Author's Response

I want to begin by thanking Labor: Studies in Working-Class History for selecting Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Rebellion in the Borderlands as its Big Book for 2022. It has been an honor to engage with the Labor and Working-Class History Association community and, especially, with Sonia Hernández, John Tutino, and Elliott Young, who so graciously accepted invitations to read and comment on the book. I will keep my reflections brief, as the readers have all made fair critiques of Bad Mexicans, including its strengths and weaknesses.Elliott Young and Sonia Hernández both comment on the book's embrace of a transnational approach to history. Young, who cofounded the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, an institute I once attended back in 2008, writes that Bad Mexicans joins a forgotten but reemerging tradition of telling “stories that cross and spill over borders.” As he notes, the first page of Bad Mexicans jumps the border, launching a narrative “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.” Hernández, herself an intrepid chronicler of cross-border and revolutionary histories, writes that “magonismo, in many ways the perfect subject for a transnational study, lends itself to creating models of scholarship based on transnational, global efforts of solidarity.” Writing a borderlands history, one that sits comfortably at the intersection of nations and within an orbit of its own (“ni de aquí ni de allá,” as Hernández's grandmother might put it) was certainly one of my goals with this book. I am thrilled that these two distinguished historians of transnational history have identified the book's borderlands frame as well executed.Each reviewer notes that historians of the Mexican Revolution debate the “importance of the magonistas in the course of the [Mexican] revolution,” given that relatively few Mexicans, on either side of the border, actively supported the magonistas in their all-out “war on capital, authority, and the Church.” As John Tutino details, the magonista platform was too anticlerical and too liberal for mass support. Similarly, as Hernández observes, leading voices among the magonistas, namely Ricardo Flores Magón and Librado Rivera, “lost many allies who saw them as intransigent and stubborn.” In turn, the magonistas “never provoke[d] mass mobilizations, while thousands joined Villista risings just across the border and thousands more rose in Zapatista communities south of Mexico City.” Elliott Young makes the point with an important question—“Just who were these protagonists of the Mexican Revolution?”—and notes that Bad Mexicans does not address how the magonistas ideologically jived with the various factions that went on to fight in the revolution. These observations are correct. The magonistas did not lead the Mexican Revolution, the 1917 Mexican Constitution was not as radical as they demanded, and Ricardo Flores Magón died alone in a cell in Leavenworth Penitentiary. Plus, in the decades ahead, their memory as political agitators has warped and waned. Most recently, the Mexican government declared 2022 the year of Ricardo Flores Magón, making Young wonder whether “poor Ricardo,” an anarchist, is “throwing up a little” in his grave. And, as Sonia Hernández notes, despite their legacy as dissident writers, journalism remains a dangerous occupation in Mexico. In fact, 2022, the year of Ricardo Flores Magón, was the deadliest year on record for journalists in Mexico. All of this is true.1 The magonistas did not win—radicals almost never do—so some historians question their impact as historical agents.Still, I believe in the magonistas and the power of their story. For me, the knowledge that a small group of ordinary men and women in the borderlands, my homeland, challenged a tyrant and stirred a revolution that ousted him from power is enough. They did not go on to lead the revolution, but there is no doubt they helped kick-start it. Here it is important to note that many scholars who question the magonistas’ impact as historical actors tend to judge them by what came after their decline in 1911. But archives across the United States and Mexico clearly show that between 1901 and 1910, the magonistas’ most active years, the two governments scrambled to contain their rebellion. According to John Tutino, Bad Mexicans taps these archives to provide “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.” I respectfully disagree. Ward Albro, W. Dirk Raat, John Womack, Juan Gomez Quiñones, and others have previously provided exhaustive analyses of the US and Mexican governments’ efforts to suppress the magonistas, especially after they arrived in the United States in 1904. We have all made clear that, between 1901 and 1910, the magonistas forced some of the most powerful men on earth to contend with their freedom dreams: power for the disenfranchised, land for the dispossessed, plenty for the impoverished, and autonomy for the subjugated. Striking terror in the hearts of powerful men, provoking the wrath of governments, and spreading ideas of freedom among the dispossessed are not the only ways to make history, but they certainly count for me. And, most important, as Sonia Hernández writes, “even if the PLM and magonismo declined, anarchist ideas [and their direct-action campaigns] remained relevant throughout the revolution and the postrevolutionary period, and their spirit is noticeable in today's struggles.” Their ideas and their lives continued not just to inspire but also to inform rebel movements, including the Chicana/o movement of the 1960s and ’70s, when Gomez Quiñones declared the magonistas to have been “major contributors as ideologues and organizers to the intellectual climate and political process of the Chicano community and México.”2 Indeed, he continues, the magonistas left the Chicana/o movement “a heritage of love, self-sacrifice, ideals, and organizational modes from which to draw critically.”3 Therefore, I agree with Elliott Young, who writes, “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.”In writing Bad Mexicans, I joined the fire tenders of this rebel history, stoking it for the questions it can answer about the past and the lessons it can provide for the present. My goal was to bring the magonista story, and what it can teach us about the past and the present, to as many people as possible. So, in closing, I want to note something the reviewers did not directly address in their comments: storytelling. Only Hernández nods to the fact that Bad Mexicans is not crafted for the academic reader. She is correct. I wrote Bad Mexicans for a broad and diverse audience. I wanted not only people who had never heard of the magonistas but even those who knew very little about the Mexican American, Mexican, and borderlands past to pick up the book and learn about these pivotal areas of modern US history. I specifically wrote for Mexican American youth hungry to see themselves at the center of US history and for social justice advocates who, like the magonistas, dare to demand a new world. I wanted these rebel readers to feel their forebears turning the pages of history. And, to be true to the magonista spirit, the book needed to inform and inspire. To do this, I retooled as a writer, working closely with my editor to develop my storytelling skills, something we, as historians, are rarely trained to do. It was difficult but thrilling work, prioritizing the pace and arc of the story alongside the evidence and argument. Draft after draft, I grew as a writer. When Fidel Martínez, editor of the Latinx Files for the Los Angeles Times, reviewed Bad Mexicans, writing that the book has the “cadence of a corrido,” I couldn't help but think the book's cadence helped to deliver its content and spirit. As Martínez put it, Bad Mexicans “radicalized me[,] . . . fundamentally changed the way I see the world, the way I see myself in this country.”4