Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands

Book cover of Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernandezby Kelly Lytle Hernández
@klytlehernandez

Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction

One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022

“Rebel historian” Kelly Lytle Hernández reframes our understanding of U.S. history in this groundbreaking narrative of revolution in the borderlands.

Bad Mexicans tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States. Led by a brilliant but ill-tempered radical named Ricardo Flores Magón, the magonistas were a motley band of journalists, miners, migrant workers, and more, who organized thousands of Mexican workers—and American dissidents—to their cause.

Determined to oust Mexico’s dictator, Porfirio Díaz, who encouraged the plunder of his country by U.S. imperialists such as Guggenheim and Rockefeller, the rebels had to outrun and outsmart the swarm of U. S. authorities vested in protecting the Diaz regime. The U.S. Departments of War, State, Treasury, and Justice as well as police, sheriffs, and spies, hunted the magonistas across the country. Capturing Ricardo Flores Magón was one of the FBI’s first cases.

But the magonistas persevered. They lived in hiding, wrote in secret code, and launched armed raids into Mexico until they ignited the world’s first social revolution of the twentieth century.

Taking readers to the frontlines of the magonista uprising and the counterinsurgency campaign that failed to stop them, Kelly Lytle Hernández puts the magonista revolt at the heart of U.S. history. Long ignored by textbooks, the magonistas threatened to undo the rise of Anglo-American power, on both sides of the border, and inspired a revolution that gave birth to the Mexican-American population, making the magonistas’ story integral to modern American life.

Show more
Show less

Interview with the Author

Podcast Art for the New Book NetworkNew Books Network 
Kelly Lytle Hernández, “Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands” (Norton, 2022)
5/9/22           50 min

Podcast art for AWM author talksAWM Author Talks 
Episode 112: Kelly Lytle Hernández
10/3/22           45 min

Buy on Amazon

Related books

Book cover of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel WilkersonCaste: The Origins of Our Discontents These Truths: A History of the United States Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis Book cover of By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners by Margaret BurnhamBy Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners Book cover of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam HochschildAmerican Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*