The Mexican Revolution literally “changed who we are as a people,” as the migration it engendered laid the foundation of today’s Mexican American population.
This is the argument that Lytle Hernández makes in her new history of the magonistas, Bad Mexicans (2022). The core of her argument is that the Mexican Revolution literally “changed who we are as a people,” as the migration it engendered laid the foundation of today’s Mexican American population. The magonistas rebelled against the Díaz administration’s policies, which catered to American industrialists who exploited and even terrorized Mexican workers on both sides of the border. The PLM spearheaded these protests, outraged at the fact that wealthy Mexicans and Americans profited while peasants starved and Díaz rigged elections to stay in power. With over forty PLM focos, or local cells, in Mexico and the United States, primarily concentrated in Texas and Arizona, the organization became a transnational project. In both cause and effect, Lytle Hernández argues, the story of the magonistas is as much a part of U.S. history as Mexican history.
The story of the Mexican Revolution is rooted in U.S. greed. Through the 1883 Land Reform Act, Díaz auctioned off many of Mexico’s natural and material resources to Gilded Age titans including J.P. Morgan, Russell Sage, the Guggenheims, the Hearsts, and the Rockefellers. They extracted oil, minerals, and rubber and invested in agriculture, transporting their mined resources to the United States via the Mexican railroad (which they owned). Meanwhile, Mexican workers and the nation’s indigenous population struggled under debt peonage. Flores Magón proclaimed the Díaz administration a “den of thieves,” but Lytle Hernández underscores that the den was underwritten by U.S. imperialism.
Americans and U.S. geography were also central to the magonistas’ survival. The U.S. police and political officials constantly pursued the Flores Magón brothers and other leaders of the PLM (they called themselves La Junta)—including Juan Sarabia, Librado Rivera, Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara, and Práxedis Guerrero—forcing them to remain constantly on the move. San Antonio, El Paso, Los Angeles, and St. Louis are four of the most important U.S. cities in which PLM rebels hid, organized, wrote, and published, often with the aid and assistance of socialists and anarchists who lived in the United States. Some, including Jovita Idar, Mother Jones, and Emma Goldman, are familiar to many. Lesser-known elites, such as lawyer Job Harriman and socialite Elizabeth Trowbridge, used their wealth and professional expertise to support the movement. But most supporters were anonymous miners and migrant laborers who shared the magonistas’ economic beliefs.