Magonismo's Legacy, Then and Now

Bad Mexicans is a timely piece of scholarship. Notwithstanding recent criticism of scholars’ use of history as “confirm[ation] [of] [their] current political positions,” in my state, Texas, I find a book like Lytle Hernández's both vital and useful.1 It is precisely the contemporary value (or, for others, threat) of its historical content that makes Bad Mexicans a potentially transformative book. Lytle Hernández is not shy about employing this turn-of-the-twentieth-century story to insist once and for all that the histories of Mexico and the United States are intimately linked; this shared history has been consequential for both US and Mexican peoples. With an engaging prose accessible to public audiences, Lytle Hernández re-creates this shared history. Through the lens of magonismo and its greater legacy, I outline my main thoughts on Bad Mexicans as a series of historical lessons for us to consider.Lesson 1: Silencing political criticism erodes democracy—then and now. In January of last year, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador declared 2022 the year of Ricardo Flores Magón to commemorate Magón's contributions to the Mexican Revolution. Ironically, he did so amid what has been a bloody war against Mexican journalists: 151 journalists have been killed since 1992, and thirteen in the first eight months of 2022. One cannot help but think of the crackdown on journalists and thinkers like Magón and colleagues over a century ago, precisely for critiquing then-president Porfirio Díaz and his associates, including US financiers who upheld Porfirian values.Porfirio Diaz's banning of Regeneración, the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM)’s main propaganda organ, and persecution forced Magón and colleagues to find alternative ways to spread critical knowledge and information among multiple audiences. By July 1907, as Lytle Hernández writes, Magón was not just hiding in Los Angeles; he was also making the city the new headquarters of the PLM. He worked with Modesto Díaz to reboot Regeneración under the new name Revolución. When Revolución hit the streets of Los Angeles in June 1907, authorities once again hunted Magón. Lytle Hernández outlines the way US authorities, including the newly created Federal Bureau of Investigation, collaborated with Mexican agents to silence and apprehend these “bad Mexicans” who stood as obstacles to state progress and capital buildup. Basing her narrative on binational archival material, Lytle Hernández shows the centrality of the United States in silencing political criticism to promote a state progress that quickly emerged as antidemocratic.Lesson 2: Anarchism and its various strands, including anarcho-syndicalism,2 were not obscure, narrow ideas and movements, as they have often been portrayed—even if the PLM and magonismo declined, anarchist ideas remained relevant throughout the revolution and the postrevolutionary period, and their spirit is noticeable in today's struggles in different parts of the world. Social revolutions take constant perseverance, patience, and commitment. Magón and others, such as the norteño activist Librado Rivera, insisted that the real revolution was yet to come. They lost many allies who saw them as intransigent and stubborn. As Magón found himself in jail long after Francisco I. Madero's assassination, many of his supporters had now turned to consolidating revolutionary goals via the new administration of President Venustiano Carranza in 1917.3 As former PLM supporters and others placed their hope on Carranza, the regional terrateniente from the border state of Coahuila unleashed a crackdown on radical labor activists uninterested in aligning themselves with the emerging revolutionary state. Carranza promoted collaboration with organized labor, but only if it benefited the new state. Thus, those considered uncooperative, fringe, unruly individuals became easy targets. These included magonistas with links to the Industrial Workers of the World and other collective groups such as the Casa del Obrero Mundial (COM) who were surveilled, tortured, and in some cases killed—at the hands of a so-called revolutionary president.4 In this regard, Magón deserves credit for his intransigence. As others decided to join Madero and later Carranza, including Tamaulipas regional elite Emilio Portes Gil, these pseudo-revolucionarios, particularly Carranza and Portes Gil, instead marginalized, hunted, and ordered the torture and at times murder of radical activists including communists who had supported many of the same goals promoted by anarchists (although via different methods). Magón's unyielding ideas ultimately condemned him to a life sentence. It was not long after his death, however, that his role in ushering the possibility for change was recognized more fully. His ideas about insisting that we view the state with suspicion and hold leaders accountable to the very ideals of labor equality, agrarian justice, educational equity, and much more, lives on to this day.While I agree with a recent review of Bad Mexicans that “to simply uplift the magonistas doesn't do justice to the gravity of their moment, or ours,” I would add that one must first deconstruct the ideological legacy of magonismo to understand it more fully. At the heart of magonismo was an enduring criticism of the state (and/or the transnational state) that had the potential to transform both Mexico and the United States; I would argue that it has the potential to transform “our moment.”5 What is “our moment”? Our moment includes assaults on democracy that require us to speak up, to address educational and labor inequalities, to eliminate gender violence; to continue the call for justice on behalf of exploited, missing, and/or murdered individuals whether journalists, students, maquila and contingent workers, or migrants; and hold elected officials accountable as representatives of the state and its citizenry. We are, however, witnessing the sharing of ideas on both sides of the US–Mexico border about autonomy, mutual respect, and dignity that are framing protests. Many of these protests are taking the form of direct action reminiscent of magonismo—to expose the state's complicity in perpetuating inequalities and/or impeding justice. During our challenging moment, history can help us hang on to the thinnest strand of hope.Lesson 3:Magonismo and extralocal ideas helped to open up a space for the articulation of gender inequality and women's critical participation in social revolutions. Magonismo was not the only ideology and movement open to women, but it was among the strongest and most unapologetic. Women carried the double or triple burden of maintaining the everyday activities of organizations like the PLM, spreading propaganda, keeping abreast of labor matters at home and abroad, and informing colleagues of potential raids and arrests. In Bad Mexicans we learn about Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, revolutionary in her own right, and of others such as Señora [Ascensión Paz] Morantes, the Coahuila native who was able to briefly avoid arrest, which allowed her to help keep magonismo alive in Texas and Mexico. She helped to spread ideas about worker autonomy and defended the rights of Texas Mexican Americans in public protests. Through her own labor, as a seamstress, she sewed political messages on pillows and flags to rally the troops and keep the movement afloat.Other contemporaries such as Andrea and Teresa Villareal and Reynalda González Parra did the hard fundraising to get their comrades out of jail, wrote commentaries encouraging fellow compañeras to join the fight, and risked their lives to defend what many viewed as unrealistic goals. While women found new opportunities to voice their demands in organizations such as the PLM, the COM, and other anarcho-syndicalist collectives, those spaces remained riddled with normative gendered ideas. Although not necessarily its central concern, Bad Mexicans reminds us of how revolutionaries framed their ideas and actions in gendered terms, including the use of gendered rhetoric to shun those who failed to join the movement. A quick glance at Regeneración's featured commentaries, poems, and articles uncovers how even the most progressive of magonistas revealed their deeply rooted normative ideas about gender. Magón himself and radical COM members encouraged men to “be tough and fight for what is yours,” using examples of women's activism as a tool to embarrass men who were not quick to join the fight. Further, anarchists supporting the PLM also framed their demands and concerns in gendered ways comparing capitalists to “putrid prostitutes.” In some cases, anarchists accused communists and socialists of acting like a group of comadres desgreñándose, or gossipy women preoccupied with in-fighting instead of ushering the “real” revolution. Magón himself, frustrated at what he saw as the selling-out of comrades like Antonio Villarreal (Andrea and Teresa's brother), likened Villareal's abandonment of the PLM effort to a lack of masculinity and as a sign of corrupt sexual desire.6 In brief, women's political and social activism as well as their own ideas about equality shaped magonismo in profound ways. Their contributions via this movement—part of a larger, global struggle for socioeconomic justice—remain part of the legacy of women's history.Lesson 4: Examining the late Gilded Age and early Progressive movement alongside the late Juarez period, Porfiriato, and revolution can lead to more nuanced interpretations of nation- making, modernization, and the racialization and/or criminalization of certain groups.Both the Mexican and US vision for development and progress during these crucial periods of nation-making involved ideas that cast people as fit or unfit for modern nation-states. Those who emerged as obstacles to state growth were disciplined, excluded, transplanted, or deported. Both countries’ privileging of modernization through capitalist development required transnational collaboration to tame and control a shared border region in the name of progress. Bad Mexicans lays bare the crucial role of collaboration at the local and regional level to achieve greater, national and transnational goals—often carried out by notorious groups such as the Texas Rangers and their Mexican counterparts, the Rurales. Such transnational state collaboration to quash any threat to state progress and any threat to foreign investment canceled both sides of the border as potential haven. Magón, Rivera, Morantes, and many others knew this quite well. Neither side of the border could offer full protection. To gain a comprehensive understanding of nation-making during the Porfirian era, it is essential to examine the role of US capital, along with the influence of prevailing racialized and gendered ideologies that shaped society. Neglecting these factors not only presents an incomplete picture but also obscures how often violence was employed in the pursuit of progress.Lesson 5: The important but often neglected history of anti-Mexican violence, particularly brutal in Texas, did not happen in a vacuum, nor did it unfold simply because revolutionary activity “spilled over” to the US side of the border.While there were Mexicans and Mexican Americans who proudly joined revolutionary movements including the PLM and eventually the Junta, the revolution also provided state authorities with an excuse to label anyone who looked Mexican or worse, a working-class Mexican a potential Mexican bandit. Such labeling made it easy to justify extralegal killings including the brutal lynching of twenty-year-old Antonio Rodríguez, as Lytle Hernández reminds us in the opening of her book. Rangers were complicit in helping authorities detain and/or eliminate suspects. There is truth in Magón's repeated claim of Rangers as the real bandits in Regeneración: as he wrote in 1915, “Shooting us in the back when we have turned ourselves in! What better proof of felony can one expect from a ranger?”7While some have argued that bringing up past injustices only impedes finding common ground when painful history is invoked and that, while “the connections we draw between the two . . . ultimately do not go anywhere,” invoking the past—no matter how dark it may be—can in fact create awareness of how past injustices, including the indiscriminate use of labeling individuals bandit or bad, have led to loss of life.8 Diminishing the importance of historical relevancy “in our moment” out of fear of sounding too presentist glosses over history as a transformative tool and, equally important, does a disservice to those who stood up against such injustice at that specific time.Finally, why keep invoking and examining magonismo when, clearly, others claimed victory and anarchist organizations declined?9 Radical social movements such as magonismo and the individuals who helped maintain it long after Magón took his last breath in the Leavenworth Penitentiary further illuminate the complexities of democratization. Through her compelling narrative, Lytle-Hernández shows both governments’ complicit role in eroding a potentially transformative democratization (a magonista-based revolution) with far-reaching consequences for people on both sides of the border. But, just as these attempts to quash real change consisted of binational efforts, so were the struggles of scores of workers and residents to create an equitable society. Their collaborative activism became the vehicle by which such change was possible. Given the relentless quest to make information available across geopolitical borders (political ideas, issues affecting different workers, updates on new labor collectives), magonismo, in many ways the perfect subject for a transnational study, lends itself to creating models of scholarship based on global efforts of solidarity. Notwithstanding its own internal problems, including heteronormative gendered ideas deeply embedded in the movement, magonismo left a legacy of direct action, a continuous critique of state power, and reminds us of women's central participation in intellectual and armed movements. In short, it reminds us of a continuous, unrelenting desire for change.For historians and future students, these types of studies help us broaden the fields of Mexican history, women's history, labor history, intellectual history, and US history. Lytle Hernández has contributed to this widening of fields and has shown, quite convincingly, the consequential nature of border regions; she, too, demonstrates how Ricardo Flores Magón—whom my grandmother would describe as “ni de aquí ni de allá” (neither from here nor from there)—was consequential to the idea that transformational change was and is possible.