Bad Mexicans

A Book that Could Be Banned

As I read Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands, I was reminded of the extraordinary efforts of the state of Arizona to ban the teaching of Mexican-American Studies by the Tucson School District. The conservative leaders of my state lived in fear of telling the truth about the struggles of Americans of Mexican heritage. They seemed to believe that the knowing their history might somehow alienate Mexican-American students. This would make them less malleable and more dangerous to the ideals of state leaders. The effort to ban Mexican-American Studies was White Supremacy at its core.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez tells the story of the origins of the Mexican Revolution through the deeds and actions of those who inspired it. She places the blame for the conditions which led to the Revolution squarely on American economic imperialism. Sensing an opportunity, American titans invested heavily in the Mexican economy during the three-decade long rule of Porfirio Diaz. Americans owned virtually all the mines, railroads, petroleum, and manufacturing infrastructure. Mexican labor was exploited by low pay and bad working conditions. Diaz had driven the peasants from their lands creating a feudal empire. Indigenous peoples, like the Maya and Yaqui, had been driven from their ancestral homelands to work as virtual slaves for rich land owners. Americans owned a quarter of Mexico’s agricultural land. Some Americans bought and sold indigenous people who were indebted to those who had stolen their land.

A handful of revolutionary journalists and dreamers emerged to oppose Diaz and his enablers. They worked on both sides of the border to foment revolution. Some were men of action, taking to the revolution to the streets of Mexico. Others lived in exile, their pens as their only weapon. One of the latter was Ricardo Flores Magon, publisher of the inflammatory Regeneration newspaper. Suppressed by Mexican and American authorities, the paper, and the movement it spawned lived underground in the borderlands and communities as far afield as St Louis and Douglas, Arizona.

When the revolution finally erupted in 1910, the radicals who had sparked it were largely swept aside. They became a postscript to Mexican history as the revolution continued to rage on toppling several governments until it petered out around 1917. About one million Mexicans fled to the US during the Revolution. Their descendants deserve to know what drove them here. The book, Bad Mexicans, is a good start to their story.

LDT December 16, ‘24

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