Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, which
Speaker 1: is podcast about history and the people in it who
Speaker 1: did good things, usually in the face of bad things,
Speaker 1: because that's one of the main things you can do
Speaker 1: when there's a dichotomy is take the other side of
Speaker 1: dichotomy and if one side of it is bad, then
Speaker 1: the other side is good. I know how words work.
Speaker 1: I'm Margaret Kiljoy with me today it's catabou. How are
Speaker 1: you Hi?
Speaker 2: I'm great, how are you?
Speaker 1: I'm doing pretty good. My dog is outside. Usually when
Speaker 1: I record, he's like right behind me. I was already
Speaker 1: telling kat this, but now I'm apparently telling everyone this.
Speaker 1: Usually he's like right behind me, and every now and
Speaker 1: then I like look back and get the little major.
Speaker 1: Dosn't have a dog?
Speaker 2: Is that?
Speaker 1: It's an endorphin machine. You just like look at it
Speaker 1: and then you're like, oh, you know.
Speaker 2: So you do that thing when you look at him.
Speaker 2: And then he said out sense is it? And then
Speaker 2: he just like raises his head a little bit to
Speaker 2: be like hey.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then he's like oh, and then he puts
Speaker 1: his head back down. It's so good.
Speaker 2: Perfect.
Speaker 1: He's a perfect little angel who is probably now scaring
Speaker 1: off all the airplanes in the yard because he's learned
Speaker 1: that if he barks at air they fly away, so
Speaker 1: he will probably do it until I die. And I'm
Speaker 1: glad that I don't have a lot of neighbors and
Speaker 1: all my neighbors think that my dog is gigantic and scary,
Speaker 1: and I don't actually hate that. I don't hate that
Speaker 1: my neighbors think I have a giant, scary dog, even
Speaker 1: though I don't. That's what this episode is.
Speaker 3: You just have to see Rendraw space. It's I know, perfect. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't know what this dog looks like.
Speaker 2: I love it. Handsome, handsome, I believe it.
Speaker 1: I believe he's a if you mixed a Muppet and
Speaker 1: a tiny German shepherd together. That's such a perfect description
Speaker 1: of Rondraw.
Speaker 2: That sounds like the most perfect being that's ever existed.
Speaker 1: I know. The other one is is actually I can
Speaker 1: see on screen as Anderson, Yeah, personally right behind me.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. It's much like how I run across the
Speaker 1: perlatives and history, and I'm like, how can all these
Speaker 1: different things be the first? I should just think about
Speaker 1: it like I think about dogs. All dogs are the
Speaker 1: best dog exactly and Anderson's person is our producer named Sophie.
Speaker 2: Hi, Sophie, that's my favorite way you've ever introduced to me.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Well, it's one of the things you're very good at.
Speaker 2: I hope, so I try really hard.
Speaker 1: Also, Ian is our audio engineer, Hi Ian Hi Ian him.
Speaker 1: Our music was made for us by unwoman. And this week,
Speaker 1: you know, like, okay, I say this every Wednesday. Every Wednesday,
Speaker 1: I say go back and listen to Monday's episode because
Speaker 1: it won't make any fucking sense. It's like extra true,
Speaker 1: I think this time because you're really coming in in
Speaker 1: the middle, like what do you Why do you make
Speaker 1: the decisions you do? I mean, I guess anyone can
Speaker 1: make any decisions they want. Is relates to this. It's
Speaker 1: not hurting anyone except yourself.
Speaker 2: It's just gonna be really confusing because you won't get
Speaker 2: all of the awesome backstory and the Louisa shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Louisa doesn't even come back into the story.
Speaker 2: And exactly do you want to miss out on li Lisa?
Speaker 1: No, Margarita doesn't come back in either.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, you're gonna sell Lisa and Margarita ridiculous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So this week we were talking about the Maganestas,
Speaker 1: the peasant and proletarian uprisings that came shortly before and
Speaker 1: likely sparked the Mexican Revolution. They're anti leader, who wishes
Speaker 1: they were the leader, but hates that he's the leader
Speaker 1: and has complicated feelings. Is a groucy guy named Ricardo
Speaker 1: Flores Magon who is about to flee Mexico after going
Speaker 1: to jail for like the tenth time by nineteen oh four.
Speaker 1: We gotta have to get out of here. The government
Speaker 1: it's probably going to kill us at some point, right.
Speaker 1: That is a thing that they do. They have a dictator.
Speaker 1: A few of their crew are already in San Antonio,
Speaker 1: Texas or Laredo, Texas, depending on your source. Most of
Speaker 1: them seem to say San Antonio, including the rich guy
Speaker 1: Ariaga and the feminist journal journalist Mendoza who runs Vesper,
Speaker 1: a Texas based Mexican poet Sarah Stella Ramirez is there too.
Speaker 1: She goes on to become a leader of the resistance.
Speaker 1: She's not woven enough into the stories I read, so
Speaker 1: I'm just shouting out her name. This is it whatever? Anyway,
Speaker 1: everyone knows how bitter I am about this, So that's
Speaker 1: where they went penniless. Ricardo's pants were actually patched up
Speaker 1: because he couldn't afford new pants, which as an anarchist
Speaker 1: punk who wore black panch pant black patch pants for
Speaker 1: most of my twenties when I wasn't wearing dresses, I'm
Speaker 1: just really excited about this guy who wears all black
Speaker 1: and has patch pants. Also, we're going to see Ricardo
Speaker 1: in ad dress before the story is through. Oh fuck,
Speaker 1: guess they took jobs as farm laborers and dishwashers. They
Speaker 1: survived off of the vegetables they gleaned at work. This
Speaker 1: is like another thing that like people talk about all
Speaker 1: these historic revolutionaries and some of them, like a lot
Speaker 1: of just be rude. A lot of the more liberal
Speaker 1: ones will be from upper class backgrounds, right, and they'll
Speaker 1: like be revolutionary spased with their family money, which is
Speaker 1: a good thing to do, right, But so many revolutionaries
Speaker 1: that I read about, like, yeah, this guy crossed into
Speaker 1: Texas from Mexico and became and started working as a
Speaker 1: day laborer on a farm because that's he had to
Speaker 1: fucking eat. Even though he is going to go on
Speaker 1: and to change the world, he still has to fucking eat.
Speaker 1: And no one's giving him enough money. People are giving
Speaker 1: him money to start his newspaper backup, or giving them
Speaker 1: money to start their newspaper backup.
Speaker 2: And I know you said that it's illegal for him
Speaker 2: to write, is it illegal for people to read?
Speaker 3: It?
Speaker 1: Is illegal for him to get it into Mexico. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people who don't care about the law, right,
Speaker 1: So they printed in the United States. And then kind
Speaker 1: of some of the bravest and people taking the most risks,
Speaker 1: and it's not sure there's every level of risk people
Speaker 1: are taking in this story. One of the crazy brave
Speaker 1: things that people do is smuggle them back in. A
Speaker 1: lot of it is like the train union, right, They'll
Speaker 1: be like, oh, yeah, I just put it on my
Speaker 1: train and I'll take it in, And so it actually
Speaker 1: kind of cool. Like, not everyone who's going to be
Speaker 1: involved in the social struggle, it's mostly a peasant and
Speaker 1: proletarian struggle. Not everyone's literate, but someone on your work
Speaker 1: crew probably is. So someone is going around and going
Speaker 1: to every fucking hacienda and passing out regeneracy on right,
Speaker 1: and then one person who knows how to read is
Speaker 1: getting up and reading it to everyone else. Which is
Speaker 1: absolutely something that people died doing.
Speaker 2: Incredible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's like something about the fact that the written
Speaker 1: word can actually change the world. But it's not. It
Speaker 1: changes the world because people use it, you know, like
Speaker 1: and people do this other work and everyone is part
Speaker 1: of any way whatever a lot goes on for them
Speaker 1: in the US. This easily could have been a four
Speaker 1: parter or more. I want to focus a bit less
Speaker 1: on the liberal leaders in exile than what the Maganese
Speaker 1: does themselves, besides mcgonnard doing so to fast forward, the
Speaker 1: liberal leaders in Texas, they have a lot of arguments
Speaker 1: about being moderate or radical liberal or anarchist. They are
Speaker 1: working entirely lessly for revolution. They fight off assassins, they
Speaker 1: get arrested for fighting off their own assassin. At one
Speaker 1: point they move from Texas to Saint Louis to get
Speaker 1: away from the assassins. Then they have to move to Toronto
Speaker 1: in Montreal because the US government is after them. Then
Speaker 1: the Canadian government's like, we're going to fucking get you.
Speaker 1: So then they go back to Los Angeles. The presidents
Speaker 1: and police of two countries and the fucking Pinkertons are
Speaker 1: hunting them.
Speaker 2: And this is like early nineteen hundreds. So they're taking
Speaker 2: like slow ash trains.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jesus, it's over and over again. They're like Ricardo,
Speaker 1: while he's living in Montreal, is in a meeting in
Speaker 1: El Paso and like, Okay, that's really far. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: they form an organization called the PLM, the Partito Liberal
Speaker 1: and Mexican, the Mexican Liberal Party. In nineteen oh six,
Speaker 1: they release a platform which is basically that they're saying like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is the plan, right, this is what we're going
Speaker 1: to do when we overthrow this far and this is
Speaker 1: a compromise position. It is a compromise position between the
Speaker 1: radicals and the moderates. And really, interestingly, and I think importantly,
Speaker 1: it wasn't the mcgon brothers or anyone else sitting down
Speaker 1: and going this is what I want. They actually like
Speaker 1: corresponded illegally with like thousands of people in Mexico. They
Speaker 1: were getting hundreds of letters a day. The US Mail
Speaker 1: confiscated over four thousand letters in the end, right, and
Speaker 1: they basically were like, what do you want, right, this
Speaker 1: is a democratic thing, right, what is our revolutionary program?
Speaker 1: And they put it all together into one document and it,
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, came out of the
Speaker 1: will of the Mexican revolutionary folks. This is often seen
Speaker 1: as the most important document in Mexican revolution. There would
Speaker 1: go with the superlatives. The books I read said it
Speaker 1: was the most important document in Mexican Revolution, and basically
Speaker 1: all the water down liberal reformers who come after pick
Speaker 1: and choose pieces of it. Ever since, the mcgone brothers
Speaker 1: go the opposite way and decide this is not radical enough.
Speaker 1: The current Mexican Constitution borrows heavily from this document because
Speaker 1: the leader of the group that drafted the nineteen seventeen
Speaker 1: constitution had actually started his work writing as a Maganesta
Speaker 1: and it which is just like if you imagine, like
Speaker 1: the founding fathers were all like actually radical, you know, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: this document it wanted to curb the powers of the
Speaker 1: executive branch. It wanted to limit presidency to four years
Speaker 1: with no possibility of re election, which has been a
Speaker 1: big issue for like almost one hundred years at this point.
Speaker 1: No more military tribunals, no more compulsory military service. Replace
Speaker 1: prisons with agricultural penal colonies, no more death penalty. Women
Speaker 1: are equal to men in all regards, Free and universal
Speaker 1: secular education for children, free speech, free press, eight hour workday,
Speaker 1: minimum wage, pensions for every job, no child. Labor unions
Speaker 1: are encouraged, restore the land to indigenous communities, seize giant
Speaker 1: landholdings and distribute the land fair among the peasants. And
Speaker 1: Mexican citizenship is mandatory for land ownership because so much
Speaker 1: of Mexico is owned by foreign business investments. This sounds great,
Speaker 1: it was, it had one one fatal Flaw's say, the
Speaker 1: fatal flaw that afflicts the nineteenth and early twentieth century
Speaker 1: labor union almost everywhere you look. Sophi's giving me the
Speaker 1: look because it came up in the last fucking episode
Speaker 1: we did about Irish miners racism.
Speaker 2: God damn it.
Speaker 1: In a This differs wildly from the Maganestas and the
Speaker 1: PLM's later politics, and likely mcgon's politics at the time.
Speaker 1: But he also puts it in, so I'm not well
Speaker 1: he the party puts it in. It calls to bar
Speaker 1: Chinese immigration because Chinese workers work for less money than
Speaker 1: Mexican workers or whatever. This is the like fucking lie
Speaker 1: that gets told to workers goddamn everywhere.
Speaker 2: How about get everyone fair wages? Yeah, I mean, it's
Speaker 2: like the EPs workers, how they might bone strike for
Speaker 2: part timers, Like that's awesome. Yeah, yeah, you know, any
Speaker 2: racist you can. Everyone should just be able to live. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I know it's crazy.
Speaker 1: But whoa, I don't know about all that. Yeah later
Speaker 1: mcgone and the PLM and stuff like, right about how
Speaker 1: fucked up this is. The workers movement knows no borders
Speaker 1: and no nationality and is basically trying to move away
Speaker 1: from a nationalism that had infused the liberal movement, but
Speaker 1: it is absolutely there at the time. The same year,
Speaker 1: in nineteen oh six, a new wave of uprising starts,
Speaker 1: and this particularly starts among miners in the border towns.
Speaker 1: The miners had it really fucking bad. They were paid
Speaker 1: in pesos but forced to buy things in dollars. The
Speaker 1: workers were Mexican, their bosses were ostato and adensis like
Speaker 1: from the US. I hate that there's no English word
Speaker 1: for this besides American, which fucking sucks. Everywhere else in
Speaker 1: the Western hemisphere is a word for this for US,
Speaker 1: which makes sense. Maybe we could just use a Yankee.
Speaker 2: That's the word that ringo, Yeah, I mean that means foreigner.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wonder. I literally just don't know, I wonder,
Speaker 1: you know, in the US, I mostly run across gringo,
Speaker 1: having the connotation of specifically white foreigner. But also this
Speaker 1: is absolutely true in this case, right, It is not
Speaker 1: just that the people are from the United States, but
Speaker 1: there are white people from the United States. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: miners are literally not getting paid enough to survive. They
Speaker 1: go into debt, into the company's store. They're literally like
Speaker 1: buying shit with money that has like their boss's face
Speaker 1: printed on it.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, fun. Wouldn't it be so much fun? It'd be
Speaker 1: like fun money, you know.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Yeah, it's like, you know, just get
Speaker 2: a box of Monopoly and turn it upside down and say,
Speaker 2: all right, try to buy things with this.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Like I get paid in dragon Bucks now, but
Speaker 1: it has Anderson on it, so I feel good about it.
Speaker 2: Thanks id.
Speaker 1: Yeah. When they die, their children inherit their debt.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Dead slavery is like actually a thing. It's different
Speaker 1: than chattel slavery, but it's fucking real. So they go
Speaker 1: on strike. It's likely that the PLM and also a
Speaker 1: radical anti racist US miners union called the Western Federation
Speaker 1: of Miners help get this strike going, but they all
Speaker 1: like everyone's either like taking credit or denying that they
Speaker 1: had anything to do with the strike, right, depending on
Speaker 1: whether how they want to look. So some folks say
Speaker 1: it was a wildcat strike. Either way, the people who
Speaker 1: did it were the workers, whether they were organized from
Speaker 1: outside or not. On June first, nineteen oh six, two
Speaker 1: thousand workers go on strike. The boss whose money is
Speaker 1: on their paper is a rare bad Quaker on this show.
Speaker 1: Usually the Quakers come in hard. Yeah. Yeah, especially during
Speaker 1: an abolition in the US times, I guess some of the
Speaker 1: only white people doing any fucking good. This particular guy
Speaker 1: happened to be Quaker and happened to be a piece
Speaker 1: of shit, so he was like but he was very like, hey,
Speaker 1: like I pay you better than anyone else, which is
Speaker 1: like true, but it's still not enough to eat, you know.
Speaker 1: And also he's friends with Diaz, so he's able to
Speaker 1: skirt even more labor laws than the other people are.
Speaker 2: And Diaz is still in power.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Diaz is still in power until nineteen ten, nineteen eleven,
Speaker 1: And so he asks yeah, because he's been in power
Speaker 1: for thirty fucking years at this point. So he's like,
Speaker 1: I'm cool, I'll just show up and everyone will like
Speaker 1: listen to me. And so he's like, hey, could you
Speaker 1: give meet your demands in writing? And so they sit
Speaker 1: there and they write down their demands in writing, and
Speaker 1: he takes them and then he he politely writes them
Speaker 1: back a letter refusing every single one of their demands.
Speaker 1: And in the meantime, cool Boss has gone to the
Speaker 1: local stores and bought every single gun and given them
Speaker 1: to all the white people working for him, all the
Speaker 1: man Baker.
Speaker 2: That's just like every Quaker, would I know.
Speaker 1: So the workers stage a walk out. A white manager
Speaker 1: starts shooting at them, kills three miners, so they stab
Speaker 1: him to death with a candlestick.
Speaker 2: That's such a slow way to die, being stabbed to
Speaker 2: death with a candle.
Speaker 1: I think it might be the holder that it's like
Speaker 1: the miners go into.
Speaker 2: The wax and thread and they're just like really going
Speaker 2: at it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wouldn't fucking mind. In this case, the manager's
Speaker 1: brother starts shooting them at Okay, I mean to be fair,
Speaker 1: they just killed his brother, but his brother just killed
Speaker 1: a bunch of whatever anyway, So he dies with a
Speaker 1: candlestick in the back too. I feel like this is
Speaker 1: a game of clue and then they burned the place down.
Speaker 1: They dynamite all the company property. They've been preparing for this. Actually,
Speaker 1: there's like, at some point I think the guy the
Speaker 1: reason the owner goes and buys the guns is they're like,
Speaker 1: someone's like, yo, dynamite's missing. That's probably bad, you know, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're starving everyone to death. Anyway, So they're shooting the
Speaker 1: they is bad. Federal troops come in. In the end,
Speaker 1: two hundred workers are dead and twenty thousand people get arrested,
Speaker 1: which is a scale that I can't really fathom.
Speaker 2: I don't understand how you arrest twenty eight thousand people.
Speaker 2: Where do you put them?
Speaker 1: I don't fucking know.
Speaker 2: That's insane.
Speaker 1: Yeah, only one of the sources I read gave the
Speaker 1: number of arrestees, so I don't have like a lower
Speaker 1: number from a different source.
Speaker 2: Either way. A shit tone.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Meanwhile, elsewhere, the Yaqui people are rebelling against the
Speaker 1: theft of their lands, and when they're arrested, they're not killed,
Speaker 1: well often they're killed. If they're not killed, they're sent
Speaker 1: to labor plantations and the jungles far from their homes
Speaker 1: and so the PLM they're getting fucking ready for revolution.
Speaker 1: They've got forty to seventy cells across the country and
Speaker 1: in the borderlands. A lot of the cells are in
Speaker 1: US border towns, and their plan is to start all
Speaker 1: the uprisings at once on one day, September twenty fourth,
Speaker 1: nineteen oh six. They're coordinating all of this across the
Speaker 1: border by mail, which was not like, frankly, that wasn't
Speaker 1: the right way to do it. Everyone figured out what
Speaker 1: they were up to. So cells start getting raided in
Speaker 1: the US and they find all the explosives and guns.
Speaker 2: Is the US raiding these cells like the New Mexico.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the US police are doing it a lot of it.
Speaker 1: The Texas Rangers are kind of like the pre border
Speaker 1: patrol Border patrol, and they're doing a lot of it
Speaker 1: as well as Sorry. Yeah, I actually I hold you
Speaker 1: responsible for this.
Speaker 2: It's all me. It's all on me. I'm so sorry everyone.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Fortunately you you weren't able to stop the rebels,
Speaker 1: especially those in Mexico. They kind of have nothing to lose, right,
Speaker 1: The people in the US, they're a little bit safer, right,
Speaker 1: Like the US is a really shitty and racist place,
Speaker 1: only then things are magic and fixed.
Speaker 2: Now, yeah, things are good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why every couple of years we have to
Speaker 1: make things fixed permanently again by having some uprisings. So
Speaker 1: some folks just fucking go, even though it's like been
Speaker 1: found out and they're like probably going to lose, They're like,
Speaker 1: we're fucking doing this. Insurgents in northern Mexico apprehend the
Speaker 1: mayor of their town, and the treasurer and the trash
Speaker 1: the tax collector of Yumenis. They flee when the soldiers
Speaker 1: are mobilized against them. In Vera Cruz, two hundred rebels
Speaker 1: attack the city of Akiyakon, only to be driven off.
Speaker 1: In Pajupan, they imprisoned city officials and appointed new ones,
Speaker 1: but then they ran out of ammunition and fled federal
Speaker 1: troops and so on and so on. Just across the country,
Speaker 1: liberals or anarchists or whatever, and indigenous folks and other
Speaker 1: people start taking officials hostage. They lose, most of the
Speaker 1: leaders are executed. Retributions are against indigenous villages, as we've
Speaker 1: already proven from earlier that is like one way they
Speaker 1: do it, as they just kill everyone in a town
Speaker 1: and set it on fire. An elderly Mexico City, City
Speaker 1: editor of an affiliated paper was beaten to death during
Speaker 1: his arrest, so everyone gave up. In Portfolio, Diaz is
Speaker 1: still empowered to day, or everyone kept going. In December
Speaker 1: nineteen oh six, the textile workers went back on strike.
Speaker 1: Because textile workers fucking love striking. The company tried to
Speaker 1: starve them out, which of course wouldn't happen now. No
Speaker 1: companies just see their union striking and be like, we
Speaker 1: care about them. They wouldn't cut all the trees in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles to try.
Speaker 2: It's just about to say, yeah, what an insane thing
Speaker 2: to do, Like that's just no why did they do that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, just like they're like, hey, let's get some bad
Speaker 1: pr for basically no reason you want to do that.
Speaker 2: Like that is like that's like a movie villain thing today,
Speaker 2: you know, like a really bad movie to be like, oh,
Speaker 2: my workers are striking, let's cut the leaves off the trees,
Speaker 2: you know that, just cut down that, Like, don't even
Speaker 2: cut down the trees, just cut all the leaves off.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like Disney level villain level.
Speaker 2: Ev Yes, it's like Disney knockoff, like when those shitty
Speaker 2: like kids studios try to make like a you know, ratitude,
Speaker 2: knockoff or whatever. The villain's like comically bad.
Speaker 1: Which I guess makes sense that it's that without their writers.
Speaker 1: It's people who make movies trying to come up with
Speaker 1: something clever to do.
Speaker 2: They're asking AI, They're like, how do we sound that
Speaker 2: to our strikers? And then chat JBT is like, cut
Speaker 2: all the leaves off.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that's probably what happened. That's probably what happened,
Speaker 1: right you? And know what else is controlled algorithmically?
Speaker 2: Tell me.
Speaker 1: The ads that people are about to listen to, unless
Speaker 1: they're on Cooler Zone Media, in which case the only
Speaker 1: ad you listened to was me advertising Cooler Zone Media.
Speaker 1: Here's some ads, and we're back the textile workers. They
Speaker 1: want to their company is going to starve them out. However,
Speaker 1: instead people from all over the country send them money
Speaker 1: because people are like, now we support the textile workers.
Speaker 1: Fuck yeah. So the owners just shut down all the
Speaker 1: factories in the area just to just to defeat the union.
Speaker 1: They're like, find no one gets anything, basically, and because
Speaker 1: they've been sent all this money, the workers are like,
Speaker 1: well I have at least I have enough to eat.
Speaker 1: So in Rio Blanca Blanco a company's store refuses to
Speaker 1: sell striking worker food. Guys like I got money.
Speaker 2: We'll get money either way. Like you get money if
Speaker 2: you just pay people a living wage, you still get
Speaker 2: Now you're getting no money.
Speaker 1: I know you could their surplus value.
Speaker 2: You could still get money by selling people who you're
Speaker 2: getting no money by doing this. You are so bad
Speaker 2: at owning a business.
Speaker 1: One money or zero money.
Speaker 2: I'd rather have one money. If I was a ghoulish
Speaker 2: cartoon character that wants to starve workers, I would still
Speaker 2: like at least one money.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, in the end, the store owner gets nothing because
Speaker 1: they looted the store and burned it down buckets. Then
Speaker 1: they went and said everyone free at the local jail.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah.
Speaker 1: And so the rebels their maganese does and they're not subtle.
Speaker 1: The editor of their newspaper of the local, the textile
Speaker 1: worker newspaper, said, when we run into difficulties with management,
Speaker 1: we shall strike, and if the strike is not successful,
Speaker 1: we shall turn to dynamite and revolution. Soon that particular
Speaker 1: editor was on the run, I believe had to move
Speaker 1: to the United States for saying that the dictatorship freaked
Speaker 1: the fuck out about this textile thing. Men, women, and
Speaker 1: children is a quote sorry from author Hernandez Padia. Men,
Speaker 1: women and children were pulled from their homes and executed
Speaker 1: in the barracks. Those able to flee were later captured
Speaker 1: and killed. Meanwhile, management at the Rio Blanco mill raised
Speaker 1: their champagne filled glasses and in unison honored General Martinez
Speaker 1: with a toast. They celebrated the massacre. Yeah, it's a.
Speaker 2: Do You're celebrating kids being slaughdered, and at no point
Speaker 2: you're not like, oh wow, am I the bad guy here?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Well, they said, are we the baddies? But then
Speaker 1: they looked at their sorry, I don't know.
Speaker 2: If again, they were like, yeah, we're thick, We're good.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Meanwhile, in the US, a lot of the labor
Speaker 1: Union in the US is trying to support this. To
Speaker 1: the goth Irish socialist Mother Jones, she probably didn't identify
Speaker 1: as a goth. She was just a woman who wore
Speaker 1: black morning clothes all the time. So she was a
Speaker 1: goth because we've always been here, much like trans people
Speaker 1: have always been here, Goths always been here, Mother Jones.
Speaker 1: We talked about her in her black dresses and her
Speaker 1: tough as fuck labor organizing in the Blair Blair Mountain episode.
Speaker 1: She liked to cuss, She liked to hang out with real,
Speaker 1: rowdy boys with revolvers, and she fights against the repression
Speaker 1: of the Maganestas in the US and alongside the rest
Speaker 1: of the US labor movement, and she puts political pressure
Speaker 1: on governments to get rebels freed from US jails. She
Speaker 1: successfully frees at least one of the sort of the
Speaker 1: liberal editors who are in the US who are writing
Speaker 1: not macgone, but another one. She goes on a speaking
Speaker 1: tour around the country about the struggle of the PLM.
Speaker 1: Labor unions raise thousands of dollars. The minor unions in
Speaker 1: particular supportive since many of their members are Mexican or
Speaker 1: Mexican American themselves, and basically there's just dozens of groups
Speaker 1: all over the US working to support the PLM. They
Speaker 1: keep trying to catch Ricardo floresmcgone. I was not to
Speaker 1: say you can't catch him, but he's been. He gets
Speaker 1: caught like eighteen times in his life, but they fail
Speaker 1: a lot too. He keeps escaping out windows and shit
Speaker 1: because he's he's pretty sure if they catch him. At
Speaker 1: this point, he's one hundred percent going to Mexico and
Speaker 1: getting executed. He has a twenty thousand dollars bounty on
Speaker 1: his head. There are scores of private detectives after him
Speaker 1: from multiple agencies. So he flees from Los Angeles by
Speaker 1: resorting to the old standby. He dresses as a woman
Speaker 1: and moves to San Francisco.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, The real question is whether he kept the mustache
Speaker 1: when he did that or not.
Speaker 2: I hope to god he did. It's an impressive mustache.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 1: He doesn't stop organizing mlon the run. I don't know
Speaker 1: what happened with his family at this point. He has
Speaker 1: a common law wife at this point, and they agreed
Speaker 1: upon basically they're both anarchists, and they both believe in
Speaker 1: the sort of anarchist feminist principle at the time of
Speaker 1: being against the formal institution of marriage. So they're common
Speaker 1: law married, and he adopts her daughter as his own,
Speaker 1: and they stay tight the rest of his life, which
Speaker 1: is like a good turn. Usually when we have like
Speaker 1: a self obsessed man who's like grauchy when he doesn't
Speaker 1: get his way and is like a radical, he's also
Speaker 1: just like a misogynist piece of shit, right, mcgone. Ricardo
Speaker 1: Floris mcgone is like interesting. He he clearly believes in it,
Speaker 1: believes and writes in a lot of feminist principles. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that I ran across at one
Speaker 1: point was that the other like broie guys he's hanging
Speaker 1: out with won't crack certain jokes around him. And it
Speaker 1: doesn't quite say what jokes, but I think it's misogynist
Speaker 1: jokes that he's like won't fucking put up with. So
Speaker 1: he's like mostly really he is better than everyone else
Speaker 1: around him who are men. But he also like is
Speaker 1: some of his earlier a lot of his articles are
Speaker 1: like women should support the revolution by supporting their men
Speaker 1: or whatever at various points, like really boring shit too
Speaker 1: at various points. So whatever, But usually I talk about
Speaker 1: these people and then they're like, wife and kids fucking
Speaker 1: hate them because they're like these people treated me like shit.
Speaker 1: He his wife and his daughter like him and help
Speaker 1: fight for him, so they.
Speaker 2: Both like him, Like you don't. Just I really love
Speaker 2: like a curmudgeon who is a wife guy, you know,
Speaker 2: like he hates everyone except like three people. That's like
Speaker 2: an archetype I really enjoy. Yeah, and I'm glad that
Speaker 2: you know he has a wife and daughter who love him. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I yeah, to very at least tolerate him and speak positively.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like actively like fight campaign to get him
Speaker 1: out of jail multiple times, choose to continue to live
Speaker 1: with him, have no legal bounds to him, and continue
Speaker 1: to do all of these things, you know. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: so the Maganist does they decide they're going to try
Speaker 1: their nineteen oh six plan again, only in nineteen oh eight.
Speaker 1: They don't really actually change that much about the plan.
Speaker 2: Do they still do it by mail?
Speaker 1: Yeah? That's the problem. That is there is more time
Speaker 1: for more people to get armed and organized, and their
Speaker 1: messaging is getting less subtle and more radical. They're basically like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: here's a quote. We do not fight for abstractions, but
Speaker 1: from material realities we want and for everyone, for everyone bred.
Speaker 1: Insofar as blood must necessarily flow, it will be so
Speaker 1: that the conquest we secure will benefit everyone and not
Speaker 1: just a certain social cast. Magon can't lead this one.
Speaker 1: He's back in jail. He's a lost track of why
Speaker 1: he gets rested in nineteen oh seven. But he gets
Speaker 1: rested nineteen oh seven. He isn't freedom next freed until
Speaker 1: until nineteen ten. He keeps trying to be in charge
Speaker 1: from jail, but basically people are doing it without him,
Speaker 1: and I don't know. There's still a floor as Magon involved.
Speaker 1: Enrique is throwing down in running papers. Ricardo is writing
Speaker 1: fiery shit in prison, which is really fucking good at
Speaker 1: I think he's better at that than he is running things, honestly.
Speaker 1: And the way he gets his stuff that he writes
Speaker 1: in prison out is that he sews paper into his
Speaker 1: underwear and then passes his on to his lawyers to
Speaker 1: smuggle out. And the nineteen oh eight uprising was more
Speaker 1: organized than the previous one. There's sixty groups in the
Speaker 1: US in Mexico. They're planning action divide Mexico into five
Speaker 1: different parts where make sure that everywhere gets hit. Each
Speaker 1: group develops its own plan of attack and gathers its
Speaker 1: own weapon and fighters. But delegates carry message Actually huh.
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, yeah, it's totally by mail. But now
Speaker 1: I'm reading this and I'm like, I think maybe it
Speaker 1: wasn't as much by mail, possibly because of maccamas and jail,
Speaker 1: because you have delegates going carrying messages between groups and
Speaker 1: giving talks. Basically like they're like going around given talks
Speaker 1: being like, hey, we're gonna have a revolution next month,
Speaker 1: y'all should do it?
Speaker 2: Hey, yeah, well send the ad.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that they do is they
Speaker 1: actually write two groups, and one of it works really
Speaker 1: well and one of it works really badly. They write
Speaker 1: to all of the indigenous allies that they've worked with
Speaker 1: and all of the other and basically they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: y'all down, we're gonna fucking overthrow this government. You want
Speaker 1: to help overthrow this government, we'll make sure everything goes good.
Speaker 1: And that went really well. They also sent letters to
Speaker 1: all the army of the of Mexico and we're like, hey,
Speaker 1: we're like of the people. You're probably a conscript. We're
Speaker 1: actually fighting for good shit. You should come join us.
Speaker 1: This mostly just leads to like really easy infiltration because
Speaker 1: someone like a bunch of officers show up and they're like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, we're like totally like with you. What's the
Speaker 1: plan again? Uh yeah? Several cells get busted this way.
Speaker 2: As many as like last time, or if you.
Speaker 1: Were I'm not sure more uprisings do happen, but I
Speaker 1: don't know the like percent of people who get busted
Speaker 1: ahead of time. I only read about one particular bust
Speaker 1: ahead of time, so I'm actually guessing fewer, but I'm
Speaker 1: not sure.
Speaker 2: Awesome.
Speaker 1: One of the letters Ricardo had smuggled at was to
Speaker 1: his brother, and it explained, okay, so they're moving more
Speaker 1: from liberal to anarchist at this point, right overall, both
Speaker 1: in terms of their ideology and their strategy and but
Speaker 1: not what they're saying. They are still the liberal party, right,
Speaker 1: and Riccardo smuggles out a letter that basically says the
Speaker 1: revolution has to be anarchist in nature. In his like,
Speaker 1: the reason is because revolutions are always betrayed by leaders
Speaker 1: in bourgeois pressures that co opt and corrupt the will
Speaker 1: of the people, which happens in the nineteen ten revolution.
Speaker 1: So he's right about that. But then he says they
Speaker 1: should still call themselves liberals and just act like anarchists
Speaker 1: and state their aims, which were anarchists, but they should
Speaker 1: disguise their true goal.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: This gets argued about about whether or not this worked
Speaker 1: for them. Some people are like, the reason it worked
Speaker 1: as well as it did is because of this. Other
Speaker 1: people are like, it actually kind of fucked them up.
Speaker 1: Because it forestalled a bunch of rifts that were going
Speaker 1: to happen, and so then instead the rifts happened during
Speaker 1: like a worse time, right, and it underestimated the radical
Speaker 1: will of the revolutionaries. I don't fucking know. I don't
Speaker 1: know what was right here. I have a honesty thing
Speaker 1: where I think you should just be about what you're about.
Speaker 1: But I also have a thing where being ideologically stubborn
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily make anyone good.
Speaker 2: And so people don't know that they actually identify with
Speaker 2: the different ideology because the word's scary.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, And it's been decades since there was like
Speaker 1: an anarchist tradition in Mexico of large size and things
Speaker 1: like that, you know, right, Yeah, I don't fucking know
Speaker 1: they did what they did. So in nineteen oh eight,
Speaker 1: both sides are getting ready. When you go around and
Speaker 1: give talks like we're gonna have a revolution on the
Speaker 1: following day, it's not a good way to keep things undercover, right.
Speaker 1: Troops are stationed on the border, political officials go into hiding.
Speaker 1: This is like such a good winning moment, Like even
Speaker 1: if you fail at your shit, if everyone was like,
Speaker 1: oh fuck, It's like when Trump had to go hide
Speaker 1: in his bunker. You know. Yeah, the Northern States go
Speaker 1: under martial law and hundreds of PLM activists are arrested
Speaker 1: and murdered. The US hates them too. They absolutely threaten
Speaker 1: US interests in Mexico and even you less interests at home. Basically,
Speaker 1: the fears that of Mexico turns into a worker's paradise,
Speaker 1: it'll stop exporting cheap labor. So one of the very
Speaker 1: first things that the precursor to the FBI, the Bureau
Speaker 1: of Investigation, one of the very first things they do
Speaker 1: in their history is attack the PLM, like, go after
Speaker 1: the PLM, keep track of them, try and bring down
Speaker 1: their leaders, all of that stuff. The Alpaso cell was
Speaker 1: the main one I know about getting raided in particular.
Speaker 1: It was huge, It was two hundred to eight hundred people.
Speaker 1: But this one didn't get caught by any other means
Speaker 1: except their neighbors were like, you know, these people are
Speaker 1: a lot of like crates and shit in their yard.
Speaker 1: It's kind of weird. So they called the cops, and yeah,
Speaker 1: so the nimbi's brought down. I mean, the NIMBY is
Speaker 1: probably proud of shit of themselves because they they find
Speaker 1: bombs and guns and like maps to all the like
Speaker 1: banks in the town in northern Mexico where they're going
Speaker 1: to go with like.
Speaker 2: No one likes snitch. Yeah, come on guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So once again the oppression mostly works but doesn't.
Speaker 1: At the same time, in Viesca, two hundred PLM fighters,
Speaker 1: women and men rose up. They take over the palace,
Speaker 1: They bomb the house of the district boss. District bosses
Speaker 1: are these like the political cronies of Diaz who oversee
Speaker 1: all of the different things in a region. Right, they're
Speaker 1: like just like the fucking symbol of corruption. They go
Speaker 1: and they free all the prisoners in the jail. They
Speaker 1: take over the town and they set up their platform,
Speaker 1: which is the anarchism disguised as liberalism. They march off
Speaker 1: to the next town. They're scattered by federal troops. In
Speaker 1: akiyucn Okiukan, a city in southeast Mexico, the PLM did
Speaker 1: the same thing. They empty at jail. They declare the
Speaker 1: liberal program and that the dictatorship was dead. There's only
Speaker 1: one exchange of gunfire in this particular time with some cops.
Speaker 1: One revolutionary was injured, one cop was killed. In the end,
Speaker 1: they're dispersed one fight near the border. So one of
Speaker 1: the other things I kind of cut through it in
Speaker 1: the fast forwarding when they were like hanging out in
Speaker 1: the US, they make friends with the IWW, the Industrial
Speaker 1: Workers of the world, who are like, if you end
Speaker 1: up doing shows about the US and the nineteen tens
Speaker 1: and twenties, you're gonna like the IWW because they're fucking
Speaker 1: everywhere and they're doing everything cool. They are like the
Speaker 1: ones who just like put a nail in Well, okay,
Speaker 1: other people became racist and with labor unions later, but
Speaker 1: they were the ones who were like, fuck racist labor
Speaker 1: organizing that is some fucking bullshit, and like really actively
Speaker 1: worked with a lot of different immigrant communities and not
Speaker 1: just ethnic whites like previous Anyway, whatever, I like them.
Speaker 1: They are a big part of They're like thrown down
Speaker 1: with the Maganese as left and right, and they're like,
Speaker 1: all right, we'll fucking help you in Vade Mexico whatever,
Speaker 1: like all part of the same struggle, right, and this
Speaker 1: I think that they were in this one border town
Speaker 1: because I think it's Les Vachas that I don't remember.
Speaker 1: I didn't write into the fucking script I think the
Speaker 1: IWW threw down because one poet later describing it, talks
Speaker 1: about a blonde guy who's fighting for the anarchists, who
Speaker 1: takes a bullet and the thigh, the shin in the
Speaker 1: shoulder and keeps fighting.
Speaker 2: That's hot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it makes me happy for the inner
Speaker 1: like international Solidarity and the guy who takes three bullets,
Speaker 1: and it's just like, you, fuck it, I'm Aragorn. You
Speaker 1: can't fucking see Bond, dude. Yeah, good for you, dude. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like Yellen and German, He's like, what the fuck.
Speaker 1: And everywhere they did this, people took note of the
Speaker 1: fact that these rebels, compared to a lot of other
Speaker 1: rebels in history, that they were all pretty used to.
Speaker 1: They didn't rob or steal, and so they had the
Speaker 1: people's support. They would I mean they would, like I
Speaker 1: think they would rob banks, right, but they wouldn't like
Speaker 1: take money from people. This all there's more fighting overall
Speaker 1: the uprising. It fails, and no small part because the
Speaker 1: Pinkertons and the US government doing all their investigations and shit.
Speaker 1: So I think nineteen oh nine, shortly after this, there's
Speaker 1: one indigenous Mayo guy. His name is Fernando Polmyraz and
Speaker 1: he's like, well, we have a problem. Why don't we
Speaker 1: go for the most direct solution that we can think
Speaker 1: of for the problem of this dictator. So he waited
Speaker 1: for Portfolio Diaz to give a public appearance and then
Speaker 1: he shot him.
Speaker 2: But uh oh, yeah, we know how he dies.
Speaker 1: I know, he was wearing a bulletproof vest.
Speaker 2: They have those in like nineteen twenty apparently ridiculous, I know,
Speaker 2: and the crowd had the assassin's back.
Speaker 1: And this is the first time whenever in the show
Speaker 1: someone like goes up and tries to kill Azar or whatever,
Speaker 1: the crowd is like fuck you and tries to kill
Speaker 1: the assassin. Right now, people fucking hate Diaz. The crowd
Speaker 1: who was there to see Diaz speak help his would
Speaker 1: be assassin get away safely.
Speaker 2: That's so embarrassing for him, I.
Speaker 1: Know, you know, it's kind of just like it was
Speaker 1: a draw, you know, like both people got away. And
Speaker 1: in nineteen ten, Ricardo gets out of prison alongside a
Speaker 1: bunch of other PLM folks in I think Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: and they are met with crowds throwing flowers and cheering,
Speaker 1: and so he's Ricardo Flora's mccon so immediately just goes
Speaker 1: back to chainsmoking and sitting over a typewriter. Regeneralcion is
Speaker 1: becoming internationalists. They now have an English language page is eventually,
Speaker 1: and it's funny because like the Spanish language part of
Speaker 1: it for a long time, eventually it balances out. For
Speaker 1: a long time, the Spanish language part is like, we're
Speaker 1: going to fucking overthrow this shit. We're going to redistribute
Speaker 1: the lands. There's gonna be full fucking socialism is going
Speaker 1: to fucking rule. And the English paper is like, us,
Speaker 1: good liberals wish to see more democracy in Mexico, your neighbor.
Speaker 2: Then it's crazy that like he had flowers thrown im
Speaker 2: and should in like la and I've never heard of
Speaker 2: this guy. Yeah, yeah, I mean like he had this
Speaker 2: much investment in like US labor movements.
Speaker 1: Yeah, US labor movements and US and Mexican American rights,
Speaker 1: which is later what he ends up fighting for a
Speaker 1: lot too. And yeah, no is people are bad at memory,
Speaker 1: which is why if they take these do we sell
Speaker 1: memory pills? Sophie, Oh what about dick pills? We sell
Speaker 1: dick pills sometimes more or less. Is that the occasionally
Speaker 1: do we sell titty skittles? Does anyone advertise estrogen on
Speaker 1: this show?
Speaker 3: I feel like we got offered something for that at
Speaker 3: one point, but I don't know.
Speaker 2: If it actually happened. I don't care. I try to
Speaker 2: not know as much about our ads.
Speaker 1: That's that's fair. Well, let's refer to one of our
Speaker 1: old standbys. This show is sponsored by the idea of
Speaker 1: not talking to cops. If you're arrested, you just want
Speaker 1: to talk to a lawyer, not a cop. Talking to
Speaker 1: a cop won't make your case better. Talking to a
Speaker 1: lawyer might. And then it also purchased shit. I guess
Speaker 1: it doesn't actually impact us one way or the other,
Speaker 1: whether or not you do.
Speaker 3: Like a gift for your lawyer that teaches you to
Speaker 3: shut the fuck up and not talk to cops.
Speaker 1: Yeah, especially if we're sponsored by Flowers.
Speaker 2: I like Flowers. Yeah. Well that was nice.
Speaker 1: Thanks, here's some ads. Then we're back. So they've started
Speaker 1: their newspaper backup, running it out of LA They have
Speaker 1: a new slogan Tierra, libertad Land and Liberty, which they
Speaker 1: got from friends of the pod, the Russian neurodnicks. We're
Speaker 1: early socialists and nihilis in Russia who left the cities
Speaker 1: to go organize a Graian communities. He passes on this
Speaker 1: slogan to Emiliano Zapata and it becomes one of the
Speaker 1: main slogans of the Mexican Revolution. But more importantly than
Speaker 1: newspapers and slogans, there's now a revolution. It's full scale.
Speaker 1: It's in Mexico. A guy named Madero who could have
Speaker 1: been in this story like eight times earlier, but I
Speaker 1: kept cutting him out because eventually I'm going to do
Speaker 1: a Mexican Revolution episode and he'll be all over it
Speaker 1: as the almost good guy but kind of not. He
Speaker 1: used to support mcgon when mcgone was more of a liberal,
Speaker 1: but now mcgon's gone further left and Madero has gone
Speaker 1: further to center. Madero ran for president in nineteen ten.
Speaker 1: He was arrested. He lost a rigged election, so he
Speaker 1: escaped from prison, goes to the US, calls for a revolution,
Speaker 1: and basically he actually wants the liberal reforms in kind
Speaker 1: of a century way, but he's pretty genuine about what
Speaker 1: he wants. Madero writes the anarchists begging for their support,
Speaker 1: and mcgon responds by writing an essay. It like publishing
Speaker 1: an essay titled Madero is a Traitor to the cause
Speaker 1: of liberty. We are now entering mcgon's curmudgeonly fuck stage
Speaker 1: where he is mad that no one is as radical
Speaker 1: as and now that the revolution is happening, which fair,
Speaker 1: I mean he fucking him and his friends laid the
Speaker 1: groundwork and then saw it not be what it could
Speaker 1: have been. But the PLM, which is more and more
Speaker 1: openly anarchist, they don't just sit the Mexican Revolution out.
Speaker 1: The Mexican Revolution fought by several different armies working more
Speaker 1: or less on the same side, but like not and
Speaker 1: actually they end up in fighting each other. It's a
Speaker 1: whole fucking thing. So the PLM is like, all right, well,
Speaker 1: our big thing is that we invade Mexico from northern
Speaker 1: from Texas and then try and set everyone free. So
Speaker 1: they they played their strengths and they try to invade
Speaker 1: Hihuahua State in northern Mexico. Just to get a sense
Speaker 1: of when I say, land distribution was unequal in Mexico
Speaker 1: during this time, the governor of Chihuahua was a banker
Speaker 1: who personally owned two million acres of land. He also
Speaker 1: owned the main bank in the area. His family owned
Speaker 1: seventy million acres. They're just for a sense of scale,
Speaker 1: because that's a number that just doesn't make any sense
Speaker 1: to me. There are only seven states in the US
Speaker 1: with more than seventy million acres total. Like this is
Speaker 1: like if I don't know, one guy owned Nevada, Wow,
Speaker 1: which is about.
Speaker 2: That's so much for one guy to own.
Speaker 1: I don't think he's just going to use it. I
Speaker 1: don't think he's going to use it all.
Speaker 2: I just don't think you can use seventy million acres.
Speaker 2: And I know that's controversial, but I really, I really
Speaker 2: think that. Can you imagine that water bill, especially.
Speaker 1: If it's Nevada, right, Lord Jesuits, Yeah, you'd have an
Speaker 1: army instead. Okay. Also, this extended family owns the railroads,
Speaker 1: the mines, the mills, the sugar refineries, the breweries, the granaries,
Speaker 1: the meat packing plants, and telephone companies of Chihuahua. Cool
Speaker 1: so crony state.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So the PLM is like, all right, we're going to
Speaker 1: bad Juaha one free. But they're already past their prime
Speaker 1: at this point nineteen oh eight. They don't recover from it.
Speaker 1: Hundreds or thousands of them have been murdered already their
Speaker 1: leadership or anti leadership or whatever was still in exile.
Speaker 1: Macgone never comes to the front. He stays in the US,
Speaker 1: coordinating and writing. I don't think this was cowardice, because
Speaker 1: nothing he can do is safe, right, But I don't know.
Speaker 1: The best I read was basically people were like, he
Speaker 1: didn't fancy himself a general or like a revolutionary leader, right,
Speaker 1: But a lot of people are like, if he had
Speaker 1: showed up, the people who are following his ideas would
Speaker 1: have probably probably more people would have fought whatever. Maybe
Speaker 1: if he had led it all at all would have
Speaker 1: gone horribly bad, because he's not a fucking general. The
Speaker 1: PLM march on Shiuahwa. They're coming from Texas. Their military
Speaker 1: leader at this point is a guy named Guilletto who
Speaker 1: had been writing for Regeneracy on as far as and
Speaker 1: He's might be the actual source of the quote it's
Speaker 1: better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
Speaker 1: It gets attributed to Zapata, but Guierto wrote an essay
Speaker 1: under that name before Sapata even really came on the scene. Later,
Speaker 1: FDR uses this quote it might just come from an
Speaker 1: ancient Greek anyway, I really have always liked this quote,
Speaker 1: so that's why I'm like, got really excited about It's
Speaker 1: a great quote, trying to source it. One time Gietto,
Speaker 1: when US cops tried to arrest him, he escaped out
Speaker 1: his bedroom window on a rope made out of sheets
Speaker 1: tied together. And I love how much weird, fucking wacky
Speaker 1: shit actually happens in history, some cartoon shit.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So they invade, They comer trains, they blow up bridges,
Speaker 1: they recruit soldiers as they go. They go and they
Speaker 1: liberate towns. The residents join their cause. When I say invade,
Speaker 1: it's like worth pointing out that it's like the people
Speaker 1: who live in Chua were happy about this. The only
Speaker 1: people wo are unhappy about it. Other people control it. Right.
Speaker 1: The Federal Army counter attacks and they drive the PLM
Speaker 1: out and Guerto is killed. He dies on his feet
Speaker 1: rather than living on his knees. I really liked him.
Speaker 1: The PLM failed. So then they did the last militant
Speaker 1: thing they did. They tried to take over Baja California.
Speaker 1: They picked it because it's sparsely populated and almost all
Speaker 1: the industry was owned by foreign assholes. The goal was
Speaker 1: to turn it into a libertarian socialist region with equal
Speaker 1: access to the means of production, redistribute all the land
Speaker 1: to the peasants, all that good stuff. Over the course
Speaker 1: of four months, the Mexican anarchists alongside the Tarahuma people,
Speaker 1: Italian and Spanish anarchists, some soldiers of four who turned
Speaker 1: out to be really shitty, like just bad people, and
Speaker 1: comrades from the IWW in the US who don't suck.
Speaker 1: They take control first of Mexicali, Los Agadonas, Tacte and
Speaker 1: Tijuana one after the other, and they institute libertarian socialism
Speaker 1: and they're like to each according to their ability, from
Speaker 1: each according to their ability, to each according to need.
Speaker 1: But they're defeated, and they're defeated because at this point
Speaker 1: Madero has taken over, like Madero wins OUs Diaz. And
Speaker 1: one of the first things that Madero does is he
Speaker 1: puts down the PLM and he's like, I can't take
Speaker 1: my revolutionary army, my usual the one that just won
Speaker 1: me the revolution, because they like the PLM, and if
Speaker 1: I take them, they'll probably all switch sides on me.
Speaker 1: So instead he uses the federal troops, like the army
Speaker 1: he just beat he takes them. He marches up to
Speaker 1: Baja California and he puts down the rebellious workers in
Speaker 1: Baja California who are trying to live free. He's supported
Speaker 1: by the US government when he does this. And this
Speaker 1: is like one of the most common tropes I ever
Speaker 1: run across in history. A bunch of like actually radical
Speaker 1: folks and anarchists and peasants and workers run to the
Speaker 1: front lines and start the revolution. Then more moderate forces
Speaker 1: conspire with literally their ostensible enemy to put them down.
Speaker 1: And they use the same excuse that they always use.
Speaker 1: They call the PLM bandits. This is why I don't
Speaker 1: like Madero. This is why mcgone doesn't like Madero. Madero
Speaker 1: goes on. The recuperation of the of the PLM starts immediately.
Speaker 1: Madero goes on to claim that he was working outside
Speaker 1: with sorry that he was working with the PLM. At
Speaker 1: one point, he spreads a rumor that mcgone is his
Speaker 1: vice president. And he does this. It wins over a
Speaker 1: ton of the PLM fighters who come and join his armies. Right,
Speaker 1: and this is where weighted to show your hand about
Speaker 1: being a radical kind of fucks mcgone and the Maganesism.
Speaker 1: The PLM over because he had waited so long to
Speaker 1: make it clear the difference between the PLM and the moderates.
Speaker 1: People had no reason to doubt Madero when Madero is like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: they're with us, because they don't have a way of
Speaker 1: knowing that they just all got murdered by Madero. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the moderate sides to the US. This is the kind
Speaker 1: of the sad part of the story where it all
Speaker 1: goes to shit. That's always happens on cool people who
Speaker 1: did cool stuff. Every story is a tragedy if you
Speaker 1: don't know when to stop telling it. The moderate part
Speaker 1: of the US Labor Movement, they take Madero's side in
Speaker 1: the split. Mother Jones calls mcgon a fanatic and drops
Speaker 1: her support because he won't play nice with Madero. And
Speaker 1: she's right that he was a zealot. Right, and at
Speaker 1: this point he is casting aside everyone who disagrees with him.
Speaker 1: He is moody as fuck. He demands that he gets
Speaker 1: his way. The revolution slips away from him, and he
Speaker 1: lashes out at friend after friend, and he pushes them away.
Speaker 1: At one point I think after this he ends up
Speaker 1: and pushing away His remaining brothers were both his brothers.
Speaker 1: It's probably for the best that he was a zealot
Speaker 1: for an anti authoritarian cause, because that kind of zelotry
Speaker 1: cannot just negatively impact a movement. His did has absolutely
Speaker 1: negatively impacted the movement, but it can also cause people
Speaker 1: with power to kill everyone they disagree with, and he
Speaker 1: never did that. He cast people aside. But he did
Speaker 1: not do what almost every other revolutionary leader does at
Speaker 1: this stage. Right, only the syndicalist IWW and the anarchists
Speaker 1: in the US labor movement and the anarchists in Mexico
Speaker 1: support the PLM. Still most of them are still pretty
Speaker 1: fucking mad at Macgon because he stayed in the US
Speaker 1: the whole time, right, and he wasn't like in the
Speaker 1: shit the Mexican Revolution continued, but today's the story of
Speaker 1: the Maganeste does. And to close up on Magone himself,
Speaker 1: he was arrested again, then he was set free, then
Speaker 1: he was arrested again once when he was out. The
Speaker 1: sort of revolutionary government of Mexico because like Madero gets
Speaker 1: killed and then someone else comes in power, and someone
Speaker 1: comes in power whatever, fucking the sort of revolutionary government
Speaker 1: Mexico was like, look, you did a lot do you
Speaker 1: want a pension, You can come back to Mexico and
Speaker 1: we'll take care of you. Mcgonne is too fucking stubborn
Speaker 1: or maybe two principal depends on you look at it.
Speaker 1: His quote is thanks, but no, all money the state
Speaker 1: has was stolen from the workers. He says that the
Speaker 1: money will only burn my hands and fill my heart
Speaker 1: with remorse.
Speaker 2: Okay, good point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he gets a few years of peace. He
Speaker 1: and his wife and his daughter, as well as his
Speaker 1: brother Enrique, and a bunch of other anarchists and several
Speaker 1: other families. They buy like five or six acres in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles and they farm, and they're like poor at shit.
Speaker 1: They scrape together enough money for like a shitty printing press.
Speaker 1: They put regeneracy on back in but there's like no
Speaker 1: one buying it anymore. PLM's fucking over. But he he
Speaker 1: writes plays, He writes children's stories. He travels around speaking
Speaker 1: about the Mexican Revolution and anarchism. He writes articles decrying
Speaker 1: the treatment of Mexican Americans at the border. He also
Speaker 1: prophetically warns that without internationalist revolution, US industry is going
Speaker 1: to move to Mexico destroy the economy in Mexico forcing
Speaker 1: immigrants from Mexico into the US.
Speaker 2: Hit that one on the head, yeah, and.
Speaker 1: Soon enough he goes back to prison again. This time
Speaker 1: he goes back to prison for suggesting that workers should
Speaker 1: refuse to fight the First World War. He's caught up
Speaker 1: in the first Red Scare. Basically in the United States.
Speaker 1: The US was like, look, if you say you're sorry,
Speaker 1: we'll pardon you. But this is fucking magone. His mother
Speaker 1: died without him there because she refused to ask him
Speaker 1: to say he was sorry. He is sick as shit
Speaker 1: with diabetes. He's like near blind, and he writes, and
Speaker 1: this is one of the last things he writes, repentance.
Speaker 1: I have not exploited the sweat, anguish, fatigue, and labor
Speaker 1: of others. I have not oppressed a single soul. Nothing
Speaker 1: to repent for. My life has been lived without my
Speaker 1: having any wealth, power, or glory, when I could have
Speaker 1: gotten these three things very easily. But I do not
Speaker 1: regret it. Wealth, power and glory are only one by
Speaker 1: trampling others' rights. My conscience is at peace, for it
Speaker 1: knows that under my convict's garb beats an honest heart.
Speaker 1: He fucking goes hard oh h. He was found dead
Speaker 1: in his cell on November twentieth, nineteen twenty two, in
Speaker 1: Fort Leavenworth Prison in Kansas, at forty eight years old.
Speaker 1: He was very sick. Most of the anarchists at the
Speaker 1: time believe he was murdered. One of his friends in
Speaker 1: the prison heard a struggle and there were bruises around
Speaker 1: his neck. One PLM supporter in prison said that a
Speaker 1: guard had killed Magon, and then the person who said
Speaker 1: that was killed by seven guards. So he was either
Speaker 1: murdered by a guard or he was murdered by medical neglect.
Speaker 2: Either way, that might be what I read in the Britannica. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you didn't want to spoil it. Uh huh.
Speaker 1: His wife, Maria lives in another twenty six years. She organized
Speaker 1: peasants to her last days. She dies in poverty because
Speaker 1: she too refused a pension in her dead husband's name.
Speaker 1: Mexico's like, Yo, you were mcgon's wife, you want a pension.
Speaker 1: She's like, she wasn't the like stuck with She wasn't
Speaker 1: like stuck with him. She was with him.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: She was of the same sort as him, as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell. Yeah, cloth and yeah, now mcgon
Speaker 1: is remembered. He is remembered by the new government as
Speaker 1: the forebearer of the revolution, which he maybe would have hated.
Speaker 1: But actually it's his brother Enrique who does a lot
Speaker 1: of the fighting to make sure that his memory and
Speaker 1: the influence he had and the legacy of the PLM
Speaker 1: stays alive. In nineteen twenty, the tenant farmer movement in
Speaker 1: Veracruz started putting on mcgon's plays. Maganesta's stayed involved in
Speaker 1: social struggle right they were involved in the Campasino movement.
Speaker 1: They added revolutionary syndicalism to the mix and the workers movement.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty seven, Regeneracion went back into production, and
Speaker 1: soon it was run by a Federacion Anarchista Mexicana. The
Speaker 1: ideas and action informed not just the anarchist movement, but
Speaker 1: all the leftist and peasant movements in Mexico. Notably, it
Speaker 1: informed the Zapatistas, the indigenous uprising in Chiapas, who I
Speaker 1: will cover one of these days. It's been on top
Speaker 1: of the list since the beginning, but I just want
Speaker 1: to do it right. One of the towns in their territory.
Speaker 1: I think no, actually, I think there's more than one town.
Speaker 1: There's a town in Chiapas I believe called Ricardo Flores Magon.
Speaker 1: I believe that the town that he was born in.
Speaker 1: I didn't write this in the scripts. I don't remember
Speaker 1: all of it. They changed the name from like something
Speaker 1: something to something Flores Magon and Riccardo Floris Macgon's great
Speaker 1: great nephew runs a museum dedicated to the Maganestas in
Speaker 1: Mexico City, And while they're a little bit buried, they'll
Speaker 1: never be completely Yeah, that's the.
Speaker 2: Mag And that wasn't, in fact a cool person who
Speaker 2: did cool stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I got so worried when, like it's always like halfway
Speaker 1: into the research that I find out someone was like
Speaker 1: a real fucking grouch, right, And I'm like, like, I
Speaker 1: was like three quarters the way through.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: One of the books I read about this before, they
Speaker 1: were like, oh and his wife Maria, And I'm like,
Speaker 1: the fuck's that didn't come up earlier? That's not worth
Speaker 1: telling me about. You know.
Speaker 2: You're like, so what's his relationship to his life?
Speaker 1: Right? And like you know, and and I don't know
Speaker 1: all of it, right, but that's my best inference is
Speaker 1: that he was a grouch, He pushed people away, he
Speaker 1: was a man, he was He fucking tried, and he
Speaker 1: didn't turn into the kinds of pieces of shit that
Speaker 1: a lot of people do. And I can't even imagine
Speaker 1: what it's like to just like put everything into this
Speaker 1: and then just see it work but not. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: but for a lot of the people who were involved
Speaker 1: in the moment, it did work. You know, it didn't
Speaker 1: work by his standards, but it did work by a
Speaker 1: lot of people's standards. Yeah, that's what I got.
Speaker 2: Cool, It's a great story. Thanks, thanks Margaret.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if people want to hear you tell stories about
Speaker 1: the current mess that is the right wing media sphere,
Speaker 1: how can they do it?
Speaker 2: Yes, you can find me on TikTok at kat m Aboo.
Speaker 2: Also subscribe to my YouTube, which is the same one
Speaker 2: that I've got to mention last episode. You can literally
Speaker 2: just look me up on the internet and you can
Speaker 2: find me on Twitter, threads, blue Sky. There are too
Speaker 2: many platforms nowadays. I have like a link tree on
Speaker 2: my profile. But yeah, I talk about right wing media
Speaker 2: and all those idiots.
Speaker 1: Yay, Hey, I have a substack. You should, I like
Speaker 1: keep saying I'm quitting Twitter and I'm like everyone who
Speaker 1: says it, it's like the annoying person who doesn't leave
Speaker 1: the party. It's like, I'm gonna leave. I'll probably go
Speaker 1: down with the ship of Twitter. I'm not sure. I
Speaker 1: just don't like social media, even though I do it.
Speaker 1: I'm on it all the time, and so I'm like,
Speaker 1: I almost don't want to start another one because I'm
Speaker 1: just like, but I don't lose guy's fun.
Speaker 2: I'll give you an invite code if you grab one
Speaker 2: yet I am, I think, are you?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I actually grabbed Margaret as a user name.
Speaker 2: That's fucking cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it doesn't feel as like elite because there's
Speaker 1: actually it's like Margaret dot b K s K.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And also there's no right now I'm following Oh great,
Speaker 2: there's no video if they don't even have a betting
Speaker 2: and yeah, all these places are just doing it like
Speaker 2: half ass, so yeah, yeah, what.
Speaker 1: Are they thinking? But yeah, I'm trying to write more substack.
Speaker 1: And you can also follow Sophie around yeah town no, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: don't do that.
Speaker 2: If you do that, my dog will fuck you up.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I will follow iron dot Dragon at Blue sky Dot.
Speaker 3: Exactly did you catch that? If you didn't too fucking bad. Yeah, no,
Speaker 3: I want to plug our our lat like I don't
Speaker 3: know whenever you're listening to this. We did a really
Speaker 3: interesting episode on Behind the Bastards with Sarah Marshall that
Speaker 3: was all about the kidnapping craze and conspiracies around that,
Speaker 3: and Robert Evans did a really good article to go
Speaker 3: along with it on his substack Shatters oone. So I
Speaker 3: want to plug that.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm listening to while walking the dog. Yes,
Speaker 1: today and tomorrow, oh, possibly dinner tonight.
Speaker 2: That's that seems good. I was listening to walking about Town.
Speaker 2: It's great.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, Wow. YouTube can be obsessed with cool Zone
Speaker 1: Media like all of us are. That's we got to
Speaker 1: bye bye.
Speaker 3: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 3: cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website.
Speaker 3: Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 3: Apple
Speaker 2: Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.