The Mexican Revolution in Chicago

Immigration Politics from the Early Twentieth Century to the Cold War

John H Flores

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780252083426
  9780252041808
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252050473
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Few realize that long before the political activism of the 1960s, there existed a broad social movement in the United States spearheaded by a generation of Mexican immigrants inspired by the revolution in their homeland. Many revolutionaries eschewed U.S. citizenship and have thus far been lost to history, though they have much to teach us about the increasingly international world of today. John H. Flores follows this revolutionary generation of Mexican immigrants and the transnational movements they created in the United States. Through a careful, detailed study of Chicagoland, the area in and around Chicago, Flores examines how competing immigrant organizations raised funds, joined labor unions and churches, engaged the Spanish-language media, and appealed in their own ways to the dignity and unity of other Mexicans. Painting portraits of liberals and radicals, who drew support from the Mexican government, and conservatives, who found a homegrown American ally in the Roman Catholic Church, Flores recovers a complex and little known political world shaped by events south of the U.S border.

1The Mexican Revolution Migrates to Chicago

He [the Mexican immigrant] cares nothing about government in his primitive state; government means to him nothing at all except something to eat and [a] place to sleep.

—Carlos Bee (D-TX), 1920, U.S. House of Representatives, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Temporary Admission of Illiterate Mexican Laborers

They [Mexican immigrants] don’t know who the President of Mexico is.

—John Nance Garner (D-TX), 1921, future vice president, Senate Committee on Immigration, 66th Congress, quoted in David Stafford Weber, “Anglo Views of Mexican Immigrants”

During the early 1920s, Mexican liberals immigrated to Chicago. These were well-educated immigrants who subscribed to a democratic, reformist, anticlerical, and activist political culture informed by their participation in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. After settling in Chicago, Mexican liberals created a community and a political movement to uplift their immigrant compatriots. Through social welfare, educational, and criminal justice services, liberals encouraged migrants to commemorate the Mexican nation-state, to honor their Mexican citizenship, to safeguard their Spanish language, and to remain loyal to Mexico. Liberals believed that education could empower migrants and facilitate their upward mobility in the United States while allowing them to retain their Mexican citizenship. Mexican liberals were passionate nationalists whose allegiance to Mexico had been bolstered by the promise of the revolution, which they thought would transform Mexico into a more democratic, educated, and prosperous country. As the liberal movement grew in size and influence, it succeeded in discouraging many migrants from becoming U.S. citizens, and it imbued the Mexican population with a more attractive understanding of Mexican nationalism.

The Liberal Mexican Revolution Migrates into the United States

The revolution was led by liberals who desired broad social reforms and the dissolution of the thirty-five-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (the Porfiriato, 1876–1911). Mexican liberals came of age as their country became more densely populated, urban, literate, and middle class, and they believed there was an inherent contradiction between the cosmopolitan way of life they aspired to and the Díaz dictatorship. During the Porfiriato, Mexico’s total population grew by 61 percent, to about 13.5 million persons by 1910, and the population of the state capitals grew by 88 percent. Between 1870 and 1900, Mexico City’s population increased from 200,000 to 471,000; Monterrey’s from 14,000 to 79,000; and Chihuahua City’s from 12,000 to 30,000. Schools were established in nearly every major city. Between 1878 and the revolution, the number of primary schools increased from about 5,200 to more than 12,000, which translated into a surge in the student population from 140,000 students to more than 700,000. The national literacy rates from the period obscure the regional realities of literacy and print culture in Mexico. Mexican census figures suggest that only 20 percent of Mexico’s population was literate in 1910, but scholars have discovered that literacy rates were much higher in the Distrito Federal, in most cities, and in all of the border states. In the Distrito Federal, the literacy rate was 64 percent in 1910, and in the border state of Sonora, 47 percent of men and women could read and write in this year. The higher literacy rates in cities and in regional pockets throughout Mexico help to explain the expansion of the Mexican press. While only two hundred newspapers were published in Mexico in 1884, more than fifteen hundred circulated throughout the country in 1907.1

The growth of Mexico’s cities created a more diverse economy and a larger middle class. As Alan Knight has argued, the Mexican middle class during the revolutionary era is best defined by its “measure of property, education, and respectability.” Middle-class Mexicans owned small businesses or worked as lawyers, doctors, engineers, state officials, administrators, teachers, and journalists. They dressed in business attire, subscribed to newspapers, and were aware of contemporary global affairs. Scholars estimate that only 8 percent of Mexico’s total population was middle class in the 1890s.2 At first glance, this percentage appears rather minor, but this figure represented the lives of more than one million Mexicans.

The upper- and middle-class liberals who criticized the Porfiriato, such as Camilo Arriaga, Fernando Iglesias Calderón, Juan Sarabia, and Ricardo Flores Magón, agitated for democratic rights, such as the freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, and the right to a universal and secular education. In various cities, liberals founded clubs and presses, or prensas de combate (oppositional presses), as they were called, which offered Mexican citizens a constant stream of criticisms of the Porfiriato. By 1901 the Mexican government counted more than 150 liberal clubs in Mexico and estimated that more than twice this number operated clandestinely. In Vera Cruz, Club Literario Liberal published Excelsior against the Díaz regime; in San Luis Potosí, Club Ponciano Arriaga (named after an influential nineteenth-century Mexican liberal) distributed Renacimiento; and in Mexico City, Mexicans could read several liberal papers, including the Diario del Hogar, whose editors were jailed repeatedly by Díaz, and Regeneración, started by Jesús, Enrique, and Ricardo Flores Magón. Díaz closed Regeneración in 1905, sending the Flores Magón brothers and their allies (the Magonistas) into exile in the United States, where they formed the Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). The PLM grew in Texas by recruiting Mexican immigrants and U.S.-born Mexicans, and these ethnic Mexicans formed PLM-affiliated fraternal societies and mutual aid groups, such as the Liga Liberal Benito Juárez and Club Liberal Mexicano. Texas officials, concerned about anti-Díaz revolutionary movements in their state, established an arrest and extradition agreement with the Díaz administration. Fearful of being extradited to Mexico, Magonistas traveled around Texas, disseminating their ideas. They then moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where they relaunched Regeneración, and then to California, where they settled in Los Angeles.3

The U.S.-Mexico border was porous during the early twentieth century; the United States did not create the Border Patrol until 1924. As Mexicans cyclically migrated to and from the American Southwest they brought the politics of the liberal revolution with them. In Mexico, Catarino Garza worked for an American company and became critical of the preferential treatment Díaz offered foreign corporations. After immigrating to Texas, Garza formed several anti-Díaz clubs and a newspaper. Sara Estela Ramírez also came to despise the Díaz dictatorship. In Saltillo, Coahuila, Ramírez had worked as a journalist and schoolteacher, and after immigrating to Laredo, Texas, she started two anti-Díaz papers, La Corregidora and La Aurora, and then joined the PLM. Surrounded by working-class Mexicans, Ramírez supported their labor struggles and recruited them to the PLM. From Texas, Ramírez moved to Mexico City and then back again several times, and through her sojourns she helped establish anti-Díaz papers on both sides of the border. Díaz responded to these émigrés with a vengeance, sending Mexican agents into the United States to suppress their activities. In Brownsville, Texas, Díaz agents caught up with Dr. Ignacio Martínez, the publisher of an anti-Díaz paper. Díaz’s men engaged Martínez and his supporters in several gunfights and eventually killed him in 1890. After another renowned anti-Díaz liberal activist was assassinated on the streets of Laredo, Catarino Garza organized an armed band of émigrés to lead raids against the Mexican military in northern Mexico. As hundreds of Mexicans joined up with Garza, the Texas Rangers learned of Garza’s exploits, partnered with the U.S. Army, and then pursued Garza across the Southwest, forcing him to flee to the Caribbean.4

Back in Mexico, Díaz attempted to crush the liberal movement. His governors and generals raided liberal clubs and presses and conscripted, jailed, and executed liberal activists. As they had in Texas, some liberals in Mexico responded to repression by becoming more militant, while others continued to seek change through parliamentarian methods. Anti-Díaz armed revolts occurred in the states of Tlaxcala and Sinaloa and were aggressively suppressed. In Coahuila, moderate liberals mobilized around Francisco I. Madero’s presidential candidacy and his call for “sufragio efectivo, no reelección” (effective suffrage and no reelection). Díaz was serving one consecutive presidential term after another, underscoring the facade of democracy in Mexico. Madero, a wealthy landowner and a moderate liberal, won numerous supporters in the border states, and they established antireelection clubs in his name. When it appeared that Madero was becoming an actual political threat, Díaz shut down Madero’s paper, El Antirreeleccionista (edited by a young José Vasconcelos); put down antireelection protests in Coahuila, Nuevo León, Zacatecas, San Luis, and Puebla; and jailed intransigent supporters of Madero (Maderistas). Madero was eventually arrested, but after he was released on bail, he escaped to San Antonio, Texas, where he was embraced by the former followers of Catarino Garza. One of Garza’s men owned a press in San Antonio, and Madero used it to publish his “Plan de San Luis,” which called for a mass revolt against Díaz in November 1910.5

Madero’s call to arms fed into a broader and diverse movement to depose Díaz. By February 1911 Maderistas and Magonistas were organizing armed rebellions, while campesinos and indigenous tribes, who had grievances against the Díaz regime that predated Madero’s plan, led independent insurrections along the mountains of Coahuila, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Durango. Unable to contain these uprisings, Díaz lost towns and cities to revolutionary factions. When Mexican citizens began rioting in Mexico City, Díaz accepted that he had lost control of the country, and under pressure from his generals, he relinquished power and fled to Europe.6

Díaz’s self-exile galvanized liberal intellectuals, who took the opportunity to call for a new and expanded secular education system. Mexican liberals were typically well-educated individuals who believed in the power of ideas, and they frequently argued that education could reshape Mexican society. The majority of liberals desired a clear separation between church and state, but many liberals were anticlerical, believing that Mexico’s educational system and intellectual culture were constrained by the influence of the Catholic Church, which was disparaged as the embodiment of antiquity and as an institution that was more loyal to Rome than to Mexico. During the colonial period, the church had managed the majority of schools in Mexico. In the aftermath of the Mexican American War (1846–48), liberal and conservative conflicts intensified as the liberals sought to create a more unified and powerful country capable of defending itself from the United States. Led by Juan Álvarez, Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, and Benito Juárez, who would eventually be elected president of Mexico, the liberals triumphed over the conservatives during the Wars of Reform (1856–61) and ratified the Constitution of 1857, which established a separation between church and state and banned clerics from political life and from teaching in federally funded public schools.7

Seeking to placate conservative Catholics who decried the creation of public “godless schools,” liberals allowed the church to continue to manage private Catholic schools. The revolutionary liberals who witnessed the fall of the Porfiriato believed the liberals of the mid-nineteenth century had not gone far enough. Revolutionary liberals wanted to sever the ties between the church and public education. Although the various revolutionary factions fought each other, they typically agreed on the need to secularize the schools. When Francisco “Pancho” Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and the Conventionists, as they are called, controlled Mexico City, a Villista declared, “The school must be kept apart from anything religious. … The priests inculcate the child from his first years with lies. … We cannot form the national character while the priests control education, for they have made their teaching a means of propaganda.” When the capital transitioned into the hands of Venustiano Carranza, Carranza’s Constitutionalist faction concurred: “The doctrine of the clergy has been the interests of the Church before the interests of the people. … It is necessary to exclude the priests from any part in primary education. … If [we] allow the clergy to come in with their outdated and retrogressive ideas, we shall not form new generations of intellectual and cultivated men.” Moderate liberals pushed back against the complete secularization of education, arguing that Mexico would never achieve national unity under such a political course. The majority of the schools in Mexico at this time were primary schools, and under pressure from the moderates, the puros (the “pure ones,” who typically rejected compromise) acquiesced. Primary public schools would be secularized and administered by the state, while the church would be permitted to manage its smaller number of parochial secondary schools.8

As revolutionaries and politicians debated educational policies in Mexico City, liberal intellectuals experimented with public education projects. José Vasconcelos, an emerging luminary in Mexican intellectual circles, and other scholars created the Ateneo de la Juventud, which taught the works of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Henri Bergson to challenge the Mexican people’s Catholicism and to discredit the positivist philosophies that had been taught during the Porfiriato. Positivism exalted order and progress, which legitimized Díaz’s authoritarianism as the means to achieve stability and economic growth in Mexico. For the majority of revolutionary liberals, positivism was a fundamentally undemocratic philosophy that needed to be negated. In 1912 Vasconcelos and other liberals formed the Universidad Popular Mexicana, which operated as a mobile university, taking the curriculum of the Ateneo to the masses through free courses taught in labor shops and factories. In 1920 Álvaro Obregón became the president of Mexico, and he appointed Vasconcelos to serve as his secretary of education. Between 1920 and 1924, Vasconcelos created more than a thousand schools, built nearly two thousand public libraries, and printed and distributed thousands of textbooks that advanced a more liberal interpretation of Mexican history.9

The liberal revolution filtered down to all segments of Mexican society, including Mexico’s urban workers and campesinos who were immigrating to the United States and to Chicagoland. The case of Tomás Echeverría illustrates this point. In Mexico, Echeverría had worked as a mason. He had been a devout Catholic and at one point even aspired to the priesthood. During the revolution, he read about liberalism and became skeptical of organized religion. Although he possessed what a contemporary described as only a “grammar school” education, Echeverría read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, who were then hailed by the revolutionary liberal intelligentsia. Grappling with the “agony of having all of his past ideas torn and shaken,” Echeverría found purpose in the philosophy of the American pragmatist William J...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Mexican Revolution Migrates to Chicago
• 2 The Counterrevolution Migrates to Chicago and Northwest Indiana
• 3 Mexican Immigrant Understandings of Empire, Race, and Gender
• 4 The Rise of the Postrevolution Mexican Left in Chicago
• 5 Mexican Radicals and Traditionalists Unionize Workers in the United States
• 6 The Cold War and the Decline of the Revolutionary Generation
• Conclusion
• Appendix: On Naturalization Records
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index