In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Magonista anarchist invasion of Tijuana
AK Press author Jim Miller co-hosts an event this Saturday at Purple Haus in San Diego to celebrate and honor the 100th anniversary of the anarchist invasion and commune in Tijuana; find out more about the event here. For our part, we’re happy to offer up this excerpt from Jim’s novel Flash, which we published last Fall. It’s a great book, and it’s just been listed as a finalist for the San Diego Book Award! Congrats to Jim, and we hope you enjoy the excerpt. It’s a great novel. You should buy a copy (and don’t forget: it’s also available on Amazon, Kobo, eBooks.com, and Apple as an ebook!).
I looked up at a bunch of teenage kids jumping on board in National City. What kind of future would these kids have? It was hard to say. There were dark clouds on the horizon, but sometimes it was times like these that made people stand up. At the next stop, a pair of soldiers got on board in their white uniforms complete with hats. They were talking loudly about sex with prostitutes. I picked up the book on the Magonista revolt and flipped to the middle to look at a black-and-white photo of Ricardo Flores Magón and his brother, Enrique. Both men had thick curly hair and identical handlebar mustaches. Ricardo’s serious expression and little round glasses gave him the aura of a philosopher.
The desert revolution was an international affair, inspired by the Magón brothers who ran the insurgency from their exile in General Otis’s Los Angeles, just after the LA Times building was bombed by a pair of angry AFL labor activists, the McNamera brothers. That bombing led to a wave of anti-labor hysteria in Southern California, thus making the Magonista’s assault on the sparsely populated border region improbable. The fact that both Otis and Spreckels had extensive land, water, and railroad holdings also assured that the odds were against them. Nonetheless, in January 1911 at the IWW headquarters in Holtville, California, a group of mostly Mexican rebels loyal to Magón planned an attack on Mexicali. Soon afterwards, the rebel band captured Mexicali in a predawn raid, killing only the town jailor. Poor sap.The initial success of the raid led to a wave of support from famous voices on the left like Jack London and Emma Goldman, who spoke in San Diego to help rally workers to the cause. The rebels’ biggest backers in the US were the Wobblies and Italian anarchists, both of whose philosophies were in line with Magon’s mix of Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Marx’s. Simply put, Magón called upon the workers to “take immediate possession of the land, the machinery, the means of transportation and the buildings, without waiting for any law to decree it.” Brutally treated by the Diaz dictatorship, and deeply committed to a utopian vision of communal society, Magon’s idealism made him both admirable and seemingly unable to reconcile his dream with political reality. This last malady was something I had a soft spot for.
Go figure.
Soon after the success at Mexicali, the rebels took Tecate, where they held off a lackluster attempt by the Mexican army to retake Mexicali. Despite this early success, factional squabbling broke out, and several leadership changes took place in the field. Many of the Mexicans who began the revolt left to fight with Madero, who was also challenging the Diaz regime. This resulted in the odd fact that a majority of the Magonista army was comprised of American Wobblies mixed with a few soldiers of fortune. With Magón permanently ensconced in Los Angeles, sending more anarchist pamphlets than bullets, the leadership ultimately fell to Caryl Rhys Pryce, a Welsh soldier of fortune who had fought in India and South Africa. A surreal pairing, I thought. Pryce fashioned himself a revolutionary and joined the Magonistas after reading a book on the murderous Diaz regime. His biggest victory came when he disobeyed orders from Magón, who wanted him to march east and fight the Mexican army, and instead turned westward to take Tijuana on May 9th 1911. After a fierce fight, a rebel force of 220 men won a battle in which 32 people died. So the big victory had been an accident of sorts. You had to love it. I turned the page and glanced at a picture of Pryce standing with his hands on his hips, looking like a character in a TV Western. There was a crowd of men at his side, but their faces were indistinguishable. Could one have been Bobby Flash?
I looked at another picture of rebels standing in front of a line of storefronts where someone had replaced the Mexican flag with one reading, “Tierra y Libertad.” It was after this victory that things turned bizarre, and dozens of sightseers from San Diego, who had watched the battle from afar like a football game, flooded the town to loot the shops. With Magón still in Los Angeles, refusing to provide more aid to the untrustworthy Pryce, the rebels turned to revolutionary tourism and gambling to raise funds. It was a kind of Wobbly Vegas. Apparently, San Diegans were fascinated with the rugged revolutionary army, and would pay to take pictures with the wild mix of cowboys, Wobbly hobos, mercenaries, black army deserters, Mexicans, Indians, and random opportunists. I turned the page and stared at a photo of a group of Wobblies, Cocopah Indians, and African American deserters, still in US uniforms, posing for a shot. No Bobby Flash.
It was during this period that Pryce met Daredevil Dick Ferris. I spotted a picture of Ferris, a pasty, pudgy specimen wearing a hat that made him look like a fading dandy. Today he’d be doing infomercials, I thought. Anyway, Ferris was a booster hired to drum up PR for San Diego and its upcoming Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park. A shameless huckster, Ferris befriended Pryce, brought him to San Diego and sought to persuade him to support Ferris’s notion of a “white man’s republic” in lower Baja, Mexico. When Pryce proved to be of no use (he was arrested on his way back to Mexico and later abandoned the revolution altogether to act in Western movies), Ferris invented an imaginary invading army, going so far as to give a letter to the Mexican consul threatening an attack if Mexico refused to sell Lower Baja, and placing an ad in several newspapers looking for recruits. He even sent a woman on horseback over the border to plant a flag in the name of “suffrage and model government.” With these two stunts under his belt, he then recruited one of the remaining Magonista rebels to the Ferris cause and sent him back across the border to be nearly lynched by angry Wobblies who then elected Jack Mosby, one of their own, as the final commander of the doomed border revolution. I found a photo of Mosby, an unassuming man with a neatly trimmed mustache, wearing a battered fedora, and looking like a librarian with an ammo belt slung across his shoulder.
Led by Mosby, 150 Wobblies and 75 Mexicans took on 560 soldiers of the Mexican army on June 22nd, 1911. Badly outnumbered and low on supplies because of Magon’s refusal to send more, the rebels were routed in three hours, with thirty killed, and the rest fleeing back across the border to be arrested by the United States army. Mosby was shot and killed when he tried to escape military custody. Ferris, shunned by Spreckels, went on the road to enact his version of the farce “The Man from Mexico” on stage. Magón died on the floor of a cell in Leavenworth after having been imprisoned for violating the Espionage Act during the first Red Scare. Bobby Flash? Somehow he made his way back to Holtville to end up on a Wanted poster with Gus Blanco. Then, under another name, he wound up running the gauntlet somewhere in San Diego in 1912. Nothing but traces of a remarkable life. I looked up, and the trolley was heading into San Ysidro. Time for my own trip across the border.
As I walked across the street toward the pedestrian bridge that takes you to the border I noticed the number of gringos headed over was much smaller than the last time I’d been to Tijuana. Almost everyone was Mexican—schoolchildren, maids, janitors, families returning from shopping trips. It seemed the drug wars in the city had scared away large numbers of Americans and forced a good number of Mexicans to do their business in San Diego. The economy probably wasn’t helping either. I wove my way through the labyrinth of concrete, over the footbridge, past the Border Patrol cameras to the big metal turnstile that clanks loudly to announce every living soul leaving or coming home. On the other side, I saw Ricardo, and he met me with a smile and a firm handshake. I started in with my feeble present-tense Spanish, but it quickly became apparent that he spoke perfect English. When I told him that I’d been reading about Ricardo Flores Magón on the trolley, he responded, “No relation, but good choice” with a laugh. We walked by an empty police checkpoint to his car, an old Jeep, parked across the street from the outdoor sports book. I glanced over at a crowd of men drinking Tecates or coffee in styrofoam cups as they stared at the screens monitoring the horse races. We got in the Jeep and drove by a few abandoned curio shops and headed toward the working class section of the city, far from Avenida Revolución, the main tourist strip. The city seemed depressed and tense. I asked Ricardo about the lack of pedestrians coming south.
“Revolución is dead too, man,” he said soberly. “Nothing happening there anymore, even on weekends. The drug wars and the economy in the north are killing the businesses.” The papers had been full of news about murders and big shoot-outs even in broad daylight. Not even the hills where the middle class and the wealthy lived were safe anymore. A newspaper editor had been murdered and others had hired guards. Some police officials had been killed by the drug lords, others were on the take. Tourists had been robbed on the roads south to San Felipe and Ensenada. It was the Wild West. We cruised past a big open-air market full of stalls selling fruit, clothing, small electronic goods, and tacos. I caught a whiff of carne asada coming off a grill. It smelled good and I realized I was hungry. We turned down a street lined with small office fronts and pulled up in front of one with “Justicia” painted on the window.
Inside, I was greeted by a small, pretty woman named Gabriela, who would introduce me to the other women sitting in a circle of small metal chairs, chatting animatedly with each other. The office was small with a big wooden desk that was littered with mail and notebooks. It had a phone but no computer. The women were sitting in a much larger meeting space, a large room with concrete walls and a concrete floor. It would have been ugly if not for the murals someone had painted all over the walls—there were portraits of Zapata, Ché Guevara, Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatista front, and, interestingly, Ricardo Flores Magón, along with some beautiful nods to Mexican folk art including a calavera with fist upraised. I smiled, sat down on one of the metal chairs, and introduced myself. One of the women thanked me for coming and handed me a plate of pan she had made. I thanked her, took a piece, and listened to their stories.
None of the women spoke English so Ricardo and Gabriela served as translators as, one by one, the women told me about their lives. They lived in the neighborhood under an abandoned maquiladora as the letter Neville had passed on to me had said. Apparently the maquiladora up the hill was owned by a man who had closed down the shop without doing any cleanup, so the chemicals involved in making batteries were left under a big canvas tent. Once the tons of abandoned waste from the batteries began to seep into the earth, it entered the well that supplied the barrio down the hill. Worse still, when the rains came in the winter, the chemicals would get washed down the hill, through the dirt streets where their children played. One of the women, Marisol, a stout, kind-faced grandmother with lively eyes, had come with pictures of the waste heap, the neighborhood from above, and children playing soccer, kicking the ball through puddles of toxic waste. I surveyed the pictures and studied Marisol’s face as she explained how it had begun with people getting sick to their stomachs or having their eyes burn for no apparent reason. Then there were strange cases of cancer, lots of them. And finally, mothers started giving birth to babies with terrible birth defects, babies with damaged brains or horrible disfigurements. By then, I was taking notes furiously, as one woman after another added her tale of betrayal.
I was particularly struck by the fact that these women still worked at other factories, for ten or twelve hours a day, and then came home to take care of their families. They woke before dawn, worked at home, at the factory, and at home again, and still found time to organize Las Madres Unidas against all odds. It was jaw-dropping. Another madre, Rosa, a sharp-eyed, middle-aged woman with obvious scars on her wiry arms and her fierce heart, angrily told me how the owner of the company had shut it down overnight, taken out the valuable equipment, and shipped it to China, where he had moved the operation because the labor was even cheaper there. NAFTA and Mexican law forbid such practices, but there were no enforcement clauses. The Mexican government ignored its own labor laws to appease the companies, and the United States ignored the matter altogether. All the while, the owner sat in a big house just across the border without a care in the world, fat and happy, as Rosa put it.
Finally, Isabel, a short, Indian-looking woman in her thirties, wearing a striking, hand-embroidered blouse and blue jeans told me about how the closing of the plant had changed the life of the barrio. Most of the people in the neighborhood had moved there to work for the factory on the hill. They came, built their own houses out of what they could—with no infrastructure, no water, no help from the government or the company. When the company left, they all had to get jobs elsewhere, further away, so the walk took an hour each way. The women had no protection on their walks and some had disappeared like the women in Juarez. They could not trust the police, and the other factory owners would not provide transportation and punished them if they arrived late or left early. It was a house of pain, I thought to myself as I looked into the faces of these women, faces lined with worry, work, and suffering. Still there was fight in them—hope against all odds. I promised them that I would tell their tale and come back to see their neighborhood with a photographer. Then I thanked them for their stories and shook each of their hands like a prayer for more power than I had to redress their great wrongs.
It was dark outside as Ricardo drove me back to the border. He thanked me for coming and I told him it was my pleasure to do what I could to tell this story. We made plans for my return visit to tour the neighborhood. The lights in the hills twinkled a reddish-yellow and car horns blared angrily in the rush hour traffic. He let me off at the end of a long line to get back. “Good bye, my friend,” he said before driving off into the night. I dropped a coin in a basket at the feet of an ancient Indian woman, who was begging on a dirty wool blanket by the line. Some little girls sold me a pack of gum and I looked over at a line of shops hawking cheap liquor and pharmaceuticals for those returning to the land of the free. In line, I closed my eyes and listened to the distant strains of music from the Mexican street blending with hundreds of car radios talking in Spanish and English. AC/DC and Los Tigres del Norte. At the end of the line, the guards regarded me suspiciously as they always seemed to do. They sternly pulled aside the whole family behind me and took them to secondary inspection as I headed to the trolley. On the way back, the train was half empty and I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep with visions of Las Madres Unidas dancing in my head.