Kelly Lytle Hernández’s Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands is a compelling history of the Mexican radicals who traversed Mexico and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and inspired the Mexican Revolution. Lytle Hernández convincingly shows how Ricardo Flores Magón and a band of Mexican socialists and anarchists inspired one of the great social revolutions of the twentieth century. In fact, Bad Mexicans makes clear how the Magonistas and the Mexican Revolution are essential to understanding the U.S. empire, the making of the American West, and rebellion against the global color line. In doing so, Lytle Hernández provides an engaging and lesser-known narrative that demonstrates how Latino history is U.S. history.
Bad Mexicans is divided into four parts: Mexico under the dictatorship of Porfirio Diáz, the evolution of Magonista ideas, state surveillance and political exiles, and the first sparks of the Mexican Revolution. Part 1, “The Porfiriato,” gives an overview of nineteenth century Mexican history, the rise of Porfirio Diáz to the presidency of Mexico, and an explanation of the social, economic, and political change that occurred during his thirty-five-year rule. Ricardo Flores Magón, his brothers, and other Mexican socialists and anarchists are also introduced. Commonly referred to as Magonistas and eventually forming the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), these radicals came together at the turn of the century because of their shared opposition to the Diáz administration. Lytle Hernández claims that Flores Magón’s speech criticizing Diáz directly at the 1901 Liberal conference in San Luis Potosí was the first instance of a Mexican dissenter placing Diáz in their crosshairs. Then, after increasing critiques of Diáz in the radicals’ newspaper Regeneración, which Magón and others founded in 1900, the Porfiriato turned their full attention towards the Magonistas. This extended period of surveillance and incarceration resulted in the destruction of print materials and offices, as well as Magonistas being jailed in Mexico City’s infamous Belem Prison. Because of this, the “malos Mexicanos,” or bad Mexicans, fled Mexico and crossed into Texas in January of 1904.
Part 2, “We Will Be Revolutionaries,” begins with the Magonista arrival in Texas. Lytle Hernández effectively situates Flores Magón and his fellow exiles within the struggle against the global color line that emerged in the early twentieth century. The author does so by contextualizing Flores Magón’s arrival and the relaunch of Regeneración, alongside Mexican land dispossession, loss of political power, rise of police impunity, and the San Antonio Mexicans who led the fight to maintain Mexicans’ right to naturalize in the United States in an era of increasing race-based immigration restriction. After an attempt on Magón’s life at a Mexican Independence Day celebration in San Antonio in 1904, the Magonistas soon fled state repression and violence again, this time to St. Louis, Missouri.
Building off her previous book, City of Inmates, Lytle Hernández provides a gripping account of the transnational pursuit of the Mexicans radicals by Mexican state officials and private detectives. Deception allowed some Magonistas to evade capture throughout the United States and Mexico and even as far as Canada. While in St. Louis, the radical core formed La Junta. Members of La Junta and other committed comrades then traveled through the United States and Mexico to organize focos, or affinity groups, who would distribute Regeneración and organize workers and radicals who would fight for land and liberty when called upon by the radicals. As La Junta weathered state surveillance to varying degrees, their focos participated in a strike in Cananea and a raid of Jiménez, Mexico, in 1906. Part 3, “Running Down the Revolutionists,” provides a striking analysis of empire and police power and shows how U.S.-Mexican collaboration bolstered each other’s attacks on those seen as threats to national security and capitalism.
What is striking is how the PLM persevered despite state violence, incarceration, treachery, and ideological disputes. Part 4, “Tierra y Libertad!,” highlights the ideas and actions that influenced the Mexican Revolution and the solidification of Flores Magón and the PLM as anarchist. Despite Magón’s incarceration in Los Angeles, Magonistas continued to plan raids and produce propaganda in defiance of the governments of the United States and Mexico. While Lytle Hernández cautions early that the Magonistas did not win any major battles or go on to take the reins of the revolution after 1910, it is clear how the radicals contributed to the revolutionary demands and actions that reshaped Mexico.
In addition to achieving her goal of showing how Magonistas changed the course of Mexican and U.S. history, Lytle Hernández does a masterful job of weaving through the stacks of bound books of correspondence and stolen Magonista letters that are held in Mexico City. In contextualizing these letters, she shows how this is also a history of state formation. The U.S. and Mexican governments used immigration policy to apprehend these radicals, which then provided needed legitimacy to the Bureau of Investigation, the pre-cursor to the FBI. One could even argue that Lytle Hernández is re-periodizing Ricardo Romo’s concept of the “Brown Scare.” While Romo dates the concept to 1913 as a precursor to the post-WWI Red Scare that led to mass deportations, Lytle Hernández shows that these anxieties existed prior to the Mexican Revolution.Footnote 1 As a result, Bad Mexicans should be required reading for examining empire, policing, and the global color line during the twentieth century.
Bad Mexicans is careful not to romanticize the Magonistas, while effectively demonstrating their importance to understanding the United States and Mexico. What results is a book that will be of interest to a range of readers. Scholars looking to better understand how incarceration and surveillance contributed to state formation will find this book useful. Readers attracted to the history of ideas and the development of social movements will also benefit from engaging with this work. Finally, either the whole or the specifics will make for a useful addition to courses that focus on borderlands, transnationalism, the state, or social movements, not to mention U.S. or Mexican history.
