CZM Rewind: Part One: Before the Mexican Revolution: Ricardo Flores Magón and the peasants who ended a dictatorship

Margaret talks with Kat Abu about the Mexican liberals who became anarchists and sparked a revolution.

Original Air Date: 7.24.23

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
rerun edition. That's right, aren't you excited? Everyone? I'm excited.
I am excited to play an episode that I've already played.
And it's mostly because, well, we're in the middle of
a series about fighting neoliberalism, and a lot of that
has to do with the Zapatistas who are fighting in Chiapas,

(00:26):
and we started that episode last week, and you know what,
there's so much I bid off so much, and I'm
trying to chew it right. I am trying to chew
that stuff right for you, and in order to do that,
I need a little bit more time. But fortunately, you know,
I get to talk about some stuff that is worth

(00:48):
reminding yourself or hearing for the first time because it's
even more context for what we're talking about. Because we're
talking about the Spapatistas, right, but what about Zappata and
even before that, what about well, the Maganistas. And that's
what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk
about a lot of Mexico's long history of radicalism and
anti authoritarianism and all of that cool stuff. So here's

(01:13):
an episode about that that we already ran once, but
I think you'll like it for the first time or again.
Hello and welcome to cool people did cool stuff. It's
the show Wow, you know what kind of show? Probably
we have a guest usually including right now, it's Cataboo.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Hi.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Hi, how are you?

Speaker 3 (01:38):
I'm great, how are you?

Speaker 2 (01:40):
I'm doing okay. Kat watches Fox News for a living,
so occasionally needs to do something else.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
As my theory, yes, I love doing things that aren't
that stuff in my personal time and things that aren't
my job. It's great.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, you can go watch Kat talk about Fox News
and then you don't have to watch Fox News, which
is a nice advantage to all of it.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
I recommend to everyone to not watch it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah, there was Like when I was a kid, there's
all these like Simpsons jokes where they make fun of Fox,
and I never got it because I didn't watch anything
else on Fox besides Simpsons. Right, and then, like now, retroactively,
all of the jokes making fun of their network make
a lot more sense. They're evergreen too, that's true. I'm
afraid to rewatch old Simpsons. Actually I haven't, and I

(02:29):
don't know what will happen if I've.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Never seen an episode of the Simpsons.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Brave honestly, honestly, of the programs on Fox. That that
is the route that you went on, Brave, never seen
an episode.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Well, the other voice you're hearing is Sophie. I Sophie's
a producer.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
In a way, I feel like you have seen an
episode of the Simpsons. Oh, everyone has.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
Seen an episode together? Yeah, I think I like someone
will mention something. I'm like, oh, I've seen like ten
screenshots from the exact Clipyer pointing out, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
Ian, as our audio engineer, are.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
You not doing any of the jokes that you put
in the script because I really like them.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
They're going to come later. I have to do all
the introductions.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
First, all right, all right, I'm excited.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yeah, everyone has to say hi to Ian before we
can move forward this point. Okay, as long as all
the listeners have also said I Ian, we can now continue.
Unwoman did our music? And so speaking of music, KD,
have you ever heard of Ariana Grande?

Speaker 3 (03:32):
No, who's that?

Speaker 2 (03:34):
I don't actually really know. That was the joke I
wrote into the script. I kind of haven't, uh pop,
great joke.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
Thanks.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
Instead, I want to talk about a Mexican revolutionary has
been dead for one hundred and one years.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
Oh hell, yes, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that like
so much. Thank you for doing that transition. Yeah, I
wrote that joke.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
And as we were talking about things beforehand, because Oriana ground,
they came up. Have you ever heard of a man
named Ricardo Flores Macgone?

Speaker 3 (04:05):
I had not.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
Excellent, I'm excited to tell you about this man.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
Today.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
We are talking about a man who was convinced that
the people of Mexico could indeed overthrow their dictator. So
he spent every hour of his life chainsmoking over a
typewriter until he convinced everyone else that they could overthrow
the dictator, and then they did so it worked amazing. Yeah,
he's really fucking interesting. It didn't go the way he

(04:33):
wanted it to, and I doubt that he would be
very happy that a lot of his words ended up
word for word or rapidly paraphrased in the Mexican Constitution,
because he had an incredible amount of influence on the
Mexican Republic after the revolution, which is interesting because he
was part of a thousand strong anarchist movement called the Maganiestas,

(04:56):
and he hated that they were called that. And this
story will start where every story in the Western Hemisphere starts,
which is Europeans showing up and fucking over everyone. In
this case, it was Fernando Cortez in fifteen eleven who
showed up in what's now Mexico and he was like,

(05:16):
this is Spain. Motherfuckers, get in line and or die.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
So he did that.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
That was bad. That lasted a few hundred years. It
was called New Spain, and then eventually people were like,
all right, fuck this, and they wanted to have some independence.
I really like doing all the crazy background context. Magon
isn't even alive during anything that I'm going to be
talking about for the next little bit. So, like a

(05:42):
lot of revolutions, the Mexican War for Independence started off
with people doing a bunch of rad stuff, and then,
like a lot of revolutions, it was co opted by
boring and or bad people. So in the early eighteen hundreds,
there's enlightenment ideas going around Mexico and these are referred
to there as liberal ideas, and they're coming over, creeping

(06:02):
over to the colonies. So there's a liberal book club
and in it is a Catholic priest his name is
Miguel Hidalgo. Like all the best book clubs, this one
went from reading books to plotting the overthrow of colonial government.
And Miguel Hidalgo wanted good things, but in the least
radical way that one could want good things. Right, he

(06:24):
called for a quote gentle and gradual means to abolish
the quote horrible right of territorial property, perpetual, hereditary, and exclusive. Basically,
he was like, we need to get rid of the
fucking hereditary land ownership where some people own everything and
everyone else's fucked right, which is increasingly what we're coming
back to. It's really fun. There's still time, I think,

(06:47):
to get rid of the hereditary upper class. But it's
been two hundred years since Hidalgo. Unfortunately, a bunch of
his friends get arrested for plotting revolution. So he shows
up to the church. He rings the bell, he calls
everyone out to him to give a speech. And this speech.
Have you heard much about the Mexican You get the

(07:09):
Mexican War for Independence and one hundred years later, the
Mexican Revolution. I hadn't known too much about it with
how I grew up.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
But everything that I knew is I grew up in Dallas, Texas,
and you take like a Texas history class, and so
I know a lot about like Santa Ana and general,
you know, Texan being mad at Mexico history.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
But that's fine, okay. Mcgon spent a lot of his
life in Texas and mostly San Antonio.

Speaker 3 (07:37):
San Antonio is nice.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
It is nice. I had a good time there. I
once tried to sleep in my van outside a convention,
but there were too many cops, so I went and
slept in a closet in the con suite. That's my
story about San Antonio. That's the main story I have
about San Antonio. Sounds lovely, Yeah, it was nice, nice closet.

(07:59):
So there's going to be the Mexican War for Independence,
and so he goes, and he this Catholic priest, and
he goes and he gives what's remembered as El Grito
de Dolores, the Cry of Dolores. And no one actually
knows what he says, right, but it's repeated like every year,
and so they have a version of what he said
that someone later wrote down and it goes something like,
will you free yourselves? We recover the land stolen three

(08:21):
hundred years ago from your forefathers by the hated Spaniards.
And he's religious, so he says, long live our Lady
of Guadalupe, Death to bad government, death to the goshupenas
gosh penis being a slur for the nobility the peninsulares
the people who were born in Spain, because New Spain
had this super elaborate racial and ethnic hierarchy that put

(08:44):
born in Spain folks the pen Peninsularis at the top,
then their white descendants, then the mixed folks way below them,
then way down at the bottom indigenous folks and black
folks and everything in like the legal system in New
Spain was built out of this racial hierarchy. So this

(09:07):
priest is like, hey, we don't like that. He's kind
of saying we just don't like the top layer of it.
He's not saying like we should totally abolish it, which
makes sense because he's the next level down himself. This
thing is what's that soften?

Speaker 3 (09:22):
How it goes?

Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (09:24):
Yeah, exactly, And this guy was his whole thing isn't
as like pure and great as it could be. It
wasn't just like let's be free, fuck colonization. It tied
into some stuff that goes way over my head about
the king had just been overthrown by Napoleon, and it
was also about defending the Catholic faith and all this stuff.
But overall I give it like a B minus because

(09:46):
it's better than anything I've ever done. I want to
like be the cast the first stone, but I've never
overthrown a government. I don't know about you. You shouldn't
tell me if you have.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
But just there's still time.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
There's still time, baby steps.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
That's true, that's true. I forgot to write down how
old this guy was when he overthrew me, about.

Speaker 3 (10:08):
To ask, because if he was like sixty, that plenty
of time.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
Yeah, yeah, thanks, at least five years. He gives this speech,
and the revolution is on and they all go march
around and take over towns. Importantly, indigenous folks show up
in large numbers and are like, yeah, all right, we'll
give this a shot. It seems like the best thing going.
And so they're all marching around in this priest general
and they're storming places with like fucking literal sticks and

(10:32):
stones and winning. There's like all of these description of
battles where they'll win by like ambushing people very carefully
or just sometimes just like charging in and having a
fuck ton of people, you know, his followers liberated property
held by the white Spaniards. This is a recurring theme
throughout this week's episode, is that a small class of
people owns like all the goddamn land, and he promises

(10:58):
anyone He promises that any one who doesn't immediately free
their slaves is going to get fucking killed, which is cool.
He also says that Jews don't have to convert to Christianity,
which is cool. He also probably and this might have
been slander used against him by the Inquisition later, but
I want it to be true. He also probably was
telling everyone that there's no such thing as hell, which

(11:19):
is like really fucking based for mister Catholic priest. He's
also producing illege having children, which of course Catholic priests
aren't supposed to do. But he's having a good time.
He's fucking he's having a revolution. He's freeing people at gunpoint,
are freeing. The gunpoint is not at the people, it's
at the owners of the ostensible owners of the people.

(11:43):
And he gets excommunicated. This is not particularly surprising, right, No,
but I don't know if you knew this, No, gohad.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
No, I was just saying no, based on that list,
I'm gonna say, those are a few rules that are
not meant to be broken.

Speaker 3 (12:01):
And I feel like the illegitimate children one flies okay
with the Catholic Church. But yeah, a's that, you know,
that's a lot of stuff.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah that I think that wasn't on the list of
why he got excumunicated.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
I think it was pays off again.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
Yeah, but he gets excommunicated, you know, for all the
heresy or whatever. But did you know that in God
and with one hundred thousand armed peasants, all things are possible.
He finds a bishop and he forces the bishop basically
at gunpoint, to rescind his excommunication. And now he's back
in the church's good graces.

Speaker 3 (12:37):
Oh my god, I love this too.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
It's awesome. Yeah, at least for a while. So they
march in and they get to Mexico City and then
they turn away. And now, depending on which book you read,
no one agrees as to why he turned away from
Mexico City. People like to argue about it. Maybe the
priest was, like everyone keeps rioting and looting and killing prisoners,
and we shouldn't do that to a whole last city.

(12:59):
But that one, that take seems to come a little
bit more from the kind of like good white priest,
scary indigenous people making up the army kind of thing.
The other take that I'm lean a little bit more
towards was he was like, oh, we have sticks and
they have guns. He turns away. Some people think that

(13:21):
his turning his back is why the war took so long.
It's also completely possible it's the only reason it was
ever possible to win it, you know, because everyone wasn't
just slaughtered right there. His army goes and holds up
in Guadalajara and like they you know, show up and
are attacking him and shit, and he gets often a pardon.

(13:41):
He gets offered a pardon in exchange for surrender, and
he's like, if fuck off, I'm not going to do that.
Like I've come this far. He is not backing down.
People refusing pardons and pensions and all kinds of awards
from the government will come up a lot this week.
So he gets captured. It doesn't go well for him.
Within a couple months, he is defrocked, excommunicated by the

(14:03):
inquisition this time just again a step up if you
have to get the whole last inquisition to kick you out.
They decide to extra depeat priest him, so they flay
his hands. And this is something to do with like
some symbolic mark left on your hands when you become
a priest, at least at this time and place. And

(14:24):
then he's executed. July twenty seventh, eighteen eleven. Is not
a really good day for him, except I don't know.
He's like Catholic and he gets martyred, right, really backed
by not a good day for him.

Speaker 3 (14:40):
I think it sounds like fun. It sounds like the
best day ever.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
I know, well, I mean like this might have been
the best day of his life. He's a Catholic and
he gets murtyreed. The Catholic Church rarely considers people they
kill to be martyrs, but Jonah.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
And he's considered a martyr. Now, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (14:57):
If he's considered a martyr by the Catholic Church.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
He's app asolutely a martyr in like Mexican history, right, yeah,
I'm not sure, but yeah. And his last words are,
though I may die, I shall be remembered forever. You
all will soon be forgotten, which is just fucking true.
This man, I guess still exists and we talk about him.

(15:20):
I didn't write down the name of the guy who
killed him.

Speaker 3 (15:23):
Hell yeah, we're talking about him in twenty twenty three.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
Yeah, his head was put on a pike and left
on display. And I want to compare really quick. He
gets called Mexico's Father of the nation, right, and he
was a priest who carried a lance and freed the
slaves at gunpoint. The US is father of the nation.
Is George Washington, who literally wore teeth he had ripped

(15:47):
out of the mouths of living slaves.

Speaker 3 (15:50):
Yeah, yeah, it's not great, no, no, And.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
I'm not sure and spun a lie that most people
believe that he had wooden teeth.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah totally. Yeah. I think so much about George Washington's
teeth me too.

Speaker 3 (16:13):
I hear conservatives talk about it a lot, and they'll
be like, well he paid them, And I'm like they're still, hey,
their own b Like what the hell are you supposed
to do? See, don't take teeth from people? Like how
how difficult is this to understand? Right, this is not
a difficult concept. Keep teeth in the mouths of the people.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
Bones belong on the inside, is the general.

Speaker 3 (16:39):
W bones belong on the inside. I'm always saying that.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
I know. That's why I brought you on, Actually is
because you saw those shirts.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
Yeah, bones belong to people, yeah, on the inside.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
Sorry, yeah, well we also saw the one that says
bones belong to me. But you know, of course, a
different thing. You're the that's fine, yeah, yeah, no, as
long as mine get to stay inside, you can do
whatever you want to other people's. That's the way the
world works. So their guy dies, right, the war goes

(17:12):
gorilla for a while, and it wasn't until ten years later,
in eighteen twenty one, that Mexico gets its independence from Spain,
and it gets it in a way less cool way.
It gets it way more in like an America way,
instead of a like, you know, people actually kicking out
the colonizer way, more in a cementing the colonizer kind
of way. The guy who takes charge his name is
Augustine d Itterbide, and he had actually started the war

(17:35):
fighting against Hill Hidalgo and just against the revolution, right,
he just like worked for the fucking crown or whatever.
His nickname was the Iron Dragon and I have a
suspicion that no one good has ever been in charge
of an army and called the iron Dragon.

Speaker 3 (17:52):
I understand that, but also that is like an object,
Like if someone called me that, I would be like, damn,
I know I was. That's a cool I I know
him evil, But it was like, could I.

Speaker 1 (18:02):
Get other people from cool zone media to call me that?

Speaker 3 (18:06):
Sophie, I'll call you the Iron Dragon.

Speaker 1 (18:07):
I can thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (18:08):
You're so welcome anytime, Iron Dragon, I.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
D Margaret, you started something very bad. I see.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
I think you can't be called the Iron Dragon until
you have three hundred sergeant prisoners executed to celebrate Good Friday?

Speaker 3 (18:25):
Are you telling? Are you saying that Sophie hasn't done.

Speaker 2 (18:27):
That well security culture?

Speaker 1 (18:31):
I mean, I don't think I'm going to do that
this week, but girls energy, I like the nickname.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
All right, all right, if I call you Iron Dragon,
then you don't have to prove it by killing three
hundred people. How about that?

Speaker 3 (18:45):
But you can't. She gives you permission. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, I'm so glad to know this.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Those are people the bones can be on the outside
of This guy is so bad that at one point
he's kicked out by his own side for being rule
and corrupt. And this is like the battie team kicks
him out for being too much. And this is the
guy that he eventually.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
Gave Mexico independence.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
Yeah, he's fighting against independence to the nail, but then
he basically right near the end, he's like, Oh, I'm
going to lose. What if instead I'm on the winning
team and I could be in charge to make sure
that no one does anything wacky like make a republic.
When I said that it was kind of like the

(19:28):
US independence, it's actually worse because the US at least
made a republic. He sets up a monarchy with all
of the additional property relations intact, much like Sophie's plan
for Cools. In this new Mexican monarchy, the only thing
it did was elevate the creoles, which are the white
people born in Mexico, to the same level as the
white people born in Spain. Everyone else just as fucked

(19:52):
as always. Their new leader calls himself an emperor.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
Fuck him.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
The priest guy was cool. This particular pattern of cool
folks with cool ideas sparking revolutions that later get watered
down real bad. That's gonna repeat, and it'll repeat in
this week's episode and all throughout history constantly. I'm not cynical.
Is it Anti Cynicism podcast?

Speaker 3 (20:19):
It does repeat, But on the bright side, sometimes it doesn't.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
It's true, it's true. I can't wait to get to
the Haitian Revolution. Yes, absolutely, yeah, and actually the Mexican
Revolution that's gonna come hundred years later. It's like a
watered down thing, but it's not a like meet the
new boss, same as the old boss kind of thing.

Speaker 3 (20:43):
So I do infuriated by people that play both sides
like that, though, I know, so annoying.

Speaker 2 (20:50):
It's so annoying, like, at least have some if you're
gonna be like a batty, be like an honorable battie,
you know.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
Exactly, have some dignity, be like going down because I
am just the worst. Yeah, and uh, I really love
being the worst. And instead you're switching sides in the
last second. It's pathetic. It's pathetic.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
It's like that everyone hates a snitch, even the cops
kind of thing, Like, yes, cops are like you spineless bastard.
I mean, give me the information, but god, you suck.

Speaker 3 (21:18):
I keep doing anything with the conservatives with jan six
or whatever.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
Yeah, how do they?

Speaker 3 (21:22):
This must be an informant. I'm like, no, you guys
just flip so easy because none of you believe in
anything exactly.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
Macpet Magpie. Keep getting confused when you say battie because
you actually mean bad person. But to me, baddie means
like a babe and a half.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
Babe and a half, it's a baddie.

Speaker 3 (21:40):
Batties are thick. I wanna you wanna be with some baddies.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
So I should stop making the people who are committing
atrocities seem cool.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, batty is a compliment unless they're hot.

Speaker 3 (21:52):
If they're hot, I mean, you can't call it like
that's technically accurate. Yeah or battye.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
Okay, okay, I'm gonna look up more photos ahead of time.
I usually mostly look.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
Up okay, okay, research research, Yeah, if you need me.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
Well, you're like thick batties. What does this mean? Google?

Speaker 2 (22:16):
Deer, Google Google that one picture of Stalin, the one
that we all know it it's not even real. Yeah,
that doesn't surprise me at all. Mister early photoshop made
made himself look better.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
I'm so sure self look like from one direction.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
But if you want to look better, you can buy
things that will increase your social status and therefore people's
interest in you. I always hated the like display of
wealth as like the way to show that you're like, like,
there's this thing where like men think that if they

(23:02):
like look rich, that a lot of like people will
try to sleep with them. Anyway, I just don't think
that that's true at all.

Speaker 3 (23:10):
When I was a bartender, I had a customer that
would come in with a Gucci belt and then always
point out his Gucci belt and got really mad when
I wouldn't give him my number, and he d five
times and I don't know what he kept thinking.

Speaker 1 (23:21):
It is always a Gucci belt and Gucci belt singular one.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
And when I was when I was a street kid
sleeping on top of a seven eleven, I did fairly well.
You know, money not the way of anyway.

Speaker 1 (23:40):
I like that Margaret was like speaking of a Gucci belt, Yeah,
I mean literal opposite of that.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
I'm saying the dirty, like filthy punks do a lot
better than mister Gucci belt.

Speaker 3 (23:56):
I'm just saying, no billionaire would be able to get
laid on forty one year.

Speaker 1 (24:02):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 3 (24:04):
It's just true.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
But these products and services will increase your sexual attractivity, Sophie,
do you remember what percent it were currently? I know
that when I exaggerated you get mad at me. It's
like thirty four percent.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
I thought I was thirty two, but uh, maybe you
were trending upwards.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah, all right, so thirty two percent more attractive if
you buy whatever shit someone tries to sell you. Here's
the bads.

Speaker 1 (24:36):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
So this guy shows up. He doesn't last. He's calls
himself the Emperor. He gets run out. I didn't really
write all the details down about this part. There's thirty
five years of chaos basically, with various emperors and tyrants
and occasionally some like republic people sneak in. Most are
corrupt as shit. They get rich selling off the nation's
natural resources to foreigners. You get this one cool moment

(25:00):
where an old rebel leader abolishes slavery along the way
the US invades and steals half the country eighteen forty six,
eighteen forty seven. This is like always one of my
I mean, I know it's sort of a cliche, but
the like the border acrossed US thing is just very,
very literally true. You know, a huge chunk of well,
all of Texas and all of the Southwest was part

(25:21):
of Mexico. And before that, obviously Mexico's also stolen land.
But you know, and the reason that they US came
and stole all this land was pretty much to expand
the slave state.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
Right.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
They weren't allowed above a certain line. I didn't write
this into the script. You weren't allowed to have a
slave state above a certain line in the US. And
so they were like, all right, we'll take all this shit.
But they didn't take really far south. I didn't know
this part. The reason they didn't take all the really
far south I like read all these quotes from them,
is that they were like, well, we want land, but
we don't want free black people and Mexican people in

(25:55):
the United States. That sounds terrible to these races, so American,
Oh my god, it really is. We're like, we could
conquer all of Mexico, but I don't know, we're just
too racist for it. So your personal hero Santa Anna
was in charge in the eighteen fifties for a while.

(26:17):
I know fucking nothing about Santana. It's like, literally, this
is the only mention of him in my script is
that the revolutionaries don't like him.

Speaker 3 (26:26):
Fun fact there is I'm not sure if you've seen
the King of the Hill episode, but I can't remember
which state as it. They had like something from Santa Ana,
like a part of his body or something, and Texas
keeps asking for it back and they won't give it back.
There's a whole King of the Hill episode about it.
We talked about it in fourth grade Texas history, but
I can't remember it for the life of me. Obviously,

(26:47):
I care very much my personal hero. He also wore
a lot of red and all the paintings. So there's
your Santa Anna briefer.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
And you saw the shirts that say his bones belong
in Texas. Yes, exactly inside Texas. Yes, so asks on
the bones. The main leader of this new batch of
eighteen fifties revolutionaries is a guy named Benito Juarez who's

(27:15):
an indigenous guy who found himself an orphan young so
he walked to the big city I think this is
Ohaca City and he became a lawyer for the down trodden.
He was the first indigenous lawyer in Mexico. So he
starts off great and he ends up middling in terms
of his legacy and stuff, right, but he genuinely is
working to improve things.

Speaker 1 (27:33):
Right.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
He goes on to become the governor of Ojaka and
he's like, I hate Santa Anna, and it works. He
takes charge. There's no more immunity for military and church people.
They have to be held to the same law as
everyone else, and by eighteen sixty one Mexico's democracy. One
weird thing along the way is that there's all these

(27:56):
well intentioned laws. You know how liberals do well intentioned
law and then they have negative effects. Sometimes that's all
liberals too. Yeah, yes, So they passed this law that
basically was like pretty much like kind of like only
people can let own land. Corporations can't have huge chunks
of land. The church can't own huge, huge chunks of land,
which sounds great. The problem is that indigenous people held

(28:18):
their lands in common, and so this took all their
land away, or huge chunks of their land. It stripped.

Speaker 3 (28:26):
Was that intentional?

Speaker 2 (28:28):
I don't know, I think, you know, I don't really
super hard want to conjecture. I suspect that many of
the people involved in doing it knew that was going
to happen, and we're happy for it. I think a
lot of it was like the liberalization kind of a
like well if we make you know, the like bringing

(28:50):
indigenous people into the like capitalist culture as like progress
kind of thing. I know that a version of it
happened in the nineteenth in the early twentieth century in
the US. I don't have this in my script at all,
but the first indigenous man who was vice president of
the United States in the twenties or thirties, I don't
remember his name. I'm completely running off of old memory.
He did a very similar thing in the United States

(29:12):
about privatizing indigenous vice president. Yes, oh my god, we
should look this up.

Speaker 3 (29:19):
Charles Curtis. He was Herbert Hoover's vice president. What years
is that, uh, nineteen twenty nine to nineteen thirty three.
Bummer that he is Herbert Hoover's vice president And he's
the only mixed race vice president in American history until

(29:40):
the inauguration of Kamala Harris in twenty twenty one. Oh,
this is the first US VP to ever open the
Olympic Games. Yes, id, what's up?

Speaker 1 (29:48):
I literally fucking hate this country. I just read was
so annoying.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, the only thing I'd ever read about him was
this thing where he sold off a lot of tribal
lands in order to like privatize it and then like
gave people some money instead of them having access to
the means of production, like they.

Speaker 3 (30:13):
Yeah, he's three eighths Native American. I don't know math,
I don't know how that works.

Speaker 2 (30:17):
But yeah, so so this happens in Mexico. Then during
all the chaos times, Napoleon the Third invades. They kick
him out on the fifth. Well, they have a big
fight on the fifth of May eighteen sixty two, which
is where Cinco de Mayo comes from. The guy who
led that fight was named Porfio Diaz, Porfyrio Diaz, and

(30:40):
he's going to be important in a minute. He is
fucking ruthless. Even if he's ostensibly liberal, he's a little
bit iron dragony. He's kind of a Sophie, is what
I'm saying. I now feel bad about this because this
is literally the main antagonist of this week is Portfolio Dias.
But you know, just is what it is.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
Europe.

Speaker 2 (30:59):
Oh yeah, you're a baddie.

Speaker 1 (31:01):
Oh my god, thank you so much. Yeah, I'm welcome.
This is the first time this has ever happened to me?

Speaker 2 (31:07):
Simple? So two folks in that battle wind up important later.
One has the Spanish version of the best name ever,
which is to say, her name is Margarita Margarita. Yeah,
I know, right, Margarita Magone and Teodora Flores. And they

(31:29):
meet and fall in love because they're fighting the French
in hand to hand combat in the streets. Yeah, And
they get together and have a bunch of kids who
are the main subject of this week's story, but we'll
get to them later. It takes Mexico until eighteen sixty
seven to drive out there would be Emperor and execute him.
Mexico returns to being a republic. They start teaching science

(31:51):
over religion in schools, this free school for all the kids.
Like you know, some progresses being made along the way.
A new radical tendency shows up in Mexico socialism, And
it's not just any socialism. Mexico gets anarchist socialism. It
gets though, what if we had a horizontally organized society?
Kind And it shows up from a really interesting source

(32:13):
from my point of view, somebody who likes to nerd
out about this kind of shit, which hopefully at least
some of you all are. There's a Greek doctor and
his name is a Plotino Rodocanati, and he is born
into the Greek aristocracy. But he's like, what if I
just run around throwing down in every revolution that Europe

(32:34):
has to offer? So he does that, Oh yeah, and
including the Hungarian War for Independence in eighteen forty eight,
which inspired a lot of revolutionaries at the time. Then,
at least according to one of the sources I read,
there's a couple different versions of how he got really
interested in Mexico. He started reading about indigenous Mexican struggle,
and specifically he started reading about their autonomous villages and

(32:56):
communal agricultural practices, and he was like, oh, this fucking rules.
Around the time, he had become a Christian anarchist, and
he was like, I'm going to move to Mexico because
I want to know more about this shit. And so
in eighteen sixty one he moves to Mexico. He goes
to Mexico City and he starts doing two things. First

(33:18):
and foremost, he's a doctor, right, so he just starts
treating people for free, and that's what he spends most
of his time doing. But he's also super educated because
he's from the aristocracy. He speaks seven languages, and he's
like verse in philosophy and shit. So he starts a
free school and he's running it and he's teaching it.

(33:39):
Soon the free school becomes a mutual aid society, which
soon becomes a resistance movement. For a while, all of
the people he teaches are like, oh, this is great,
let's go get guns and fuck up the landowners. And
he's like, wait, no, I'm kind of like a Christian
pacifisty anarchist and they're like yeah, but we're not, so
fuck off. And then later he kind of comes around
actually to the more radical side of things, or the

(34:01):
more militant side of it.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
Lovely and Magpie explains like some deep history like drama,
like it was a fight in middle school, and like
I understand it better. I'm like, yeah, that makes sense.
They were in front of their lockers.

Speaker 3 (34:18):
Exactly, a dictator and a locker y. Yeah, sprayed him
in the face with back's body spray.

Speaker 1 (34:24):
Yeah one, yeah, thank you, Magpie.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
Yeah, you're welcome. He has a work rage against the
machine shirt on this entire time. It's actually impressive. Absolutely,
So this guy, uh, he spends about twenty five years
in Mexico teaching and healing, and then in eighteen eighty six,
I'm just going to like because he's not gonna be
in the story of the rest of the time, but
he's an interesting enough guy. He just disappears from the
historical record in eighteen eighty six. Some say that he

(34:50):
went back to Greece. Some say that he moved into
the hills to become a farmer. No one knows. And
the Christianity that he was into was a Christianity without
dogma institution. He refused both Protestant and Catholic affiliation. He
also tried Mormonism, which is the first like cool Mormon
I've ever had on this show.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
We're really excited about this, like a a week or
two ago. Margaret was like, hey, and you know that
I'm serious because I'm calling her Margaret. Margaret was like,
guess what, And I was like what. Margaret was like,
I think I found our first cool Mormon. And I
was like, no, you didn't.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
Man.

Speaker 1 (35:30):
Margaret was like, wait and see, and here we are
about this cool Mormon. Tell us.

Speaker 2 (35:37):
So he joins the Church of the Latter day Saints
because the Protestants are too materialists, and he can't be
a Catholic because the Catholic Church is like one of
the primary institutions of domination and destruction in Mexico at
the time. And so he leads his thing, and apparently
he's kind of part of bringing Mormonism to Mexico. But
he couldn't get the Church of Latter day Saints to

(35:58):
agree to his plan to over or the Mexican government
to institute a classicst society built on mutual aid.

Speaker 1 (36:04):
So he left.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
He has his priority street. I gotta say that. Yeah,
he's like, will Mormons helped me make like decolonize Mexico
into a like anarchist space And they're like no, and
he's like, all right, see you. He himself didn't lead
social struggle. The students that he taught did. They fought

(36:27):
alongside indigenous rebels generally, who collectively started both the agrarian
land reform movement in a modern sense and the labor
movement of Mexico from eighteen sixty seven to eighteen seventy.
One of his students, Chavez Lopez or Lopez Chavez. Newspapers
wrote it both ways. I guess that's what happens when
you do last names other and fifty others, men and women.

(36:50):
And this is the main thing that I keep running across.
It's always one guy written down in history, and so
I had to I just want to shout out Luisa Cavada,
who is written down as some guy's wife during all
this struggle, even though she was as much a fucking.

Speaker 1 (37:04):
Part of it. She outlives these whatever. Anyway, they his
wifed her.

Speaker 2 (37:09):
Oh yeah, they his wife her. At least they gave
her name, which is like lucky, I'm not even gonna
give his name.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
He's the Storylisa.

Speaker 1 (37:18):
Yeah, this story does not pass the Bechdel test.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
No. No, they go around, they terrorize the land of
elite in the country. After someone drained the lake and
displaced fifteen hundred peasants. They go around and they expropriate
the huciendas, which are basically the plantations. And they're not
just like looting, right, They're not just like, oh, we're
gonna take all this stuff, right, because there's a lot

(37:41):
of bandits in Mexico throughout all this time, and who
sometimes do cool things, sometimes do shitty things. But instead
they divvy up the land and give it back to
everyone so that everyone has an equal opportunity to grow
food and live. This makes them popular. If you want
to know a way to be popular, you find someone
who has like ten million acres and you take it

(38:01):
from him with a sword and then give it to everyone.

Speaker 3 (38:06):
Great strategy, I know, I know.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
It's a lot of folks who joined them did so
specifically because they were like, oh, finally we can do
things the old way again, right and having communal land
practices and all the stuff that they grew up with
their families grew up with a slight majority of this crew,
the like fifty plus people get away. In the end,
many see death by firing squad or die in battle.

(38:32):
Chavez gets executed. His last words are long lived Socialism.
His death in eighteen sixty eight didn't stop the rebellion
because he wasn't in charge. It went on twice as
long without him as it did with him. And three
of the survivors of his band, including our girl Louisa,
they go to Chiapas in southern Mexico and they get

(38:52):
involved in the indigenous uprisings there of eighteen sixty nine. Basically,
they show up and give weapons trainings and folks are
like and they give weapons trainings and like, all right, now,
what should we do. Whatever you decide to do, we're
in it, which was attack those who have stolen all
the land for themselves and distribute it fairly again. So
they go and do that, And it was this agrarian

(39:15):
movement of combined anarchist and indigenous and anarchist indigenous struggle
that influenced the later movement of Emiliano Zapata is a
revolutionary war hero who will be part of another week's episode,
but we can't don't have time to get to him
this week, and I'm sad. This was almost like a
six parter that I dragged you into and then realized
I should not do that. I should divide it in
a more natural way. And therefore this struggle in Chiapas

(39:40):
influenced the Pata and then influenced the Zapatistas, who now
control huge chunks of Chiapas in an autonomous way. So
that's fucking cool. And you know what else is cool
is increasing your sex appeal thirty two percent.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
You know what's cooler, Magpa having no ads, which automatically
increases your exibule by like, I don't know two hundred
and fifty two percent.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
People want to hand you the ox cord. If you
have cool Zone Media on free, which you can have
by do people still use ox cords the bluetooth?

Speaker 1 (40:21):
I would say it's I would say it's both.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, both. If you go to Cooler if you just
google Cooler Zone Media and you have an iPhone, you
can get all of this without ads by subscribing, and
if you have an Android you can wait a little longer.
Or her ass Sophie online because Sophie responds really well
and it certainly won't include you in the three hundred
that she will sacrifice on Good Friday.

Speaker 1 (40:46):
More understanding why I have the nickname I have Now.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
When I think about executing three hundred prisoners on Good Friday,
how is that not just literally blood sacrifice to the God?

Speaker 1 (40:58):
I mean, you're not wrong, like it is. It is
like a weird version of The wicker Man, but in mass.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
And reverse because the Wickerman killed a cop. They did,
they did, they did, they did. I just saw that.
I just saw the original in theaters. I went with
Sarah Marshall, Oh my God, and it rules they like
they like they the Wickerman are from yeah about basically

(41:28):
there's still being Pagans on island in England.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
They like anoint the cop. It was amazing. They like
anoint the cop by rubbing their blonde hair on him
and then they burn him alive.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
Yeah, like I like my favorite medieval song.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
They like like they were so ahead of their times.
They're like, you know what would be really cool, Let's
barn a cop. And in wicker And in nineteen seventy
two or three or whenever it came out, people are like, whoa,
that's really scary. And then they played in twenty twenty
three and people are like, it's fucking based. But it's

(42:06):
supposed to be horror, but it is the funniest movie
I've seen in a very long time. And they're all
just like horny.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
Yeah, yeah, anyway, here's some horny ads.

Speaker 1 (42:20):
This has become a plug for nineteen seventy threes to
the wicker Man and if I could anoint somebody with
my blonde hair, I fucking was. And we are back.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
So the cities didn't want to be left out of
all of this burning cops alive. I mean social struggle,
and social struggle has always looked different in cities in
the countryside, so in the city you get the start
of the labor movement. In eighteen sixty five, you get
what's called the first strike in Mexican history. This isn't
true by a technicality. Every time, every book is always

(43:04):
like the first, the biggest, the longest, like some super superlative,
and I always google it and it's never true. But
this one might be true by a technicality, because there
was a strike in New Spain ninety nine years earlier
among silver miners. But eighteen sixty five you get the
start of the modern Mexican labor movement. And this was

(43:25):
anarchist at two different textile plants, one of men, one
of women in Mexico City. On June tenth, eighteen sixty five,
the government showed up with rifles and they shot people
and the strike was broken, so they all gave up.

Speaker 1 (43:41):
No.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
In eighteen sixty eight, the struggle moved to Clan La
Pontla de Bas, which used to be more of its
own city but is now part of the greater Mexico
City area, and you have four factories of anarchist textile workers.
I believe all women who go on strike before the strike,
they worked fourteen hour days in the summer, twelve hour
days in the winter. They were allowed five minutes each
day to eat. It's sony because things are so bad

(44:03):
right now, and so there's all of this like rise
of the modern labor movement. I'm really excited about it,
and I still like sometimes read all this stuff and
I'm like, I mean, we just shouldn't let things get
this way, right, But it's like that's not sure. I know,
people will work forteen hour days and shit and just
have to do fucking a million different jobs and like
drive uber eats and shit. I don't know whatever. Anyway,

(44:26):
it's fucking bad, so they strike.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
They win.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
This is the first successful strike in Mexican history. Again,
skeptical first, but whatever, it fucking rules. After this, anarchist
projects crop up everywhere. It's mostly put folks pushing for
worker cooperatives and the socialist groups. They let any worker in,
and they even allow some employers. And you can only

(44:51):
be in the socialist group if your employees vouch for
you as like actually a decent boss, right, oh hell
yeah yeah. And it's like it's most these artisans, like
some shoemaker who hires assistance or whatever is like hey,
like I want to be part of this too, and
just ask the assistants and like all right, well are
they cool? And people are yeather there cool, So so

(45:14):
the Iron Dragon you can be in.

Speaker 1 (45:16):
Yeah, I mean I was just gonna say that should
just be like normal, that's how that should be. Like,
if you're uncool, you don't get to be in the group. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:26):
It's like, you know these corporations at Post stuff about
like how they're so you know, their allies or whatever,
and then they don't pay their workers living wage and
it's like okay, cool, Well how about you do that first? Yeah, yeah,
and then we'll be like, hey, you're cool. And then
so then you're not cool.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
Yeah exactly, you're just not Your trans employees want to
eat food every day. It turns out.

Speaker 3 (45:45):
That's crazy, that's insane. Come on, yeah, that's too much.

Speaker 1 (45:47):
Yeah wait, I think you just called secretly, just called
me cool.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Oh no, oh no. One day we're going to do
the Sophie episode, the episode about cool Zone media where
we won't say aloud who is the bad person on
it because it would break me as heart.

Speaker 1 (46:09):
But oh my gosh, oh my gosh, it's the last person.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
I thought you were going to say, Yeah, that's why
it's funny. The red and black flag became the primary
symbol of the Mexican labor movement. At this point, women's
rights became central to the was central to their platform
the entire time, which it fucking better have been, because
it was women who were the first ones throwing down.
And then, of course twentieth century labor historians didn't bother

(46:36):
writing down their fucking names, so I have a hard
time writing them back into it.

Speaker 3 (46:42):
Shout out to Louise Islence again.

Speaker 2 (46:43):
I know, I know. And once we get to the Maganesis,
there's gonna be a few more women by name, literally,
because the most recent and best book about the Maganestas is,
which i'll talk about in a bit, Actually, someone already
did the work of writing all the women who were
central to the right back into the fucking story. The
first two books I read about the maganese Does fucking

(47:04):
didn't anyway, whatever, I'm not bitter, Wait, yeah, I am okay.
In the meantime, our man portfolio Diaz, the hero Cinco
de Maya. He is not our man. He is a
fucking bastard, not even a battie. As I have learned,
he's just a bastard. He comes to pass.

Speaker 3 (47:22):
Let's let me see if he's a baddie. How do
you spell his name?

Speaker 1 (47:24):
Oh? Portfolio okay, so po r f.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
I r io.

Speaker 3 (47:32):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
Cool.

Speaker 3 (47:33):
Oh he is not a battie, you know, he's definitely
not a batty. He's a bastard.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
Yeah, No, Kata is confirmed. Kata is confirmed.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
Yeah, I'm I'm double checking and I agree completely.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
So he sucks.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
He runs on a like I'm a cool liberal and
I'm the guy from Cinco de Mayo, you should vote
for me, And he runs on a no one should
be president twice campaign that's like his whole thing. He
loses a couple times, so he stages a coup and
then wins, which is a way that people in the
US have tried recently to win. But he becomes a

(48:12):
dictator for more than three decades. He absolutely does not
keep to his no one should be president twice thing.
He just slowly extends the like how long the president's
allowed to be president? Basically it'll take a revolution to
knock him out. He is sometimes called a constitutional dictator
because technically he was just president, but He rigged every
single election, He jailed and killed his opponents. His legislative

(48:34):
branch didn't have any real power. He was a fucking dictator.
And you can totally tell the tone of what Mexican
history thing you're listening to based on how they treat
this guy. There's a lot of people handwave about like,
well he brought stability and prosperity, and then people are
like everyone starved to death under him. He literally just
increased like the GDP right, the actual wages for people

(48:58):
went down under him. Everyone was poorer and more fucked
than during the like decades of chaos. I don't really
like him, is what I'm trying to say, Margaret.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
Have you considered that maybe the rich people really benefited
from that system?

Speaker 1 (49:15):
There were winners?

Speaker 3 (49:17):
Yeah, exactly, so you can't be mad. You know, you
got to take some wines. Yeah, takes them. Yeah, whatever
the other one is, I'm tired.

Speaker 2 (49:24):
And also he was he was mestizo. He was he
was not entirely white. And although he hired a bunch
of race scientists that he called his Scientific Council or
whatever the fuck who claimed that Mexico needed the European
race to rule it.

Speaker 3 (49:42):
And guff.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
He removed limits on land ownership and seized even more
fucking land from indigenous people, causing huge uprisings, one of
which I the Yaqui people. I want to like. I
think that might be a totally separate thing. I thought
about diving more and more into them, But then the
more I dove down that rabbit hole, I was this
is its own fucking amazing story.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
Does this? Does this fucker like die painfully? Like what's happening?

Speaker 2 (50:07):
Oh my god, I remember how the person who replaces
him dies. I don't, off the top of my head,
don't remember how he dies.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
I know which it's probably all exile is cool?

Speaker 2 (50:20):
Okay, wait, hold on, we're finding out because this is
the kind of thing that.

Speaker 1 (50:25):
Yeah, you're talking about someone who truly fucking sucks. And
I'm like, all right, where does the come up in? Yeah,
that usually doesn't happen in history. I mean he died
in exile in France. Yeah, I want to see how
he died. Yeah, because being exiled and then you're in
France not that bad mainly to old age study. Yeah,

(50:54):
damn it, magpie, I mean exile cool.

Speaker 3 (50:58):
Oh, officially this is from Tannica. Officially, he died of
a heart attack, though it was speculated he'd been murdered
by prison guards or died of medical neglect.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
Yes, there it is baby like, No, this.

Speaker 3 (51:12):
Is totally this is a different person.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
The character of.

Speaker 3 (51:17):
I got he just hung out with teris probably got
like a stipend or something like this.

Speaker 1 (51:21):
Oh, I was excited, all right, all right, fucking old age.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
Yeah, so before he ideas, it's called the porfiato porfuriato.
This period he modernized Spain and offered its stability by
killing everyone he didn't like. When he first came to power,
he ran as a liberal right originally, and so the
moderate socialist supported him because he made vague promises about reform.
He kept none of them. The anarchists, of course, didn't

(51:47):
support him. They didn't support his opponents either, They supported
not having a ruler. Fortunately the split didn't last too long.
After Diaz comes to power and he shows a true color,
the socialists are back to being united and people, you know,
they get together and they're like really excited about all this.
But they're actual actions. The socialist's actual actions, both labor

(52:08):
actions and the agrarian revolts are met with brutal repression.
From eighteen seventy eight eighteen eighty four, there are several
armed anarchists slash indigenous peasant uprisings. The ideological leaders are
killed and the movements continue. The article I read refers
to them as getting snuffed out these uprisings. It's a
combination of executions and exile. The strikes were put down

(52:30):
by troops. Agrarian revolters were hunted down. Leftists were killed,
often by what was called Leifuga or fuga. It's the
fugitive law, which means you're allowed to kill anyone who's
trying to escape, which means they're like, oh no, he's
running away, Like literally, as long as you shoot someone
in the back, it's legal, which is a pretty wait.

Speaker 3 (52:52):
Escape from Mexico no.

Speaker 1 (52:54):
Like escape from captivity.

Speaker 2 (52:56):
Like if a cop comes up to you and he's
like come with me, and you're like I don't want to,
then they can be like, ah, well now I get
to kill you.

Speaker 1 (53:02):
Right.

Speaker 3 (53:03):
Oh that's so strange. It only happens in this one time.

Speaker 2 (53:05):
I know, that's what's Yeah. Ten thousand people met their
death to Leifuga. The only place that I get so
angry about that. I hate whenever people are like, but
he was running away, and you're like do you hear yourself?
Do you hear what you just said? Like why would

(53:27):
that anyway? Whatever? Okay, the left doesn't give up anarchist
ideas wind up influencing a huge number of the later
revolutionary leaders. Many go on to advocate for states. They
but even the revolutionary leaders who advocate for states, they
end up more focused on regional autonomy and land reform

(53:48):
as a result of all of this socialism, and eventually
the left goes into decline under Diaz because open organizing
is just too fucking dangerous. Everyone's just being murdered. There's
all these wildcat strikes, particularly among textile workers who just
fucking rule and just keep wanting to strike no matter what.
Until we get to the main point of the story,

(54:08):
until we get to a grouchy and unpleasant man who
put his entire life, body, and soul into the movement.
He wound up being called the forefather of the Mexican Revolution,
even it wasn't anything like the revolution that he fought for.
Until he get to the maganestas. This would be where
we make you wait till next week. But there's more
because I moaha a lot in this one.

Speaker 1 (54:31):
Let's get it.

Speaker 2 (54:32):
Ricardo Flores Macgon was born in Ohaka on September sixteenth,
eighteen seventy three. His father was indigenous from the Zappa
Tech people, and his father had been a soldier but
was cut off from his pension when the bureaucracy was like, oh,
we like totally lost the records that you fought you
should bring those records. But the dad lost his pension
records as well as his first wife and his mother

(54:54):
in law to a house fire. Mcgon's father had a
really fucking rough life.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
That's so sad.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
Yeah, so he common in law marys Ricardo's mother, who
is Mestizo, part Indigenous, part Spanish, one white ancestor. But
that's enough to like elevate you in the social weird
hierarchy classes. His parents were common in law married. They
never had a ceremony or anything official, I think because
of not really wanting to have much to do with

(55:23):
the Mexican state. And Ricardo grew up understanding that the
indigenous forms of mutual aid, where no one in his
town was rich and no one in his town was poor,
was the way the world ought to work. He grew
up in a town with no judges, no jails, and
no cops, and he's basically like, obviously this Diez's appropriation

(55:44):
of rural lands meant that capitalism was creeping ever closer
to what Ricardo saw as his anarchist, communist indigenous upbringing.
There was actually an uprising there. This is after he
leaves right like right near the birth town where he
live for a little while. That is interesting enough that
I want to stick it in. The folks there were like,

(56:05):
we don't like our priest. We like our local holy figure,
who is a teenage healer named Teresa Area the Saint
of Kabora. And so they're like, we don't want the
Catholic church. Fuck off, We've got our saint. So they
kick out the priest. The state burns down the village,
They kill three hundred people. They just destroy this village

(56:28):
for kicking out the church. The survivors flee to the UA.
I'm like, this is a cool story. It's interesting. The
survivors flee to the US, including Teresa, who continued to
organize against the Diaz regime support union activity. She go
around on like speaking tours and then she give all
of her money to the poor. She dies of friend

(56:49):
of the pod tuberculosis in nineteen oh six, and it
took me As I mentioned. The third book I read
to read about the women related to any of the uprising,
and that book that I recommend to everyone is called
Bad Mexicans by Kelly Leidel Hernandez. That is the book
to read about maganest does. It's worth reading. Like there's

(57:11):
some other books that like collect the writings of a
lot of these people and that's like really cool too,
like primary source stuff. But if you want to not
be written out of history, Bad Mexicans is your book.
The older mcgon brother, his name is Hazus. He goes
to jail for writing about what happened in that uprising
along the way before the burning of the town. Their

(57:33):
father dies because he had a fucking hard life, and
the mother moves them to Mexico City so that their
children can get an education. Ricardo goes to law school.
When he's seventeen, he's arrested for the first time alongside
his brother Hazus, for protesting against reelection, and he's set
free because other protests get so hot and demand the

(57:55):
release of prisoners, and so a lot of the prisoners
get set free, which is a thing that's happened a
lot in and I think that Americans should consider. His
brother stays behind bars for a while longer. So Ricardo
drops out of school. He drops out of law school,
and he gets into the newspapers. First, he edits for
the Eld Democrata, which was shut down by Diaz. When
the newspaper was raided after only three months of existing,

(58:16):
Ricardo escaped by jumping out of a window. And then
he becomes a wanderer. He has the rough six years.
He works odd jobs. He has a job banana carrier
and job ice vendor, and he's sending money back.

Speaker 3 (58:32):
So a very old timey Mexican job. Absolutely, it's like
the equivalent of like being in New York in nineteen twelve,
and it's like button.

Speaker 2 (58:40):
Cleaner, yeah, yeah, exactly where it secretly means that you
go into the sewers and pull the buttons out of
like human group. Yep. And so he sends a bunch
of money back to his mother. I believe different sources
talk about this period of his life differently. He gets
into the CD side of life. He's drinking and gambling
and fucking. He is both befriending and hiring sex workers

(59:02):
I think unrelated to the two. He does wind up
with an STI that leaves him sterile during this period
of his life, and it's during this period of life
that he like, it's funny because they're like, during this
period of life, he sees how bad people have it.
And I'm like, he grew up in a town that
got burned out anyway, but he sees just how fucking bad.

(59:23):
And maybe it's because he's from more of an indigenous
background that like, where folks were able to take care
of each other, and he sees how bad the fucking
working class has it. So in eighteen ninety nine, he's like,
all right, but what about revolution, revolution in newspapers, Let's
fucking go. Also, I want to be a bohemian, wear
all black, talk about politics and cafes, and read poetry.
So he does what everyone does when they want to

(59:45):
be a bohemian and they don't come from money. He
moves in back with his mother because Margaret's are always
there for you and we won't let you down. In nineteen,
what's his last name, Floresmagon.

Speaker 3 (01:00:00):
We're doing a batty test on this guy.

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
His brother's hotter. His brother, Enrique is definitely hotter.

Speaker 1 (01:00:07):
Damn.

Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
If he just like didn't have the mustache, I could
totally see. Oh yeah, here's his brother. His brother's definitely hotter.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
Yeah, I like that, Magpie predetermined.

Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
Oh yeah, yeah, no, you were totally right.

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
I look up photos of the good guys.

Speaker 3 (01:00:26):
Yeah, yeah, okay, they passed the batty test, especially if
you know you're dressing an all black hanging out with
your mom. Yeah, hey yeah, sex workers you know. Yeah,
all right, Baddy approved?

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
Yeah no, I yeah, so.

Speaker 1 (01:00:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
In nineteen hundred, he and Haesus start a paper that
changes the world, is called Regeneration On and it was
mostly originally a legal paper. It covers issues of the
miscarriage of justice under Diaz because his brother's a lawyer.
It's basically if the National Lawyer's Guild started a newspaper
that led to the overthrow of a dictator. In nineteen

(01:01:02):
hundred and one, people were like, what if we didn't
have a right wing dictator and called for a liberal party.
So they had a congress, and when they called for
the congress, it's surrounded by angry army officers. More than
one hundred and fifty people, including Jesus and Ricardo, crossed
the line of army officers to go openly participate in
a seditious congress. Ricardo was there to speak for a

(01:01:25):
liberal student group and for his newspaper, just to show
how different the word liberal, like what liberal meant in
nineteen oh one Mexico to now. The Liberal Congress started
with a quote from the anarchist Max Stirner. The quote
is tyrants appear great because we come to them on
our knees. Let us rise. I feel like I didn't

(01:01:47):
actually name this episode. Liberals ain't what they used to be,
but that's the subtext. The guy who called for the
conference was from a wealthy family, but he read a
lot of Marx and Bakuna, and then he blew all
of his inherited wealth on revolution, including running a book
club and taking care of several destitute peasants who had
a mine for theory and practice, which is likely where

(01:02:09):
Ricardo started reading about anarchism. Are these book clubs? Which
is this is what you should do. If you've inherited
a bunch of wealth, you should pay proletarian organizers to
live and spend their money on and tools for revolution
and social change, whatever tools are appropriate in the context
where you live. My favorite attendee of the conference was

(01:02:31):
a woman named Juana Belen Guterrez de Mendoza, and she
was Indigenous. She's from the Coxcun people. Her father had
been a landless rural blacksmith. She didn't know her birth date,
but she got arrested all the time, so the state
made one up for January twenty seventh, eighteen seventy five.
She was arrested again and again advocating for mine workers

(01:02:54):
like her husband, and whenever she was arrested and asked
to write down her name on the booking, she wrote
to Desion Rebellion, Yeah, it's awesome. And then I'm also
really excited because I'm very mad. I think people know this.
I literally have the worst sedition tattooed on my knuckles.
And I got really mad about January sixth because of this.

(01:03:19):
I'm like really fucking bitter.

Speaker 3 (01:03:21):
They ruin everything. Fine, you know, it's just like, come on, guys.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
I know. Then her husband died and she started an
anarchists feminist paper called Vesper, which told men they better
step up lest the women run the revolution alone. It
was like a whole thing in like nineteenth century feminist revolutionaries.
A lot of it was basically being like you fuck it.
They would like play to the machismo of of the

(01:03:49):
culture they're in and be like, you fucking cowards, we're
doing it. Fuck's wrong with you? And I've seen this
in a bunch of different countries.

Speaker 1 (01:03:56):
I really like it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
That's awesome. You don't want women to run things? Yeah,
I get them to run the revolution with you.

Speaker 2 (01:04:03):
Yeah. Later, she's going to join a Miliona Zapata's army
and fight in the revolution and go to her grave
in nineteen forty two, still fighting for land in liberty.
She runs papers for decades. She translates Bacunan, Kropockin, and
Prudana into Spanish.

Speaker 1 (01:04:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:20):
So she's at this fucking congress. Most of the delegates
are trying to play it safe. Most of them are
only critiquing the church or mine owners rather than Diaz directly,
because they don't want to be killed. Ricardo doesn't care.
He's a fucking bohemian. He takes the stage. He's probably
wearing like a big black baggy sweater because that was

(01:04:41):
his style at the time. And he gets up there
and he shouts the administration of Porfoio Diaz is a
den of thebes, and everyone hisses at him because they're like, no,
you can't fucking say that with the fuck oh shit,
you know, so he just yells it again and again,
and finally the third time he fucking yells it, people
find their courage and met a statement of applause and

(01:05:05):
rarely like like speak truth the power, et cetera, et cetera,
is like it's like one of these like watered down phrases.
It's possible that in the single act, Ricardo Flories mcgaun
forced the ostensible opposition to the dictator to admit to
all the world that they weren't an ostensible opposition, they
were actually in opposition. He like this kind of it's okay,

(01:05:26):
the revolution doesn't start for ten years. This is what
makes everyone have to actually start working for it. It's
also by shouting this to the rooftops, he basically sets
it up that he's going to spend the majority of
the twenty one years left in front of him in
prison as a result of ten different convictions. I made
up the number ten because I don't remember. It's a

(01:05:47):
bunch of fucking convictions. I just don't want to be
give a specific and then okay. So Regeneracion becomes the
main liberal newspaper, and it calls for the Constitution to
be respected and for Diaz to stop bring in the elections,
and it calls to support strikes and land reform. So
it didn't take long for Ricardo and his brother Hazus
to go back to jail. They were apparently the first

(01:06:10):
newspaper there we go with first to openly criticize not
just the actions of the government, but the legitimacy of
the government. They're also finally covering all the stories of
sexual violence that the state enacted, and it was there, Hey,
this particular political boss guy is a fucking rapist story
that got them thrown in prison. Several of the times
that macgone and at least one of his other brothers

(01:06:32):
go to prison is specifically for calling out sexual abuse
and things like that from the Diaz regime. So they're
in jail. Fortunately they only got two of the brothers
in jail. They have a third brother, so Enrique. He
starts publishing the paper Jesus and Ricardo write for it

(01:06:55):
from jail, and while they're in their mother dies. Marguerita's
sons got her fierceness from her. As far as I
can tell, the government had tried to convince her in
her deathbed to convince her sons to give up their activism. Basically,
they're like, she's like fucking dying and the government's like, look,
we'll set your sons free and they can be with

(01:07:16):
you when you die if you tell them to just
fucking stop. Right. Her quote to them is, quote, tell
President Diaz that I choose to die without seeing my sons,
and tell them this, I'd rather see my sons hang
from a tree or a hanging post than for them
to retract or repent.

Speaker 3 (01:07:38):
That's awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:07:39):
Yeah, she fucking goes hard. What about us?

Speaker 3 (01:07:43):
That's awesome?

Speaker 1 (01:07:43):
From street fighting the French.

Speaker 3 (01:07:46):
To a dying mother that's going up seeing her children
before she's gone from this world. Yeah, because she does.
How much it means to her, to so many other
people and to her sons.

Speaker 2 (01:07:57):
Yeah awesome. Yeah, this is we'll talk about a little
bit later, but this is the revolution that the quote
it's better to die on your feet than live on
your knees comes from, and it just it comes again
and again. A few days later, her two older sons
are sentenced to two years in Bellum prison. And Bellum
prison is where they actually already are, but they get

(01:08:19):
convicted there. It's a cesspit of a prison in a
very literal way. There's no plumbing, people shit and overflowing
holes in the ground, and it's where they throw like
the like, people who have no like, the sick and
the homeless and the drunks and all of that stuff. Right,
But their paper, and the anarch of feminist paper, Vesper,

(01:08:41):
which has eight thousand subscribers and a bunch of journalists
and poets and has never fucking mentioned in any of
the other fucking books, continues, and when the brothers get out,
Jesus is like, you know what, I'm good that i
had a fucking good run of it. I'm not turning
my back on any of this. I'm going to be
a lawyer, and I'm going to marry my fiance of

(01:09:03):
eleven years, who's been fucking waiting.

Speaker 3 (01:09:07):
How long were they in jail for eleven years?

Speaker 2 (01:09:09):
No, he goes to jail a lot. They've been engaged
for eleven years. That particular stint was like two years.
So yeah, Jeseus never becomes a radical again. He stays
a liberal and like literally a revolutionary, and he ends
up in the government of the first There's a lot
of different governments that happened during the revolution, and he

(01:09:31):
ends up the government post for a little while. He
does offer his brother's legal help over the years, but
they would get into screaming matches about how to get
things done. Because his brothers later go anarchist and he
stays liberal. Enrique steps up and now Ricardo and Enrique
they take over another paper since their papers shut down

(01:09:51):
for the moment, so they get arrested again because they
that's what they do. They go back to bell in prison.
A lot of the other liberals are waiting for them,
including that rich guy with all the cool anarchy books.
His name is Adiaga, and Adiago was offered to be
freed if he would just stop funding the revolution. They're like, look,
you're a rich guy, just be a fucking richie, like
it's fine, and he's like I'm good, fuck you, and

(01:10:13):
stays in prison. They all get out nineteen oh three
and they get right back to it. Oh god. They
all go to jail so many fucking times that I
can't keep track of which time anyway. Then they get
arrested and let out again. This time the government shuts
down Vesper two. And in this whole click, Ricardo is

(01:10:36):
the one who's remembered. He's not the strategician or the
best writer or anything specific. Besides, he is the well,
he's the most stubborn one of One of their friends
said quote he was the prototype of the apostle, and
that he dazzled his comrades with his character of iron. Eh, Sophy,
you could be this guy. You could be the iron magone. Okay,

(01:11:02):
all right, No, I think you're still the Iron Dragon.

Speaker 3 (01:11:04):
I'm sorry Iron Dragon for Dragon sound schooler. Yeah, Dragon
sounds way cool.

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
I'm sorry the Iron Flower. Okay anyway. Uh So, most
people just think he's a stubborn, fucking an asshole. Frankly,
like Macgon, does not make friends. He he converts people
into revolutionaries, but no one fucking likes him. But he

(01:11:28):
hates cults of personality and authoritarian leadership, and he struggles
his whole life with the fact that he wants to
get his way in every argument and lead everything, but
he also doesn't. Then the brothers get the best compliment
any journalist can ever receive. The Mexico City Court, ratified

(01:11:48):
later by the Supreme Court, declared that it was illegal
for any periodical in Mexico to carry anything written by
any of the Flora's mcgon brothers.

Speaker 3 (01:11:58):
So that'll stop them for sure. That's way to stop
a journalist.

Speaker 2 (01:12:03):
Could you imagine just if someone was like, here's the kataboo.

Speaker 1 (01:12:06):
Lah the law.

Speaker 3 (01:12:08):
Yeah, I'd be like, oh fucking sick, Like, let me
violate this as many times as possible.

Speaker 1 (01:12:13):
Your books will sell very well.

Speaker 3 (01:12:15):
It will sell so well, Like I just can't imagine
ever being like, oh I want these people, these journalists,
they are obviously very committed to stop writing something. Let's
make a law against them specifically, Like that would never
work in any any era of journalism ever. Yeah, unless
you're a garbage journalist, and in that case the law
is not going to it wouldn't have done it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:35):
Yeah, they wouldn't have needed the law for your garbage
journalists because they would have been like, Hey, do you
want to die or do you want to write? And
people will be like, I mean, do you want to
die or stop writing? The garbage journalist will be like,
I'm good.

Speaker 3 (01:12:44):
You know, Kelly, I kill me do it?

Speaker 1 (01:12:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:12:49):
So they don't want to get killed and they want
to keep writing, so they have to flee Mexico, which
we'll talk about on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 (01:13:00):
That was so cool.

Speaker 2 (01:13:02):
But before we talk about that, let's talk about you.
Let's talk about how people can see you tell the
journalist the thing you think I would know the verb
for my own job. You plug your pluggables. That's it.

Speaker 3 (01:13:20):
Uh, there you go. There are now a billion social
media platforms, so many. There are so many, and I'm
so tired. My TikTok is kataboo. My blue Sky is
that too. My Twitter is Aba Gazali cat. My Instagram
is k Alba Gazale, which is also my threads account.

(01:13:41):
If you go on my Twitter, I have a pin
tweet that has all of it. I need to update
my little link tree thing. But pretty much you could
just look at catabou in the site and you'll find it.

Speaker 2 (01:13:51):
Yay, Hey, Sophie, you.

Speaker 1 (01:13:57):
Can just follow our cool zone media. That would make
me ha be Anderson is barking in the background, so
that doesn't make her happy.

Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
No, apparently you shouldn't follow Sophie.

Speaker 1 (01:14:10):
You should follow Okay Anderson, what do you want? She
wants you to follow my Instagram so you can see
photos of her.

Speaker 2 (01:14:17):
Oh okay, is that?

Speaker 1 (01:14:19):
Why tell you how to find that? You can do
that yourselves.

Speaker 2 (01:14:23):
Which your Twitter?

Speaker 1 (01:14:24):
That's my that's my Twitter. Oh my Twitter. I post
photos over there too.

Speaker 2 (01:14:29):
I mean it's like Google is the actual way that
anyone's going to find anything whenever, Like someone's going to
type in Margaret Kiljoy Twitter, not actually go to at
Magpie Killjoy And that's fine, that's fine, But you should
type in Margaret Kiljoy substack because now I write too
much again and it's on substack and half of it
is free, and half of it is about my personal life.

(01:14:49):
And so it's not free because I see no reason
why you should get to read that without giving me
money to buy food.

Speaker 3 (01:14:57):
But agreed, you all on Wednesday, Margret Buny to buy food.

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):
It's rand read about.

Speaker 3 (01:15:03):
A personal life.

Speaker 1 (01:15:03):
Yeah, I mean, well cool yeah, and we'll be back
on Wednesday. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check
us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(01:15:24):
you get your podcasts.