Beginning with the title, this study is a provocative, compelling, and engaging book that proposes to reorder the way people in the United States think about US-Mexico relations, the police state, immigration, activism, and the history of the Mexican Revolution. Lytle Hernández argues that those in the United States cannot understand US history without a knowledge of Mexican history, which is often treated as a footnote in schools. Moreover, Hernández asserts that those in the United States cannot comprehend Mexican history without learning about the history of the Mexican Revolution and argues that it was a cataclysmic event that “remade Mexico . . . [and] also remade the United States” (7). Additionally, the book provides a new way of thinking about the US-Mexico borderlands as a geographic and symbolic space of US designs as a global power. This epistemological frame centers the lived experiences of Mexican Americans and other Latinx communities and their central role in US history.
As a way to provide a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the complex history of the revolution “as a seminal event in US history [that] changed who we are as people” (8), Hernández chooses as her subjects the anarchist brothers Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón and other revolutionaries at the center of the loose organization La Junta, which denounced the corruption and abuses of dictator Porfirio Díaz and the US companies and industrialists that supported his regime. The author chronicles the many challenges, triumphs, and failures of the brothers and this group. Despite their inability to organize an armed revolution, their work as journalists, spies and political agitators set the intellectual stage for ousting Díaz. Writing in an engaging and vivid language—for example, she shares that Ricardo Flores Magón “looked more like a girthy professor than a gutsy revolutionary” (5)—the author humanizes the brothers and offers complex portraits of the other main players.
The book is divided into four sections, each containing multiple chapters organized chronologically, beginning with Díaz's dictatorship. The second section narrates the founding of the magonistas, their initial organization, and their work as journalists and activists. The third concentrates on the negative consequences of publishing critiques of the Díaz regime's crimes, corruption, and illegitimacy in their newspaper La Regeneración. The newspaper kept the movement afloat, and its publication led to the persecution of the brothers Flores Magón by both US and Mexican organizations, including the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. As Hernández underscores, the FBI weaponized against them and other political ‘radicals’ and anarchists to protect US economic interests in Mexico. The final section discusses the beginnings of the Mexican Revolution and the broader legacy of the brothers Flores Magón and others in La Junta.
This is an engrossing and page-turning account of a seminal moment in Mexico's history. Its witty and refreshingly candid tone (“Revolutions are hard to schedule,” 279) will engage a wide readership, from Mexicanists and Border Studies scholars to undergraduate students. It provides a robust set of notes that lists the extensive secondary source materials used to craft this story. The index also includes a short list of aliases used by the rebels, as collected by the Furlong Secret Service Company, one of the surveillance and intelligence organizations hired by authorities to eliminate radicals agitating for revolutionary change in Mexico. The list is helpful in keeping up with the narrative, which moves along with a sense of urgency, perhaps mimicking the idealism of the rebels and the dire conditions in which they often found themselves.
A number of photographs are scattered throughout the chapters. One of note is that of Josefina Fierro de Bright, a leading Mexican American civil rights activist who helped organize the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee in the 1940s. Her mother, Josefa Fierro, was a vital member of La Junta. Among other things, she smuggled guns into Mexico in support of insurgent actions. This, along with a long and tangled cast of characters and events, compels careful and engaged reading. Those who undertake it are rewarded by sentences like “Corral hung a cloak of falsehoods over the raids” (246) and “It was the Twitter feed of the printing press era” (255).
