Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, which is podcast about history and the people in it who did good things, usually in the face of bad things, because that's one of the main things you can do when there's a dichotomy is take the other side of dichotomy and if one side of it is bad, then the other side is good. I know how words work. I'm Margaret Kiljoy with me today it's catabou. How are you Hi?
I'm great, how are you?
I'm doing pretty good. My dog is outside. Usually when I record, he's like right behind me. I was already telling kat this, but now I'm apparently telling everyone this. Usually he's like right behind me, and every now and then I like look back and get the little major. Dosn't have a dog?
Is that?
It's an endorphin machine. You just like look at it and then you're like, oh, you know.
So you do that thing when you look at him. And then he said out sense is it? And then he just like raises his head a little bit to be like hey.
Yeah, and then he's like oh, and then he puts his head back down. It's so good.
Perfect.
He's a perfect little angel who is probably now scaring off all the airplanes in the yard because he's learned that if he barks at air they fly away, so he will probably do it until I die. And I'm glad that I don't have a lot of neighbors and all my neighbors think that my dog is gigantic and scary, and I don't actually hate that. I don't hate that my neighbors think I have a giant, scary dog, even though I don't. That's what this episode is.
You just have to see Rendraw space. It's I know, perfect. Yeah, I don't know what this dog looks like.
I love it. Handsome, handsome, I believe it.
I believe he's a if you mixed a Muppet and a tiny German shepherd together. That's such a perfect description of Rondraw.
That sounds like the most perfect being that's ever existed.
I know. The other one is is actually I can see on screen as Anderson, Yeah, personally right behind me. It's amazing. It's much like how I run across the perlatives and history, and I'm like, how can all these different things be the first? I should just think about it like I think about dogs. All dogs are the best dog exactly and Anderson's person is our producer named Sophie.
Hi, Sophie, that's my favorite way you've ever introduced to me. Thank you so much.
Well, it's one of the things you're very good at.
I hope, so I try really hard.
Also, Ian is our audio engineer, Hi Ian Hi Ian him. Our music was made for us by unwoman. And this week, you know, like, okay, I say this every Wednesday. Every Wednesday, I say go back and listen to Monday's episode because it won't make any fucking sense. It's like extra true, I think this time because you're really coming in in the middle, like what do you Why do you make the decisions you do? I mean, I guess anyone can
make any decisions they want. Is relates to this. It's not hurting anyone except yourself.
It's just gonna be really confusing because you won't get all of the awesome backstory and the Louisa shit.
Yeah, Louisa doesn't even come back into the story.
And exactly do you want to miss out on li Lisa?
No, Margarita doesn't come back in either.
Oh my god, you're gonna sell Lisa and Margarita ridiculous.
Yeah, So this week we were talking about the Maganestas, the peasant and proletarian uprisings that came shortly before and likely sparked the Mexican Revolution. They're anti leader, who wishes they were the leader, but hates that he's the leader and has complicated feelings. Is a groucy guy named Ricardo Flores Magon who is about to flee Mexico after going to jail for like the tenth time by nineteen oh four.
We gotta have to get out of here. The government it's probably going to kill us at some point, right. That is a thing that they do. They have a dictator. A few of their crew are already in San Antonio, Texas or Laredo, Texas, depending on your source. Most of them seem to say San Antonio, including the rich guy Ariaga and the feminist journal journalist Mendoza who runs Vesper, a Texas based Mexican poet Sarah Stella Ramirez is there too. She goes on to become a leader of the resistance.
She's not woven enough into the stories I read, so I'm just shouting out her name. This is it whatever? Anyway, everyone knows how bitter I am about this, So that's where they went penniless. Ricardo's pants were actually patched up because he couldn't afford new pants, which as an anarchist punk who wore black panch pant black patch pants for most of my twenties when I wasn't wearing dresses, I'm just really excited about this guy who wears all black
and has patch pants. Also, we're going to see Ricardo in ad dress before the story is through. Oh fuck, guess they took jobs as farm laborers and dishwashers. They survived off of the vegetables they gleaned at work. This is like another thing that like people talk about all these historic revolutionaries and some of them, like a lot
of just be rude. A lot of the more liberal ones will be from upper class backgrounds, right, and they'll like be revolutionary spased with their family money, which is a good thing to do, right, But so many revolutionaries that I read about, like, yeah, this guy crossed into Texas from Mexico and became and started working as a day laborer on a farm because that's he had to fucking eat. Even though he is going to go on and to change the world, he still has to fucking eat.
And no one's giving him enough money. People are giving him money to start his newspaper backup, or giving them money to start their newspaper backup.
And I know you said that it's illegal for him to write, is it illegal for people to read?
It?
Is illegal for him to get it into Mexico. Fortunately, there's a lot of people who don't care about the law, right, So they printed in the United States. And then kind of some of the bravest and people taking the most risks, and it's not sure there's every level of risk people are taking in this story. One of the crazy brave
things that people do is smuggle them back in. A lot of it is like the train union, right, They'll be like, oh, yeah, I just put it on my train and I'll take it in, And so it actually kind of cool. Like, not everyone who's going to be involved in the social struggle, it's mostly a peasant and proletarian struggle. Not everyone's literate, but someone on your work
crew probably is. So someone is going around and going to every fucking hacienda and passing out regeneracy on right, and then one person who knows how to read is getting up and reading it to everyone else. Which is absolutely something that people died doing.
Incredible.
Yeah, there's like something about the fact that the written word can actually change the world. But it's not. It changes the world because people use it, you know, like and people do this other work and everyone is part of any way whatever a lot goes on for them in the US. This easily could have been a four
parter or more. I want to focus a bit less on the liberal leaders in exile than what the Maganese does themselves, besides mcgonnard doing so to fast forward, the liberal leaders in Texas, they have a lot of arguments about being moderate or radical liberal or anarchist. They are working entirely lessly for revolution. They fight off assassins, they get arrested for fighting off their own assassin. At one point they move from Texas to Saint Louis to get
away from the assassins. Then they have to move to Toronto in Montreal because the US government is after them. Then the Canadian government's like, we're going to fucking get you. So then they go back to Los Angeles. The presidents and police of two countries and the fucking Pinkertons are hunting them.
And this is like early nineteen hundreds. So they're taking like slow ash trains.
Yeah, Jesus, it's over and over again. They're like Ricardo, while he's living in Montreal, is in a meeting in El Paso and like, Okay, that's really far. Yeah, And they form an organization called the PLM, the Partito Liberal and Mexican, the Mexican Liberal Party. In nineteen oh six, they release a platform which is basically that they're saying like, hey, this is the plan, right, this is what we're going to do when we overthrow this far and this is
a compromise position. It is a compromise position between the radicals and the moderates. And really, interestingly, and I think importantly, it wasn't the mcgon brothers or anyone else sitting down and going this is what I want. They actually like corresponded illegally with like thousands of people in Mexico. They
were getting hundreds of letters a day. The US Mail confiscated over four thousand letters in the end, right, and they basically were like, what do you want, right, this is a democratic thing, right, what is our revolutionary program? And they put it all together into one document and it, as far as I can tell, came out of the will of the Mexican revolutionary folks. This is often seen as the most important document in Mexican revolution. There would
go with the superlatives. The books I read said it was the most important document in Mexican Revolution, and basically all the water down liberal reformers who come after pick and choose pieces of it. Ever since, the mcgone brothers go the opposite way and decide this is not radical enough.
The current Mexican Constitution borrows heavily from this document because the leader of the group that drafted the nineteen seventeen constitution had actually started his work writing as a Maganesta and it which is just like if you imagine, like the founding fathers were all like actually radical, you know, yeah, okay, this document it wanted to curb the powers of the
executive branch. It wanted to limit presidency to four years with no possibility of re election, which has been a big issue for like almost one hundred years at this point. No more military tribunals, no more compulsory military service. Replace prisons with agricultural penal colonies, no more death penalty. Women are equal to men in all regards, Free and universal secular education for children, free speech, free press, eight hour workday,
minimum wage, pensions for every job, no child. Labor unions are encouraged, restore the land to indigenous communities, seize giant landholdings and distribute the land fair among the peasants. And Mexican citizenship is mandatory for land ownership because so much of Mexico is owned by foreign business investments. This sounds great, it was, it had one one fatal Flaw's say, the fatal flaw that afflicts the nineteenth and early twentieth century
labor union almost everywhere you look. Sophi's giving me the look because it came up in the last fucking episode we did about Irish miners racism.
God damn it.
In a This differs wildly from the Maganestas and the PLM's later politics, and likely mcgon's politics at the time. But he also puts it in, so I'm not well he the party puts it in. It calls to bar Chinese immigration because Chinese workers work for less money than Mexican workers or whatever. This is the like fucking lie that gets told to workers goddamn everywhere.
How about get everyone fair wages? Yeah, I mean, it's like the EPs workers, how they might bone strike for part timers, Like that's awesome. Yeah, yeah, you know, any racist you can. Everyone should just be able to live. Yeah, I know it's crazy.
But whoa, I don't know about all that. Yeah later mcgone and the PLM and stuff like, right about how fucked up this is. The workers movement knows no borders and no nationality and is basically trying to move away from a nationalism that had infused the liberal movement, but it is absolutely there at the time. The same year, in nineteen oh six, a new wave of uprising starts, and this particularly starts among miners in the border towns. The miners had it really fucking bad. They were paid
in pesos but forced to buy things in dollars. The workers were Mexican, their bosses were ostato and adensis like from the US. I hate that there's no English word for this besides American, which fucking sucks. Everywhere else in the Western hemisphere is a word for this for US, which makes sense. Maybe we could just use a Yankee.
That's the word that ringo, Yeah, I mean that means foreigner.
Yeah, I wonder. I literally just don't know, I wonder, you know, in the US, I mostly run across gringo, having the connotation of specifically white foreigner. But also this is absolutely true in this case, right, It is not just that the people are from the United States, but there are white people from the United States. Yeah. The miners are literally not getting paid enough to survive. They
go into debt, into the company's store. They're literally like buying shit with money that has like their boss's face printed on it.
Cool.
Yeah, fun. Wouldn't it be so much fun? It'd be like fun money, you know.
Oh my god. Yeah, it's like, you know, just get a box of Monopoly and turn it upside down and say, all right, try to buy things with this.
Yeah. Like I get paid in dragon Bucks now, but it has Anderson on it, so I feel good about it.
Thanks id.
Yeah. When they die, their children inherit their debt.
Cool.
Yeah.
Yeah. Dead slavery is like actually a thing. It's different than chattel slavery, but it's fucking real. So they go on strike. It's likely that the PLM and also a radical anti racist US miners union called the Western Federation of Miners help get this strike going, but they all like everyone's either like taking credit or denying that they had anything to do with the strike, right, depending on whether how they want to look. So some folks say
it was a wildcat strike. Either way, the people who did it were the workers, whether they were organized from outside or not. On June first, nineteen oh six, two thousand workers go on strike. The boss whose money is on their paper is a rare bad Quaker on this show. Usually the Quakers come in hard. Yeah. Yeah, especially during an abolition in the US times, I guess some of the
only white people doing any fucking good. This particular guy happened to be Quaker and happened to be a piece of shit, so he was like but he was very like, hey, like I pay you better than anyone else, which is like true, but it's still not enough to eat, you know. And also he's friends with Diaz, so he's able to skirt even more labor laws than the other people are.
And Diaz is still in power.
Yeah, Diaz is still in power until nineteen ten, nineteen eleven, And so he asks yeah, because he's been in power for thirty fucking years at this point. So he's like, I'm cool, I'll just show up and everyone will like listen to me. And so he's like, hey, could you give meet your demands in writing? And so they sit there and they write down their demands in writing, and he takes them and then he he politely writes them back a letter refusing every single one of their demands.
And in the meantime, cool Boss has gone to the local stores and bought every single gun and given them to all the white people working for him, all the man Baker.
That's just like every Quaker, would I know.
So the workers stage a walk out. A white manager starts shooting at them, kills three miners, so they stab him to death with a candlestick.
That's such a slow way to die, being stabbed to death with a candle.
I think it might be the holder that it's like the miners go into.
The wax and thread and they're just like really going at it.
Yeah, I wouldn't fucking mind. In this case, the manager's brother starts shooting them at Okay, I mean to be fair, they just killed his brother, but his brother just killed a bunch of whatever anyway, So he dies with a candlestick in the back too. I feel like this is a game of clue and then they burned the place down.
They dynamite all the company property. They've been preparing for this. Actually, there's like, at some point I think the guy the reason the owner goes and buys the guns is they're like, someone's like, yo, dynamite's missing. That's probably bad, you know, like, yeah, you're starving everyone to death. Anyway, So they're shooting the
they is bad. Federal troops come in. In the end, two hundred workers are dead and twenty thousand people get arrested, which is a scale that I can't really fathom.
I don't understand how you arrest twenty eight thousand people. Where do you put them?
I don't fucking know.
That's insane.
Yeah, only one of the sources I read gave the number of arrestees, so I don't have like a lower number from a different source.
Either way. A shit tone.
Yeah. Meanwhile, elsewhere, the Yaqui people are rebelling against the theft of their lands, and when they're arrested, they're not killed, well often they're killed. If they're not killed, they're sent to labor plantations and the jungles far from their homes and so the PLM they're getting fucking ready for revolution. They've got forty to seventy cells across the country and
in the borderlands. A lot of the cells are in US border towns, and their plan is to start all the uprisings at once on one day, September twenty fourth, nineteen oh six. They're coordinating all of this across the border by mail, which was not like, frankly, that wasn't the right way to do it. Everyone figured out what they were up to. So cells start getting raided in the US and they find all the explosives and guns.
Is the US raiding these cells like the New Mexico.
Yeah, the US police are doing it a lot of it. The Texas Rangers are kind of like the pre border patrol Border patrol, and they're doing a lot of it as well as Sorry. Yeah, I actually I hold you responsible for this.
It's all me. It's all on me. I'm so sorry everyone.
Yeah. Fortunately you you weren't able to stop the rebels, especially those in Mexico. They kind of have nothing to lose, right, The people in the US, they're a little bit safer, right, Like the US is a really shitty and racist place, only then things are magic and fixed.
Now, yeah, things are good.
Yeah, that's why every couple of years we have to make things fixed permanently again by having some uprisings. So some folks just fucking go, even though it's like been found out and they're like probably going to lose, They're like, we're fucking doing this. Insurgents in northern Mexico apprehend the mayor of their town, and the treasurer and the trash the tax collector of Yumenis. They flee when the soldiers
are mobilized against them. In Vera Cruz, two hundred rebels attack the city of Akiyakon, only to be driven off. In Pajupan, they imprisoned city officials and appointed new ones, but then they ran out of ammunition and fled federal troops and so on and so on. Just across the country, liberals or anarchists or whatever, and indigenous folks and other people start taking officials hostage. They lose, most of the
leaders are executed. Retributions are against indigenous villages, as we've already proven from earlier that is like one way they do it, as they just kill everyone in a town and set it on fire. An elderly Mexico City, City editor of an affiliated paper was beaten to death during his arrest, so everyone gave up. In Portfolio, Diaz is still empowered to day, or everyone kept going. In December nineteen oh six, the textile workers went back on strike.
Because textile workers fucking love striking. The company tried to starve them out, which of course wouldn't happen now. No companies just see their union striking and be like, we care about them. They wouldn't cut all the trees in Los Angeles to try.
It's just about to say, yeah, what an insane thing to do, Like that's just no why did they do that?
Yeah, just like they're like, hey, let's get some bad pr for basically no reason you want to do that.
Like that is like that's like a movie villain thing today, you know, like a really bad movie to be like, oh, my workers are striking, let's cut the leaves off the trees, you know that, just cut down that, Like, don't even cut down the trees, just cut all the leaves off.
Yeah, it's like Disney level villain level.
Ev Yes, it's like Disney knockoff, like when those shitty like kids studios try to make like a you know, ratitude, knockoff or whatever. The villain's like comically bad.
Which I guess makes sense that it's that without their writers. It's people who make movies trying to come up with something clever to do.
They're asking AI, They're like, how do we sound that to our strikers? And then chat JBT is like, cut all the leaves off.
Oh my god, that's probably what happened. That's probably what happened, right you? And know what else is controlled algorithmically?
Tell me.
The ads that people are about to listen to, unless they're on Cooler Zone Media, in which case the only ad you listened to was me advertising Cooler Zone Media. Here's some ads, and we're back the textile workers. They want to their company is going to starve them out. However, instead people from all over the country send them money because people are like, now we support the textile workers. Fuck yeah. So the owners just shut down all the factories in the area just to just to defeat the union.
They're like, find no one gets anything, basically, and because they've been sent all this money, the workers are like, well I have at least I have enough to eat. So in Rio Blanca Blanco a company's store refuses to sell striking worker food. Guys like I got money.
We'll get money either way. Like you get money if you just pay people a living wage, you still get Now you're getting no money.
I know you could their surplus value.
You could still get money by selling people who you're getting no money by doing this. You are so bad at owning a business.
One money or zero money.
I'd rather have one money. If I was a ghoulish cartoon character that wants to starve workers, I would still like at least one money.
Yeah.
Well, in the end, the store owner gets nothing because they looted the store and burned it down buckets. Then they went and said everyone free at the local jail.
Hell yeah.
And so the rebels their maganese does and they're not subtle. The editor of their newspaper of the local, the textile worker newspaper, said, when we run into difficulties with management, we shall strike, and if the strike is not successful, we shall turn to dynamite and revolution. Soon that particular editor was on the run, I believe had to move to the United States for saying that the dictatorship freaked the fuck out about this textile thing. Men, women, and
children is a quote sorry from author Hernandez Padia. Men, women and children were pulled from their homes and executed in the barracks. Those able to flee were later captured and killed. Meanwhile, management at the Rio Blanco mill raised their champagne filled glasses and in unison honored General Martinez with a toast. They celebrated the massacre. Yeah, it's a.
Do You're celebrating kids being slaughdered, and at no point you're not like, oh wow, am I the bad guy here?
Yeah? Well, they said, are we the baddies? But then they looked at their sorry, I don't know.
If again, they were like, yeah, we're thick, We're good.
Yeah. Meanwhile, in the US, a lot of the labor Union in the US is trying to support this. To the goth Irish socialist Mother Jones, she probably didn't identify as a goth. She was just a woman who wore black morning clothes all the time. So she was a goth because we've always been here, much like trans people have always been here, Goths always been here, Mother Jones. We talked about her in her black dresses and her tough as fuck labor organizing in the Blair Blair Mountain episode.
She liked to cuss, She liked to hang out with real, rowdy boys with revolvers, and she fights against the repression of the Maganestas in the US and alongside the rest of the US labor movement, and she puts political pressure on governments to get rebels freed from US jails. She successfully frees at least one of the sort of the liberal editors who are in the US who are writing not macgone, but another one. She goes on a speaking tour around the country about the struggle of the PLM.
Labor unions raise thousands of dollars. The minor unions in particular supportive since many of their members are Mexican or Mexican American themselves, and basically there's just dozens of groups all over the US working to support the PLM. They keep trying to catch Ricardo floresmcgone. I was not to say you can't catch him, but he's been. He gets caught like eighteen times in his life, but they fail a lot too. He keeps escaping out windows and shit
because he's he's pretty sure if they catch him. At this point, he's one hundred percent going to Mexico and getting executed. He has a twenty thousand dollars bounty on his head. There are scores of private detectives after him from multiple agencies. So he flees from Los Angeles by resorting to the old standby. He dresses as a woman and moves to San Francisco.
Yes.
Yeah, The real question is whether he kept the mustache when he did that or not.
I hope to god he did. It's an impressive mustache.
It is.
It is.
He doesn't stop organizing mlon the run. I don't know what happened with his family at this point. He has a common law wife at this point, and they agreed upon basically they're both anarchists, and they both believe in the sort of anarchist feminist principle at the time of being against the formal institution of marriage. So they're common law married, and he adopts her daughter as his own, and they stay tight the rest of his life, which
is like a good turn. Usually when we have like a self obsessed man who's like grauchy when he doesn't get his way and is like a radical, he's also just like a misogynist piece of shit, right, mcgone. Ricardo Floris mcgone is like interesting. He he clearly believes in it, believes and writes in a lot of feminist principles. And one of the things that I ran across at one point was that the other like broie guys he's hanging
out with won't crack certain jokes around him. And it doesn't quite say what jokes, but I think it's misogynist jokes that he's like won't fucking put up with. So he's like mostly really he is better than everyone else around him who are men. But he also like is some of his earlier a lot of his articles are like women should support the revolution by supporting their men or whatever at various points, like really boring shit too
at various points. So whatever, But usually I talk about these people and then they're like, wife and kids fucking hate them because they're like these people treated me like shit. He his wife and his daughter like him and help fight for him, so they.
Both like him, Like you don't. Just I really love like a curmudgeon who is a wife guy, you know, like he hates everyone except like three people. That's like an archetype I really enjoy. Yeah, and I'm glad that you know he has a wife and daughter who love him. Yeah, I yeah, to very at least tolerate him and speak positively.
Yeah, and like actively like fight campaign to get him out of jail multiple times, choose to continue to live with him, have no legal bounds to him, and continue to do all of these things, you know. Like, yeah, so the Maganist does they decide they're going to try their nineteen oh six plan again, only in nineteen oh eight. They don't really actually change that much about the plan.
Do they still do it by mail?
Yeah? That's the problem. That is there is more time for more people to get armed and organized, and their messaging is getting less subtle and more radical. They're basically like, well, okay, here's a quote. We do not fight for abstractions, but from material realities we want and for everyone, for everyone bred. Insofar as blood must necessarily flow, it will be so that the conquest we secure will benefit everyone and not just a certain social cast. Magon can't lead this one.
He's back in jail. He's a lost track of why he gets rested in nineteen oh seven. But he gets rested nineteen oh seven. He isn't freedom next freed until until nineteen ten. He keeps trying to be in charge from jail, but basically people are doing it without him, and I don't know. There's still a floor as Magon involved.
Enrique is throwing down in running papers. Ricardo is writing fiery shit in prison, which is really fucking good at I think he's better at that than he is running things, honestly. And the way he gets his stuff that he writes in prison out is that he sews paper into his underwear and then passes his on to his lawyers to smuggle out. And the nineteen oh eight uprising was more organized than the previous one. There's sixty groups in the
US in Mexico. They're planning action divide Mexico into five different parts where make sure that everywhere gets hit. Each group develops its own plan of attack and gathers its own weapon and fighters. But delegates carry message Actually huh. I'm like, oh, yeah, it's totally by mail. But now I'm reading this and I'm like, I think maybe it wasn't as much by mail, possibly because of maccamas and jail, because you have delegates going carrying messages between groups and
giving talks. Basically like they're like going around given talks being like, hey, we're gonna have a revolution next month, y'all should do it?
Hey, yeah, well send the ad.
And one of the things that they do is they actually write two groups, and one of it works really well and one of it works really badly. They write to all of the indigenous allies that they've worked with and all of the other and basically they're like, hey, y'all down, we're gonna fucking overthrow this government. You want to help overthrow this government, we'll make sure everything goes good.
And that went really well. They also sent letters to all the army of the of Mexico and we're like, hey, we're like of the people. You're probably a conscript. We're actually fighting for good shit. You should come join us. This mostly just leads to like really easy infiltration because someone like a bunch of officers show up and they're like, oh yeah, we're like totally like with you. What's the plan again? Uh yeah? Several cells get busted this way.
As many as like last time, or if you.
Were I'm not sure more uprisings do happen, but I don't know the like percent of people who get busted ahead of time. I only read about one particular bust ahead of time, so I'm actually guessing fewer, but I'm not sure.
Awesome.
One of the letters Ricardo had smuggled at was to his brother, and it explained, okay, so they're moving more from liberal to anarchist at this point, right overall, both in terms of their ideology and their strategy and but not what they're saying. They are still the liberal party, right, and Riccardo smuggles out a letter that basically says the
revolution has to be anarchist in nature. In his like, the reason is because revolutions are always betrayed by leaders in bourgeois pressures that co opt and corrupt the will of the people, which happens in the nineteen ten revolution. So he's right about that. But then he says they should still call themselves liberals and just act like anarchists and state their aims, which were anarchists, but they should disguise their true goal.
Right.
This gets argued about about whether or not this worked for them. Some people are like, the reason it worked as well as it did is because of this. Other people are like, it actually kind of fucked them up. Because it forestalled a bunch of rifts that were going to happen, and so then instead the rifts happened during like a worse time, right, and it underestimated the radical will of the revolutionaries. I don't fucking know. I don't
know what was right here. I have a honesty thing where I think you should just be about what you're about. But I also have a thing where being ideologically stubborn doesn't necessarily make anyone good.
And so people don't know that they actually identify with the different ideology because the word's scary.
Yeah. Absolutely, And it's been decades since there was like an anarchist tradition in Mexico of large size and things like that, you know, right, Yeah, I don't fucking know they did what they did. So in nineteen oh eight, both sides are getting ready. When you go around and give talks like we're gonna have a revolution on the following day, it's not a good way to keep things undercover, right. Troops are stationed on the border, political officials go into hiding.
This is like such a good winning moment, Like even if you fail at your shit, if everyone was like, oh fuck, It's like when Trump had to go hide in his bunker. You know. Yeah, the Northern States go under martial law and hundreds of PLM activists are arrested and murdered. The US hates them too. They absolutely threaten US interests in Mexico and even you less interests at home. Basically, the fears that of Mexico turns into a worker's paradise,
it'll stop exporting cheap labor. So one of the very first things that the precursor to the FBI, the Bureau of Investigation, one of the very first things they do in their history is attack the PLM, like, go after the PLM, keep track of them, try and bring down their leaders, all of that stuff. The Alpaso cell was the main one I know about getting raided in particular. It was huge, It was two hundred to eight hundred people.
But this one didn't get caught by any other means except their neighbors were like, you know, these people are a lot of like crates and shit in their yard. It's kind of weird. So they called the cops, and yeah, so the nimbi's brought down. I mean, the NIMBY is probably proud of shit of themselves because they they find bombs and guns and like maps to all the like banks in the town in northern Mexico where they're going to go with like.
No one likes snitch. Yeah, come on guys.
Yeah. So once again the oppression mostly works but doesn't. At the same time, in Viesca, two hundred PLM fighters, women and men rose up. They take over the palace, They bomb the house of the district boss. District bosses are these like the political cronies of Diaz who oversee all of the different things in a region. Right, they're like just like the fucking symbol of corruption. They go and they free all the prisoners in the jail. They take over the town and they set up their platform,
which is the anarchism disguised as liberalism. They march off to the next town. They're scattered by federal troops. In akiyucn Okiukan, a city in southeast Mexico, the PLM did the same thing. They empty at jail. They declare the liberal program and that the dictatorship was dead. There's only one exchange of gunfire in this particular time with some cops. One revolutionary was injured, one cop was killed. In the end,
they're dispersed one fight near the border. So one of the other things I kind of cut through it in the fast forwarding when they were like hanging out in the US, they make friends with the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the world, who are like, if you end up doing shows about the US and the nineteen tens and twenties, you're gonna like the IWW because they're fucking
everywhere and they're doing everything cool. They are like the ones who just like put a nail in Well, okay, other people became racist and with labor unions later, but they were the ones who were like, fuck racist labor organizing that is some fucking bullshit, and like really actively worked with a lot of different immigrant communities and not just ethnic whites like previous Anyway, whatever, I like them.
They are a big part of They're like thrown down with the Maganese as left and right, and they're like, all right, we'll fucking help you in Vade Mexico whatever, like all part of the same struggle, right, and this I think that they were in this one border town because I think it's Les Vachas that I don't remember.
I didn't write into the fucking script I think the IWW threw down because one poet later describing it, talks about a blonde guy who's fighting for the anarchists, who takes a bullet and the thigh, the shin in the shoulder and keeps fighting.
That's hot.
Yeah, you know, it makes me happy for the inner like international Solidarity and the guy who takes three bullets, and it's just like, you, fuck it, I'm Aragorn. You can't fucking see Bond, dude. Yeah, good for you, dude. Yeah, it's like Yellen and German, He's like, what the fuck. And everywhere they did this, people took note of the fact that these rebels, compared to a lot of other rebels in history, that they were all pretty used to. They didn't rob or steal, and so they had the
people's support. They would I mean they would, like I think they would rob banks, right, but they wouldn't like take money from people. This all there's more fighting overall the uprising. It fails, and no small part because the Pinkertons and the US government doing all their investigations and shit. So I think nineteen oh nine, shortly after this, there's one indigenous Mayo guy. His name is Fernando Polmyraz and
he's like, well, we have a problem. Why don't we go for the most direct solution that we can think of for the problem of this dictator. So he waited for Portfolio Diaz to give a public appearance and then he shot him.
But uh oh, yeah, we know how he dies.
I know, he was wearing a bulletproof vest.
They have those in like nineteen twenty apparently ridiculous, I know, and the crowd had the assassin's back.
And this is the first time whenever in the show someone like goes up and tries to kill Azar or whatever, the crowd is like fuck you and tries to kill the assassin. Right now, people fucking hate Diaz. The crowd who was there to see Diaz speak help his would be assassin get away safely.
That's so embarrassing for him, I.
Know, you know, it's kind of just like it was a draw, you know, like both people got away. And in nineteen ten, Ricardo gets out of prison alongside a bunch of other PLM folks in I think Los Angeles, and they are met with crowds throwing flowers and cheering, and so he's Ricardo Flora's mccon so immediately just goes back to chainsmoking and sitting over a typewriter. Regeneralcion is
becoming internationalists. They now have an English language page is eventually, and it's funny because like the Spanish language part of it for a long time, eventually it balances out. For a long time, the Spanish language part is like, we're going to fucking overthrow this shit. We're going to redistribute the lands. There's gonna be full fucking socialism is going to fucking rule. And the English paper is like, us, good liberals wish to see more democracy in Mexico, your neighbor.
Then it's crazy that like he had flowers thrown im and should in like la and I've never heard of this guy. Yeah, yeah, I mean like he had this much investment in like US labor movements.
Yeah, US labor movements and US and Mexican American rights, which is later what he ends up fighting for a lot too. And yeah, no is people are bad at memory, which is why if they take these do we sell memory pills? Sophie, Oh what about dick pills? We sell dick pills sometimes more or less. Is that the occasionally do we sell titty skittles? Does anyone advertise estrogen on this show?
I feel like we got offered something for that at one point, but I don't know.
If it actually happened. I don't care. I try to not know as much about our ads.
That's that's fair. Well, let's refer to one of our old standbys. This show is sponsored by the idea of not talking to cops. If you're arrested, you just want to talk to a lawyer, not a cop. Talking to a cop won't make your case better. Talking to a lawyer might. And then it also purchased shit. I guess it doesn't actually impact us one way or the other, whether or not you do.
Like a gift for your lawyer that teaches you to shut the fuck up and not talk to cops.
Yeah, especially if we're sponsored by Flowers.
I like Flowers. Yeah. Well that was nice.
Thanks, here's some ads. Then we're back. So they've started their newspaper backup, running it out of LA They have a new slogan Tierra, libertad Land and Liberty, which they got from friends of the pod, the Russian neurodnicks. We're early socialists and nihilis in Russia who left the cities to go organize a Graian communities. He passes on this slogan to Emiliano Zapata and it becomes one of the main slogans of the Mexican Revolution. But more importantly than
newspapers and slogans, there's now a revolution. It's full scale. It's in Mexico. A guy named Madero who could have been in this story like eight times earlier, but I kept cutting him out because eventually I'm going to do a Mexican Revolution episode and he'll be all over it as the almost good guy but kind of not. He used to support mcgon when mcgone was more of a liberal, but now mcgon's gone further left and Madero has gone further to center. Madero ran for president in nineteen ten.
He was arrested. He lost a rigged election, so he escaped from prison, goes to the US, calls for a revolution, and basically he actually wants the liberal reforms in kind of a century way, but he's pretty genuine about what he wants. Madero writes the anarchists begging for their support, and mcgon responds by writing an essay. It like publishing an essay titled Madero is a Traitor to the cause
of liberty. We are now entering mcgon's curmudgeonly fuck stage where he is mad that no one is as radical as and now that the revolution is happening, which fair, I mean he fucking him and his friends laid the groundwork and then saw it not be what it could have been. But the PLM, which is more and more openly anarchist, they don't just sit the Mexican Revolution out. The Mexican Revolution fought by several different armies working more or less on the same side, but like not and
actually they end up in fighting each other. It's a whole fucking thing. So the PLM is like, all right, well, our big thing is that we invade Mexico from northern from Texas and then try and set everyone free. So they they played their strengths and they try to invade Hihuahua State in northern Mexico. Just to get a sense of when I say, land distribution was unequal in Mexico during this time, the governor of Chihuahua was a banker who personally owned two million acres of land. He also
owned the main bank in the area. His family owned seventy million acres. They're just for a sense of scale, because that's a number that just doesn't make any sense to me. There are only seven states in the US with more than seventy million acres total. Like this is like if I don't know, one guy owned Nevada, Wow, which is about.
That's so much for one guy to own.
I don't think he's just going to use it. I don't think he's going to use it all.
I just don't think you can use seventy million acres. And I know that's controversial, but I really, I really think that. Can you imagine that water bill, especially.
If it's Nevada, right, Lord Jesuits, Yeah, you'd have an army instead. Okay. Also, this extended family owns the railroads, the mines, the mills, the sugar refineries, the breweries, the granaries, the meat packing plants, and telephone companies of Chihuahua. Cool so crony state.
Right.
So the PLM is like, all right, we're going to bad Juaha one free. But they're already past their prime at this point nineteen oh eight. They don't recover from it. Hundreds or thousands of them have been murdered already their leadership or anti leadership or whatever was still in exile. Macgone never comes to the front. He stays in the US, coordinating and writing. I don't think this was cowardice, because nothing he can do is safe, right, But I don't know.
The best I read was basically people were like, he didn't fancy himself a general or like a revolutionary leader, right, But a lot of people are like, if he had showed up, the people who are following his ideas would have probably probably more people would have fought whatever. Maybe if he had led it all at all would have gone horribly bad, because he's not a fucking general. The
PLM march on Shiuahwa. They're coming from Texas. Their military leader at this point is a guy named Guilletto who had been writing for Regeneracy on as far as and He's might be the actual source of the quote it's better to die on your feet than live on your knees. It gets attributed to Zapata, but Guierto wrote an essay
under that name before Sapata even really came on the scene. Later, FDR uses this quote it might just come from an ancient Greek anyway, I really have always liked this quote, so that's why I'm like, got really excited about It's a great quote, trying to source it. One time Gietto, when US cops tried to arrest him, he escaped out his bedroom window on a rope made out of sheets tied together. And I love how much weird, fucking wacky shit actually happens in history, some cartoon shit.
I love it.
Yeah, So they invade, They comer trains, they blow up bridges, they recruit soldiers as they go. They go and they liberate towns. The residents join their cause. When I say invade, it's like worth pointing out that it's like the people who live in Chua were happy about this. The only people wo are unhappy about it. Other people control it. Right. The Federal Army counter attacks and they drive the PLM out and Guerto is killed. He dies on his feet
rather than living on his knees. I really liked him. The PLM failed. So then they did the last militant thing they did. They tried to take over Baja California. They picked it because it's sparsely populated and almost all the industry was owned by foreign assholes. The goal was to turn it into a libertarian socialist region with equal access to the means of production, redistribute all the land
to the peasants, all that good stuff. Over the course of four months, the Mexican anarchists alongside the Tarahuma people, Italian and Spanish anarchists, some soldiers of four who turned out to be really shitty, like just bad people, and comrades from the IWW in the US who don't suck.
They take control first of Mexicali, Los Agadonas, Tacte and Tijuana one after the other, and they institute libertarian socialism and they're like to each according to their ability, from each according to their ability, to each according to need. But they're defeated, and they're defeated because at this point
Madero has taken over, like Madero wins OUs Diaz. And one of the first things that Madero does is he puts down the PLM and he's like, I can't take my revolutionary army, my usual the one that just won me the revolution, because they like the PLM, and if I take them, they'll probably all switch sides on me. So instead he uses the federal troops, like the army he just beat he takes them. He marches up to Baja California and he puts down the rebellious workers in
Baja California who are trying to live free. He's supported by the US government when he does this. And this is like one of the most common tropes I ever run across in history. A bunch of like actually radical folks and anarchists and peasants and workers run to the front lines and start the revolution. Then more moderate forces conspire with literally their ostensible enemy to put them down. And they use the same excuse that they always use. They call the PLM bandits. This is why I don't
like Madero. This is why mcgone doesn't like Madero. Madero goes on. The recuperation of the of the PLM starts immediately. Madero goes on to claim that he was working outside with sorry that he was working with the PLM. At one point, he spreads a rumor that mcgone is his vice president. And he does this. It wins over a ton of the PLM fighters who come and join his armies. Right, and this is where weighted to show your hand about being a radical kind of fucks mcgone and the Maganesism.
The PLM over because he had waited so long to make it clear the difference between the PLM and the moderates. People had no reason to doubt Madero when Madero is like, oh, no, they're with us, because they don't have a way of knowing that they just all got murdered by Madero. Yeah, the moderate sides to the US. This is the kind of the sad part of the story where it all goes to shit. That's always happens on cool people who did cool stuff. Every story is a tragedy if you
don't know when to stop telling it. The moderate part of the US Labor Movement, they take Madero's side in the split. Mother Jones calls mcgon a fanatic and drops her support because he won't play nice with Madero. And she's right that he was a zealot. Right, and at this point he is casting aside everyone who disagrees with him. He is moody as fuck. He demands that he gets his way. The revolution slips away from him, and he lashes out at friend after friend, and he pushes them away.
At one point I think after this he ends up and pushing away His remaining brothers were both his brothers. It's probably for the best that he was a zealot for an anti authoritarian cause, because that kind of zelotry cannot just negatively impact a movement. His did has absolutely negatively impacted the movement, but it can also cause people with power to kill everyone they disagree with, and he
never did that. He cast people aside. But he did not do what almost every other revolutionary leader does at this stage. Right, only the syndicalist IWW and the anarchists in the US labor movement and the anarchists in Mexico support the PLM. Still most of them are still pretty fucking mad at Macgon because he stayed in the US the whole time, right, and he wasn't like in the shit the Mexican Revolution continued, but today's the story of
the Maganeste does. And to close up on Magone himself, he was arrested again, then he was set free, then he was arrested again once when he was out. The sort of revolutionary government of Mexico because like Madero gets killed and then someone else comes in power, and someone comes in power whatever, fucking the sort of revolutionary government Mexico was like, look, you did a lot do you want a pension, You can come back to Mexico and
we'll take care of you. Mcgonne is too fucking stubborn or maybe two principal depends on you look at it. His quote is thanks, but no, all money the state has was stolen from the workers. He says that the money will only burn my hands and fill my heart with remorse.
Okay, good point.
Yeah, and he gets a few years of peace. He and his wife and his daughter, as well as his brother Enrique, and a bunch of other anarchists and several other families. They buy like five or six acres in Los Angeles and they farm, and they're like poor at shit. They scrape together enough money for like a shitty printing press. They put regeneracy on back in but there's like no one buying it anymore. PLM's fucking over. But he he
writes plays, He writes children's stories. He travels around speaking about the Mexican Revolution and anarchism. He writes articles decrying the treatment of Mexican Americans at the border. He also prophetically warns that without internationalist revolution, US industry is going to move to Mexico destroy the economy in Mexico forcing immigrants from Mexico into the US.
Hit that one on the head, yeah, and.
Soon enough he goes back to prison again. This time he goes back to prison for suggesting that workers should refuse to fight the First World War. He's caught up in the first Red Scare. Basically in the United States. The US was like, look, if you say you're sorry, we'll pardon you. But this is fucking magone. His mother died without him there because she refused to ask him to say he was sorry. He is sick as shit
with diabetes. He's like near blind, and he writes, and this is one of the last things he writes, repentance. I have not exploited the sweat, anguish, fatigue, and labor of others. I have not oppressed a single soul. Nothing to repent for. My life has been lived without my having any wealth, power, or glory, when I could have gotten these three things very easily. But I do not regret it. Wealth, power and glory are only one by
trampling others' rights. My conscience is at peace, for it knows that under my convict's garb beats an honest heart. He fucking goes hard oh h. He was found dead in his cell on November twentieth, nineteen twenty two, in Fort Leavenworth Prison in Kansas, at forty eight years old. He was very sick. Most of the anarchists at the time believe he was murdered. One of his friends in the prison heard a struggle and there were bruises around
his neck. One PLM supporter in prison said that a guard had killed Magon, and then the person who said that was killed by seven guards. So he was either murdered by a guard or he was murdered by medical neglect.
Either way, that might be what I read in the Britannica. Yeah, yeah, you didn't want to spoil it. Uh huh.
His wife, Maria lives in another twenty six years. She organized peasants to her last days. She dies in poverty because she too refused a pension in her dead husband's name. Mexico's like, Yo, you were mcgon's wife, you want a pension. She's like, she wasn't the like stuck with She wasn't like stuck with him. She was with him.
You know.
She was of the same sort as him, as far as I can tell. Yeah, cloth and yeah, now mcgon is remembered. He is remembered by the new government as the forebearer of the revolution, which he maybe would have hated. But actually it's his brother Enrique who does a lot of the fighting to make sure that his memory and the influence he had and the legacy of the PLM stays alive. In nineteen twenty, the tenant farmer movement in
Veracruz started putting on mcgon's plays. Maganesta's stayed involved in social struggle right they were involved in the Campasino movement. They added revolutionary syndicalism to the mix and the workers movement. In nineteen thirty seven, Regeneracion went back into production, and soon it was run by a Federacion Anarchista Mexicana. The ideas and action informed not just the anarchist movement, but
all the leftist and peasant movements in Mexico. Notably, it informed the Zapatistas, the indigenous uprising in Chiapas, who I will cover one of these days. It's been on top of the list since the beginning, but I just want to do it right. One of the towns in their territory. I think no, actually, I think there's more than one town. There's a town in Chiapas I believe called Ricardo Flores Magon. I believe that the town that he was born in. I didn't write this in the scripts. I don't remember
all of it. They changed the name from like something something to something Flores Magon and Riccardo Floris Macgon's great great nephew runs a museum dedicated to the Maganestas in Mexico City, And while they're a little bit buried, they'll never be completely Yeah, that's the.
Mag And that wasn't, in fact a cool person who did cool stuff.
Yeah. Yeah.
I got so worried when, like it's always like halfway into the research that I find out someone was like a real fucking grouch, right, And I'm like, like, I was like three quarters the way through.
Uh.
One of the books I read about this before, they were like, oh and his wife Maria, And I'm like, the fuck's that didn't come up earlier? That's not worth telling me about. You know.
You're like, so what's his relationship to his life?
Right? And like you know, and and I don't know all of it, right, but that's my best inference is that he was a grouch, He pushed people away, he was a man, he was He fucking tried, and he didn't turn into the kinds of pieces of shit that a lot of people do. And I can't even imagine what it's like to just like put everything into this and then just see it work but not. Yeah, you know, but for a lot of the people who were involved
in the moment, it did work. You know, it didn't work by his standards, but it did work by a lot of people's standards. Yeah, that's what I got.
Cool, It's a great story. Thanks, thanks Margaret.
Yeah, if people want to hear you tell stories about the current mess that is the right wing media sphere, how can they do it?
Yes, you can find me on TikTok at kat m Aboo. Also subscribe to my YouTube, which is the same one that I've got to mention last episode. You can literally just look me up on the internet and you can find me on Twitter, threads, blue Sky. There are too many platforms nowadays. I have like a link tree on my profile. But yeah, I talk about right wing media and all those idiots.
Yay, Hey, I have a substack. You should, I like keep saying I'm quitting Twitter and I'm like everyone who says it, it's like the annoying person who doesn't leave the party. It's like, I'm gonna leave. I'll probably go down with the ship of Twitter. I'm not sure. I just don't like social media, even though I do it. I'm on it all the time, and so I'm like, I almost don't want to start another one because I'm just like, but I don't lose guy's fun.
I'll give you an invite code if you grab one yet I am, I think, are you?
Yeah?
I actually grabbed Margaret as a user name.
That's fucking cool.
Yeah, but it doesn't feel as like elite because there's actually it's like Margaret dot b K s K.
Yeah.
And also there's no right now I'm following Oh great, there's no video if they don't even have a betting and yeah, all these places are just doing it like half ass, so yeah, yeah, what.
Are they thinking? But yeah, I'm trying to write more substack. And you can also follow Sophie around yeah town no, yeah, no, don't do that.
If you do that, my dog will fuck you up.
Yeah.
I will follow iron dot Dragon at Blue sky Dot.
Exactly did you catch that? If you didn't too fucking bad. Yeah, no, I want to plug our our lat like I don't know whenever you're listening to this. We did a really interesting episode on Behind the Bastards with Sarah Marshall that was all about the kidnapping craze and conspiracies around that, and Robert Evans did a really good article to go along with it on his substack Shatters oone. So I want to plug that.
That's what I'm listening to while walking the dog. Yes, today and tomorrow, oh, possibly dinner tonight.
That's that seems good. I was listening to walking about Town. It's great.
Hell yeah, Wow. YouTube can be obsessed with cool Zone Media like all of us are. That's we got to bye bye.
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