Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernández

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernández Benjamin Johnson Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands. By Kelly Lytle Hernández. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022. Pp. 372. Illustrations, appendix, notes, index.) Ricardo Flores Magón died a lonely and grim death in 1922 in the Leavenworth, Kansas, federal penitentiary after years of ill health and fading eyesight. The ignominy of his departure from this world belies the enormous impact that Flores Magón and his circle, the Magonistas, had on Mexico and the borderlands it shares with the United States. In this compelling and accessible synthesis of the Magonista movement, Kelly Lytle Hernández traces the lives and politics of Flores Magón and his brother from their beginnings in southern Mexico to exile in the United States (including several years in Laredo and San Antonio) and their remarkable success in starting a revolution, which overthrew the western hemisphere’s longest-running regime and opened new possibilities for dignity and security for millions living in Mexico and its northern borderlands. Ricardo and his brother Enrique were born in the 1870s to parents who met while supporting Mexican forces against an invading French army in Puebla in 1863—ironically, the battle during which Porfirio Díaz first came into prominence. The young men’s growing dissatisfaction with Díaz’s regime (1876–1911) for its stifling of democracy and exploitation of Mexico’s masses and the brothers’ fostering of independent journalism and politics are the book’s early subjects. The narrative follows the Magonista circles, including Praxedis Guerrero, Librado Rivera, Antonio Villareal, and Juan Sarabia, into the United States in 1905. Here the focus is on their search for a viable base—Laredo, San Antonio, St. Louis, and ultimately Los Angeles—from which to publish their newspaper Regeneración and form a political and ultimately armed movement to bring down the Díaz regime. The Mexican and United States governments spied on them extensively (in the process generating some of the key documentation for Lytle Hernández and the scholars she relies on), trying to use the law and sometimes extralegal violence to stop the men and women whom Díaz rightly came to regard as the greatest threats to the continuation of his rule. Ricardo was sentenced to prison twice, the second time in 1918 for violating the notorious Espionage Act. As can be readily ascertained from the author’s frequent and generous acknowledgements of previous scholarship, Bad Mexicans is a work that rests on a foundation of more focused and archivally driven studies of the Magonistas, political movements likes anarchism and socialism, Mexican American social history, and anti-Díaz politics. Lytle Hernández’s primary achievement is to tell the story of the Magonistas as a compelling, even riveting, narrative of conspiracy, pursuit, suffering, and triumph that crosses much of North America. Her sympathy for her insurgent subjects is un-stated but clear; the book is very effective in evoking empathy and solidarity [End Page 404] with the struggle against state oppression and economic exploitation in both Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. She gracefully puts the Magonistas in conversation with the largest developments in both Mexican and United States history. Yet the author refuses to blind herself to Ricardo Flores Magón’s sexism, homophobia, and penchant for vindictiveness, all of which not only led to his estrangement from former comrades, but also at times hampered his movement and its ability to achieve its central goal, the overthrow of the Díaz dictatorship. Bad Mexicans thus embodies the large scope and judiciousness that one hopes for from a synthetic account. It also comes with some of the familiar costs of painting a picture on such a large canvas. The author’s attention is more on action—political organizing, military preparations, surveil-lance, and repression—than on social or ideological analysis. Borderlands specialists will not find new arguments or information about such topics as economic changes, imperialism, and race or ideas of nationalism, race, and gender. Some may find the treatment of segregation and race in South Texas to be somewhat reductive. But they...