicts that transformed Mexico, emerging as tragic heroes, drowned in the origins of a popular revolution. There is much to learn from their efforts and their limits.The studies culminating in Bad Mexicans are essential to any engagement with the intersections of Mexican and US history in the twentieth century. Yet there are few laborers in these histories, although Mexican workers drove northward before and after 1910. In Migra!, Lytle Hernández revealed key episodes in often cruel yet ultimately impossible attempts to control that flow. In City of Inmates, she detailed the rise of incarceration as a way of labor control imposed on Native Americans, white tramps, Chinese immigrants, undocumented Mexicans, and African Americans (a perspective reenergized by Elliott Young in Forever Prisoners).39 For all the towering importance of Bad Mexicans, I see City of Inmates as Kelly Lytle Hernández's pivotal contribution to labor history—setting Los Angeles in a long history of power, production, and exclusions at complex intersections of class, race, and citizenship.