Scorpion’s Tale

A Borderlands History of Mexican Imprisonment in the Sunbelt

KELLY LYTLE HERNÁNDEZ

On January 16, 1904, A. V. Lomeli hustled down the dusty streets of Laredo, Texas. Nervous and sweating, he burst into the Western Union office, ordering the attendant to rush an encrypted telegram to Mexico City. “Mexican journalists Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón, Camilo Arriaga, and Juan Sarabia arrived here with the purpose of establishing among the border communities on the U.S. side oppositional newspapers to spread their revolutionary propaganda,” wrote Lomeli. Implicit to Lomeli’s wire was the fact that Arriaga, Sarabia, and the brothers Flores Magón were infamous Mexican dissidents whom the Mexican government had long struggled to silence in Mexico. That the rebel journalists had relocated to the United States unnerved Lomeli. How could Mexican authorities suppress the rebels’ activities in a foreign land? “Send the secret police to keep an eye on them,” he pleaded.1

Following Lomeli’s plea, a wave of revolution and incarceration rolled across the borderlands, breaking open key moments in the making of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917). Indeed, just as Lomeli warned, the Flores Magón brothers and their colleagues had entered the United States to incite and organize a revolution against Mexico’s president, Porfirio Díaz. President Díaz dispatched spies and hired U.S. and Mexican authorities to crush their uprising. Incarceration was one of the main counterinsurgency tactics deployed by Díaz’s agents. Within the next few years, Díaz’s cross-border counterinsurgency network captured and caged Ricardo Flores Magón along with thousands of his supporters (popularly known as magonistas). Magón was briefly incarcerated in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1905; held prisoner in Los Angeles, California, between August 1907 and March 1909; and then immediately sentenced to serve fifteen months in the Arizona State Penitentiary in Yuma, Arizona. By the time of his release in August 1910, Ricardo had spent three years behind bars in the United States while thousands of magonistas had served time in U.S. and Mexican jails and prisons, mostly in the borderlands. But incarceration failed to break the magonista movement. In fact, incarceration, especially in Los Angeles, actually fueled it. Magón’s nineteen months incarcerated in the Los Angeles County Jail renewed the magonista movement, put it on the international stage, and, in turn, shaped the rise of the Mexican Revolution.

The magonista tale is a key chapter in the history of imprisonment in the United States, especially in the border regions of the Sunbelt states. Magonista imprisonment marks the first trend in Mexican incarceration in the United States during the twentieth century. This matters because Mexicans and Mexican Americans, that is, Mexicanos, now comprise a substantial portion of the imprisoned population in Sunbelt states. According to the Prison Policy Initiative,2 Hispanics, overwhelmingly led by Mexicanos, are overrepresented among the imprisoned populations of California, Arizona, and New Mexico. And whereas the rates of Latino imprisonment are not as staggeringly disproportionate as for African American and Indigenous populations, Latinos comprise the majority of imprisoned populations in many Sunbelt states. In California, for example, Latinos constitute 42 percent of the state prison population. However, in the federal prison system, the disproportionalities of Latino imprisonment are striking. According to the Pew Hispanic Research Center, Latino immigrants, led by Mexican nationals, comprise more than 90 percent of the persons imprisoned on federal immigration charges.

Despite the significance of Latino imprisonment across the local, state, and federal penal systems of Sunbelt states, we know relatively little about the historical dynamics of Mexicano imprisonment in the United States. Without much research on the subject, historians typically fold the rise of Mexicano imprisonment into the chronologies and conceptual frameworks developed to examine African American incarceration since the end of slavery. Undoubtedly, slavery and its afterlives played key roles in the criminalization and incarceration of both African Americans and Latinos in the United States. Slavery’s shadow is capacious, and anti-blackness is central to all histories of race in the United States. But, as essays by David Hernández and Ethan Blue in this volume make clear, the regime of U.S. immigration control has powerfully and particularly shaped the dynamics of Mexican imprisonment in the United States. The magonista tale similarly identifies a distinctive factor in the history of Mexicano imprisonment in the United States by establishing the Mexican Revolution as a crucial moment in the making and meaning of Mexicano imprisonment in the U.S.–Mexico border region. Indeed, Mexican imprisonment surged in the United States when U.S. and Mexican authorities tried to cage the rise of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) by imprisoning thousands of rebels across the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.

The magonista tale also highlights the binational dimensions of Mexican incarceration in the United States. In this case, a group of Mexican rebels moved to the United States to advance a revolution in Mexico. In response, U.S. and Mexican authorities worked together to root out the dissidents and cage their uprising by imprisoning the movement’s leaders. Therefore, the magonista tale offers a close look at how cross-border collaboration and binational objectives framed the rise of Mexican imprisonment during the early twentieth century, especially in the border region.

But incarceration failed to cage the magonista uprising. In particular, Ricardo Flores Magon and his rebel allies used the Los Angeles County Jail to organize a social movement across bars and borders, reminding us that incarceration does not always produce its intended results. Indeed, incarceration did not crush the magonista rebellion. It revived it. As the essays by Douglas K. Miller and Dan Berger in this volume show, imprisoned persons have led wide-reaching social movements. The imprisonment of magonistas is a powerful but often overlooked chapter in the history of political prisoners and prison uprisings in the United States, documenting how Mexicans imprisoned in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands sowed the outbreak of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, the world’s first social revolution of the twentieth century.

Order and Progress

After taking office by coup in 1876, General Porfirio Díaz held a firm grip on the office of president until his ouster in 1911. During his thirty-five-year reign, often described as “el Porfiriato,” Díaz introduced massive social and economic changes across Mexico.3 Indeed, after decades of sinking debt, military coups, foreign invasions, and Indigenous uprisings in Mexico, Díaz promised to bring what he called “Order and Progress” to Mexican life and politics. He achieved “Order” by centralizing political power in his office, rigging elections, controlling the judicial system, and governing with a brutal distaste for dissent.4 Díaz achieved “Progress” by courting foreign capital, especially British and Anglo-American investors, to buy up land and transform Mexico’s rural subsistence economy into a node of extraction and production within the global industrial economy. It worked. By the early twentieth century, Mexican products such as copper, hemp, and henequen flowed through the world market.

But Díaz’s program of rapid industrial progress meant dispossessing rural farming families, campesinos, and Indigenous peoples of their landholdings to make way for a new economic and social order.5 The investors consolidated traditionally communal plots, locked the dispossessed in debt servitude or forced them to migrate in search of work, and leveraged the labor of the dispossessed to redirect Mexico’s agricultural production toward exports for the global market.6 By the turn of the twentieth century, progress in Díaz’s Mexico had pushed five million Mexican campesinos from interdependence in a subsistence economy to wage labor and debt servitude in the global economy. When campesinos and Indigenous communities protested, Díaz and his appointees dispatched the rurales to address their complaints.7 Despite the dangers, many people within Mexico, especially the dispossessed, opposed the Díaz regime and its program of “Order and Progress.” Among them was a law school dropout named Ricardo Flores Magón.

El Scorpio

Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1873, Ricardo Flores Magón came of age in Díaz’s Mexico.8 When attending law school in Mexico City, Ricardo became involved in the city’s active student movement. By 1900, Ricardo had dropped out of school and launched a weekly newspaper, Regeneración. His younger brother, Enrique, later joined the operation, which was initially dedicated to exposing corruption in Mexico’s judicial system. By 1901, the tone of Regeneración had changed. No longer an organ for reform, Ricardo Flores Magón had rebranded Regeneración as “a journal of combat” and began to boldly insist on the end of the Díaz regime.

As a journal of combat, Regeneración ran increasingly daring broadsides, detailing the stories of the dispossession, peonage, and violence that undergirded Díaz’s pursuit of “Order and Progress.” Ricardo, in particular, charged Mexico’s president with gutting popular democracy, corrupting the judicial system, stifling social equality, and inviting foreign investors to cheaply lease the nation’s labor and natural resources. Branding Díaz a “tyrant,” a “dictator,” and a “butcher,” Ricardo earned his penname, The Scorpion.9 He also summoned Díaz’s wrath.

Always swift to crush dissent, President Díaz tried to silence los Flores Magón, their colleagues, and their rebel press. The police raided their offices and destroyed their printing presses. Díaz also had Ricardo and his rebel cohort incarcerated multiple times in the dungeons of Mexico City’s infamous Belem Prison. In 1903, a Mexico City judge prohibited all newspapers from publishing any of his writings. With this, Díaz muzzled the scorpion’s lash. Indeed, when Ricardo was released from prison in late 1903, there was not a whisper of the rebels’ opposition. The insurgency had been crushed. Or so it seemed.

The telegram from Consul Lomeli in Laredo, Texas, ended the illusion. Ricardo Flores Magón had crossed the border with his brother and a handful of colleagues, and their dissident cohort was promising to rebuild their rebellion from safe harbor in the United States.

México de Afuera

The rebels’ border crossing was an astute strategy of exile and rebellion in an age of dispossession and migration.10 Among the millions of dispossessed and dislocated people in Díaz’s Mexico, many men and women headed to the United States in search of work. By the early 1900s, Mexicans made tens of thousands of border crossings each year.11

Anchored in the U.S.–Mexico border region, Mexicans working in the United States formed new communities (colonias) of Mexicans living north of the border.12 Soon the rising number of Mexicans living in the United States forged what many called “México de Afuera”—Mexico abroad.

The rebels crossing the border into the United States escaped Díaz’s Mexico and entered the heart of México de Afuera. Within weeks of arriving, they began holding rallies among Mexicans living and working in the border region. Their audiences responded with “aplausos, gritos, vivas, y mueras” (applause, shouts, long lives, and death chants) to the rebels’ charges of “tyranny” against President Díaz.13 From México de Afuera, the rebels vowed to fell the tyrant Díaz.

Within one year of crossing the border, the rebels relaunched Regeneración and rebuilt its subscriber list. The list soon topped 30,000 subscribers. But the rebels were soon on the run.14

On the Run

After A. V. Lomeli sent his telegram to Mexico City, the rebels in Laredo noticed they were being watched. Worried they were not safe living in the border town abutting Díaz’s Mexico, they relocated to San Antonio, Texas.15 They moved again after a man broke into the rebels’ San Antonio office and attempted to stab Ricardo in the back. Several months later, the rebels reappeared in St. Louis, Missouri.

From St. Louis, the rebels cranked out weekly issues of Regeneración. Díaz hired a spy to report the rebels’ every move. The spy watched Ricardo most closely. According to him, Ricardo was just five feet, five inches tall, “bastante gordo [quite fat],” and he smoked cigarettes constantly. But, warned the spy, Magón was also “intelligent,” “serious,” “organized,” capable of speaking with “elegance,” and “fanatic about the cause he pursues.” Díaz asked his spy if Magón could effectively lead a revolution. “Yes, sir, I believe he is capable of anything,” responded the spy. But, followed Díaz, if Magón was captured and subjected to “many years in prison,” what would happen to the rebellion? “It would all end,” assured the spy. “El Don Ricardo,” he explained, was “el alma de todo [the spirit of everything/the soul of the rebellion].”16 If Magón were to be incarcerated, the magonista uprising would crumble.

As Díaz’s spy watched, the rebels began making plans to formally challenge Díaz’s rule in Mexico. In September 1905, they established a political party, el Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), appointing Ricardo as president, Juan Sarabia as vice president, Antonio Villarreal as secretary, and Enrique Flores Magón as treasurer. Manuel Sarabia and another rebel, Librado Rivera, served as the first and second vocales. Together, these six founding members of the PLM formed the party’s leadership circle known as the St. Louis Junta.

Heavily influenced by Magón, the PLM represented one of the most ideologically extreme challenges to Díaz’s regime. Magón, for example, made the anarchist battle cry “Land and Liberty!” the PLM’s anthem. Most important, the PLM manifesto, issued in 1906, called for a series of labor protections and political freedoms combined with the massive redistribution of land and the restoration of Indigenous land rights. Therefore, what Magón and the PLM envisioned was not just the ouster of Díaz but the fundamental restructuring of Mexican society, largely via land redistribution and labor rights.

The St. Louis Junta invited their supporters, especially all Regeneración subscribers, to join the PLM by establishing secret clubs called focos. Foco leaders would communicate monthly with the St. Louis Junta and prepare members for a formal political campaign to challenge Díaz’s reelection. By the fall of 1906, subscribers established as many as seventy focos. The focos ranged in size from several members to several hundred members, but most units were located in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, with critical concentrations along the Arizona–Sonora and Texas–Mexico borders and in Los Angeles, California. Indeed, the PLM vision of radically altering the distribution of land and labor cracked like thunder through Mexican colonias in the borderlands.

President Díaz attempted to disarm the PLM by prohibiting the circulation of Regeneración within Mexico. It did not work. Mexico’s migrants sidestepped the Mexican postal system by hand delivering Regeneración throughout Mexico.17 18 Diaz also asked U.S. authorities to extradite the rebels to Mexico, but the rebels had not committed any offenses listed in the U.S.–Mexico extradition treaty of 1897.

So the Mexican consul in St. Louis hired the Thomas Furlong Detective Company to place the rebels under twenty-four-hour surveillance. The Furlong agents were not careful, clumsily peering into the rebels’ homes and lurking in the postal office when the rebels arrived to collect their mail.19 Aware of the constant surveillance and fearing the possibility of extradition, los Flores Magón brothers and Juan Sarabia disappeared from St. Louis in March 1906.20 Going underground to evade capture, los Flores Magón and Juan Sarabia traveled constantly across the United States and into Canada. Their plan was to lay low and organize a campaign for Mexico’s 1910 election. But when foco members in Cananea, Mexico, led a dramatic strike against Diaz, the St. Louis Junta decided to leverage the massive political fallout from Cananea into a revolution across Mexico. Soon after, the St. Louis Junta released a manifesto, which called for Díaz’s ouster and announced that, within one year, the PLM would lead an armed rebellion for “Land and Liberty” in Mexico.21

Enrique Creel’s Cross-Border Counterinsurgency Campaign

To crush the PLM revolution, President Díaz appointed Enrique Creel, the governor of Chihuahua, Mexico, to lead the Mexican government’s counterinsurgency campaign. A wealthy businessman and landowner deeply vested in the Díaz regime, Enrique Creel had married into the powerful Terrazas family of northern Mexico and was the presumed successor to the aging Díaz. The PLM uprising threatened to upend Creel’s aspirations for the presidency.

To halt the uprising, Creel hired private detectives, paid bribes, and worked with U.S. and Mexican officials to arrest magonistas, root out rebel leaders, and, most important, capture Ricardo Flores Magón. Creel also ordered Mexican consuls in the United States to carefully watch local Mexican communities and pay retainers to local sheriffs, police officers, and U.S. marshals for their assistance in apprehending “malos mexicanos [bad Mexicans].”22 Altogether, Creel stitched together a cross-border counterinsurgency network to find the rebels and thwart their rebellion before it could begin.

Across the borderlands, Creel’s network arrested every magonista they could find. In southern Arizona, for example, Creel’s operatives chased down rumors of secret focos until they discovered a PLM meeting place in Douglas, Arizona.23 Along with U.S. immigration officers, a border sheriff, and the Mexican consul from the area, the Arizona Rangers raided a PLM meeting, arresting several dozen magonistas.

But Ricardo Flores Magón was Enrique Creel’s principal target. Across the United States and even into Canada and Europe, Creel’s network followed rumored sightings of Magón. Their search focused on the Mexican communities of the United States where Magón seemed to hide with impunity among Mexican immigrants. In Texas, for example, a Creel operative believed that “there is no question … that Ricardo Flores Magón is … very near … but I have been unable so far, due to the fact that practically the entire Mexican colony is in sympathy with these people, to get any definite information as to where he is exactly located.”24 In Los Angeles, Furlong’s agents believed that they had tracked Ricardo to the home of a local PLM member but that Magón, dressed in drag, had jumped out a back window and melted into the crowd of Mexican women on the city streets.25

With Creel’s cross-border network scouring the borderlands for magonistas, the rebels felt pinched. “La vigilancia de la Dictadura es grandisima en la frontera [the surveillance is overwhelming in the borderlands],” wrote Magón from hiding in an undisclosed location, but Magón remained free and, in turn, Creel grew increasingly frantic with each passing day. The future of Mexico, Creel believed, hinged upon arresting Magón. Arresting Magón, he wrote, was of “Importancia y de influencia saludable para todo el pais [importance and meaning for the entire nation].”26

In September 1906, Magón was still at large, and Creel’s operatives in El Paso, Texas, reported disturbing news. Magón, they explained, had slipped into the region, and during the early morning hours, he was visiting Mexican colonias to recruit soldiers for a newly established PLM army.27 Moreover, the El Paso foco was holding large nightly meetings and, although the magonistas spoke in codes, Creel’s operatives picked up hints that the rebels were planning a raid on Ciudad Juárez.

Located just across the border from El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juárez was Mexico’s principal commercial land port with the United States. A raid on Ciudad Juárez would destabilize Mexico’s international trade networks and threaten foreign investment. Creel rushed to Ciudad Juárez to coordinate the city’s defense. There, he mustered thousands of soldiers and waited for the PLM army to strike. But the PLM did not strike Juarez. They struck Jiménez, a small Mexican town near the Texas border but located several hundred miles away.

At 6 A.M. on September 26, sixty mounted magonistas crossed the Rio Grande and raided Jiménez. By 10 A.M., the magonistas had taken the local mayor and city treasurer hostage and stood in the town plaza reading a signed proclamation to local residents: “In legitimate defense of our downtrodden liberties and rights … we rebel against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz.”28 Then, the rebels released their hostages and moved on to raid another town. As they rode out of town, the mayor of Jiménez sent word to the nearest army garrison and, soon, the Mexican military was riding in quick pursuit of the PLM fighters. Intercepted by soldiers before reaching their next target, the rebels fled back across the border.

The Jiménez raid signaled that the PLM’s armed revolution against Porfirio Díaz had begun. Creel stepped up his counterinsurgency campaign by ordering Mexican authorities in and around Juárez to kick down doors and question any suspected magonistas. They found nothing. A maze of secrecy shrouded the PLM’s membership rolls in Mexico. Taking extreme measures to protect their identities, magonistas blocked Creel’s investigations. But, in October 1906, Creel got a lucky break.

In preparation for the anticipated PLM raid, Creel had brought Thomas Furlong, the private detective from St. Louis, to Ciudad Juárez to help root out magonistas and fortify the city. Furlong, after all, had spent months conducting sloppy but persistent surveillance on magonistas coming and going from the PLM headquarters in St. Louis. While combing Juárez and its hinterlands, Furlong stumbled upon Juan Sarabia. Furlong immediately recognized Sarabia, the vice president of the PLM who had slipped into Mexico to recruit soldiers for the PLM. He chased him down and had Sarabia arrested.29 In Sarabia’s pocket, Furlong found a list of Regeneración subscribers. The names and addresses on the subscribers’ list unlocked Creel’s search for magonistas in the borderlands. Indeed, immediately after Sarabia’s capture, Creel orchestrated the mass arrests of Regeneración subscribers on charges of being “enemigos del orden y la tranquilidad publica [enemies of public order and tranquility].”30 The arrests began in and around Ciudad Juárez but extended across northern Mexico as Creel attempted to sweep magonistas into jail before they could launch another attack. Creel had all magonista prisoners transferred to the Ciudad Juárez jail where, for extra security, he hired additional guards and ordered the mayor to sleep inside the jail. Creel himself stood guard with extra military troops in a home rented next to the jail. By March 1907, two hundred magonistas in northern Mexico had been arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison.31

Creel also immediately rushed a copy of the Regeneración subscriber list to his operatives north of the border who, in the early morning hours of October 21, 1906, began to raid homes, hotels, and restaurants in the El Paso area.32 During the raids, Antonio Villarreal was captured, but Ricardo Flores Magón escaped on a train heading to Los Angeles.33 Unaware of Ricardo’s getaway, Creel’s team continued to comb the streets of El Paso, but “fue inutil”34—it was useless. He was gone. Ricardo, the PLM’s “alma de todo,” had, once again, disappeared.35 Furious, Creel offered a $20,000 bounty for Ricardo’s capture.

Into 1907, Creel broadened his pursuit of Ricardo Flores Magón, PLM leaders, and Regeneración subscribers in Mexico.36 Across the country, Mexican officers raided homes, arresting both rebels and their family members and offering bribes for community members to turn in suspected magonistas.37 The rebels warned each other, “don’t go outside at night. It is dangerous,” because “a diario hacen apprehensions en Mexico [there are daily arrests in Mexico].”38 “No va a haber suficientes carceles para encontrar a los revolucionarios [they are not going to have enough jails to hold all of the revolutionaries],” wrote one rebel.39

Creel’s network also aggressively pursued magonistas north of the border. Working directly with Creel and his detectives, U.S. officials arrested and held for extradition dozens of men charged with participating in the 1906 raid on Jiménez. By March 1907, magonistas in the United States were reporting that “en St Louis, Mo., en El Paso, San Antonio, Del Rio y Rio Grande City, Texas, lo mismo que en varias poblaciones de Arizona y California, las carceles se apoderaron de nuestros hermanos [in St. Louis, El Paso, San Antonio, Del Rio, and Rio Grande City, as well as in various communities of Arizona and California, the jails have taken over our brothers].”40

“We’re Broke”

By March 1907, Ricardo Flores Magón had lived on the run for a full year. In this time, Magón had moved constantly to evade arrest because Furlong’s detectives seemed to be everywhere, conducting regular surveillance in Mexican communities in Illinois, Missouri, New York, Texas, Arizona, and California. Furlong once successfully tracked Magón to a hideout in Vancouver, Canada, where Magón worked as a casual laborer by day—“pico y pala”—and wrote for Regeneración by night.41 But as Furlong waited and waited for Mexican officials to wire him evidence that could be used to extradite Magón from Canada, Magón slipped out of the city.

Magón was not the only PLM leader living on the run. Antonio Villarreal, who escaped U.S. authorities after his arrest in El Paso, joined Magón in hiding somewhere along the line. Librado Rivera, too, had been arrested but escaped and was living as a fugitive. He walked thirty-three miles through “lluvia y nieve [rain and snow]” and then spent two days crossing a mountain to avoid detection.42 And there were many magonistas not on the run but living, working, and organizing under constant Furlong surveillance. The Regeneración office in St. Louis, for example, was still being watched. In Chicago, a Furlong detective befriended Manuel Sarabia and reported his every move.43 And all magonista mail was monitored.

Since Creel’s operatives closely monitored rebel correspondence, magonistas spent countless hours devising systems of communication that did not reveal the rebels’ ranks, whereabouts, or plans. For example, each of the rebels used a pseudonym in all correspondence.44 All letters passed through at least five couriers before arriving at their final destination. And many of the letters were written in secret code to conceal sensitive information. The system worked well. “They have recently adopted a code system that makes it very difficult for us to follow all of the persons of interest and discern one from the other,” wrote one of Creel’s agents.45 But fooling Creel’s network came at the expense of smooth communication among the rebels, especially with Ricardo.

In deep hiding and always located at the end of the rebels’ intricate correspondence chain, Ricardo became isolated from the magonistas and their movement. “Dear Friend, I write these lines to you so you won’t think anything has happened [to] me although [I] have nothing to tell you. ’Tis Sunday and a lonesome day having no news from you,” wrote Magón from an undisclosed location in February 1907.46 He was lonely and out of reach.

Moreover, Magón was unable to go out in public. This left him unable to work, making him dependent on bits of money sent along by magonistas. Magonistas mailed money to Magón, but most could afford only a few cents or dollars at a time. “Estamos muy brujas [We are broke],” wrote Ricardo, after being joined by Antonio Villarreal. “We have just two cents and not a friend in the world,” he complained. Unable to buy enough food, Magón and Villarreal suffered from a “ravenous hunger,” eating just enough to keep them from standing in line at public soup kitchens. “With such hunger one does not want to write,” wrote Magón, who described “feel[ing] faint, frail, and irritable.” Indeed, Magón had virtually stopped submitting articles for Regeneración.47 Therefore, although Creel’s network had repeatedly failed to find Ricardo Flores Magón, they kept him in hiding and on the run and thereby drove Magón toward isolation, hunger, and depression.

By June 1907, the magonista rebellion was slipping away. Chased by Creel’s cross-border counterinsurgency network, Magón was isolated, frail, and unable to lift the scorpion’s pen. Across the borderlands, hundreds of magonistas were in jail. Those not in jail were too busy devising tricks to evade arrest to plan for revolution in Mexico. And magonista fighters grew impatient and began to bicker when Magón, on the run, failed to issue new plans to invade Mexico.48 “These are desperate times,” wrote Manuel Sarabia, who would soon be kidnapped and spirited across the border by Creel’s agents.49 But then, in August of 1907, Creel’s operatives crashed through the back door of a shack at the outskirts of Los Angeles, imprisoned Magón, and unwittingly opened one of the most dynamic periods of the magonista uprising.

Bust to Boom in Los Angeles

In January 1907, Creel’s spies in Los Angeles detected increased correspondence moving to and from the city’s PLM members. A laborer recently arrived in the city, Modesto Díaz, and a socialist named María Talavera Broussé seemed to be at the center of the activity.50 Working closely with the Mexican consul in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County sheriff, the local postmaster, and two Los Angeles Police Department officers, Thomas Rico and Felipe Talamantes, Thomas Furlong placed Modesto, María, and a sundry of Mexican radicals in the city under twenty-four-hour surveillance. In June, Furlong’s network caught sight of costumed men coming and going from a home rented at the edge of town by María Broussé. Furlong’s agents watched the house and monitored all mail delivered to it. On August 23, Rico, Talamantes, and two Furlong detectives surrounded Broussé’s home. At 4 P.M., they burst through the back door and, inside, found Ricardo Flores Magón, Librado Rivera, and Antonio Villarreal. Creel’s operatives lunged at the rebels, but Magón, Rivera, and Villarreal refused to submit. In a brawl that lasted nearly an hour, dishes broke and chairs crashed. The rebels and Creel’s men thrashed about, pounding one another to exhaustion before their struggle tumbled into the courtyard in front of Broussé’s rented home. There, on the streets of Los Angeles, Creel’s men finally bested the rebels. Magón, bloody and unconscious, dropped to the ground. Rivera and Villarreal were simply too tired to fight anymore.

Enrique Creel, who had rushed to Los Angeles to oversee the raid, rejoiced at the arrest of Ricardo Flores Magón. Working with U.S. authorities, he had Magón, Villarreal, and Rivera charged with violating the U.S. Neutrality Act, which prohibited launching raids on foreign nations from U.S. soil. If convicted, Magón, “el alma de todo,” would be caged in a U.S. federal penitentiary for several years and the magonista uprising would finally end. However, from the moment of Magón’s capture, Magón’s incarceration in Los Angeles offered the magonistas an unexpected platform to rebuild and expand their movement.

By 1907, Los Angeles was emerging as the capital of México de Afuera. Whereas fewer than five hundred Mexican immigrants lived in Los Angeles in 1890, an estimated 25,000 Mexican immigrants lived in the city by 1910.51 By 1930, Los Angeles would be home to more Mexicans than any city other than Mexico City. When Creel’s operatives punched Magón out of hiding in Los Angeles, they unveiled his presence in the growing heart of México de Afuera. In fact, when the brawl between the rebels and Creel’s agents spilled into the courtyard of Broussé’s rented home, Villarreal and Rivera shouted their names to passersby on the street. Mexicans passing by recognized the rebels’ names, gathered round, and began chanting for the rebels’ release. Creel’s operatives ignored the demands, tossing Magón, Villarreal, and Rivera into the back of an open wagon, taking them on a three-mile trek to the city jail right through the center of the town. The crowd of shouting Mexicans followed. As the wagon wound up First Street and past the foundries, saloons, and union halls packed in the central core of the city, more and more Mexicans joined the protest. By the time Creel’s men pulled the wagon in front of the jail, several hundred Mexicans stood on the street cheering for the rebels.52 Creel’s operatives rushed the rebels into the jail but, into the night, Mexicans milled about on the street lifting up “gritos” (shouts) of support and protest to the rebels inside. By midnight, magonistas living in Los Angeles had fanned across the city passing word that Ricardo Flores Magón, “el alma de todo,” had been captured.53 In his rounds, Anselmo Figueroa, a magonista active within the local chapter of the socialist party, included a visit to the home of Job Harriman, a lawyer and one of the nation’s leading socialists.54 The next morning Harriman rushed to the jail to represent the rebels.

Ricardo, Librado, and Antonio spent nineteen months in the Los Angeles County Jail while Harriman fought their extradition to Arizona to stand trial on charges of violating the U.S. Neutrality Act. During that time, the Los Angeles County sheriff, also on Creel’s payroll, promised to hold the rebels “incommunicado,” but that was a pledge he could not keep.55

Built in November 1903, the Los Angeles County Jail was a three-story edifice of stonewalls and steel bars, but despite its façade, the jail was a relatively open facility. Reporters were constantly coming and going from the jail to scoop the daily crime story.56 Temperance workers, preachers, and teachers also maintained regular contact with prisoners. The sheriff allowed them to walk the corridors offering Bibles, prayers, and books.57 The jail was even a favored honeymoon destination in the city. Hoping to catch a glimpse of a Western desperado or bandit, newlyweds regularly visited the jail and walked its corridors.58 And prisoners themselves routinely left the jail. Prisoner trusties were often given permission to visit local bars so long as the returned in the evening, and every day but Sunday, several hundred prisoners served their time on the chain gang. Finally, the architecture of the Los Angeles County Jail allowed for unmonitored and unapproved communication between prisoners and community members. Indeed, just before the jail was completed in 1903, progressive legislators in California passed a state law requiring adequate ventilation in all public detention facilities. To meet state ventilation requirements, county officials left the jail’s windows open year round. Large air slats between steel bars allowed prisoners to regularly communicate with passersby on the streets and alleyway around the jail. Jail guards tried to stop “outsiders … [from] communicat[ing] secretly with the prisoners,” but irregular monitoring and persistent communicators allowed for fraternization between prisoners and outsiders.59 The county jail, in other words, was an open institution.

Incarcerated in the Los Angeles County Jail, Ricardo Flores Magón easily penetrated the jail walls to communicate with magonistas in the city. Counting from the Buena Vista Street into the alleyway, Magón’s cell was the third window from the corner on the second floor.60 From his cell, Ricardo spoke with supporters who gathered in the alley below, he dropped notes to comrades, and, in whispers, he stoked a romance with María Broussé. To María, Magón complained of living conditions in the drafty jail, but unlike during his months on the run, he had food, carried on regular correspondence with colleagues, and fell in love. Incarceration in the Los Angeles County Jail, in other words, pulled Magón from hunger and isolation, granting him an open perch in the rebellious capitol of México de Afuera and allowing him to gather much-needed sustenance for his body, heart, and revolution.

María and her teenaged daughter, Lucy Norman, played crucial roles in rekindling the magonista rebellion around Magón in the Los Angeles County Jail. They held meetings, visited homes, and wrote letters to ensure that whenever the rebels exited the jail to attend court hearings, crowds of cheering Mexicans would line the street between the jail and the courthouse. Little girls in white dresses would run ahead of the rebels to scatter red flowers in their path.61 At the courthouse, “throngs” of more Mexicans waited for the rebels to arrive, followed them into the hearing room, and remained through hours of testimony. When Job Harriman won a point or the defendants took the stand, Magón’s supporters erupted in applause. They hissed at the U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the case and the local Mexican consul who carefully monitored the proceedings.

The vibrant rallies that María and Lucy organized kept the magonista movement charged, revitalized Magón, and assured the rebels that, although they had long languished in hiding, the PLM’s popular base in México de Afuera had not collapsed.62 Emboldened, Magón ordered another armed raid into Mexico. To pull it off, he depended on María and Lucy to smuggle his plans from the Los Angeles County Jail to PLM fighters in the borderlands. They chose the jail’s laundry system.

During the early twentieth century, many county sheriffs in the United States derived most of their income by collecting fees for issuing warrants and holding prisoners at the county jail. Paid one dollar per day to maintain federal and county prisoners, the Los Angeles County sheriff could pocket any profit he squeezed from the cost of feeding and caring for prisoners. To keep prisoner maintenance costs low, the Los Angeles County sheriff required long-term prisoners to do their own laundry.63 Such prisoners could wash their dirty clothes on the third floor of the jail or recruit family members to, once a week, pick up their dirty clothes and drop off clean ones.

María and Lucy quickly figured out how to exploit the jail’s laundry system. Each week, María or Lucy picked up Magón’s dirty clothes from the jail. Before washing the clothes, the women carefully searched Magón’s dirty pants, shirts, and underwear for scraps of paper that he would sew into the folds. On rolled slivers of paper, Magón meticulously crammed manifestos, military orders, and love letters. María and Lucy slipped out the smuggled correspondence, washed the clothes, and then into the empty folds sewed their own messages or those of Magón’s PLM colleagues.64 On these scraps sewn in Magón’s laundry, plans for a second PLM raid in Mexico slowly developed. Then, Magón delivered the final plans during a visit with María in the jail’s visitors’ room. Sitting across from María, Magón dropped the plans on the floor. María slipped her long skirt over the papers. When she later reached down for her purse, María scooped up the plans, casually left the jail, and immediately delivered the plans to a safe house where PLM fighters poured over Magón’s instructions and then quickly headed to the Texas–Mexico border.65

According to Magón’s plans, one hundred PLM soldiers would raid Las Vacas, Mexico, on June 26, 1908. Las Vacas was a small town just across the border from Del Rio, Texas. But Enrique Creel knew their plan. Working with the sheriff of Los Angeles, Creel’s detectives had been monitoring Magón’s laundry and found his correspondence with María. They made copies of every smuggled letter they found before returning it to its fold and allowing the correspondence to continue, monitored but uninterrupted. When the rebel forces arrived in Las Vacas, Creel had three thousand Mexican soldiers standing guard in the city.66 After a daylong battle that left fifteen men dead, the remaining PLM soldiers fled back across the border into Texas.

In Texas, Creel’s detectives tracked the Las Vacas raiders for more than one year. By September 1909, most of the Las Vacas raiders had been arrested, charged, and caged for violating the U.S. Neutrality Act. By mid-1910, however, all but two of the magonista fighters were released from custody. They had spent up to sixteen months as prisoners awaiting trial in south Texas jails, but prosecutors could not produce evidence directly linking the prisoners to the Las Vacas raid.67 Furious, Creel shot off letters of protest to the U.S. secretary of state and U.S. attorney general, but Creel received only cool platitudes in return. Indeed, U.S. support for Creel’s pursuit of the PLM rebels north of the border had withered in 1909–1910 as another attack ignited by Ricardo Flores Magón from the Los Angeles County Jail ripped across the political landscape of the United States.

Radical Los Angeles

As in Mexico, the rise of industrial capitalism in the United States created many discontents. In response to the inequities of the industrial age, many U.S. workers and voters embraced socialism and labor unionism. Across the country, vibrant socialist and labor movements were afoot at the turn of the twentieth century. Confronting particularly strong foes in the city, Los Angeles was a hub of activity.68

Led by the unbending editor of the Los Angeles Times, Harrison Gray Otis, the local business elite fiercely believed in unfettered capitalism.69 With near unanimity, business owners in Los Angeles banded together to oppose any hint of unionization among the city’s workers or socialism among the city’s voters. They blacklisted union members, supported one another through strikes, and denied loans to employers who refused to toe the line against unions. By 1906, Otis’s network had beat down union membership and declared Los Angeles to be an open-shop city. Aided by national and statewide labor federations, a rowdy cohort of socialists, progressives, and unionists living in Los Angeles were fiercely committed to breaking Otis’s hold on the city.

In 1907 and 1908, strikes, pickets, boycotts, and street meetings erupted across the city’s central core. Prominent radicals including Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, and Samuel Gompers all rolled through town to support the campaign. When these luminaries of radicalism in the United States arrived in town, local workers poured into labor halls to hear them speak, but on the streets every day the city’s resident radicals stepped onto soapboxes to preach about the vagaries of industrial capitalism. Their crowds reached into the hundreds, blocking traffic to hear the gospel of socialism and labor unionism. Otis and the city’s elite fought back with scathing press reports plus injunctions and public speaking restrictions, but local radicals openly defied the bans. Standing on soapboxes, they hollered about wage slavery and land privatization run amok. When arrested and booked at the city jail, they established a Karl Marx/Los Angeles City Jail Branch of the Socialist Party of America.70 Therefore, while Ricardo Flores Magón sat in the Los Angeles County Jail plotting the end of the Díaz regime, local socialists sat in the city jail, located just three blocks away, discussing how to break the Otis regime in Los Angeles. Job Harriman wove their struggles together.

Barbarous Mexico

The magonista uprising had been a movement to which Anglo-American radicals had given little attention prior to Magón’s capture in Los Angeles. But when Anselmo Figueroa knocked on Job Harriman’s door the night of Magón’s arrest, the relationship between U.S. radicals and Mexican revolutionaries radically changed. Harriman quickly grasped the synergy between the local campaign against Otis and international solidarity with the magonistas. Like many of the city’s industrial elite, Harrison Gray Otis was an investor in Díaz’s Mexico. Otis, in particular, owned 850,000 acres of land just south of the California border. Because the magonistas’ proposed stripping all foreigners of their landholdings in Mexico, aiding the magonista movement carried within it a powerful strike against Otis.71

An astute and well-connected organizer, Job Harriman not only navigated the rebels’ legal case but quickly mobilized political support for the incarcerated rebels by encouraging his friends and colleagues to meet with the PLM rebels in the visitors’ room of the Los Angeles County Jail. In these meetings, the rebels began to build an audience among the city’s many progressives, unionists, and radicals. In December 1907, Harriman coordinated a large meeting in the jail’s visitors’ room between local journalists and the rebels. At the meeting, the rebels read their “Manifesto to the American People,” which was their first communiqué to the U.S. public. Directed toward U.S. radicals and progressives, the manifesto detailed the history of the PLM and its battles with the Díaz regime. Further, the rebels claimed, the corruptions of the Díaz regime spilled into the United States when U.S. authorities abided by the requests of Díaz to incarcerate magonistas. The many arrests of magonistas in the borderlands, the rebels argued, were evidence that Díaz’s boundless tyranny had penetrated into U.S. territory, imperiling liberty north of the border.

A socialist journalist named John Kenneth Turner missed the Manifesto meeting but later visited the rebels in jail. At their meeting, the rebels told Turner of their own troubles with Díaz in both Mexico and United States and assured Turner that Díaz’s image as a “benevolent patriarch” was just a cruel illusion. Charging Díaz with ignoring political rights and liberties guaranteed by the Mexican constitution and having “converted free laborers into serfs, peons and some of them even into—slaves,” the rebels listed slavery among the many “atrocities of Porfirio Díaz.”72 Slavery, Turner scoffed, no longer existed in the Americas, but the rebels detailed how systems of debt peonage in Díaz’s Mexico made “chattel” of men, women, and children and encouraged Turner to travel to Mexico to investigate for himself. “Slavery?” Turner wondered, and he began to make preparations to travel to Mexico. Turner took with him as his guide Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara, the PLM confidant who had aided the striking miners in Cananea.

Turner, posing as an Anglo-American investor, and Gutiérrez de Lara, posing as his translator, traveled from Los Angeles into Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and Valle Nacional, asking employers what it was like to do business in Díaz’s Mexico. All of the employers noted cheap labor. Workers, they boasted, could be purchased for the price of their debt, fed little, and housed in locked facilities. If they ran away, Díaz’s troops and police would chase them down. After snapping pictures of workers in shackles and tattered clothes, Turner returned to the United States prepared to broadcast to the U.S. public that Díaz’s Mexico, a model of modernity, was little more than a “wonderful fairyland conjured out of slavery.”73

In a series of articles published in American Magazine, a progressive paper based in New York City, Turner revealed for a U.S. audience the stories of violence and debt servitude that the rebels had long told about Díaz’s Mexico. Entitled “Barbarous Mexico,” Turner’s essays shocked American progressives and triggered widespread concerns about U.S. involvement in Díaz’s Mexico. In 1910, Turner repackaged his essays into a best-selling book, which quickly made Turner one of most popular muckraking journalists in the United States.

Turner’s popular exposé of life and labor in Díaz’s Mexico also focused national attention on the story of magonista incarceration in the United States. In the borderlands, explained Turner, there was a band of Mexican political exiles trying to lift up a revolution against the tyrant Díaz, but with the aid of U.S. officials, they had been arrested at the request of Díaz and sat in jails and prisons north of the border.74 In June 1910, the U.S. House of Representatives called a hearing to investigate Turner’s charges of U.S. complicity in Díaz’s tyranny. Invited to provide testimony before congress, Turner detailed the numerous arrests made by Creel’s network north of the border. He told the story of Ricardo, Antonio, and Librado, who, by then, had been convicted of violating the U.S. Neutrality Act and transferred to the Arizona State Penitentiary.75 But Turner also chronicled the multiple arrests of lesser-known magonistas in the border region. In one case, Turner reported, U.S. and Mexican authorities had gone so far as to kidnap a magonista from an Arizona jail and, with the cover of darkness, turned him over to Mexican authorities waiting at the border. On June 30, 1907, he explained, the Mexican consul in Douglas, Arizona, had spotted Manuel Sarabia on the streets.76 That evening, upon the request of the Mexican consul, local sheriff’s deputies arrested Sarabia and held him in the county jail. Near midnight, they pulled a kicking and screaming Sarabia from the jail, shoved him in the trunk of their car, drove him to the border, and turned him over to Mexican officials, who threw him over the back of a horse and rode to the jail in Hermosillo, Mexico. Only the political efforts of the Western Federation of Miners and the fiery labor activist Mother Jones, who also testified during the hearings, forced the Mexican government to return Sarabia unharmed.

In the days and weeks ahead, the dramatic testimony provided by Turner, Jones, and others ripped across the U.S. political landscape as newspapers across the country made front-page news of the hearings. “How We Pull Díaz’s Chestnuts out of the Fire: American Government officials act as Agents of Mexico, and Even Kidnap Liberals to Aid Díaz’s Political Fortunes,” led an article in the New York Times, which had once described Díaz as a gift of “peace,” “security,” and “industry” in Mexico but now liberally used terms that Turner had borrowed from the incarcerated rebel leaders in Los Angeles to describe Díaz. Díaz was a “tyrant” and a “butcher,” explained an editorial.77 U.S.-based investors in Mexico rushed to Díaz’s defense, but they increasingly stood alone in their support for the aging ruler of Mexico. By the close of summer 1910, Díaz’s once deep reservoirs of support north of the border had nearly run dry.

In contrast, when Magón, Rivera, and Villarreal were released from the Arizona State Prison in August 1910, their networks were more extensive and entrenched than before their capture. Indeed, when first arrested in Los Angeles, they had been pulled from hunger and hiding at the edge of town. When they were released from the Arizona State Prison, John Kenneth Turner, by then a celebrity journalist, met them at the prison gates and escorted them back to Los Angeles. As the rebels stepped from the train in Los Angeles, crowds of cheering and hollering PLM supporters surrounded the rebel leaders. That evening, the rebels’ rallies and radical journalism began again.78 Incarceration in the United States, in other words, had not pushed the PLM rebels into oblivion nor crushed their uprising. Rather, incarceration in the borderlands brought the magonistas a new beginning at a moment when Creel’s operatives were chasing their movement into decline.

In November 1910, Francisco Madero harnessed discontent sowed by the magonistas and others, leading an armed uprising that pushed Diaz’s Mexico toward the Mexican Revolution of 1910.79 Several months later, in May 1911, Porfirio Díaz boarded a ship to France, where he would live in exile until his death in 1915. El Porfiriato was over.

The magonistas helped sow the ouster of Porfirio Díaz. Their imprisonment, coordinated by U.S. and Mexican authorities, marked the first surge of Mexicans across the borderlands. Although Mexican authorities had hoped that imprisonment would crush the uprising, the incarceration of Ricardo Flores Magón, in particular, opened a key moment in the magonista movement, allowing a rebel leader to emerge from hiding, address U.S. radicals, and collaborate across bars and borders to coordinate a volley of new assaults on the Díaz regime. In the end, magonistas’ dramatic tale of imprisonment and insurgency in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands documents the Mexican Revolution as a crucial moment in the rise of Mexicano incarceration in the United States, and it highlights how binationalism has operated as a powerful dynamic in setting U.S. carceral priorities, especially in the U.S.–Mexico border region of the Sunbelt.

Notes

1. 16 de enero de 1904, letter from consul Lomeli, Leg. 270, Exp. 3, Archivo de la Embajada de México en Estados Unidos de América (hereafter AEMEUA), Acervo Historico Diplomático, Mexico City, Mexico (hereafter AHD).

2. The Prison Policy Initiative numbers come from the Prison Policy Initiative website, States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2018, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2018.html.

3. The historiography on Porfiriato and the making of the Mexican Revolution is extensive and evolving. For dominant works, see John Coatsworth, Growth against Development: The Economic Impact of Railroads in Porfirian Mexico (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1981); John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981); Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Paul Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police and Mexican Development (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981); Vanderwood, The Power of God against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Mark Wasserman, Capitalists, Caciques, and Revolution: The Native Elite and Foreign Enterprise in Chihuahua, Mexico, 1854–1911 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). For new directions in this scholarship, see Adolfo Gilly, The Mexican Revolution: A People’s History (New York: New Press, 2006); Emilio Kouri, A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo and Aurora Gómez Galvarriato, El Porfiriato (Mexico City: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, 2006).

4. Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress.

5. Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico; Wasserman, Capitalists, Caciques, and Revolution.

6. Friedrich Katz, “Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54, no. 1 (February 1974): 1–47.

7. Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress.

8. For a brilliant biography of Ricardo Flores Magón, see Claudio Lomnitz, The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (New York: Zone Books, 2014).

9. For examples of Magón’s writings, see Land and Liberty: Anarchist Influences in the Mexican Revolution, Ricardo Flores Magón, ed. David Poole (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1977); Chaz Bufe and Mitchell Cowen Verter, eds., Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006).

10. For a discussion of the cross-border magonista movement, see Javier Torres Pares, La revolucion sin frontera: El partido Liberal Mexicano y las relaciones entre el movimiento obrero de México y el de los Estados Unidos, 1900–1923 (Mexico City: UNAM, 1990).

11. Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States, 1900–1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977).

12. Ramón Chacón, “The Chicano Immigrant Press in Los Angeles: The Case of ‘El Heraldo de México,’ 1916–1920,” Journalism History 4, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 48–54.

13. January 25 and Feb 8, 1904, Letters from Lomeli, Leg. 270, Exp. 3, AEMEUA, AHD. The rebels built upon a history of rebellion in the Texas–Mexico borderlands. See Elliott Young, Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas–Mexico Border (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

14. Chaz Bufe and Mitchell Cowen Verter, eds. Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader. (Oakland, Califorinia: AK Press), 37. For information regarding the number of subscribers, see John Mason Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860–1931 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 89; and Dirk Raat, Revoltosos: Mexico’s Rebels in the United States, 1903–1923 (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1981), 13–39.

15. Ellen Howell Myers, “The Mexican Liberal Party, 1903–1910” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1970), 27.

16. “Informacion Secreta que el Agente N. N. de St. Louis, Missouri, le dio al suscrito, contestando al siguiente interrogatorio,” box 26, folder 7A, Silvestre Terrazas Papers (hereafter STP), Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter Bancroft).

17. A. M. Medino to Ricardo Flores Magón, August 1, 1907, Leg. 294, Exp. 10, AEMEUA AHD.

18. Ethel Duffy Turner, “Writers and Revolutionaries,” an interview conducted by Ruth Teiser (University of California, Berkeley, 1967), 70–71.

19. See the series of letters written by Consul Diebold (St. Louis) and Furlong in November 1906. Leg. 285, Exp. 7, AEMEUA, AHD.

20. Ward S. Albro, Always a Rebel: Ricardo Fores Magón and the Mexican Revolution (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 33.

21. “a la Nación,” Leg. 294, Exp. 10, AEMEUA, AHD. See also PLM Manifiesto de 1906, available in Bufe and Verter, eds. Dreams of Freedom, 131–34.

22. May 10, 1907, Enrique Creel to John Foster, Leg. 299, Exp. 5, AEMEUA, AHD. For more on the role of Mexican authorities in the United States, see Michael M. Smith, “The Mexican Secret Service in the United States, 1910–1920,” Americas 59, no. 1 (2002): 65–85.

23. See Corral to Creel October 9, 1906, folder 7A, box 26, STP, Bancroft; Ethel Duffy Turner, Ricardo Flores Magón y el Partido Liberal de Mexico (Mexico City: Comisión Nacional Editorial del Comité Ejecutivo, 1984), 102.

24. Griner to Creel, May 2, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 5, AMEMUA, AHD.

25. Albro, Always a Rebel, 69; see also Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD.

26. October 23, 1906 letter, Creel to Corral, folder 7A, box 26, STP, Bancroft.

27. Creel to Ramon Corral, October 4, 1906, folder 7A, box 26, STP, Bancroft.

28. Exhibit “A,” Liberals of Jimenez to the Nation of Fellow Citizens,” Leg. 304, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD.

29. Leg. 362, Exp. 16, 48, AEMEUA, AHD.

30. October 23, 1906, letter from El Gob to Corral, folder 7A, box 26, STP, Bancroft. See also quote from October 22, 1906, letter from Parral and letter dated October 30, 1906, from Creel to Corral, also in folder 7A, box 26, STP, Bancroft.

31. March 11, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD.

32. For more on the importance of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez during the buildup to the Mexican Revolution, see Charles Harris and Louis R. Sadler, The Secret War in El Paso: Mexican Revolutionary Intrigue, 1906–1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009); David Romo, Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, 1893–1923 (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2005).

33. “Paginas Negras,” March 1, 1908, Revolución.

34. S. Montemayor to Sr. Enrique Creel, folder 11B, box 27, STP, Bancroft.

35. October 28, 1906, folder 7A, box 26, STP, Bancroft.

36. Transcript of deportation hearing for Antonio Villarreal, November 15, 1906, Leg. 285, Exp. 10, AEMEUA, AHD. See also March 11, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD.

37. May 24, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 7, AEMEUA, AHD; May 6, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 7, AEMEUA, AHD; Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD. See also April 7, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD.

38. March 27, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD; April 24, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD.

39. March 27, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD; April 24, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD. See also April 29, 1907, Leg. 304, Exp. 9, AEMEUA, AHD; May 22, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 7, AEMEUA, AHD. See also Antonio Aruajo letter of May 1908, Leg. 299, Exp. 7, AEMEUA, AHD; and May 15, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD; May 18, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD; Mrs. Lopez letter in April 9, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD.

40. March 23, 1907 letter, Leg. 294, Exp. 10, AEMEUA, AHD.

41. November 15, 1906, Leg. 285, Exp. 7, AEMEUA, AHD.

42. April 28, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD.

43. January 15, 1907, letter from L. C. H., Leg. 304, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD.

44. “Lista de los nombres que se mencionan en parte de la correspondencia de los llamados revolucionarios,” Leg. 304, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD.

45. Consul Diebold (St. Louis) to Enrique Creel, November 26, 1906, Leg. 285, Exp. 7, AEMEUA, AHD.

46. Magón to Don Pilar, February 24, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 3, AEMEUA, AHD.

47. Ricardo Flores Magón to Manuel Sarabia, March 25, 1907, Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD.

48. February 18, 1907, letter from Sam Moret (Manuel Sarabia) to German Riesco (Antonio Aruajo), Leg. 299, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD.

49. May 28, 1907, letter, Leg. 299, Exp. 7, AEMEUA, AHD.

50. March 2, 1907, letter from Consul Lozano, Leg. 295, Exp. 1, AEMEUA, AHD; June 30, 1907, letter, Leg. 304, Exp. 10, AEMEUA, AHD.

51. Robert M. Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), table 3, 76.

52. “Nip Revolutionists in Los Angeles Den,” Los Angeles Times, August 24, 1907.

53. Twenty-four-hour surveillance of the jail by Mexicans is commented upon by Mexican Consul in Los Angeles on December 21, 1907. See Leg. 304, Exp. 6, AEMEUA, AHD.

54. Raat, Revoltosos, 40–64.

55. Leg. 199, Exp. 8, AEMEUA, AHD.

56. “At the City Hall: Newspaper Reporters,” Los Angeles Times, November 22, 1896.

57. 1910/1911 Annual Report of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (California), 73–74. See also “Prisoners Sign Pledge,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1909.

58. “County Jail Sketches,” Los Angeles Times, March 5, 1899.

59. “County Jail Too Small?,” Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1904; “Rock Lot Is Hard to Get,” Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1904.

60. Ricardo Flores Magón a María, 18 de octubre de 1908, Archivo Digital de Ricardo Flores Magón, Mexico City, Mexico (hereafter ADRFM).

61. “Prisoners Walk on Flowery Path,” Los Angeles Express, September 28, 1907.

62. “Prisoners Walk on Flowery Path.”

63. Fourth Biennial Report of the State Board of Charities and Corrections of the State of California from July 1, 1908 to June 30, 1910 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1910), 83.

64. Carta a María, 1 de noviembre de 1908, ADRFM; Cartas a María y Lucy, 25 de octubre 25 de 1908, ADRFM; Carta a Lucy Norman, 1 de noviembre de 1908, ADRFM; Ricardo Flores Magón a Enrique Flores Magón y Práxedis G. Guerrero, 13 de junio, 1908, ADRFM.

65. Lawrence D. Taylor, “The Magonista Revolt in Baja California: Capitalist Conspiracy or Rebelion de los Pobres?,” Journal of San Diego History 45, no. 1 (Winter 1999), http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/1999/january/magonista/.

66. Bufe and Verter, Dreams of Freedom, 64.

67. U.S. House of Representatives, Hearings on House Joint Resolution 201 Providing for a Joint Committee to Investigate the Alleged Persecution of Mexican Citizens by the Government of Mexico, Washington, DC, 1910, 53–68.

68. Errol Wayne Stevens, Radical L.A.: From Coxey’s Army to the Watts Rebellion, 1894–1965 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009).

69. Harrison Gray Otis, “A Striking Contrast: Industrial Freedom, Industrial Peace, and Industrial Progress in Los Angeles and Elsewhere,” [Republished from the Argonaut of San Francisco, June 8, 1907] Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

70. “Karl Marx Jail Squad,” Common Sense, July 11, 1908; “Juries Find Speakers Guilty,” Common Sense, February 28, 1908; “Two More ‘Martyrs,’ ” Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1908; “Notes from the Branch City Jail Meeting Held on July 10, 1908,” Common Sense, July 18, 1908; “News from Bastile,” Common Sense, July 11 and 18, 1908.

71. One example of Anglo-American radicals making the connection between Otis and Díaz is Ethel Dolmen, “Hombres Arrestados en Los Angeles que Son Campeones de la Libertad en Mexico,” Revolución, 12 de octubre, 1907.

72. Ethel Duffy Turner, “Writers and Revolutionaries,” 2.

73. John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico (Chicago: Kerr Company, 1910), 26.

74. Many years later, the celebrated Mexican artist David Siquieros honored Turner, alongside Ricardo Flores Magón and over the left shoulder of Karl Marx, as one of the many key agitators of the Mexican Revolution.

75. For a discussion of the Arizona State Penitentiary and the disproportionate number of Mexican prisoners, see “Prison Reforms in Arizona,” Charities and the Commons: A Weekly Journal of Philanthropy and Social Advance v xviii, no. 12 (June 22, 1907).

76. U.S. House of Representatives, Hearings on House Joint Resolution 210 Providing for a Joint Committee to Investigate the Alleged Persecutions of Mexican Citizens, 90.

77. New York Times, August 7, 1910.

78. Los Angeles Herald, August 5 and 10, 1910.

79. For more on the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the civil war that followed, see Gil Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatan, Mexico, and the United States, 1880–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).