Published in The Cochise County Historical Journal, Vol. 53, No. 2, Fall–Winter 2023. Note: an overzealous copy editor added a number of commas that I don’t approve of, and one grammatical error, at the last minute. It’s laborious to correct because there’s a change of format and the footnotes got detached from the text.
Revoltosos in Bisbee: Magonistas in the 1917 Deportation
The Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) was founded in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, in 1901 in open opposition to Mexico’s long-lived, iron-fisted dictator, Porfirio Díaz, who was about to win his third term as president. They organized a series of local clubs and newspapers that called for a return to the Liberal Constitution of 1857: they demanded freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, separation of church and state, and other individual, secular freedoms. They were nationalist and demanded curbs on foreign and particularly U.S. capitalist penetration. They revealed the corruption and despotism of the regime; one of its young leaders, Ricardo Flores Magón, went farther and proclaimed the Díaz administration a “den of thieves.” Liberal clubs spread throughout the Republic, some open and some clandestine, and were met with a wall of repression. Hundreds were imprisoned, among them Ricardo Flores Magon and his older brother Jesús, and a number of newspapers were shut down, but sprang up again.
In 1904 many Liberal leaders went into exile in the U.S. where they settled in the Borderlands. They published a weekly newspaper, Regeneración, and gathered the reins of the Liberal clubs scattered throughout Mexico and the diaspora. While their focus was on Mexico and overthrowing Diaz, they lived and labored among workers and immersed themselves in workers’ struggles in the U.S. They associated with U.S. revolutionaries, socialists and anarchists, particularly in Los Angeles and briefly in Tucson. They were especially close to the Industrial Workers of the World and encouraged dual and multiple memberships. Research recently became available that shows a Liberal club in Bisbee, Arizona from 1912 through at least 1916. They were present in the 1917 Bisbee Deportation and a leading force among its hundreds of Mexican participants.
The PLM came out as anarchists in 1911 while keeping the name “liberal”; they declared War against the Trinity of Plunder: the Church, the Bosses, and the State. They were persecuted by the cops and company thugs of both nations. For more on the PLM, see www.revoltososindouglas.com and my article in the Fall–Winter 2020 issue of this Journal.[2]
This article is dedicated to Hector Salinas, 1950–2023, who introduced me to the Revoltosos.
At least six and probably eight Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexican Liberal Party) members were among the 1,186 “undesirables” deported in the famous expulsion from Bisbee in 1917, eight including leaders Rosendo Dorame and Fernando Palomares.[3] Their names appear in the Dorcy Army Census made by the troops housing the deportees at the military post at Columbus, New Mexico.[4] They were certainly not the only PLM supporters among the deportees.
The Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—called the strike that led to the Deportation. Founded in 1905, they were One Big Union, the first to focus on organizing what is called “unskilled” labor.They fought to abolish states and governments, they were against any war but the class war, and they were close to the Partido Liberal Mexicano, implacable radicals of the same stripe. They organized mass, horizontal, industrial unions in western fields, lumber camps, mines, and smelters, in eastern textile mills, and on docks around the world. Mexican organizers were central to their efforts in Arizona and they founded a Spanish-speaking local in Phoenix in 1906; in 1909, they published La Unión Industrial in Spanish. I am using the term “Mexican” to refer to anyone of Mexican descent, regardless of citizenship.
There is a crawl at the opening of the film Bisbee ‘17, explaining that Bisbee miners got tired of “the unsafe working conditions, imbalance of power, and the discrimination they faced in the camp” and so the IWW came to radicalize them.[5] But the workers had been tired all along, tired of bad air and deteriorating lungs, of fatigue, danger, and darkness, and the calculated compression of space in the tunnels and stopes. They were tired of the insulting distance between their lives and those of the town’s wealthy, on display every day. They had tried to organize in 1907, but organizers were fired and black-listed. They had been resisting in a thousand ways passed down in oral tradition, radicalized by their lives.
One prominent Bisbee activist, Rosendo Dorame, was a member of both the PLM and the IWW and was the managing editor of La Unión Industrial. He appears in the film Bisbee ’17, explaining solidarity to the young protagonist. Dorame labored as a miner, barber, carpenter, and even as a sheriff, in Texas, Colorado, California, and maybe northern Mexico, as well as Arizona.[6] He did jail time with Wobbly Big Bill Haywood after the Cripple Creek mining strike in Colorado in 1894, when the strikers won a victory for the eight-hour day, thanks to the state militia protecting the workers. Haywood and Dorame were quickly released.[7]
The PLM had a steady presence throughout the copper borderlands and deep roots in the Mexican diaspora. Regeneración circulated in barrios on both sides of the line; they published a page in English in every issue. Its agents moved through the mining camps as if the border did not exist. They had a club in Douglas in 1906 and 1907 and clubs in Clifton–Morenci, Mowry (Patagonia), Ray, El Paso, two in Cananea, and one in the now forgotten camp of Johnston, founded in 1917.[8]
In Bisbee, Mexican participation in the 1917 strike was high and they were singled out as trouble-makers and leaders. Mexicans were at least 25% of the deportees, the most of any nationality, and only 13% of the mineworkers, indicating that they were deported not only for striking.[9]
The PLM in Bisbee
In November, 1910, the Mexican Revolution broke out. Ammunition flew off the shelves of the company stores in Bisbee and Douglas; 1000 miners left Clifton to fight.[10] Dorame joined the rebels in Sonora with sixteen men, they were captured and imprisoned.[11]
The IWW participated in the PLM’s five-month occupation of Tijuana and Mexicali in Baja, Mexico during the first spring of the Revolution. PLM forces were small and ill-equipped but they overran Mexicali, on the California border, then they took Tijuana, but were soon defeated by Madero’s federal army. PLM forces were outnumbered by their own international supporters, including hundreds of Wobblies and a handful of mercenaries and attention-hounds, enough to spur fear of U.S. annexation of the Baja penninsula.[12]
The Partido Liberal Mexicano organized the Club Liberal Ignacio Zaragoza in Bisbee in 1912.[13] Twenty-two initial subscribers, including six married couples, announced its inauguration in Regeneración. In 1916, 47 members of the Bisbee Club signed on to the Three Points, a campaign acknowledging PLM leadership and describing the Revolution as a battle of poor against rich. We know these were married couples because the women signed with their husbands’s surnames following their own with a “de,” a shortening of “wife of.”[14]
The PLM advocated equality for women and promoted women as writers and leaders. There was an impressive circle of women activists around Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón, including Sara Estela Ramírez, Josefina Amador, María Talavera Brousse and her daughter, Lucia Norman, and in Texas, Andrea and Teresa Villarreal. Ethel Duffy Turner and Elizabeth Trowbridge were important U.S. supporters. Several PLM clubs were all women.
In 1913, the IWW Convention resolved that “organized labor. . . ought to assist the Mexicans with all the power at their command.”[15] In November, Al Sikes and Murrel Flood, the IWW press committee in Bisbee, resolved to prepare a report on the Revolution and present it to the IWW at large.[16]
Aniceto Valencia and his wife, Narcisa, hosted the first meeting of Grupo Zaragoza in their home; he was the group’s initial secretary. Aniceto was fired from the Copper Queen mine a year later and wrote a series of exhortations to revolution for Regeneración. He collaborated with PLM campaigns to free José María Rangel and Raúl Palma, PLM militants imprisoned for their role in anti-Díaz uprisings, and he called for armed struggle: “We workers will not win economic, political, and social freedom by peaceful means, we will be redeemed through arms!”[17]
Bautista Leal, a lifelong revolutionary, named a child Reivindicación, which means Vindication or Justice. He formed a Liberal Club in Johnston, a copper mine north of Bisbee. When his daughter Acelia died in 1914 for lack of a medicine her parents could not afford, her mother Isidra joined him in denouncing the regime, lamenting, “She died because we are poor, she could have been saved—pudo haber sido salvada.”[18]
Phelps Dodge, owner of the biggest Bisbee mine, bragged that they offered “fair” pay, but what is fair? The miners’ life still led to early death. The owners calculated the maximum compression of space with a minimal expenditure for safety and squeezed every bit of strength from the men. The workers paid for their own tools that were used up in the mine, as they themselves were used up. They lived in shacks made of scrap and ate from the company store, that robbed them doubly through monopoly pricing. The men could not go to work without the women’s labor, cooking over woodfires and washing clothes made filthy in the tunnels, by hand, hauling water, laboring to restore the men to the yoke of it and getting paid nothing at all. Their children had poor or no schooling, then they got used up by the mine as well.
Miners circulated through the region and went from place to place, many went home for harvests. Before 1910, most western miners worked less than two years on a job.[19] PLM and Wobbly militants were even more mobile. Industrial workers formed vast moving throngs at the turn of the twentieth century throughout the U.S. West and the Mexican North.
The IWW and the PLM incited workers to overthrow the rule of property and form self-governing, autonomous collectives to take hold of the means of life themselves. This gospel of hope was spread by railway and tramp labor, lumberjacks and field hands, on both sides of the border. It was carried in Wobbly songs and Mexican corridos and in newspapers passed from hand to hand and read aloud, in stories told around campfires, among folks whose memory of resistance was an oral tradition. Meanwhile Capital kept reaching into the hinterlands and modernizing consumption, jobs, and with that, patterns of deference, exchanging feudal bonds for disciplinary rules and the blacklist. The workers were ruled not by a patron with a name and surname but by an impersonal regime and its masked thugs backed up by the state. The IWW tactic of hurling masses of workers into strikes, occupations, and street protests was a match for the new era. Both the PLM and the IWW rejected electoral campaigns and formal contracts in favor of direct action. Wallace Stegner called them “the shock troops of labor.”[20]
Tomás Farrel Cordero taught children to read on scraps of newspaper and to write with a stick in the dust. He founded a school, an “escuelita,” in the Muheim Building at the foot of Brewery Gulch. He soon moved on, to Clifton–Morenci, Metcalf, Lordsburg, and Globe. He was one of an army of radical militants, riding the rails between mining camps, with a bundle of Regeneración and a flair for speech-making. The school remained for some time.[21]
The eight PLM deportees of 1917 are listed as laborers, one a mucker. None were underground miners. None is listed as a citizen; five are listed as property owners and included in the Bisbee city directories. The property, if there were property, would have been a shack and indicates relative stability in an area where turnover reached 25%, so does the inclusion in city directories.[22] There is doubt as to the accuracy of the Dorcy Census.[23]
Andrés Mendoza worked as a laborer in the scavenger department in Dubacher Canyon in back of B Hill. His wife Candelaria had joined the Bisbee Club in 1912 alongside him. In 1920, he was working in Superior, a copper town east of Phoenix.[24]
José María Valenzuela lived in Tin Town with no occupation recorded. Domingo Canales appeared with neither occupation or home address, but listed as a married homeowner with children. Jesus Tamayo was described as employed at the Bunker Hill Mining Company in Tombstone, along with Juan Salas, who returned to Bisbee only to be killed in a premature blast a year later.[25]
Severiano Barragán worked for the Copper Queen, lived in Brewery Gulch, and denounced the “unjustified discounts to his salary made by the company and the despotic treatment of its employees.”[26]
Fernando Palomares, El Indio Mayo, was a lifelong agitator for the PLM and IWW. His mother was a Mayo Indian and he grew up in a utopian socialist community in Topolobampo, Sinaloa. He was a brilliant organizer and worked among indigenous communities throughout northern Mexico and the Southwest. He often used the alias Francisco Martínez and is probably the individual listed on the Dorcy Census as Francisco Palomares, a married homeowner with no occupation. Palomares compared his own organizing to “leaving a trail of powder.”[27]
We assume that some members of Club Ignacio Zaragoza stayed on in Bisbee but that many more were part of the shifting, mobile mass of miners who moved from one camp to another. Twenty-six are listed in the city directories between the years 1914 and 1918. The list of PLM members comes from the two articles published in Regeneración and from a biographical dictionary posted on archivomagon, an on-line resource maintained by the Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos sobre la Revolución Mexicana (National Institute for Historical Studies of the Mexican Revolution). Archivomagón contains a treasure trove of information, including a complete set of Regeneración and many books in digital format.
The list of the deportees on the University of Arizona website is incomplete and contains 900 names; it comes from the Dorcy Army Census made soon after their arrival at Fort Furlong in Columbus, New Mexico. Authorities had counted 1,186 men being loaded on boxcars. There are a number of obvious errors in the list, including the spelling of Spanish surnames, Astrada for Estrada and two misspellings of Ibarra.[28] It is interesting that Mike Anderson noted some misspellings, “especially those of Slavic and Scandinavian origin,” and not others [[1]footnote Anderson, pg. 59]; it is also interesting that he ignores Rosendo Dorame on his list of union organizers, although Dorame was featured in the film that Mike also took part in. [[2]footnote Anderson, pg. 63, footnote 16]
There was no means of verifying much if any of the information volunteered by the men to the soldiers. Katherine Benton-Cohen created a database with an additional 134 names, using the Dorcy Census and the list of plaintiffs in the civil suit, Simmons vs. El Paso, and other sources.[29] In 2016, a citizens committee formed in Bisbee to organize for the Centennial and Mike Anderson began investigating the fate of the deportees and amending the list with his findings.[30] He has located several hundred individuals to date in a heroic undertaking.
The Copper Triangle
The Copper Triangle was once the northern frontier of Sonora, sparsely inhabited by indigenous peoples and mestizo pioneers, where early mining was done by independent prospectors called gambusinos. The Borderlands changed hands in the mid-nineteenth century, becoming a border, when the U.S. defeated Mexico and took a third of its territory, but the bigger change came fifty years later with industrialization. Eastern corporations such as Phelps Dodge replaced prospectors and built railroads that phased out muleteams and haulers. Mining that once required skilled work and rewarded experience became mechanized and the workers easily replaced. Immigrant labor from Europe flooded in to meet demand, while accelerated capitalist development in Mexico displaced campesinos without absorbing their labor and sent more migrants to the U.S. to become transnational exiles.
The Borderlands were once part of Mexico and Mexicans had pioneered techniques in mining, as they did with livestock, but in the new Anglo regime, their status fell below that of migrants from Europe. They were colonized as members of a defeated nation and racialized in the U.S. on land that was once theirs. They were subjected to the dual wage, la doble nómina, and paid half as much as Anglos, while Anglos held better positions denied to Mexicans. In Bisbee, they were kept out of underground work.[31]
Race is a historical invention, used to justify the marking of broad categories of people who can be physically distinguished as inferior. In the U.S., it was used to justify the slavery of people of African descent. Many Anglos came to the mining districts from the South and sought to impose its binary black–white system on dark-skinned Mexicans, who were already disenfranchised by the loss of the Southwest. Their indigenous heritage was seen by many as an additional mark of racial inferiority.
Race functioned to control labor, both white and dark-skinned. Anglo miners were awarded better positions and often preferred their privileges to solidarity with laborers they saw as inferior. Conservative unionism protected the few at the expense of the many; it kept the companies in command. European immigrants learned to identify as white and separate themselves from Mexicans, Chinese, Blacks, and Indians. As long as white workers supported lower wages for Mexicans, the Mexicans could be brought in as strike breakers. The threat of ethnic replacement could only be used against workers who saw each other as enemies.[32]
3,500 Mexican copper miners struck in Clifton–Morenci as early as 1903. They had no union, but were organized in mutualistas, sickness and benefit societies, a collective practice carried from the homeland and maintained as a corrective to Anglo Protestant individualism.[33] At a time when Mexicans were excluded from churches, unions, and fraternal orders, mutualistas performed many social functions and involved the whole family, they were also surrogate unions.
The strike was defeated by torrential summer rains that burst a dam and carried away downtown. Ten organizers, including several Italians and no Anglos, were sent to the territorial prison in Yuma, accused of rioting, although the strike was peaceful. Among them was the Chihuahuense, Abrán Salcido, who found Regeneración in jail and became an organizer for the PLM in Cananea when he got out. The solidarity and militance of the Clifton–Morenci strikers convinced the Western Federation of Miners to begin organizing Mexican workers, although their efforts were inconsistent and sporadic.[34]
Copper camps were divided among white camps, like Globe, Jerome, and Bisbee, and Mexican camps like Clifton–Morenci, Ajo, Ray, and Asarco–El Paso. Bisbee, ten miles from the border, had a sizable Mexican population despite their exclusion from underground mining. Craft workers, a privileged strata who usually came from northern Europe, particularly Cornwall, enforced racial and ethnic segregation in the camps and in Bisbee resisted unionization. Many joined the Workingmens’ Loyalty League, formed by the companies, and became deputies in the expulsion of 1917. They sacrificed their class interests for the sake of maintaining segregation, refusing to strike with Mexican workers because they identified more with the bosses.
The primary drama of race played out between Mexicans, who lost status when the border was drawn through their lands, and Anglos, a term that includes the Irish, to their dismay. The position of Blacks varied but was always subordinate, Chinese were subject to sundown laws, and Indians were marked for death or the rez. Immigrants from Spain and Italy were readily seen as Mexican. “Bohunks,” Finns, and Slavs were distinguished from the better sort of Anglo, but became reluctantly white. There were a number of Serbs in Bisbee.
In Arizona, white labor lobbied for the exclusion of Mexican and immigrant labor. They demanded the 80 percent law, formally known as the Alien Labor Law, that would require 80 percent of the employees in large workplaces to be either U.S. citizens or English-speakers. In response, La Liga Protectora Latina (the Latin Protection League) appeared in Phoenix to defend Mexican rights. Progressive governor George Hunt and Rosa McKay, the first woman elected to the state legislature, supported the nativist iniative. The Western Federation of Miners and the American Federation of Labor were for it. The copper barons opposed it for complicating their purchase of labor. The state legislature voted for the law in 1914 but it was struck down by the Federal District Court.[35]
The Mexican Revolution
Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1911 with an iron fist; he modernized at the expense of its citizens, by leveraging foreign investment. He built railroads to take Mexico’s natural wealth to export markets and fueled expansion through extractive industries. He privatized land once held in common. These enclosures and his appointments of outsiders as local political bosses enraged villages throughout the country. A number of rebellions broke out during the 1890s, including one in Tomóchic, Chihuahua, where an entire town was massacred.[36]
Diaz punished protest and gagged the opposition press; he made strikes and labor unions illegal. He developed a police force, the Rurales, out of felons and bandits and set them loose to patrol the highways.[37] He rounded up thousands of rebellious Yaqui Indians from the banks of the Río Yaqui in Sonora and shipped them to the Yucatán to work as slaves on henequen plantations, producing binder twine for North American harvests.[38] Peons were enslaved by debts to the company store and were bought and sold as part of estates. The countryside was pillaged to supply industry and the urban classes, campesinos were forced into wage labor, and others were press-ganged into a corrupt and officer-burdened army. The rich got richer on modernization while the countryfolk starved or fled.
By 1906, opposition to Díaz permeated the country. There were strikes in mining, textiles, and railroads. In June, Mexican miners in Cananea, a copper town just south of Bisbee in Sonora, went on strike for an eight-hour day and equal opportunity with U.S. employees. The U.S.-owned company paid $3.50 to Mexicans in pesos and $5 to Anglos in dollars, the stronger currency. Workers’ housing was segregated and that of the Anglos was notably better. Initial negotiations failed. Strikers marched through town, gathering supporters, and the first battle broke out at the company lumber yard when the managers turned a firehose on the crowd and began shooting. The miners stabbed them with their candlesticks and set fire to the yard. The mine owner, Colonel William Greene, called the governor of Sonora and his friend Walter Douglas of the Copper Queen in Bisbee for help. Cananea is 50 miles from Bisbee, across relatively flat terrain with a train line. The closest Mexican troops were stationed at Imuris, where they would have to march some 40 miles on sinuous mountain roads and would take several days to reach Cananea.[39]
In Bisbee, in response to Greene’s call, the Arizona Rangers mustered a force of more than 200 volunteers, armed from Phelps Dodge’s stores. They crossed the border as civilians, against the explicit orders of the territorial governor of Arizona, Joseph Henry Kibbey, and were sworn into the Mexican army by General Luis Torres. By the time they arrived in Cananea, the fighting was over, and they paraded about town and did guard duty then went home, never firing a shot. Nevertheless, the symbolic weight of their intervention reverberated throughout the country, a catalyst for the Revolution: U.S. gunmen had been mobilized against Mexican workers on Mexican soil. A number of sources get it wrong and portray the Americans in shoot-outs with the strikers.[40] General Torres ordered the miners back to work on pain of being drafted to fight the Yaquis. Strike leaders went sent to the notorious prison in the Veracruz harbor, San Juan de Ulúa. Greene went bankrupt in the crash of 1907, but before that he reorganized the work regime to mechanize and eliminate a number of jobs.[41]
Bitterness over that defeat and the U.S. role in it became part of the groundswell that led to the Revolution four years later. Many credit the PLM with its organizing, but the workers themselves initiated the strike. PLM attention was focused on the uprising they planned for September, after the harvest, although they did take leadership once it began; the Western Federation of Miners was also present.
The Revolution broke out in Chihuahua in late 1910 and exploded far and wide. It caused consternation north of the border, where U.S. citizens cried for protection but crowded the rooftops overlooking the spectacle. The border suffered from improvised refugee camps, stray gunfire, and interruptions to daily life and trade. Newspapers whipped up anti-Mexican hysteria.
The border was hard hit by fighting, since everyone wanted the customs duties and control over the passage of goods, which meant access to U.S. weapons. U.S. dealers provided arms to all who paid, although the U.S. was officially neutral until coming out for Venustiano Carranza in late 1915.
In May 1911, Porfirio Díaz lost the Battle of Juárez and retired to France in disgrace while the moderate democrat Francisco Madero came to power. The first demand of the revolution, the tumbling of the tyrant, was met. More battles would be fought in Juárez.
The revolution was a war between three classes: the landed elite, allied with the biggest landowner of all, the Church; the poor, some urban and employed in manufacturing, but most in servitude or abandoned in the countryside; and the emerging middle classes. The landed elite were overrun by their own peasants and by armies of the poor under Villa and Zapata. They were formally defeated and lost most of their influence, but many eventually climbed back into power in various ways in different places.
The poor were organized into armies and swept the country, led by Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata and their own local chiefs. The immense majority of the population rose up, engulfed by war, creating a vast tapesty of local battles. The armies of the poor were still a rising tide when the constitutional convention was held in 1916–17 and this ensured its inclusion of workers’ rights, public schools, agrarian distribution, and public ownership of the subsoil. It also forbid U.S. ownership of property near the border. The poor sat, momentarily, in the seat of power, but nothing had prepared them to hold on and govern.
The emerging middle class got hold of government from the beginning. Francisco Madero took over from Díaz; Venustiano Carranza and then Alvaro Obregón and the Sonoran dynasty of presidents followed. They made Sonora an agricultural powerhouse. Throughout the Republic they built dams and highways, they modernized and industrialized and created schools to bring remote indigenous villages into a new nation. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Party of the Institutional Revolution), the ruling party until 2000, represented the middle classes. By the end of the Twentieth Century it lost its ability to maneuver through social distribution and incorporation, battered by global neoliberalism.
The U.S. has long held the economic advantage over Mexico. Mexico was among the first places where the U.S. made substantial investments and has been called the “laboratory of American imperialism.”[42] The British and U.S. built the railroads north and south to facilitate the extraction of resources. The Rockefeller and Guggenheim families owned nearly all Mexico’s petroleum and mining interests, which they operated without care for the social or environmental costs of extraction. Other extractive industries have included cotton, rubber, sugar, hennequin, tropical hardwoods, and of course tequila and mezcal. All produce wealth for their investors and poverty for the locals. Displaced campesinos followed—and still follow—the railroads north to become migrant labor.[43]
The Plan of San Diego
The first Plan of San Diego, dated early 1915, called for an insurrection against Anglo rule by a “liberating army for races and peoples,” commanded by a Supreme Revolutionary Congress based in San Diego, Texas, to achieve the return of the border states to Mexico. Other lands would return to Native peoples and former Black slaves; the Plan did not specify how competing claims would be resolved. Its most inflammatory paragraph, eliminated in the second version, called for the death of all white men above the age of sixteen.[44]
The Plan’s origins are murky. A second plan, “Manifiesto ¡A los Pueblos Oprimidos de América!” (Manifesto to the Oppressed Peoples of America!) was announced on February 20 in San Diego, with all new signatures, and focused on social revolution, the collectivization of railways, and agrarian reform. It was wholly different in tone and reflected the influence of the PLM, although its militarism was foreign to magonismo.[45]
The original of the first version, written in Spanish, was lost early on. It is possible that the exhortation to kill all white men was invented to create hysteria or that the whole document was planted to justify attacks on Mexicans. Some historians have suggested that it was a provocation by Venustiano Carranza to provoke U.S. recognition of his forces.[46] Ricardo Flores Magón repudiated the Plan in the pages of Regeneración.[47] Whatever its source, it reflected longstanding local tensions, sharpened in the ferment of the Revolution. Although the repression that followed dwarfed the handful of attacks presumably inspired by the Plan, it was the incendiary language of the first version that still captures the imagination.
Manifestos are commonly named for places and San Diego was associated with the rebellion of Catarino Garza in the 1890s; it was not the site of any planned assault. Garza was a journalist who published Spanish-language newspapers where he attacked the abuses of both Porfirio Díaz and the Texas Rangers. He created an army to overthrow Díaz under the banner Free Borderlands and was defeated.[48]
Beginning in July, 1915, rebels mounted some thirty guerrilla attacks on ranches, railroads, and towns where dozens were killed. They executed the patriarch of the segregationist Austin family, who led the Law and Order League and was known for his brutality against Tejanos, Texans of Mexican descent. They attacked Las Norias, a section of the two-million-acre King Ranch, a symbol of white authority. Their raids were targeted; they did not massacre whites on sight and they attacked Tejano landowners and lawmen viewed as complicit with Anglo rule.[49]
The retaliation was bloody and targeted ethnic Mexicans indiscriminantly. Vigilantes took revenge, lawmen arrested prisoners then killed them “as they attempted to escape.” Prisoners were dragged from custody and lynched.[50] Hundreds were murdered.
These conflicts occurred in South Texas, in the Río Grande valley, long a rural backland but shaken by the coming of the railroad in 1904. The train brought access to markets for commercial agriculture, mainly cotton, and its refrigerated cars encouraged truck farming. The boom brought an invasion of Anglo settlers, many from the U.S. South, who imposed Juan Crow segregation and outlawed the marriages between Anglos and Mexicans that had served to knit the communities together.[51] Settlers pressured Mexican landholders to sell. Land values, especially near railheads, shot up and many property owners who had survived the handover in 1848 lost their land for taxes. Others were simply murdered, since it was “easier to buy from a widow than a husband.” Some families stayed on as sharecroppers and laborers.[52] Railroads made the world smaller, bringing prosperity for a few and misery for many.
The U.S. interfered repeatedly in the Mexican Revolution. They judged which caudillo to support based on his willingness to protect U.S. interests. First they supported Porfirio Díaz. Then, in 1913, Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson oversaw the final plans for the coup that overthrew the moderate democrat Francisco Madero. Madero was murdered and Victoriano Huerta, a throwback to Díaz, was installed. Huerta in turn lost power to the armies of Villa and Zapata two years later.
The U.S. occupied the port of Veracruz for seven months in 1914 to enforce an ineffective arms embargo. In October 1915, they came out in support of Venustiano Carranza against Pancho Villa, allowing Carranza to move troops through the U.S. from Texas to Douglas, Arizona, ensuring Villa’s defeat in the Battle of Agua Prieta. In retaliation, Villa’s forces attacked Columbus, New Mexico in March, 1916. In response, President Wilson sent the Punitive Expedition into Chihuahua where they marched through the sierra with thousands of troops and failed to locate one seasoned guerrilla leader in his home territory. The ecological damage must have been spectacular as they moved heavy equipment through the canyonlands.[53] After a few months, the troops retreated to Colonia Dublán in northern Chihuahua, where they remained, confined to barracks, until late January. Among them were Black Buffalo Soldiers from the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry.
The Expedition backfired, rebuilding Villa’s shattered image. It guaranteed the passage of Article 27 by the Constitutional Convention, then in session, which asserted Mexico’s right to nationalize large landholdings, including those of foreigners, and its rights to the subsoil, including minerals and petroleum.[54]
While Germany was glad to see the U.S. distracted by tensions with Mexico, Friedrich Katz found no evidence of German participation in the Columbus raid and much evidence against it. It was not mentioned in the investigations of the German–American Claims Commission, which met after the war and catalogued every German intrigue that originated in either the U.S. or Mexico.[55]
The Zimmermann Telegram
The Zimmermann Telegram was a diplomatic feint that neither side believed in: Germany offered to support the reconquest of the borderlands should Mexico agree to mount naval attacks on U.S. shipping.[56] It was intercepted in January, 1917, as the Punitive Expedition prepared to leave Chihuahua, months before the U.S. entered the war against Germany.
Germany offered no guarantees and Mexico knew the Germans could not deliver; Mexico was to attack the U.S.—while in the midst of its own civil war—and Germany would do nothing unless Japan joined alliance.[57] “…the alliance proposal was in reality a large-scale deceptive maneuver to incite Carranza to a suicidal attack on the United States.”[58] Alan Knight referred to “the somewhat patronising assumption that the key determinants of events lay outside Mexico: in the White House, the Wilhelmstrasse, or the offices of Standard Oil.”[59]
The once canonical historian of the U.S. West, Walter Prescott Webb, claimed there were German agents throughout Mexico, but Germany was not a determining factor in the Revolution.[60] Alan Knight, in his two-volume award-winning history, The Mexican Revolution, described the U.S. response to German provocations as, “‘Germany desires to keep up the turmoil in Mexico until the United States is forced to intervene; therefore, we must not intervene.’ But it is illicit to infer from these hopes and fears—or from the presence of a few Germans in Villa’s orbit—a direct German involvement in the Columbus raid.”[61] Knight also remarked, commenting on German plans to sabotage the Tampico oil fields, “German policy is more notable for its internal fragmentation than for its direct impact on events in Mexico.”[62] Friedrich Katz examined the roles of the U.S., England, France, and Germany in the Revolution and concluded that the U.S. had the far greatest impact.[63] Mexico had been repeatedly invaded and subjugated by the U.S. who took most of its exports at laughable prices, while Germany and its coffee plantations came in a distant fourth, after England and France.
Despite its fantastical nature, the Zimmerman Telegram caused consternation and a renewed flood of anti-Mexican vitriol on the border. But who had more reason to fear invasion? The Mexican–American War of 1846–48 had ended when the U.S. occupied Mexico City for ten months, not without rape and pillage [footnote Peter Guardino, The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 214–15 and 299], leaving when the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was signed. One-third of Mexico’s territory was ceded to the U.S., while Articles VIII and IX ensured the safety of the existing property rightsof Mexican citizens in the transferred territories. Yet most Mexican landholders did not hold perfect title and the Treaty required their claims to be adjudicated in U.S. courts, where they lost, consistently, and went from living on their own land to being a despised and landless minority, enslaved to rent. Even the U.S. peace envoy, Nicholas Trist, expressed his shame at “the iniquity of the war, as an abuse of power on our part…”[64] The American General William Worth declared, “our Anglo-Saxon race [have] been land stealers from time immemorial, and why shouldn’t they [be]?”[65] The White Republic now stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Manifest Destiny was fulfilled. The specter of the return of the borderlands to Mexican sovereignty will continue to haunt the region as long as Mexicans are discriminated against in their former homelands.
During the late Nineteenth Century, there were a number of attempted filibusters, armed incursions aimed at securing land in northern Mexico. In 1853, the King of the Filibusters, William Walker, invaded Baja California and Sonora and proclaimed the Republic of Sonora. After eight months, he was expelled. He went on to invade Nicaragua, where he declared himself president and sought to reinstate racial slavery. In 1857, Henry Crabb took the Arizona Colonizing Company into Sonora. They were defeated at Caborca and he was executed.[66] These were not the only filibusters.
The Bisbee Deportation
The Deportation took place during the tense days after the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, with the Mexican Revolution in its seventh year and important battles taking place near the border. Miners were working overtime to supply copper to the arms industries, while wartime inflation devoured their wages. Profits were soaring and the companies were ruthless: when the price of copper was high, the workers did overtime, when it dipped, they were locked out.
The copper barons bought local newspapers and targeted labor’s former supporters, the small business and farm owners who had once joined together against the big corporations. That pro-labor coalition had elected the progressive politician George Hunt as governor seven times. But the companies leaned on American nativism and racial prejudice and Arizona was settled by Texans and other southerners. The campaign against labor slid into a campaign against foreigners, migrant labor, and “agitators.” World War I brought on storms of patriotic fervor, where it was easy to find Germans in every cabinet and the IWW stood for Imperial Wilhelm’s Warriors. Villa’s raid on Columbus and fear of revolution across the border played a big role at Bisbee.[67]
There were 4,233 strikes in 1917 in the U.S. despite the no-strike pledge.[68] Bisbee’s first strike was in 1907, organized by the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Hundreds of union sympathizers were laid off while the companies announced a “completely voluntary” wage increase. Thousands of Eastern European and Mexican laborers went on strike while the English-speaking mechanics and higher ranks refused to join.[69] The legendary labor organizer Mother Jones spoke at an open air meeting, then showed up in Douglas to join succesful efforts to free the kidnapped PLM militant, Manuel Sarabia. The PLM had a chapter in Douglas that year, the Club Libertad, and there was frequent contact between Bisbee and Douglas; there would have been magonistas among those thousands of strikers.[70]
There were a number of strikes in majority Mexican camps throughout the region, where the Mexicans showed tenacity, solidarity, and militance, defying their reputation for docility. The companies raised pay but refused to recognize a union. In 1913–15, during a strike at the Asarco smelter in El Paso, Mother Jones told the Anglo workers, “You voted for the pirates that went down into Mexico and took the land away from them. You gave the Mexicans hell, so they have a right to give you hell.”[71]
In 1915–16, Mexican miners in Clifton–Morenci–Metcalf organized and won a substantial increase in wages. The March, 1916 settlement was followed by a series of wildcat strikes, showing both the workers’ determination to challenge the wrongs done to them and the persistence of those wrongs.[72] The Los Angeles Labor Press said of this strike that “everyone knows it was the Mexican miners that won the strike . . . by standing like a stone wall until the bosses came to terms.”[73]
By 1917, the IWW and the Western Federation of Miners were openly competing for locals. In January, 1917, the IWW united copper miners throughout Arizona in the Metal Mine Workers Union Local No. 800, a rival to the WFM’s newly named International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, commonly called Mine–Mill. By April, the historian Melvyn Dubowsky reported that No. 800 had more than 6,000 members, most of them in Arizona.[74] That number was exaggerated.
A Military Intelligent report dated May noted the presence of “Magonistas” in Bisbee: “The Mexicans are being organized and have been organized into the I.W.W. by paid organizers, Mexicans, who are aliens and are not citizens of the United States, most of these organizers are Magonistas and can not go into Mexico, they are of the Ricardo Flores Magon school of anarchists…”[75] An FBI informant in Arizona wrote that ‘‘70% of the workers were Mexicans, whether by ethnicity or citizenship and . . . most were members of [the IWW].’’[76]
These numbers are inflated and reflect an unstable membership, but an effervescence was percolating throughout the Mexican diaspora. They had seen Villa and Zapata in the National Palace and battalions of workers triumph in battle. They could see Russian revolutionaries on the verge of toppling the old oligarchy; voices from below were clamoring for justice around the world. No wonder they were drawn to the Wobblies.
According to the Los Angeles Times, “The Mexican employees of the copper companies are the despair of even their American union associates, for they stop work when they will, on any pretext.”[77] In April, labor resistence in Nacozari temporarily closed the Phelps Dodge mine there. In June, the nearby El Tigre mine struck.[78] In Morenci, in May, an IWW speaker denounced the U.S. Department of Justice for intimidation, another did the same in Globe-Miami. In July, the Wobblies held an anti-war rally in Globe-Miami and called the flag a “banner of oppression.”[79] Their refusal to support World War I played its part in the ferocity of the repression launched against them.
The companies intensified their campaign against the unions. Newspapers condemned the workers as unpatriotic. The employers preferred the IWW to other unions, since it was easier to portray as treasonous. The Arizona labor movement split as the conservative craft workers left the miners’ unions. The strikers and the migrants were labeled pro-German regardless.[80]
The IWW called a strike against the United Verde Copper Company in Jerome on July 6. A vigilante team of local citizens formed to run the Wobblies out of town. One hundred Wobblies were jailed amid a carnival atmosphere, then 67 were loaded into train cars provided by the mining company and deported to Needles, California on July 10. The authorities sent them back and they were released but this was a dress rehearsal for events in Bisbee two days later. [81]
IWW Metal Mine No. 800 captured the Bisbee local in the spring. In June, they held their first Arizona convention, five hundred workers attended, celebrated in Bisbee. They voted to strike against the recommendations of their leaders. In a copper mine in Butte, Montana, 170 miners had just died in a fire underground, solidarity strikes were planned as a national campaign.
National IWW leader Grover Perry insisted on calling for the six-hour day, an absurd demand during wartime, while Bisbee miners demanded higher wages, improved safety, and an end to the blacklist. They included a demand that essentially demolished the dual wage system, by raising surface wages to $5.50, an increase of more than double, and underground wages to $6.00, only a small increase. This could undermine existing racial categories of work: if aboveground paid as much as underground, why would white men not take the less demanding jobs above ground?[82]
The PLM was an overlooked influence in the Deportation, but they were the leaders of the Mexicans who turned out in force. The Bisbee local had long been Anglo-Irish and so was the Executive Board selected in June except for one Finn. This was curious in light of the long-standing Liberal Club and the presence of Rosendo Dorame and Fernando Palomares, militants with both the IWW and the PLM. Mike Anderson used a narrow definition of leadership when he omitted Rosendo Dorame from his list of union organizers deported, although Dorame was featured in the film that Mike also took part in. Mellinger reports the IWW saw Mexicans as “low priority” and taken for granted; the Wobblies concentrated on the skilled crafts.[83] They may have been caught up in conflicts within the IWW—PLM in Los Angeles, beyond the scope of this paper. [[3]Norman Eugene Caulfield, The Industrial Workers of the World and Mexican Labor, 1905—1925, Masters Thesis, University of Houston 1987, pg. 30-31]. But even federal agents recognized the strength of the magonistas in Bisbee.
Phelps Dodge refused to negotiate, its superintendent tore up the list of demands. “There will be no compromise because you cannot compromise with a rattlesnake,” said Walter Douglas. Three thousand out of 4700 miners walked out on June 26, without a vote. The New York Times repeated the slander that the IWW was working with German agents to cripple the war effort in Arizona, “Big Copper Strike Blamed on Germans.”[84]
The Fourth of July was tense, but peaceful. The Bisbee Daily Review declared, “The I.W.W. and their tools and agents and dupes are striking against the success and safety of our government’s soldiers when they strike in the great copper mines that must be depended upon to furnish guns and shells for our armies…” The Sheriff requested federal troops, but an officer from Fort Huachuca spent several days in Bisbee and determined the situation was peaceful. Women joined the picket line and took part in strike support. A sheriff complained, “Some of the women were as bad or worse than the men.” Men were drifting back to work. Despite the propaganda war waged against them, not one act of violence attributable to the IWW occurred in Bisbee between June 27 and July 12. [85]
On July 12, two thousand volunteers, including several hundred from Douglas, were armed with rifles from the Phelps Dodge store; many were deputized by the sheriff.[86] They rounded up two thousand strikers and other townsfolk at dawn and marched them three miles to the Warren ballpark. Telephone and telegraph lines were guarded to block communication. The Bisbee Daily Review trumpeted: “All Women and Children Keep Off Streets Today” and described the strikers as “strange to these parts” and the strike “a direct attempt to embarrass and injure the government of the United States.” The deportees were mostly workers and some tradesmen and professionals; ethnically they were a rainbow, reflecting the composition of the copper camps during those days of high wartime production. Many were simply Mexicans. “Are you an American or are you not?” was the question Sheriff Harry Wheeler asked that day.[87] There was a long-standing tradition of expelling undesirables, particularly in the West.
The sheriff had been a Rough Rider, a cavalry officer in the 1898 Spanish–American War and then an Arizona Ranger. In that capacity he had escorted Manuel Sarabia back to Douglas when he was kidnapped in 1907 and earned praise from Mother Jones. He became convinced that Germans were behind the strike and that it was meant to sabotage the production of arms. He had been in the county since before 1903 and lived among miners, who held him in high regard, so why was he hallucinating Germans and blind to his neighbors and friends? Perhaps he was still traumatized by the Seige of Naco, a battle between opposing forces of revolutionaries that had dragged on for more than one hundred days in 1914–15, causing a handful of bystander casualties. Maybe it was simpler to attribute every disturbance to Germans.[88]
At the ballpark the prisoners waited under a blazing sun. They were given the opportunity to renounce the strike and return to work and many did. A number of women urged their menfolk to stay strong and sixty-year-old Anna Payne shouted at a deputy, “We belong to the working class!” and convinced him to release her two sons.[89]
1,186 men were loaded onto 23 box cars that carried little food and water and whose floors were thick with manure. They were taken to Columbus, New Mexico, where the authorities refused to receive them, so the train turned back and parked at the hamlet of Hermanas, where the crew abandoned them. The Twelth Cavalry finally took them back to Camp Furlong in Columbus. They were housed in a stockade built for refugees from the Mexican Revolution, which became known as Camp Wobbly. They were free to leave but not to return to Bisbee, where a number of families were left destitute and many were permanently broken up. Many of the deportees melted away; wartime jobs were plentiful. Some insisted on their right to return to their homes and stayed until the middle of September, when the army cut their rations in half. Sentries controlled the roads into Bisbee and required a passport to enter, to prevent the deportees’ return.[90]
President Woodrow Wilson sent a Mediation Commission to interview the families of the deportees; they determined that the deportation was “wholly illegal.” They failed to interview any Mexicans still in Bisbee.[91] Were they unable to find bilingual Mexicans or interpreters? Did they believe the Mexicans had nothing to add to the story?
Cochise County put 210 defendants on trial for kidnapping; the defense evoked the law of necessity, arguing that the accused had acted to prevent greater harm. When the first defendant was acquitted, the charges against the rest were dropped.[92]
Families who had participated in the deportation on both sides remained in Bisbee. In a town of 21,000, almost one-fifth of the population had been directly involved, subtracting the deputies from Douglas.[93] The town filled with absences overnight. Given the anger and shame on both sides, it is not surprising that the memory was buried. Recalcitrant strikers were rendered as invisible as Mexicans, in a camp where the company bragged of its labor relations.
In 1918, the Justice Department tightened immigration laws, targeting anarchists and war resisters. The Palmer raids swept through 33 cities, hunting for Radical Aliens. Thousands were arrested and hundreds deported. From 1917 to 1922, the federal prison at Leavenworth held so many militants from around the world that it became known as the University of Radicalism.[94]
The PLM was sidelined by its U.S. exile and battered by relentless surveillance, arrests, assaults, and trials. Regeneración ceased publication in 1918 when Ricardo Flores Magón and Librado Rivera were imprisoned for the last time. Flores Magón died in Leavenworth Prison in 1922. His body was conveyed to Mexico City by the Railway Workers Union; thousands met the train along the way. The Magonistas were forgotten in the U.S. and sanctified in Mexico, purged of their binational associations and named the precursors of the Revolution. 2022 was the Centennial of Ricardo Flores Magón’s death and there were commemorative events throughout the country; the National Institute for the Historical Study of the Mexican Revolution convened a colloquium to discuss archival resources for magonismo.[95]
The IWW was hammered in the 1920s, recovered in the 1930s with the Depression, then was hit again by World War II and the red scare of the 1950s, then finally enjoyed a resurgence of class struggle unionism with the 1960s and the civil rights and anti-war movements. Since then they have experienced a steady growth of influence, particularly among young people, organizing service workers, dockworkers, printshops and bookstores, bike messengers, students and teaching assistants, and the unemployed.[96]
Conclusion
The Bisbee mine shut down in 1975, due to the falling price of copper. Random House published Robert Houston’s novel about the deportation, Bisbee ‘17, in 1979; it was reprinted by the University of Arizona in 1999.[97] Houston’s book is a fictionalized account where Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn join the striking Wobblies. The stories of Orson McCrae, a deputized miner, and Jim Brew, who shot and killed McCrae before being killed himself, are imagined in detail. In 1982, the University of Arizona Press published historian James Byrkit’s Forging the Copper Collar: Arizona’s Labor–Management War, 1901–1921.[98] Phelps Dodge threatened to withdraw funding from the Press in retaliation.[99] Byrkit compared the copper camps to imperial colonies and concluded that Arizona “never has had a potent and enduring populist tradition, and it never has been free of the bitter heritage” that locked it into the copper collar.[100] Some years passed before these books were available in the Copper Queen Library.
The January, 1981 edition of Arizona Highways concluded a story about Bisbee with the following note on Bisbee’s Mining and Historial Museum, “Curiously missing from the historical exhibits is anything pertaining to the most dramatic incident of Bisbee’s history and one of the most flagrant instances of vigilantism in the history of the West.”[101] This omission has long been remedied; the Museum now features an exhibit about the deportation, with a boxcar and a video, and an enormous photo of strikers being loaded into cattle cars at gunpoint. They also feature exhibits on unions, including the IWW with a photograph of Joe Hill. There are displays featuring quotations from oral history interviews of former miners collected by volunteers.
For some years during the 1980s, Rob e. Hanson, an IWW member and printshop owner, commemorated the deportation with a handful of friends at the grave of Jim Brew. He collected a number of documents about the events and published them in 1985, including an article on the Steelworkers 1983 strike against five Phelps Dodge facilities.[102]
The 2017 centennial was celebrated in Bisbee with a full month of activities, culminating in a reenactment of the events of July 12 and the days leading up to it, which was filmed as part of Bisbee ‘17.[103] A special issue of The Cochise County Historical Journal, partially funded by the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona, featured the Deportation.[104] The only mention of Mexican participation in those events was a pamphlet celebrating the PLM included in Laurie McKenna’s art piece, “The Undesirables.”[105]
Mexicans have been ignored in most labor histories.[106] Philip Foner’s volume on the IWW ignores them; his Chapter 10, “The Immigrant Workers,” in his History of the Labor Movement in the United States, includes sections on Europeans and Asians but no Mexicans, despite their centrality to Southwestern labor. The only entry on Mexicans refers to the Oxnard sugar beet workers, where Foner focuses on their Japanese allies.[107] He once remarked to Devra Weber that “Mexicans weren’t there,” to justify the omission .[108]
There are no Mexican farmworkers in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, although it takes place in California. His Chapter Nineteen begins, “Once California belonged to Mexico…[but the] Mexicans were weak and fed [sic]. They could not resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the Americans wanted land.”[109] Does this “fed” mean fed up or maintained through charity? I checked two printings to be sure it was not a typo. This American classic is of its time, as they say, in painting Californios as losers.
Long considered the definitive history of the IWW, We Shall Be All, first published in 1969 and revised in 2000, ignores the Mexican sections of the IWW and does not mention the PLM. The author mentions Mexican workers only three times.[110] In his account of the Bisbee Deportation, he describes Mexicans as an “insignificant minority” of the deportees, although they were 229 out of the 900 counted by the army and the largest group by nationality.[111] He also describes Bisbee as an exception to the polyglot mining towns, although the list of deportees contains 35 nationalities, including “American.”[112]
The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First 100 Years mentions the Baja raid and the strike in Bisbee, briefly, with minor errors, but not the Partido Liberal Mexicano although they do refer to Norman Caulfield’s Mexican Workers and the State which has extensive information on the IWW in Mexico.[113]
Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, in its brief description of the Deportation, lists “179 Slavs, 141 Britishers, 82 Serbians, and only a handful of Germans.”[114] There are no Mexicans at all in this valuable compendium of Wobbly stories and songs, although they were central to IWW work in the Southwest and Northern Mexico, stretching it across the border. Mexican participation was frequently documented in the Industrial Worker, for example, “By 1909 the bulk of [the Phoenix local’s] membership was ‘Spanish speaking.’”[115]
Recently historians of the IWW have begun to acknowledge the PLM. Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW, published in 2017, includes a number of references to the PLM and a chapter by David Struthers about interracial organizing in the Southwest.[116] In 2013, the Industrial Worker published an article entitled “Re-remembering the Mexican IWW” that acknowledges the importance of the PLM to the IWW.[117]
Within the mining camps, Mexicans were nearly invisible to Anglos. When Anglos and Mexicans were injured, the Clifton Copper Era reported only the Anglos by name, the others were simply “Mexican.”[118] Samuel Truett referred to the “shadowy Mexican demimonde of Arizona’s copper towns.”[119] Perhaps if the Anglos observed Mexicans more closely, their stereotypes—docile, dirty, ignorant—would not hold up? Perhaps they conflated darker skin with darkness and darkness with invisibility? A recent study by the Arizona Archives Matrix Project found that less than two percent of Arizona archives focus on the LBGQT community or people of color, except for the indigenous on reservations.[120]
Mexicans are freqiently submerged among other immigrants in the accounts, although unlike Europeans who crossed an ocean, they returned frequently and retained their mexicanidad. Many did not migrate at all—Cochise County and Tucson were once part of Mexico—they stayed in place while the border itself moved to their disadvantage, not that long ago.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, the Chicano movement burst out: Cesar Chávez and Dolores Huerta with the United Farmworkers; Corky González and El Plan Espiritual de Atzlán; La Raza Unida in Crystal City, Texas; Reies López Tijerina and the demand for the return of stolen lands; the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War and the high school blowouts for better education; Luis Valdez and Teatro Campesino, agit-prop theater in the fields and streets of the barrios. Militant historians began to look at the history of Chicanos–Mexicanos not only as a labor issue but in terms of colonialism and race, of communities and cultural retention and change. They rediscovered the heritage of the Revoltosos; Juan Gómez-Quiñónez, the dean of Chicano Studies, published Sembradores, Ricardo Flores Magón y El Partido Liberal Mexicano in 1973, thc centennial of Flores Magón’s birth. [[4]Juan Gómez-Quiñónez, Sembradores: Ricardo Flores Magón y El Partido Liberal Mexicano: A Eulogy and Critique (Los Angeles: University of California, 1973).] He and other scholar-activists mentored students, opening the professions to new generations.[121]
The Borderlands is a relatively new field of study. History involving both sides of the border involves separate archives and requires scholars to be bilingual. There is no aspect of local border history that doesn’t require acquaintance with Mexico and a reading knowledge of Spanish.
I would not have spent so much ink on the Zimmerman Note and the Plan de San Diego did they not get so much local play, for example, in the CCHJ and in the story map for Camp Naco, where they feature as explanations for panic over Mexico with no consideration for what was actually happening in Mexico. [[5]Daniel Frey, “The Bisbee Deportation: Rationalizations, Pretexts, and Reasons,” CCHJ, vol. 47, no. 1; https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/9ed6bde290734fa2a798bec4f5f3a66a] The Plan de San Diego, whatever its origins, led to the murders of hundreds of ethnic Mexicans; this should be part of the story. Mexicans were not only exploited in local mines, they pushed back and fought for their own emancipation. The Revolution was fought throughout the country, not only on the border, and brought real improvement to millions: peons became citizens, schools reached into the backlands, and the agrarian reform provided land to rural communities. The public sphere was opened up for the first time. The revoltosos fought for those improvements, and they were improvements not only for Mexico but for everyone. This, too, should be part of the story.
Women of the Partido Liberal Mexicano
María Brousse Talavera (1867–1946) and her teenage daughter, Lucia Norman (1890–1923), were already social activists when PLM leaders arrived in Los Angeles in 1906. She became Ricardo Flores Magón’s common-law wife and was central to the organization in L.A. while Flores Magón and other leaders were often imprisoned. She smuggled the plans for the 1908 revolt out of jail in their laundry. She was an eloquent speaker and managed the group’s correspondence. Lucia accompanied her mother and when PLM leaders were convicted in 1912, she led a march of 2000 through the streets of L.A.
Sara Estela Ramírez (1881–1910) was an early Chicana feminist poet and activist who published two literary magazines and was named La Musa Tejana. She provided the Texas chapters with a headquarters in her home then died young of tuberculosis.
Andrea (1881–1963) and Teresa (born 1883) Villarreal published two radical newspapers in San Antonio, Texas, beginning in 1909. Both sisters were powerful speakers. Their brother, Antonio Villarreal, had been a founder of the PLM but broke with its leadership over his support for Francisco Madero’s presidency.
Josefina Amador (born 1893) ran guns to Mexican revolutionaries as a teenager; her entire family was IWW and PLM. Her daughter, Josefina Fierro de Bright, was a lifelong organizer for the Chicano movement, beginning in the 1930s. Margarita Ortega (1871–1913) fought with arms in Baja in 1911. Eloise Monreal Velarde (1858–1968) organized a memorial service for Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill when he was executed in 1915. Basiliza Franco married Fernando Palomares and led an all women’s club in El Paso.
Elizabeth Trowbridge (1879–1934) was a Boston heiress who spent her entire fortune supporting the Mexican Cause. She joined the Socialist Party at 18 and moved to California ten years later, where she met Manuel Sarabia in jail and bailed him out, and then eloped to Europe with him when he skipped bail on charges of sedition.
Ethel Duffy Turner (1885–1960) was among the U.S. supporters of the Mexican Cause, many of them close to the Socialist Party in Los Angeles, who mobilized when RFM and three companions were on trial for violation of U.S. neutrality laws in 1908. She and Trowbridge and several others spent several months in Tucson in late 1908, publishing The Border, a glossy magazine that combined the glamor of the southwest with a political defense of magonismo. The Border is available in the Special Collections Library of the University of Arizona.
Notes:
[1] Elizabeth Henson moved to Bisbee 40 years ago. She has a PhD from the University of Arizona in Latin American History and a book, Agrarian Revolt in the Sierra of Chihuahua, 1959–1965 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019). She is a visiting scholar in the History Department of the University of Arizona.
[2] Elizabeth Henson, “¡Tierra y Libertad!: A Brief History of the Partido Liberal Mexicano in Douglas,” Cochise County Historical Journal, vol. 50, no. 2, Fall–Winter, 2020, pg. 22–48.
[3] Palomares is listed as “Francisco Palomares”; he frequently called himself Francisco Martínez and he may have been in Bisbee at the time. Rosendo Dorame was certainly in Bisbee at the time and is presumably listed as Rusindo Amador. Many names on the list were misspelled.
[4] Archivomagon.net and The Bisbee Deportation of 1917, a University of Arizona Web Exhibit, Deportees Listing https://wayback.archive-it.org/8851/20171217204532/http:// www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/bisbee/deportees/index.html, accessed August 12, 2023. This URL is tricky, you can eventually find it through the Special Collections Library.
[5] Bisbee ’17 (2018), Robert Greene, Fourth Row Films. Bisbee ‘17 was made by folks too young to have seen much industrial labor and the film does not convey the lived experience of hard-rock mining; they leave management to describe mining and explain the deportation in terms of the companies’ overreach. The film focuses on the drama of the picket line and armed removal and the family ties torn by a labor struggle. Laurie McKenna points out that the music carries the lessons of class struggle. Laurie is an artist who created “The Undesirables,” a travelling multimedia installation focused on the deportation. She also contributed an article on Rosa McKay, a pro-labor state legislator who defied the Loyalty League on the day of the Deportation, to the Special Deportation Issue of theCochise County Historical Journal and played a miner in the film Bisbee ’17. See https://www.rockpaperfence.com/. Also see her article, “Rosa McKay,” Cochise County Historical Journal, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 79–83.
[6] Devra Weber, “Keeping Community, Challenging Boundaries: Indigenous Migrants, Internationalist Workers, and Mexican Revolutionaries, 1900–1920,” in John Tutino, ed., Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), pg. 210.
[7] Archivomagon.net/diccionario-biografico; Regeneración, January 15, 1916, pg. 3, January 29, 1916, pg. 3, and February 12, 1916, pg. 3.
[8] “Johnston” is probably Johnson, an abandoned camp on the east side of the Little Dragoons north of Bisbee. It was owned by the Keystone Copper Mining Company, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, according to The Copper Handbook, by Walter Harvey Weed (vol. XI, 1912–1913). Houghton, Michigan: Walter Harvey Weed, 1914.
[9] Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), pg. 208.
[10] Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pg. 158–59.
[11] Archivomagon.net/diccionario-biografico.
[12] Claudio Lomnitz, The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (New York: Zone, 2014), pg. 319–329; Lowell Blaisdell,The Desert Revolution(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962).
[13] The original Sociedad Ignacio Zaragoza, named for the hero of the Battle of Puebla, was founded in the 1890s in Texas as a de facto union for Mexican railroad workers and had branches throughout the borderlands. Rosendo Dorame headed the Phoenix branch. Devra Weber, “Wobblies of the Partido Liberal Mexicano,” in Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 85, No. 2, pg. 214.
[14] Regeneración, November 2, 2012, pg. 2; Regeneración, February 12, 1916, pg. 3.
[15] Regeneracion, October 4, 1913.
[16] Archivomagon.net/diccionario-biografico.
[17] Archivomagon.net/diccionario-biografico.
[18] Archivomagon.net/diccionario-biografico.
[19] Philip J. Mellinger, Race and Labor in Western Copper: The Fight for Equality, 1896–1918 (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1995), pg. 11.
[20] Joyce L. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Oakland: PM Press, 2011), pg. xvii.
[21] Archivomagon.net/diccionario-biografico.
[22] Bisbee-Warren District Directories, 1914–1915 and 1916–1917; The Bisbee Deportation of 1917, a University of Arizona Web Exhibit; Carlos A. Schwantes, Bisbee: Urban Outpost on the Frontier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), pg. 115–16.
[23] The Dorcy Census contains pervasive errors in spelling, especially of names, and was conducted with no means to verify the information volunteered by the deportees. They had been marched off without time to pack, only to dress at gunpoint; they carried little documentation. Mike Anderson’s research confirms the existence of several hundred deportees, since he was able to find them later on. See Mike Anderson, “Forgotten Men: The Odyssey of the Bisbee Deportees,” Cochise County Historical Journal, vol. 47, no. 1, Spring–Summer, 2017.
[24] Bisbee-Warren District Directories, 1914–1915 and 1916–1917; Archivomagon.net/diccionario-biografico; database compiled by Katherine Benton-Cohen, using the Dorcy Census and additional sources, as amended by Mike Anderson. Benton-Cohen’s database contains 134 more names than the list on the University of Arizona website; I only became aware of the discrepancies as I finished this article.
[25] Bisbee-Warren District Directory, 1914–1915 and 1916–1917; Archivomagon.net/diccionario-biografico; database compiled by Katherine Benton-Cohen, using the Dorcy Census and additional sources, as amended by Mike Anderson.
[26] Archivomagon.net/diccionario-biografico; The Bisbee Deportation of 1917, a University of Arizona Web Exhibit.
[27] Weber, “Wobblies,” pg. 218–19; Weber, “Keeping Community,” pg. 224. See, in Spanish, Alfonso Torúa Cienfuegos, comp. y com., Fernando Palomarez, Indio Mayo. Epístolas libertarias y otros textos (Hermosillo: Universidad de Sonora, 2016) and his invaluable Magonismo en Sonora (1906 —1908). Historia de una persecución (Hermosillo: Universidad de Sonora, 2003).
[28] The Bisbee Deportation of 1917, a University of Arizona Web Exhibit.
[29] Benton-Cohen, pg. 329, footnote 26.
[30] Anderson, cited.
[31] Benton-Cohen, pg. 84.
[32] Most of the literature on race in the U.S has focused on the foundational role of Black slavery in the East. See, among many others, David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (London and New York: Verso, 1991) and W.E.B. Dubois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1935). For a view incorporating Mexicans, see Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). A foundational text on race and Mexican-Americans remains Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979). Also see Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California, 1971).
[33] Mellinger, Chapter 2. Also see Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) for a discussion of race in Clifton–Morenci.
[34] Mellinger, pg. 46, 55; Archivomagon.net/diccionario-biografico.
[35] Mellinger, pg. 144; Benton-Cohen, pg. 201.
[36] See Paul J. Vanderwood, The Power of God against the Guns of Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
[37] Paul J. Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development, rev. and enlarged (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1992).
[38] John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1911). The Yaquis were both separated from their traditional homelands and exploited as workers.
[39] C.L. Sonnichsen, Colonel Greene and the Copper Skyrocket (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974), pg. 177–94; Truett, pg. 144–45. Also see, in Spanish, Manuel González Ramírez, La huelga de Cananea (México, DF: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 2006).
[40] Ethel Duffy Turner, Revolution in Baja California (Detroit: Blaine Ethridge Books, 1981): “Workers were shot down by federal forces and by Arizona Rangers who invaded Mexico from across the border,” (pg. ix);
https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cananea_strike, consulted June 19, 2023: “When the crowd approached the government building of the municipal president they were received by a 275-man American posse led by an Arizona Ranger acting against the Governor’s orders.Other workers were killed, while the strike leaders were sent to prison.”
“Greene imported American troops from the neighboring American state of Arizona. As the troops were called in, violence broke out, and more than 10 miners were killed in the process.” https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/cananea-strike, consulted June 26, 2023.
[41] Sonnichsen, pg. 194–202; Truett, pg. 146–52; Herbert O. Brayer, “The Cananea Incident,” New Mexico Historical Review, 1938, pg. 387.
[42] John Mason Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pg. 5. This is a comprehensive survey of U.S. economic penetration of Mexico.
[43] John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pg. 141–57.
[44] Oscar Martínez, U.S.–Mexico Borderlands: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Books, 1996), pg. 139–41.
[45] Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pg. 79–82.
[46] Johnson, pg. 79–82; Monica Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2020), pg. 309, footnote 56.
[47] Johnson, pg. 61–62; Regeneración, October 2, 1915.
[48] Monica Martinez, pg. 13–14.
[49] Johnson, pg. 2, 76–99.
[50] Monica Martinez; Johnson, Chapter 5.
[51] Jim Crow was a term used to describe the segregation of Black folks in the U.S. South since the late Nineteenth Century. The term Juan Crow describes discrimination against Mexicans or other Latinos.
[52] Johnson, pg. 27–34, 40; Monica Martinez, pg. 14–15.
[53] Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pg. 569.
[54] Hart, Empire and Revolution, pg. 329–332.
[55] Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pg. 337–39, 342.
[56] Katz, Secret War, pg. 364–65.
[57] Katz, Secret War, pg. 364–65.
[58] Katz, Secret War, pg. 353.
[59] Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, vol. 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), pg. 346.
[60] Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pg. 163.
[61] Knight, pg. 346.
[62] Knight, pg. 614, footnote 438.
[63] Katz, Secret War, pg. xi.
[64] Michael C. Meyer and William H. Beezley, eds., The Oxford History of Mexico (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pg. 368–69.
[65] Foley, pg. 21.
[66] Oscar Martinez, pg. 47.
[67] James W. Byrkit, Forging the Copper Collar: Arizona's Labor-Management War of 1901–1921 (University of Arizona Press, 1982), pg. 109–15; Richard Melzer, “Exiled in the Desert: The Bisbee Deportees’ Reception in New Mexico, 1917,” New Mexico Historical Review, July 1, 1992, pg. 277.
[68] Byrkit, pg. 146.
[69] Benton-Cohen, pg. 133–36; Byrkit, pg. 30–32; Mellinger, pg. 73–77.
[70] See Henson, “Tierra y Libertad.”
[71] El Paso Herald, January 3, 1914, pg. 6.
[72] Acuña, Corridors, pg. 190–97; Mellinger, pg. 180–82; Yvette Huginnie, Strikitos: Race, Class, and Work in the Arizona Copper Industry, 1870–1920, Yale dissertation, 1991, pg. 310.
[73] Weber, “Keeping Community,” pg. 223.
[74] Benton-Cohen, pg. 206; Melvin Dubofsky, We Shall be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, abridged (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2000), pg. 212.
[75] Huginnie, pg. 332, citing War Department General Staff, Military Intelligence Division 1917–1941, Record Group 165, 9140–534, pg. 5, May 9, 1917.
[76] Weber, “Wobblies,” pg. 207.
[77] Acuña, Corridors, pg. 197.
[78] Acuña, Corridors, pg. 162.
[79] Norman Caulfield, “Wobblies and Mexican Workers in Mining, 1905-1924,” International Review of Social History 40 (1995), pg. 67.
[80] Byrkit, pg. 147–49.
[81] Byrkit, pg. 168–72.
[82] Byrkit, pg. 158–60; Benton-Cohen, pg. 206–09; Anderson, pg. 63, footnote 16.
[83] Mellinger, pg. 177–79; Benton-Cohen, pg. 209.
[84] Byrkit, pg. 159–160, 184.
[85] Byrkit, pg. 147, 164–67; Benton-Cohen, pg. 207, 226.
[86] A list of deputies is included in Rob e. Hanson, The Great Bisbee IWW Deportation of July 12, 1917 (Bigfork, MT: Signature Press, 199?), unpaginated.
[87] Benton-Cohen, pg. 1–3; Byrkit, pg. 195.
[88] Benton-Cohen, pg. 218–21.
[89] Benton-Cohen, pg. 213–16.
[90] Melzer, pg. 269–71; Benton-Cohen, pg. 216; Byrkit, pg. 227–29.
[91] Benton-Cohen, pg. 227–28, 330, footnote 33.
[92] Benton-Cohen, pg. 235.
[93] Byrkit, 334, footnote 25.
[94] Christina Heatherton, “University of Radicalism: Ricardo Flores Magón and Leavenworth Penitentiary,” American Quarterly, vol. 66 (3), pg. 564–66.
[95] This author participated in the INEHRM colloquium, in Cananea at the Museum of Workers Struggle and at the Sonoran Historical Society about her earlier work on magonistas in Douglas, all in 2022.
[96] www.IWW.org. See “The Wobblies,” documentary film made in 1979 by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, available on Kanopy.
[97] Robert Houston, Bisbee ’17 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999).
[98] Byrkit, cited.
[99] Charles Bethea, “July 1917: The Bisbee Deportation,” The Cochise County Historical Journal, vol. 47, no. 1, Spring–Summer, 2017, pg. 52–53.
[100] Byrkit, pg. ix, 328.
[101] Joseph Stocker, “Bisbee Close Up,” Arizona Highways, January, 1981, pg. 44.
[102] Rob e. Hanson, The Great Bisbee IWW Deportation.
[103] Bisbee ‘17.
[104] Cochise County Historical Journal, vol. 47, no. 1, Spring–Summer 2017.
[105] Henson, Beth, “Los Flores Magón: Every Revolutionary is Illegal” (Laurie McKenna, publ., The Undesirables Project, Bisbee, Arizona, July 2017).
[106] See Weber, “Wobblies,” for a detailed discussion of the absence of Mexicans in previous labor history.
[107] Philip Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Volume III: The Policies and Practices of the American Federation of Labor, 1900–1909, Chapter 10, “The Immigrant Workers” (International Publishers, 1964), pg. 276; and Volume IV: The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905 - 1917.
[108] Weber, “Wobblies,” pg. 194, footnote 11.
[109] John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: The Modern Library, 1939), pg. 315.
[110] Dubofsky, pg. 105, 211–12.
[111] Dubofsky, pg. 221.
[112] Dubofsky, pg. 211.
[113] Norman Caulfield, Mexican Workers and the State: From the Porfiriato to NAFTA (Texas Christian University Press, 1998).
[114] Joyce L. Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1998), pg. 294.
[115] Weber, “Keeping Community,” pg. 219, citing Industrial Worker, May 20, 1909.
[116] Peter Cole, David Struthers and Kenyon Zimmer, eds, Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (London: Pluto Press, 2017).
[117] J. Pierce, “Re-remembering the Mexican IWW,” Industrial Worker, November 2013.
[118] Huginnie, 93–94, 219.
[119] Truett, pg. 158.
[120] azarchivesmatrix.org; Nancy Liliana Godoy, “Community-Driven Archives: Conocimiento, Healing, and Justice,” in Radical Empathy in Archival Practice, Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez, Jasmine Jones, Shannon O'Neill, and Holly Smith, eds., Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 2 (2021), pg. 1.
[121] See, among the pioneers: Ernesto Galarza, Barrio Boy; Vicki Ruíz, From Out of the Shadows; Mario T. García, The Chicano Generation; Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America; Juan Gómez-Quiñonez, Los Sembradores; Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest; and Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico.
