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

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

Original Air Date: 7.26.23

 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

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

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
Like one of the cool things that I'm doing is
taking an extra week to make sure that this really
big story about neoliberalism and the Zapatistas and all that stuff,
making sure I do it right, and to facilitate me
taking that break, I'm learning a rerun. You probably already

(00:24):
knew that this is part two, but I figured i'd
tell you again anyway. And this is an episode about
the Maganistas, who kind of did the Mexican Revolution before
the Mexican Revolution, and I think they're cool and that
they did cool stuff, which is why I recorded an
episode about them, and I'm playing it again, and here

(00:46):
it is. Hello and Welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff,
which is podcast about history and the people in it
who did good things, usually in the face of bad things,
because that's one of the main things you can do
when there's a dichotomy is take the other side of dichotomy,
and if one side of it is bad, then the
other side is good. I know how words work. I'm

(01:08):
Margaret Kiljoy with me today. It's Kataboo. How are you?

Speaker 3 (01:13):
I'm great?

Speaker 2 (01:13):
How are you? I'm doing pretty good? My dog is outside.
Usually when I record, he's like right behind me. I
was already telling Kath this, but now I'm apparently telling
everyone This's usually he's like right behind me, and every
now and then I like look back and get the
little The major he doesn't have a dog is that
it's a endorphin machine. You just like look at it
and then you're like, oh, you know, do you do that.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
Thing when you look at him? And then he said
out sense is it? And then he just like raises
his head a little bit to be like hey.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, and then he's like oh, and then he puts
his head back down. It's so good.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
Perfect.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
He's a perfect little angel who is probably now scarying
off all the airplanes in the yard because he's learned
that if he barks at airplanes, they fly away, so
he will probably do it till I die. And I'm
glad that I don't have a lot of neighbors and
all my neighbors think that my dog is gigantic and scary,
and I don't actually hate that. I don't hate that

(02:03):
my neighbors think I have a giant, scary dog, even
though I don't. That's what this episode is you just.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Have to see Rendrow space. It's I know, perfect.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
What this dog looks like.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
I love it, handsome, hands I believe it. I believe that.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
He's a if you mixed a muppet and a tiny
German shepherd together.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
That's such a perfect description of Rondraw.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
That sounds like the most perfect being that's ever existed.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
I know. The other one is actually I can see
on screen is Anderson.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
Ye equally perfectly right behind me.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
It's amazing. It's much like how I run across the
perlatives and history, and I'm like, how can all these
different things be the first? I should just think about
it like I think about dogs. All dogs are the
best dog exactly. And uh. Anderson's person is our producer
named Sophie.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
Hi, Sophie, that's my favorite way you've ever introduced me.
Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
Well, it's one of the things you're very good at.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
I hope, so I try really hard.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Also, Ian as our audio engineer, Hi Ian Hi, Ianne him.
Our music was made for us by unwoman. And this week,
you know, like, okay, I say this every Wednesday. Every Wednesday,
I say, go back and listen to Mondays episode because
it won't make any fucking sense. It's like extra true,
I think this time, because you're really coming in the middle,

(03:27):
Like what do you Why do you make the decisions
you do? I mean, I guess anyone can make any
decisions they want is relate to this. It's not hurting
anyone except yourself.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
It's just going to be really confusing because you won't
get all of the awesome backstory and the Louisa shit.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah, Louisa doesn't even come back into the story.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
And exactly do you want to miss out on li Lisa?

Speaker 2 (03:48):
No, Margarita doesn't come back in either.

Speaker 3 (03:52):
Oh my god, you're going to mis sell with Lisa
and Margarita. Ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah, So this week we were talking about the Maganestas,
the peasant and proletarian uprisings that came shortly before and
likely sparked the Mexican Revolution. They're anti leader who wishes
who was the leader, but hates stud he's the leader
and has complicated feelings. Is a grouchy guy named Ricardo
Flores Magone who is about to flee Mexico after going

(04:17):
to jail for like the tenth time. By nineteen oh four.
We gotta have to get out of here. The government
it's probably going to kill us at some point, right,
That is a thing that they do. They have a dictator.
A few of their crew are already in San Antonio,
Texas or Laredo, Texas, depending on your source. Most of
them seem to say San Antonio, including the rich guy

(04:40):
Ariaga and the feminist journal journalist Mendoza who runs vesper, a,
Texas based Mexican poet Sarah Stella Ramirez is there too.
She goes on to become a leader of the resistance.
She's not woven enough into the stories I read, so
I'm just shouting out her name. This is it whatever? Anyway,
everyone knows how bitter I am about this. So that's
where the they went penniless. Ricardo's pants were actually patched

(05:03):
up because he couldn't afford new pants, which as an
anarchist punk who wore black patch pant black patch pants
for most of my twenties when I wasn't wearing dresses,
I'm just really excited about this guy who wears all
black and has patch pants. Also, we're going to see
Ricardo in a dress before the story is through. Oh fuck,

(05:24):
guess they took jobs as farm laborers and dishwashers. They
survived off of the vegetables they gleaned at work. This
is like another thing that like people talk about all
these historic revolutionaries, and some of them like a lot
of just to be rude, A lot of the more
liberal ones would be from upper class backgrounds, right, and
they'll like be revolutionary spased with their family money, which
is a good thing to do, right, But so many

(05:46):
revolutionaries that I read about, like, yeah, this guy crossed
into Texas from Mexico and became and started working as
a day laborer on a farm because that's he had
to fucking eat. Even though he is going to go
on and to change the world, he still has to
fucking eat. And no one's giving him enough money. People
are giving him money to start his newspaper backup, or

(06:08):
giving them money to start their newspaper backup.

Speaker 3 (06:11):
And I know you said that it's illegal for him
to write, is it illegal for people to read?

Speaker 2 (06:19):
It is illegal for him to get it into Mexico. Fortunately,
there's a lot of people who don't care about the law.
Rat So they printed in the United States and then
kind of some of the bravest and people taking the
most risks, and it's not sure there's every level of
risk people are taking. In this story. One of the
crazy brave things that people do is smuggle them back in.

(06:40):
A lot of it is like the train union, right,
They'll be like, oh, yeah, I just put it on
my train and I'll take it in and so it
actually kind of cool. Like, not everyone who's going to
be involved in the social struggle, it's mostly a peasant
and proletarian struggle. Not everyone's literate, but someone on your
work crew probably is. So someone is going around and
going to every fucking hacienda and passing out regeneracy on right,

(07:04):
and then one person who knows how to read is
getting up and reading it to everyone else, which is
absolutely something that people died doing.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
It's incredible.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah, there's like something about the fact that the written
word can actually change the world, but it's not it
changes the world because people use it, you know, like
and people do this other work and everyone is part
of any way whatever a lot goes on for them
in the US. This easily could have been a four parter. More,

(07:34):
I want to focus a bit less on the liberal
leaders in exile than what the Maganese does themselves, besides
mcgonnard doing so to fast forward. The liberal leaders in Texas,
they have a lot of arguments about being moderate or radical,
liberal or anarchist. They are working tirelessly for revolution. They
fight off assassins, they get arrested for fighting off their
own assassin. At one point they move from Texas to

(07:56):
Saint Louis to get away from the assassins. Then they
have to move to Toronto, and because the US government
is after them, then the Canadian government's like, we're going
to fucking get you. So then they go back to
Los Angeles. The presidents and police of two countries and
the fucking Pinkertons are hunting them.

Speaker 3 (08:12):
And this is like early nineteen hundred. So they're taking
like slow ash trains.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, Jesus, it's over and over again. They're like Ricardo,
while he's living in Montreal, is in a meeting in
El Paso and like, Okay, that's really far. Yeah, And
they form an organization called the PLM, the Partito Liberal

(08:38):
and Mexican, the Mexican Liberal Party. In nineteen oh six,
they release a platform which is basically that they're saying like, hey,
this is the plan, right, this is what we're going
to do when we overthrow this fuck. And this is
a compromise position. It is a compromise position between the
radicals and the moderates. And really, interestingly, and I think importantly,
it wasn't the mcgon brother Is there anyone else sitting

(09:01):
down and going this is what I want? They actually
like corresponded illegally with like thousands of people in Mexico.
They were getting hundreds of letters a day. The US
Mail confiscated over four thousand letters in the end, right,
And they basically were like, what do you want? Right?
This is a democratic thing, right, what is our revolutionary program?

(09:21):
And they put it all together into one document, and it,
as far as I can tell, came out of the
will of the Mexican revolutionary folks. This is often seen
as the most important document in Mexican revolution. There would
go with the superlatives. The books I read said it
was the most important document in Mexican revolution. And basically
all the water down liberal reformers who come after pick

(09:42):
and choose pieces of it. Ever since, the mcgon brothers
go the opposite way and decide this is not radical enough.
The current Mexican Constitution borrows heavily from this document because
the leader of the group that drafted the nineteen seventeen
constitution had actually started his work writing as a Maganesta

(10:03):
and it which is just like if you imagine like
the founding fathers were all like actually radical, you know, yeah, Okay,
this document it wanted to curb the powers of the
executive branch. It wanted to limit presidency to four years
with no possibility of re election, which has been a
big issue for like almost one hundred years at this point.

(10:23):
No more military tribunals, no more compulsory military service. Replace
prisons with agricultural penal colonies, no more death penalty. Women
are equal to men in all regards. Free and universal
secular education for children, free speech, free press, eight hour workday,
minimum wage, pensions for every job. No child labor unions
are encouraged. Restore the land to indigenous communities, seize giant landholdings,

(10:48):
and distribute the land fairly among the peasants. And Mexican
citizenship is mandatory for land ownership because so much of
Mexico is owned by foreign business investments. This sounds great,
It was. It had one one fatal flaw.

Speaker 3 (11:04):
What's that?

Speaker 2 (11:05):
The fatal flaw that afflicts the nineteenth and early twentieth
century labor union almost everywhere you look. Sophie's giving me
the look because it came up in the last fucking
episode we did about Irish miners racism.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
God damn it.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
In a this differs wildly from mcgone, the Maganestas and
the PM's later politics, and likely mcgon's politics at the time.
But he also puts it in, so I'm not well
he the party puts it in. It calls to bar
Chinese immigration because Chinese workers work for less money than
Mexican workers or whatever. This is the like fucking lie

(11:43):
that gets told to workers goddamn everywhere.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
About get everyone fair wages. Yeah, I mean it's like
the EPs workers, how the RC phone strike for part timers,
Like that's awesome. Yeah, yeah, you know racist, you can
everyone should just be able to live. Yeah, I know,
it's crazy.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
But WHOA, I don't know about all that. Yeah later
mcgone and the PLM and stuff like right about how
fucked up this is? The worker's movement knows no borders
and no nationality and is basically trying to move away
from a nationalism that had infused the liberal movement, but
it is absolutely there at the time. The same year,

(12:24):
in nineteen oh six, a new wave of uprising starts,
and this particularly starts among miners in the border towns.
The miners had it really fucking bad. They were paid
in pesos but forced to buy things in dollars. The
workers were Mexican, their bosses were estato and a dentis
like from the US. I hate that there's no English
word for this besides American, which fucking sucks everywhere else

(12:46):
in the Western hemisphere is a word for this for US,
which makes sense. Maybe we could just use a Yankee.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
That's the word that ringo. Yeah, I mean that means foreigner.

Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yeah, I wonder. I literally just don't know. I wonder.
You know, in the USA mostly run across gringo having
the connotation of specifically white foreigner. But also this is
absolutely true in this case, right, It is not just
that the people are from the United States, but there
are white people from the United States. Yeah. The miners
are literally not getting paid enough to survive. They go

(13:18):
into debt into the company's store. They're literally like buying
shit with money that has like their boss's face printed
on it.

Speaker 3 (13:28):
Cool. Yeah, fun.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
Wouldn't it be so much fun? It'd be like fun money,
you know, Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
Yeah, it's like, you know, just get a box of
Monopoly and turn it upside down and say, all right,
try to buy things with this.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeah, like I get paid in dragon Bucks now, but
it has Anderson on it, so I feel good about it.

Speaker 3 (13:49):
Anxiety.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah, when they die their children inherit their debt.

Speaker 3 (13:58):
Cool. Fun.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah. Dead slavery is like actually a thing. It's different
than chattel slavery, but it's fucking real. So they go
on strike. It's likely that the PLM and also a
radical anti racist US miners union called the Western Federation
of Miners help get this strike going, but they all,
like everyone's either like taking credit or denying that they
had anything to do with the strike, right, depending on

(14:24):
whether how they want to look. So some folks say
it was a wildcat strike. Either way, the people who
did it were the workers, whether they were organized from
outside or not. On June first, nineteen oh six, two
thousand workers go on strike. The boss whose money is
on their paper is a rare bad quaker. On this show.

(14:45):
Usually the Quakers come in hard. Yeah, yeah, especially during
an abolition in the US times, I guess some of
the only white people doing any fucking good. This particular
guy happened to be Quaker and happened be a piece
of shit, so he was like but he was very like, hey,
like I pay you better than anyone else, which is
like true, but it's still not enough to eat, you know.

(15:08):
And also he's friends with Diaz, so he's able to
skirt even more labor laws than the other people are.

Speaker 3 (15:13):
And Diaz is still in power.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah, Diaz is still in power until nineteen ten, nineteen eleven,
And so he asks, yeah, because he's been in power
for thirty fucking years at this point. So he's like,
I'm cool. I'll just show up and everyone will like
listen to me. And so he's like, hey, could you
give meet your demands in writing? And so they sit
there and they write down their demands and writing, and
he takes them and then he he politely writes them
back a letter refusing every single one of their demands,

(15:36):
and in the meantime, cool Boss has gone to the
local stores and bought every single gun and given them
to all the white people working for him all the manager.

Speaker 3 (15:47):
That's just like every flaker, would I know.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
So the worker stage a walkout. A white manager starts
shooting at them, kills three miners, so they stab him
to death with a candlestick.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
That's such a slow way to die, being stabbed to
death with the candles.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
I think it might be the holder that it's like
the miners go into the.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
Imagine it's the wax and thread and they're just like
really going at it.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
Yeah, I wouldn't fucking mind. In this case, the manager's
brother starts shooting them at Okay, I mean to be fair,
they just killed his brother, but his brother just killed
a bunch of whatever anyway, So he dies with a
candlestick in the back too. I feel like this is
a game of clue. And then they burned the place down.
They dynamite all the company property. They've been preparing for this. Actually,
there's like at some point I think the guy the

(16:35):
reason the owner goes and buys the guns is they're like,
someone's like, yo, dynamite's missing. That's probably bad, you know, like, yeah,
you're starving everyone to death. Anyway, So they're shooting the
they is bad. Federal troops come in. In the end,
two hundred workers are dead and twenty thousand people get arrested,
which is a scale that I can't really fathom.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
I don't understand how you arrest twenty thousand people. Where
do you put them?

Speaker 2 (17:02):
I don't fucking know.

Speaker 3 (17:04):
That's insane.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yeah, only one of the sources I read gave the
number of arrestees, so I don't have like a lower
number from a different source.

Speaker 3 (17:13):
Either way, A shit done.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
Yeah. Meanwhile, elsewhere, the Yaqui people are rebelling against the
theft of their lands, and when they're arrested, they're not killed,
well often they're killed. If they're not killed, they're sent
to labor plantations and the jungles, far from their homes.
And so the PLM they're getting fucking ready for revolution.
They've got forty to seventy cells across the country and

(17:35):
in the borderlands. A lot of the cells are in
US border towns, and their plan is to start all
the uprisings at once on one day, September twenty fourth,
nineteen oh six. They're coordinating all of this across the
border by mail, which was not Frankly, that wasn't the
right way to do it. Everyone figured out what they

(17:55):
were up to. So cells start getting raided in the
US and they find all the explosives and guns.

Speaker 3 (18:02):
Is the US rating these cells, like New Mexico.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yeah, the US police are doing it a lot of it.
The Texas Rangers are kind of like the pre border
patrol Border patrol, and they're doing a lot of it
as well. Sorry, yeah, I actually I hold you responsible
for this.

Speaker 3 (18:23):
It's all me. It's all on me. I'm so sorry everyone.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
Yeah, fortunately you you weren't able to stop the rebels,
especially those in Mexico. They kind of have nothing to lose, right,
The people in the US, they're a little bit safer, right,
Like the US is a really shitty and racist place.
Only then things are magic and fixed.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
Now, yeah, things are good.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah, that's why every couple of years we have to
make things fixed permanently again by having some uprisings. So
some folks just fucking go, even though it's like been
found out and they're like probably going to lose, They're like,
we're fucking doing this. Insurgents in northern Mexico apprehend the

(19:10):
mayor of their town and the treasurer and the trash
the tax collector of Yumenis, they flee when the soldiers
are mobilized against them. In Vera Cruz, two hundred rebels
attack the city of Achaiakon, only to be driven off.
In Pajupan, they imprisoned city officials and appointed new ones,
but then they ran out of ammunition and fled federal

(19:31):
troops and so on and so on. Just across the country,
liberals or anarchists or whatever, and indigenous folks and other
people start taking officials hostage. They lose. Most of the
leaders are executed. Retributions are made against indigenous villages, as

(19:51):
we've already proven from earlier that is like one way
they do it, as they just kill everyone in a
town and set it on fire. An elderly Mexico City
city edit of an affiliated paper was beaten to death
during his arrest, so everyone gave up. In Portfolio, Diaz
is still empowered to day, or everyone kept going. In

(20:13):
December nineteen oh six, the textile workers went back on
strike because textile workers fucking love striking. The company tried
to starve them out, which of course wouldn't happen now.
No companies just see their union striking and be like,
we care about them. They wouldn't cut all the trees
in Los Angeles to try.

Speaker 3 (20:30):
It's just about to say, yeah, what an insane thing
to do like that. That's just no why did they
do that?

Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, just like they're like, hey, let's get some bad
pr for basically no reason you want to do that?

Speaker 3 (20:44):
Like that is like and that's like a movie villain
thing today, like a really bad movie to be like,
oh my workers are striking, Let's cut the leaves off
the trees, you know, not just cut down that, like,
don't even cut down the trees, just cut all the
leaves off.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
It's like Disney level villain level.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
Ev Yes, it's like Disney knockoff, like when those shitty
like kids studios try to make like a you know,
Gratitude knockoff or whatever.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
The villain's like comically bad, which I guess makes sense
that it's that without their writers. It's people who make
movies trying to come up with something clever to do.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
They're asking AI, They're like, how do we sound that
to our strikers, and then chat GVT is like cut
all the leaves off. Oh my god, that's probably what happened.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
That's probably what happened. Right you and know what else
is controlled algorithmically tell me the ads that people are
about to listen to, unless they're on Cooler Zone Media,
in which case the only ad you listened to was
me advertising Cooler Zone Media. Here's some ads, and we're

(21:54):
back the textile workers. They want to their company is
going to starve them out. However, instead, people from all
over the country send them money because people are like,
now we support the textile workers. Fuck yeah. So the

(22:16):
owners just shut down all the factories in the area
just to just to defeat the union. They're like, find
no one gets anything, basically, and because they've been sent
all this money, the workers are like, well I have
at least I have enough to eat. So in Rio
Blanca Blanco, a company store refuses to sell striking worker food.
Guys like, I got money.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
We'll get money either way. Like you get money if
you just pay people a living wage, you still get
Now you're getting no money.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
I know you can their surplus value.

Speaker 3 (22:46):
I know you can still get money by selling people food.
You're getting no money by doing this. You are so
bad at owning a business.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
One money or zero money.

Speaker 3 (22:58):
I'd rather have one money if I was a goulish
cartoon character that wants to starve workers. I would still
like at least one money.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
Yeah. Well, in the end, the store owner gets nothing
because they looted the store and burned it down buckets.
Then they went and said everyone free at the local jail.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
Hell yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
And so the rebels their maganese does and they're not subtle.
The editor of their newspaper of the local, the Textile
Worker newspaper, said, when we run into difficulties with management,
we shall strike, and if the strike is not successful,
we shall turn to dynamite and revolution. Soon that particular
editor was on the run I believe had to move
to the United States for saying that the dictatorship freaked

(23:40):
the fuck out about this textile thing. Men, women and
children is a quote sorry from author Hernandez Padia. Men,
women and children were pulled from their homes and executed
in the barracks. Those able to flee were later captured
and killed. Meanwhile, management at the Rio Blanco mill raised

(24:00):
their champagne filled glasses and in unison honored General Martinez
with a toast. They celebrated the massacre. Yeah, it's a.

Speaker 3 (24:11):
Do you're celebrating kids being slaughdered, and at no point,
you're not like, oh wow, am I the bad guy here?

Speaker 2 (24:16):
Yeah? Well, they said, are we the baddies? But then
they looked at their Sorry, I don't know if I can.

Speaker 3 (24:21):
They were like, yeah, we're thick, We're good.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah. Meanwhile in the US, a lot of the labor
union in the US is trying to support this. To
the goth Irish socialist Mother Jones, she probably didn't identify
as a goth. She was just a woman who wore
black mourning clothes all the time. So she was a
goth because we've always been here, much like trans people

(24:44):
have always been here, Goths always been here. Mother Jones.
We talked about her in her black dresses and her
tough as fuck labor organizing in the Blair Blair Mountain episode.
She liked to cuss, She liked to hang out with
real rowdy boys with revolvers, and she fights against the
repression of the Maganestas in the US and alongside the

(25:06):
rest of the US labor movement, and she puts political
pressure on governments to get rebels freed from US jails.
She successfully frees at least one of the sort of
the liberal editors who are in the US who are
writing not Magone but another one. She goes on a
speaking tour around the country about the struggle of the PLM.
Labor unions raise thousands of dollars. The minor unions in
particular a supportive since many of their members are Mexican

(25:28):
or Mexican American themselves, and basically there's just dozens of
groups all over the US working to support the PLM.
They keep trying to catch Ricardo Flores Magone. I was
not to say you can't catch him, but he's been.
He gets caught like eighteen times in his life. But
they fail a lot too. He keeps escaping out windows
and shit because he's pretty sure if they catch him.

(25:50):
At this point he's one hundred percent going to Mexico
and getting executed. He is a twenty thousand dollars bounty
on his head. There are scores of private detectives after
him from multiple agencies. So he flees from Los Angeles
by resorting to the old standby. He dresses as a
woman and moves to San Francisco. Yes, yeah, the real

(26:11):
question is whether he kept the mustache when he did
that or not.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
I hope to that he did. It's an impressive mustache.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
It is. It is. He doesn't stop organizing mlon the run.
I don't know what happened with his family at this point.
He has a common law wife at this point, and
they agreed upon basically they're both anarchists, and they both
believe in the sort of anarchist feminist principle at the
time of being against the formal institution of marriage. So
they're common law married, and he adopts her daughter as

(26:39):
his own, and they stay tight the rest of his life,
which is like a good turn. Usually when we have
like a self obsessed man who's like grouchy when he
doesn't get his way and is like a radical, he's
also just like a misogynist piece of shit, right mcgon
Ricardo flour Is mcgon is like interesting. He clearly believe it,
believes and writes in a lot of feminist principles. And

(26:59):
one of the things that I ran across at one
point was that the other like Broie guys he's hanging
out with, won't crack certain jokes around him. And it
doesn't quite say what jokes, but I think it's misogynist
jokes that he's just like won't fucking put up with.
So he's like mostly really he is better than everyone
else around him who are men, but he also like

(27:20):
is some of his earlier a lot of his articles
are like women should support the revolution by supporting their
men or whatever at various points, like really boring shit too,
at various points, so whatever, But usually I talk about
these people and then they're like, wife and kids fucking
hate them because they're like, these people treated me like shit.
He his wife and his daughter like him and help

(27:42):
fight for him, so they.

Speaker 3 (27:43):
Both like him, Like you don't. Just I really love
like a curmudgeon who is a wife guy, you know,
like he hates everyone except like three people. That's like
a an archetype. I really enjoy. Yeah, and I'm glad
that you know, he has a wife and daughter who
love him. Yeah, I yeah, just very at least tolerate

(28:04):
him and speak positively.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah, and like actively like fight campaign to get him
out of jail multiple times, choose to continue to live
with him, have no legal bounds to him, and continue
to do all of these things, you know, Like, yeah,
so the Maganest does they decide they're going to try
their nineteen oh six plan again, only in nineteen oh eight.

(28:26):
They don't really actually change that much about the plant.

Speaker 3 (28:30):
Do they still do it by mail?

Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, that's the problem. That is, there is more time
for more people to get armed and organized, and their
messaging is getting less subtle and more radical. They're basically like, well, okay,
here's a quote. We do not fight for abstractions, but
from material realities. We want land for everyone, for everyone bred.
Insofar as blood must necessarily flow, it will be so

(28:55):
that the conquest we secure will benefit everyone and not
just a certain social cast. Macgon can't lead this one.
He's back in jail. He's a lost track of why
he gets rested in nineteen oh seven, but he gets
rested in nineteen oh seven. He isn't freedom next freed
until until nineteen ten. He keeps trying to be in

(29:15):
charge from jail, but basically people are doing it without him,
and I don't know there's still a floor as Magon involved.
Enrique is throwing down in running papers. Ricardo is writing
fiery shit in prison, which he's really fucking good at.
I think he's better at that than he is running things, honestly,
and the way he gets his stuff that he writes
in prison out is that he sews paper into his

(29:38):
underwear and then passes on to his lawyers to smuggle out.
And the nineteen oh eight uprising was more organized than
the previous one. There's sixty groups in the US and Mexico.
They're planning action. They divide Mexico into five different parts
where make sure that everywhere gets hit. Each group develops
its own plan of attack and gathers its own weapon
and fighters. But delegates carry message. Actually huh, I'm like, oh, yeah,

(30:02):
it's totally by mail. But now I'm reading this and
I'm like, I think maybe it wasn't as much by mail,
possibly because of occamas and jail, because you have delegates
going carrying messages between groups and giving talks. Basically, like
they're like going around given talks being like, hey, we're
gonna have a revolution next month, y'all should do it.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
Hey, yeah, we'll send the ABDI.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
And one of the things that they do is they
actually write two groups, and one of it works really
well and one of it works really badly. They write
to all of the indigenous allies that they've worked with
and all of the other and basically they're like, hey,
y'all down, we're gonna fucking overthrow this government. You want
to help overthrow this government, We'll make sure everything goes good.
And that went really well. They also sent letters to

(30:44):
all the army of Mexico and we're like, hey, we're
like of the people. You're probably a conscript. We're actually
fighting for good shit. You should come join us. This
mostly just leads to like really easy infiltration because someone
like a bunch officers show up and they're like, oh yeah,
we're like to like with you. What's the plan again? Yeah,

(31:04):
several cells get busted this way.

Speaker 3 (31:08):
As many as like last time, or if you were.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
I'm not sure. More uprisings do happen, but I don't
know the like percent of people who get busted ahead
of time. I only read about one particular bust ahead
of time, so I'm actually guessing fewer, but I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 (31:22):
Awesome.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
One of the letters Ricardo had smuggled out was to
his brother and it explained, okay, so they're moving more
from liberal to anarchist at this point right overall, both
in terms of their ideology and their strategy and but
not what they're saying. They are still the Liberal Party right,
and Ricardo smuggles out a letter that basically says the

(31:45):
revolution has to be anarchist in nature, and he's like,
the reason is because revolutions are always betrayed by leaders
in bourgeois pressures that co opt and corrupt the will
of the people, which happens in the nineteen ten revolution.
So he's right about that. But then he says, they
should still call themselves liberals and just act like anarchists
and state their aims, which were anarchists, but they should

(32:07):
disguise their true goal.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
Right.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
This gets argued about about whether or not this worked
for them. Some people are like, the reason it worked
as well as it did is because of this. Other
people are like, it actually kind of fucked them up
because it forestalled a bunch of rifts that were going
to happen, and so then instead the rifts happened during
like a worse time, right, and it underestimated the radical

(32:33):
will of the revolutionaries. I don't fucking know. I don't
know what was right here. I have a honesty thing
where I think you should just be about what you're about.
But I also have a thing where being ideologically stubborn
doesn't necessarily make anyone good, and so.

Speaker 3 (32:52):
People don't know that they actually identify with the different
ideology because the word's scary.

Speaker 2 (32:56):
Yeah. Absolutely, And it's been decades since. They're like an
anarchist tradition in Mexico of large size and things like that.
You know, Yeah, I don't fucking know they did what
they did. So in nineteen oh eight, both sides are
getting ready. When you go around and give talks like

(33:16):
we're gonna have a revolution on the following day, it's
not a good way to keep things undercover.

Speaker 1 (33:21):
Right.

Speaker 2 (33:21):
Troops are stationed on the border. Political officials go into hiding.
This is like such a good winning moment, like even
if you fail at your shit, if everyone was like,
oh fuck, it's like when Trump had to go hide
in his bunker, you know. Yeah, the Northern States go
under martial law and hundreds of PLM activists are arrested

(33:43):
and murdered. The US hates them too. They absolutely threaten
US interests in Mexico and even US interests at home. Basically,
the fears that of Mexico turns into a worker's paradise,
it'll stop exporting cheap labor. So one of the very
first things that the precursor to the FBI, the Bureau Investigation.
One of the very first things they do in their
history is attack the PLM, like go after the PLM,

(34:05):
keep track of them, try and bring down their leaders,
all of that stuff. The Alpaso cell was the main
one I know about getting raided in particular. It was huge.
It was two hundred to eight hundred people. But this
one didn't get caught by any other means except their
neighbors were like, you know, these people are a lot

(34:26):
of like crates and shit in their yard. It's kind
of weird. So they called the cops, and yeah, so
the nimbi's brought down. I mean, the NIMBI is probably
proud of shit of themselves because they they find bombs
and guns and like maps to all the like banks
in the town in northern Mexico where they're gonna go

(34:46):
with like.

Speaker 3 (34:48):
No one likes a snitch. Yeah, come on, guys.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
Yeah. So once again the oppression mostly works but doesn't.
At the same time, in Viesca, two hundred pl fighters
women and men rose up. They take over the palace,
They bomb the house of the district boss. District bosses
are these like the political cronies of Diaz who oversee
all of the different things in a region. Right, they're

(35:12):
just like the fucking symbol of corruption. They go and
they free all the prisoners in the jail. They take
over the town and they set up their platform, which
is the anarchism disguised as liberalism. They march off to
the next town. They're scattered by federal troops. In akiyucn Akiukan,
a city in southeast Mexico, the PLM did the same thing.

(35:34):
They empty a jail, they declare the liberal program and
that the dictatorship was dead. There's only one exchange of
gunfire in this particular time with some cops. One revolutionary
was injured, one cop was killed. In the end, they're
dispersed one fight near the border. So one of the
other things I kind of cut through it in the
fast forwarding when they were like hanging out in the US,
they make friends with the IWW, the Industrial Workers of

(35:56):
the World, who are like, if you end up doing
shows about the US and the nineteen tens and twenties,
you're gonna like the IWW because they're fucking everywhere and
they're doing everything cool. They are like the ones who
just like put a nail in. Well, okay, other people
became racist and with labor unions later, but they were
the ones who were like, fuck racist labor organizing that

(36:19):
is some fucking bullshit, and like really actively worked with
a lot of different immigrant communities and not just ethnic
whites like previous Anyway, whatever, I like them. They are
a big part of They're like thrown down with the
maganeste As left and right, and they're like, all right,
we'll fucking help you invade Mexico whatever, like so far
of the same struggle, right and this. I think that

(36:39):
they were in this one border town because I think
it's Les Vacas that I don't remember. I didn't write
into the fucking script. I think the IWW threw down
because one poet later describing it talks about a blonde
guy who's fighting for the anarchists, who takes a bullet
and the thigh, the shin in the shoulder and keeps fighting.
It's hot, yeah, you know, it makes me happy for

(37:04):
the inner like international solidarity and the guy who takes
three bullets and it's just like you, fuck it, I'm aragorn.
You can't fucking see dude.

Speaker 3 (37:12):
Yeah, good for you, dude.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, it's like Yellen and German He's like, what the fuck.
And everywhere they did this, people took note of the
fact that these rebels, compared to a lot of other
rebels in history, that they were all pretty used to.
They didn't rob or steal, and so they had the
people's support. They would I mean they would, like I

(37:35):
think they would rob banks, right, but they wouldn't like
take money from people. This all there's more fighting overall
the uprising. It fails, and no small part because the
Pinkertons in the US government doing all their investigations and shit.
So I think nineteen o nine, shortly after this, there's

(37:55):
one indigenous Myo guy. His name is Fernando Polmaz and
he's like, well, we have a problem. Why don't we
go for the most direct solution that we can think
of for the problem of this dictator. So he waited
for Portfolio Das to give a public appearance and then
he shot him.

Speaker 3 (38:15):
But uh oh, yeah, we know how he does.

Speaker 2 (38:19):
I know he did. He was wearing a bulletproof vest.
They had those in like nineteen twenty apparently ridiculous, I know,
And the crowd had the assassin's back. And this is
the first time whenever in the show someone like goes
up and tries to kill Azar or whatever, the crowd
is like fuck you and tries to kill the assassin.

(38:41):
Right now, people fucking hate Diaz. The crowd who was
there to see Diaz speak help his would be assassin
get away safely.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
That's so embarrassing for him, I know.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
You know, it's kind of just like it was a draw,
you know, both people got away. And in nineteen ten,
Ricardo gets out of prison alongside a bunch of other
PLM folks in I think Los Angeles, and they are
met with crowds throwing flowers and cheering, and so he's

(39:15):
Ricardo Flora's mccon so immediately just goes back to chainsmoking
and sitting over a typewriter where General Sion is becoming internationalists.
They now have an English language page is eventually, and
it's funny because like the Spanish language part of it
for a long time, eventually it balances out. For a
long time, the Spanish language part is like, we're going
to fucking overthrow this shit. We're going to redistribute the lands.
There is gonna be full fucking socialism is going to

(39:36):
fucking rule. And the English paper is like us good
liberals wish to see more democracy in Mexico, your neighbor.

Speaker 3 (39:48):
But then it's crazy that like he had flowers throw
an irons should in like la and I've never heard
of this guy. Yeah, yeah, I mean like he had
this much investment in like US labor movements.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah, US labor movement and US and Mexican American rights,
which is later what he ends up fighting for a
lot too. And yeah, no is people are bad at memory,
which is why if they take these Do we sell
memory pills? Sophie?

Speaker 3 (40:19):
Oh, what about dick pills?

Speaker 2 (40:21):
Do we sell dick pills? Sometimes? More or less?

Speaker 1 (40:25):
Is that the occasionally?

Speaker 2 (40:27):
Do we sell titty skills? Does anyone advertise estrogen on
this show?

Speaker 1 (40:32):
I feel like we got offered something for that at
one point, but I don't know if it actually happened.
I don't care. I try to not know as much
about our ads.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
That's that's fair. Well, let's refer to one of our
old standbys. This show is sponsored by the idea of
not talking to cops. If you're arrested, you just want
to talk to a lawyer, not a cop. Talking to
a cop won't make your case better. Talking to a
lawyer might. And then it also purchased shit. I guess

(41:06):
it doesn't actually impact us one way or the other,
whether or not you.

Speaker 1 (41:09):
Do like a gift for your lawyer that teaches you
to shut the fuck up and not talk to cops.

Speaker 2 (41:14):
Yeah, especially if we're sponsored by Flowers. I like Flowers.

Speaker 3 (41:19):
Yeah, that was nice.

Speaker 2 (41:22):
Thanks, here's some ads and we're back. So they've started
their newspaper backup, running it out of la They have
a new slogan at Tierra Libertad, Land and Liberty, which
they got from friends of the pod. The Russian Neurodniks

(41:42):
were early socialists and nihilis and Russia who left the
cities to go organize agrarian communities. Later, he passes on
this slogan to Emiliano Zapada and it becomes one of
the main slogans of the Mexican Revolution. But more importantly
than newspapers and slogans, there's now a revolution. It's full scale.

(42:03):
It's in Mexico. A guy named Madero who could have
been in this story like eight times earlier, but I
kept cutting him out because Eventually I'm going to do
a Mexican Revolution episode and he'll be all over it
as the almost good guy but kind of not. He
used to support mcgon when mcgon was more of a liberal,
but now mcgon's gone further left and Madero has gone

(42:24):
further to center. Madero ran for president in nineteen ten.
He was arrested. He lost a rigged election, so he
escaped from prison, goes to the US, calls for a revolution,
and basically he actually wants the liberal reforms in kind
of a century way, but he's pretty genuine about what

(42:44):
he wants. Madero writes the anarchists, begging for their support,
and mcgon responds by writing an essay like publishing an
essay titled Madero is a Trader to the Cause of Liberty.
We are now entering mcgon's curmudgeonally fuck stage, where he
is mad that no one is his radicals and now

(43:06):
that the revolution is happening, which fair, I mean he
fucking him and his friends laid the groundwork and then
saw it not be what it could have been. But
the PLM, which is more and more openly anarchist, they
don't just sit the Mexican Revolution out the Mexican Revolution

(43:28):
fought by several different armies working more or less on
the same side, but like not and actually they end
up in fighting each other. It's a whole fucking thing.
So the PLM is like, all right, well, our big
thing is that we invade Mexico from northern from Texas
and then try and set everyone free. So they played
their strengths and they try to invade Chihuahua State in

(43:49):
northern Mexico, just to get a sense of when I
say land distribution was unequal in Mexico during this time,
the governor of Chihuahua was a banker who personally owned
two million acres of land. He also owned the main
bank in the area. His family owned seventy million acres.

(44:10):
They're just for a sense of scale, because that's a
number that just doesn't make any sense to me. There
are only seven states in the US with more than
seventy million acres total. Like this is like if I
don't know one guy owned Nevada.

Speaker 3 (44:29):
Wow, which is about that's so much for one guy
to own.

Speaker 2 (44:33):
I don't think he's just going to use it. I
don't think he's going to use it all.

Speaker 3 (44:36):
I just don't think you can use seventy million acres.
And I know that's controversial, but I really, I really
think that.

Speaker 1 (44:43):
Can you imagine that water bill.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
Especially if it's Nevada, right, Jesus, Yeah, you'd have an
army instead. Okay. Also, this extended family owns the railroads,
the mines, the mills, the sugar refineries, the breweries, the granaries,
the meat packing plants, and telephone companies of Chihuahua. Cool
so crony state. Right, So the PLM is like, all right,

(45:10):
we're going to pad Juaha, I'm free. But they're already
past their prime at this point nineteen oh eight. They
don't recover from it. Hundreds or thousands of them have
been murdered already. Their leadership or anti leadership or whatever
was still in exile. Macgone never comes to the front.
He stays in the US, coordinating and writing. I don't

(45:31):
think this was cowardice, because nothing he can do is safe, right,
But I don't know. The best I read was basically
people were like, he didn't fancy himself a general or
like a revolutionary leader, right, But a lot of people
are like, if he had showed up, the people who
are following his ideas would have probably probably more people

(45:53):
would have fought whatever. Maybe if he had led it
all at all, would have gone horribly bad because he's
not fucking general. The PLM march on Shiuawa. They're coming
from Texas. Their military leader at this point is a
guy named Guierto who had been writing for Regeneracy on
as far as, and he's might be the actual source
of the quote it's better to die in your feet

(46:14):
than live on your knees. It gets attributed to Zapata,
but Guierto wrote an essay under that name before Sapata
even really came on the scene. Later, FDR uses this
quote it might just come from an ancient Greek anyway.
I really have always liked this quote. So that's why
I'm like, got really excited about It's a great quote,
kying to source it one time Gietto when when US

(46:35):
cops tried to arrest him, he escaped out his bedroom
window on a rope made out of sheets tied together.
And I love how much weird fucking wacky shit actually happens.

Speaker 3 (46:43):
In history, some cartoon shit.

Speaker 1 (46:46):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
Yeah, So they invade, they commandeer trains, they blow up bridges,
they recruit soldiers as they go. They go and they
liberate towns. The residents join their cause. When I say invade,
it's like worth pointing out that it's like the people
who live in how we're happy about this? The only
people who are unhappy about other people control it right in.
The Federal Army counter attacks and they drive the PLM

(47:08):
out and Guerto is killed. He dies on his feet
rather than living on his knees. I really liked him.
The PLM failed, so then they did the last militant
thing they did. They tried to take over Baja California.
They picked it because it's sparsely populated and almost all

(47:29):
the industry was owned by foreign assholes. The goal was
to turn it into a libertarian, socialist region with equal
access to the means of production, redistribute all the land
of the peasants, all that good stuff. Over the course
of four months, the Mexican anarchists, alongside the Tarahuma people,
Italian and Spanish anarchists, some soldiers of fortune who turn
out to be really shitty, like just bad people, and

(47:52):
comrades from the IWW in the US who don't suck.
They take control first of MEXICALI Los Agadonas to Caste
and Tijuana one after the other, and they institute libertarian
socialism and they're like to each according to their ability,
from each according to their ability, to each according to need.
But they're defeated. And they're defeated because at this point

(48:17):
Madero has taken over, Like Madero wins Ouse Dias. And
one of the first things that Madero does is he
puts down the PLM, and he's like, I can't take
my revolutionary army, my usual the one that just won
me the revolution, because they like the PLM and if

(48:37):
I take them, they'll probably all switch sides on me.
So instead he uses the federal troops, like the army
he just beat. He takes them. He marches up to
Baja California, and he puts down the rebellious workers in
Baja California who are trying to live free. He's supported
by the US government when he does this, And this
is like one of the most common tropes I ever

(48:58):
run across in history. A bunch of like actually radical
folks and anarchists and peasants and workers run to the
front lines and start the revolution. Then more moderate forces
conspire with literally theirs sensible enemy to put them down,
and they use the same excuse that they always use.
They call the PLM bandits. This is why I don't
like Madero. This is why mcgon doesn't like Madero. Madero

(49:23):
goes on. The recuperation of the of the PLM starts immediately.
Madero goes on to claim that he was working outside
with sorry that he was working with the PLM. At
one point he spreads a rumor that Magon is his
vice president. And he does this, it wins over a
ton of the PLM fighters who come and join his armies. Right,

(49:46):
and this is where having weighted to show your hand
about being a radical kind of fucks Magon and the
maganeseism the PLM over. Because he had waited so long
to make it clear the difference between the PLM and
the moderates, people had no reason to doubt Madero. When
Madero is like, oh, no, they're with us, because they
don't have a way of knowing that they just all

(50:06):
got murdered by Madero. Yeah, the moderate sides to the US.
This is the kind of the sad part of the
story where it all goes to shit. That's always happens
on cool people who did cool stuff. Every story is
a tragedy if you don't know when to stop telling it.
The moderate part of the US Labor Movement they take
Madero's side in the split. Mother Jones calls mcgonn a

(50:27):
fanatic and drops her support because he won't play nice
with Madero. And she's right that he was a zealot. Right,
and at this point he is casting aside everyone who
disagrees with him. He is moody as fuck. He demands
that he gets his way. The revolution slips away from him,
and he lashes out at friend after friend, and he
pushes them away at one point. I think after this

(50:48):
he ends up even pushing away his remaining brothers. Were
both of his brothers. It's probably for the best that
he was a zealot for an anti authoritarian cause, because
that kind of zelotry cannot just negatively impact a movement.
His did has absolutely negatively impacted the movement, but it
can also cause people with power to kill everyone they
disagree with, and he never did that. He cast people aside,

(51:11):
but he did not do what almost every other revolutionary
leader does at this stage. Right, only the syndicalist IWW
and the anarchists in the US labor movement and the
anarchists in Mexico support the PLM. Still most of them
are still pretty fucking mad at Macgone because he stayed
in the US the whole time, right, and he wasn't

(51:31):
like in the shit. The Mexican Revolution continued, But today's
the story of the maganest does. And to close up
on Magone himself, he was arrested again, then he was
set free, then he was arrested again once when he
was out. The sort of revolutionary government in Mexico because
like Madero gets killed and then someone else comes in power,
and someone comes in power whatever, fucking the sort of

(51:54):
revolutionary government in Mexico was like, look, you did a lot.
Do you want a pension? You can come back to
Mexico and will take care of you. Mcgonne is too
fucking stubborn or maybe two principal depends on you look
at it. His quote is thanks, but no, all money
the state has was stolen from the workers. He says
that the money will only burn my hands and fill

(52:15):
my heart with remorse.

Speaker 3 (52:17):
Okay, good point.

Speaker 2 (52:18):
Yeah, And he gets a few years of peace. He
and his wife and his daughter as well as his
brother Enrique, and a bunch of other anarchists and several
other families. They buy like five or six acres in
Los Angeles and they farm, and they're like poor ast shit.
They scrape together enough money for like a shitty printing press.

(52:38):
They put regeneracy on back in but there's like no
one buying it anymore. PLM's fucking over. But he he
writes plays, He writes children's stories, He travels around speaking
about the Mexican Revolution and anarchism. He writes articles to
crying the treatment of Mexican Americans at the border. He
also prophetically warns that without internationalist revolution, USND is going

(53:00):
to move to Mexico, destroy the economy in Mexico, forcing
immigrants from Mexico into the US.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
Hit that one on the head.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
Yeah, and soon enough he goes back to prison again.
This time, he goes back to prison for suggesting that
workers should refuse to fight the First World War. He's
caught up in the first Red Scare. Basically in the
United States. The US was like, look, if you say
you're sorry, will pardon you. But this is fucking magone.

(53:29):
His mother died without him there because she refused to
ask him to say he was sorry. He is sick
as shit with diabetes. He's like near blind, and he writes,
and this is one of the last things he writes, repentance.
I have not exploited the sweat, anguish, fatigue, and labor
of others. I have not oppressed a single soul. I
have nothing to repent for. My life has been lived

(53:51):
without my having any wealth, power or glory, when I
could have gotten these three things very easily. But I
do not regret it. Wealth power and glory are only
one by trampling others' rights. My conscience is at peace,
for it knows that under my convict's garb beats an
honest heart. He fucking goes hard. He uh. He was

(54:14):
found dead in his cell on November twentieth, nineteen twenty two,
in Fort Leavenworth Prison in Kansas, at forty eight years old.
He was very sick. Most of the anarchists at the
time believe he was murdered. One of his friends in
the prison heard a struggle and there were bruises around
his neck. One PLM supporter in prison said that a
guard had killed Magon, and then the person who said

(54:36):
that was killed by seven guards. So he was either
murdered by a guard or he was murdered by medical neglect.
Either way, that.

Speaker 3 (54:46):
Might be what I read in the Britannica.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
Yeah, yeah, you.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
Didn't want to spoil it.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
Uh huh. His wife, Maria lives another twenty six years.
She organized peasants to her last days. She dies in
poverty because she who refused a pension in her dead
husband's name. Mexico's like, Yo, you were mcgon's wife, you
want a pension. She's like, she wasn't the like stuck

(55:12):
with She wasn't like stuck with him. She was with him.
You know. She was of the same sort as him,
as far as I can tell. Yeah, cloth and yeah.
Now mcgon is remembered. He get remembered by the new
government as the forebearer of the revolution, which he maybe
would have hated. But actually it's his brother Enrique who

(55:32):
does a lot of the fighting to make sure that
his memory and the influence he had and the legacy
of the PLM stays alive. In nineteen twenty, the tenant
farmer movement in Veracruz started putting on mcgon's plays. Maganesta's
stayed involved in social struggle right. They were involved in
the Campesino movement. They added revolutionary syndicalism to the mix

(55:53):
and the workers movement. In nineteen thirty seven, regeneracy On
went back into production, and soon it was by Federacian
Anarchista Mexicana. The ideas and action informed not just the
anarchist movement, but all the leftist and peasant movements in Mexico. Notably,
it informed the Zapatistas, the indigenous uprising in Chiapas, who

(56:13):
I will cover one of these days. It's been on
top of the list since the beginning, but I just
want to do it right. One of the towns in
their territory, I think no, actually, I think there's more
than one town. There's a town in Chiapas I believe
called Ricardo Flores Magon. I believe that the town that
he was born in. I didn't write this in the scripts.
I don't remember all of it. They changed the name

(56:34):
from like something something to something Floresmagon and Ricardo Floris
Macgon's great great nephew runs a museum dedicated to the
Maganestas in Mexico City. And while they're a little bit buried,
they'll never be completely Yeah, that's the Magan that.

Speaker 3 (56:56):
Wasn't, in fact a cool person who did cool stuff.

Speaker 1 (56:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
Yeah, I got so worried when, like, it's always like
halfway into the research that I find out someone was
like a real fucking grouch, right, And I'm like, like,
I was like three quarters the way through one of
the books I read about this before they were like,
oh and his wife Maria, And I'm like, the fuck's

(57:21):
that didn't come up earlier? That's not worth telling me about.
You know.

Speaker 3 (57:24):
You're like, so, what's his relationship to his life?

Speaker 1 (57:26):
Right?

Speaker 2 (57:27):
And like, you know, and and I don't know all
of it, right, but that's my best inference is that
he was a grouch. He pushed people away, he was
a man, he was he fucking tried, and he didn't
turn into the kinds of pieces of shit that a
lot of people do. And I can't even imagine what
it's like to just like put everything into this and

(57:48):
then just see it work but not Yeah, you know,
but for a lot of the people who were involved
in the moment, it did work. You know, it didn't
work by his standards, but it did work by a
lot of people's standards. Yeah, that's what I got.

Speaker 1 (58:08):
Cool.

Speaker 3 (58:09):
It's a great story. Thanks, thanks Margaret.

Speaker 2 (58:11):
Yeah, if people want to hear you tell stories about
the current mess that is the right wing media sphere,
how can they do it?

Speaker 3 (58:22):
Yes, you can find me on TikTok at kat m Aboo.
Also subscribe to my YouTube, which is the same one
that I've got to mention last episode. You can literally
just look me up on the Internet and you can
find me on Twitter, threads, blue Sky. There are too
many platforms nowadays. I have like a link tree on
my profile. But yeah, I talk about right wing media

(58:43):
and all those idiots.

Speaker 2 (58:45):
Yay, Hey, I have a substack. You should. I like
keep saying I'm quitting Twitter, and I'm like everyone who
says it, it's like the annoying person who doesn't leave
the party. It's like, I'm gonna leave, go down with
the ship of Twitter. I'm not sure. I just don't

(59:05):
like social media, even though I do it. I'm on
it all the time, and so I'm like, I almost
don't want to start another one because I'm just like,
but I don't lose guy's fun.

Speaker 3 (59:16):
I'll give you an infte code if you grab one yet.

Speaker 2 (59:18):
I am I think?

Speaker 1 (59:19):
Are you?

Speaker 2 (59:19):
Yeah, I actually grabbed Margaret as a user name.

Speaker 1 (59:23):
That's fucking cool.

Speaker 2 (59:24):
Yeah, but it doesn't feel as like elite because there's
actually it's like Margaret dot b K s K.

Speaker 1 (59:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (59:32):
And also there's no all right, I'm following great, there's
no video if they don't even have em betting and yeah,
all these places are just doing it like half ass,
so yeah, yeah, what.

Speaker 2 (59:45):
Are they thinking? But yeah, I'm trying to write more
on substack. And you can also follow Sophie around town. No, no,
don't do that.

Speaker 1 (59:57):
If you do that, I'm a dog will fuck you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
Uh yeah, I will.

Speaker 3 (01:00:03):
Follow iron dot Dragon at Blue sky Dot.

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
Exactly. Did you catch that? If you didn't, too fucking bad.

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
No, I want to plug our our lat like I
don't know. Whenever you're listening to this. We did a
really interesting episode on Behind the Bastards with Sarah Marshall
that was all about the kidnapping craze and conspiracies around that,
and Robert Evans did a really good article to go
along with it on his sub stack shatters oone. So

(01:00:36):
I want to plug that.

Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
That's what I'm listening to while walking the dog. Yes,
today and tomorrow. Oh, possibly dinner tonight. That's that seems good.

Speaker 3 (01:00:46):
I was listening to Walking about Town. It's great.

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
Oh yeah, Wow, you two can be obsessed with cool
Zone Media like all of us. Are as we got by.

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
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
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