Part One: Before the Mexican Revolution: Ricardo Flores Magón & the Peasants Who Ended a Dictatorship

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 there's Cataboo. Hi. Hi,
how are you?

Speaker 2 (00:17):
I'm great? How are you?

Speaker 1 (00:19):
I'm doing okay. Kat watches Fox News for a living,
so occasionally needs to do something else.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
As my theory, yes, I love doing things that aren't
that steph my personal time and things that aren't my job.
It's great.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
All of it. I recommend to everyone to not watch it.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Yeah, yeah, there was. 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. And then, like now, retroactively,
all of the jokes making fun of their network make
a lot more sense.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
They're evergreen too, that's true.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
I'm afraid to rewatch old Simpsons. Actually I haven't, and
I don't know what will happen if I.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
I've never seen an episode of the Simpsons.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
Brave honestly, honestly, of the programs on Fox. That that
is the route that you went on Brave never seen
an episode?

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Well, the other voice you're hearing is Sophie. I Sophie's
a producer.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
In a way, I feel like you have seen an
episode of The Simpsons.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Oh everyone has 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 clipyard pointing out, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
Ian is our audio engineer, or you're.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
Not doing any of the jokes that you put in
the script because I really like them.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
They're going to come later. I have to do all
the introductions first.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
All right, all right, I'm excited.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Yeah, everyone has to say hi to Ian before we
can move forward this point. Okay, as long as all
the listener have also said I Ian, we can now continue.
Unwoman did our music? And so speaking of music, God,
have you ever heard of Ariana Grande?

Speaker 3 (02:11):
No?

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Who's that?

Speaker 1 (02:13):
I don't actually really know. That was the joke I
wrote into the script. I kind of haven't.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
A pop great joke.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
Thanks. Instead, I want to talk about a Mexican revolutionary's
been dead for one hundred and one years.

Speaker 3 (02:29):
Oh hell yes, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that like
so much. Thank you for doing that transition.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
Yeah, I wrote that joke. And as we were talking
about things beforehand, because Ariana Grande came up. Have you
ever heard of a man named Ricardo Flores Macgone, I
have not, excellent, I'm excited to tell you about this man. Today.
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

(02:59):
typewriter until he convinced everyone else that they could overthrow
the dictator. And then they did so it worked.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Its amazing.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
Yeah, he's really fucking interesting. It didn't go the way
he 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

(03:31):
was part of a thousand strong anarchist movement called the Maganestas,
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

(03:53):
showed up in what's now Mexico and he was like,
this is Spain. Motherfuckers, get in line and or die.
So he did that. 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

(04:14):
the crazy background context. Mcgon isn't even alive during anything
that I'm going to be talking about for the next
little bit. So, like a 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

(04:35):
around Mexico and these are referred to there as liberal ideas,
and they're coming creeping 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

(04:58):
in the least radical way that one could want good things. Right,
he 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

(05:22):
what we're coming back to. It's really fun. There's still time,
I think, to get rid of the hereditary upper class.
But it's been two hundred years since id the all go. 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.

(05:42):
And this speech, have you heard much about the Mexican
You get the Mexican Warfare, independence, and one hundred years later,
the Mexican Revolution. I hadn't known too much about it
with how I.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
Grew up, 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 like Santa
Ana and general you know, Texan being mad at Mexico history.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
But that's fine, okay. Mcgon spent a lot of his
life in Texas and mostly San Antonio.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
San Antonio is nice.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
It's gone lovely.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yeah, it was nice, nice closet. So there's going to
be this Mexican war for independence, and so he goes
and he this 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,

(06:57):
and it goes something like, will you free yourselves? We
recover the land and stolen three 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

(07:21):
racial and ethnic hierarchy that put born in Spain folks
the pensil 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 priest is like, hey,

(07:47):
we don't like that. He's kind of saying we just
do not 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. Just think, is
what's that soften?

Speaker 2 (08:01):
How it goes?

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Yeah? 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

(08:25):
minus because 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 3 (08:38):
But just there's still time.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
There's still time, baby steps.

Speaker 1 (08:42):
That's true, that's true. I forgot to write down how
old this guy was when he overthrew me.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
I was about to ask, because if he was like sixty,
that plenty of time.

Speaker 1 (08:50):
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 into this priest general
and there's storming places with like fucking literal sticks and

(09:11):
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 anyone,

(09:38):
He promises that anyone 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

(09:58):
is like really fucking based for mister Catholic priest. He's
also producing illegitimate 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 distensible owners of the people.

(10:22):
And he gets excommunicated. This is not particularly surprising, right, No,
But I don't know if you knew this no.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
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 2 (10:40):
I feel like the illegitimate children one flies okay with
the Catholic Church. But yeah, past that, you know, that's
a lot of stuff.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah that I think that wasn't on the list of
what he got ex communicated. I think it was pays
off again. 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 arm peasants, all
things are possible. He finds a bishop and he forces

(11:10):
the bishop basically a gunpoint, to rescind his excommunication. And
now he's back in that church. Is good graces.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
Oh my god, I love this too.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
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.

(11:38):
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

(12:00):
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 holes up
in Guadalajara and like they you know, show up and
are attacking him and shit, and he gets often a pardon.

(12:20):
He gets offered a pardon in exchange for surrender, and
he's like, if fuck off, I'm not gonna 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 inquisition.

(12:43):
This time just again a step up. If you have
to get the whole ass inquisition to kick you out.
They decide to extra deepeat priest him, so they flay
his hands and this has 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

(13:03):
then he's executed July twenty seventh, eighteen eleven, which is
not a really good day for him, except I don't know,
he's like Catholic and he gets martyred, right.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
Really back by not a good day for him.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
I think it sounds like fun. It sounds like the
best day ever I know.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
Well, I mean like this might have been the best
day of his life. He's a Catholic and he gets martyred.
The Catholic Church rarely considers people they kill to be martyrs,
but Jonah.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
And he's considered a martyr.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
Now I don't know if he's considered a martyr by
the Catholic Church, he's absolutely 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.

(13:56):
This man I guess still exists. We talk about him.
I didn't down the name of the guy who killed him.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
Hell yeah, we're talking about him in twenty twenty three.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
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

(14:26):
out of the mouths of living slaves.

Speaker 4 (14:29):
Yeah, yeah, it's not great, no, no.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
And and spun a lie that most people believe that
he had wooden teeth.

Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah, totally. Yeah. I think so much about George Washington's
teeth me too.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
I heard conservatives talk about it a lot, and they'll
be like, well he paid them, And I'm like they're
still hey there ow and be like, what the hell
are you supposed to do? See, don't take teeth from people?
Like how how difficult is this to understand?

Speaker 1 (15:08):
Right, this is not.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
A difficult concept. Keep teeth in the mouths of the people.

Speaker 1 (15:15):
Bones belong on the inside, is the general w Bones
belong on.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
The inside I'm always saying that. I know.

Speaker 1 (15:24):
That's why I brought you on, actually is because you
saw those shirts.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
Yeah, bones belong to people. Yeah on the inside.

Speaker 1 (15:30):
Sorry, yeah, well we also saw the one that says
bones belong to me. But you know, of course a
different thing.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
You're the exception.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
That's fine, yeah, yeah, no, as long as mine get
to stay inside, can do whatever you want to other people.
And that's the way the world works. So their guy dies, right,
the war goes 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

(15:59):
in 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 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

(16:23):
I have a suspicion that no one good has ever
been in charge of an army and called the Iron Dragon.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
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 name. I know
I know him evil, but I was.

Speaker 3 (16:41):
Like, could I get other people from cool zone media
to call me that?

Speaker 2 (16:45):
So if I'll call you the Iron Dragon, I can
thank you so much. Thank you, You're so welcome anytime,
Iron Dragon.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
I d Margaret, you started something very odd.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
See, I think he can't be called the Iron Dragon
until you have three hundred sergeant prisoners executed to celebrate
Good Friday?

Speaker 2 (17:04):
Are you telling? Are you saying Sophie hasn't done that?

Speaker 1 (17:07):
Well security culture?

Speaker 3 (17:10):
I mean, I don't think I'm going to do that
this week, but girls energy.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
Name 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 2 (17:24):
But you can't. She gives you permission. Yeah. Yeah, I'm
so glad to know this.

Speaker 1 (17:28):
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 cruel and corrupt.
And this is like the Battie Team kicks him out
for being too much. And this is the guy that
like he eventually.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
Gave Mexico independence.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
Yeah, he's fighting against independence too and 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

(18:07):
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 Cool Zone. This new Mexican monarchy, the only thing
it did was elevate the Creootes, which are the white
people born in Mexico, to the same level as the
white people born in Spain. Everyone else just as fucked

(18:31):
as always. Their new leader calls himself an emperor. Fuck him.
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 going to repeat, and it'll repeat
in this week's episode and all throughout history constantly. I'm

(18:53):
not Cynical is an anti cynicism podcast.

Speaker 2 (18:58):
It does repeat, but on the bright side, sometimes it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
It's true, it's true. I can't wait to get to
the Haitian Revolution.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
God, yes, absolutely, yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
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 2 (19:22):
So I do infuriated by people that play both sides
like that, though I know it so annoying.

Speaker 1 (19:29):
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 2 (19:36):
Exactly, have some dignity, be like I'm going down because
I am just the worst. Yeah, and I really love
being the worst. And instead you're switching sides for the
last second. It's pathetic. It's pathetic.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
It's like that everyone hates to 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 2 (19:57):
I keep doing anything with the conservatives with jan six whatever, Yeah,
how do they do this must be an informant. I'm like, now,
you guys just flip so easy because none of you
believe in anything exactly.

Speaker 3 (20:07):
Magpie, 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 1 (20:16):
Babe and a half is a baddie.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
Batties are thick. I wanna you wanna be with some baddies.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
So I should stop making the people who are committing
atrocities seem cool.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
Yeah, battie is a compliment unless they're hot.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
If they're hot, I mean, you can't call it like
that's technically accurate. Yeah, or batty.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
Okay, okay, I'm going to look up more photos ahead
of time. I usually mostly look.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
Up okay, okay, research research, Yeah, if you need me.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
Well, you're like thick batties. What does this mean?

Speaker 1 (20:54):
Google deer, Google Google that one sure of Stalin, the
one we all know it.

Speaker 3 (21:05):
It's not even real.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all. Mister early photoshop
made made himself look better.

Speaker 3 (21:14):
I'm so sure self look like zeaned from one direction.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
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

(21:41):
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 2 (21:49):
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 yeah five times,
and I don't know, you kept thinking.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
It is always a Gucci belt, Gucci belt singular one.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
And when I was a 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.
I like that Margaret was like speaking of a Gucci belt, Yeah,
I mean literal opposite of that. I'm saying the dirty,

(22:29):
like filthy punks do a lot better than mister Gucci belt.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
I'm just saying, no billionaire would be able to get
laid on forty one k yere.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
It's just true.

Speaker 1 (22:46):
But these products and services will increase your sexual attractivity.
Sophie do you remember what percent you were currently? I
know that when I exaggerated, you get mad at me.
It's like thirty four percent.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
I thought I was thirty two, but you were trending upwards.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yeah, all right, so thirty two percent more attractive if
you buy whatever shit someone tries to sell you. Here's
the bads and we're back. So this guy shows up.
He doesn't last. He's calls himself the Emperor. He gets

(23:23):
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 where an old rebel leader
abolishes slavery along the way the US invades and steals

(23:44):
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
crossed 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 of Mexico and before that,
obviously Mexico's also stolen land. But you know, and the

(24:06):
reason that they US came and stole all this land
was pretty much to expand the slave state.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
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 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 the United States.

(24:35):
That sounds terrible to.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
These races so American, Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (24:39):
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 Ana was in charge in
the eighteen fifties for a while. I know fucking nothing
about Santana. Like literally, this is the old mention of

(25:01):
him in my script, is that the revolutionaries don't like him.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
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 Anna,
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,
and we talked about it in fourth grade Texas history,
but I can't remember it for the life of me. Obviously,

(25:26):
I care very much my personal hero. He also wore
a lot of red and all the paintings. So, okay,
there's your Santa Anna briefer.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
And you saw the shirts that say his bones belong
in Texas.

Speaker 4 (25:37):
Yes, exactly inside Texas. Yes, so ass on the bones.
The main leader of this new batch of eighteen fifties
revolutionaries is a guy named Benito Juarez who's an indigenous
guy who found himself an orphan young so he walked

(25:58):
to the big city. I think this is Ohaka City
and he became a lawyer for the downtrodden. 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 3 (26:12):
Right.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
He goes on to become the governor of Ohaka, 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

(26:35):
well intentioned laws. You know how liberals do well intentioned
laws and then they have negative effects. Sometimes that's all
liberals do. 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

(26:57):
their lands in common and took all their land away
or huge chunks of their land.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
It stripped was that intentional?

Speaker 1 (27:07):
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 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

(27:28):
bringing 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, And 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

(27:50):
United States about privatizing indigenous vice president Yes, oh my god,
we should look this up.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
Charles Curtis was Herbert Hoover's vice president.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
What years is that, uh.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
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 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 3 (28:27):
I literally fucking hate this country.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
I just read was so annoying. 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.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
They Yeah, he's three eights native American. I don't know math,
I don't know how that works.

Speaker 1 (28:56):
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, Porfirio Diaz, and

(29:19):
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, cool just is what it is. You're
a baddie.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
Oh my god, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
Yeah, I'm welcome. This is the first time this has
ever happened to me. 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 Margariteo. Yeah, I know, right, Margarita Magone and

(30:05):
Teodora Flores. And they 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.

(30:29):
They start teaching science 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

(30:51):
from a really interesting source 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 was born into the Greek aristocracy. But he's like,
what if I just run around throwing down in every

(31:12):
revolution that Europe 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

(31:34):
autonomous villages and 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.

(31:54):
He goes to Mexico City and he starts doing two things.
First 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

(32:15):
a free school and he's running it and he's teaching it.
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
pacifist the anarchist. And they're like yeah, but we're not
so fuck off. And then later he kind of comes

(32:37):
around actually the more radical side of things, or the
more militant side of.

Speaker 3 (32:41):
It, 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 exactly. He's this
dictator and a locker. Yeah sprayed him in the face
with back's body spray. Yeah one percent. Yeah, thank you, Magpie.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
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 gonna 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

(33:27):
record in eighteen eighty six. Some say that he 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 dogmar institution.
He refused both Protestant and Catholic affiliation. He also tried Mormonism,
which is the first like cool Mormon I've ever had

(33:49):
On this show.

Speaker 3 (33:51):
We're really excited about this, like a week or two ago.
Margaret was like, hey, and you know that I'm serious
because I'm calling her Margaret.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
Margaret was like, guess.

Speaker 2 (34:02):
What, And I was like what.

Speaker 3 (34:03):
Margaret was like, I think I found our first cool Mormon.
And I was like, no, you didn't.

Speaker 1 (34:09):
Man.

Speaker 3 (34:09):
Margaret was like, wait and see, and.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
Here we are Mormon. Tell us. So he joins the
Church of the Latter day Saints because the Protestants are
too materialist, 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 his thing, and apparently he's kind of

(34:32):
part of bringing Mormonism to Mexico. But he couldn't get
the Church of Latter day Saints to agree to his
plan to overthrow the Mexican government to institute a classless
society built on mutual aid.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
So he left because it's priority street. I got I
gotta say that.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
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 alongside indigenous rebels generally, who collectively started both the

(35:09):
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.
And this is like the main thing that I keep

(35:31):
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 has written down as some guy's
wife during all this struggle, even though she was as
much a fucking part of it. She outlives these whatever. Anyway,
they his wifeed her. Oh yeah, they his wife her.
At least they gave her name, which is like lucky,

(35:54):
I'm not even going to give his name.

Speaker 3 (35:55):
He's the story story, Luisa. Yeah, this story does not
pass the Bechdel test.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
No. No, they go around. They terrorized the land of
elite in the country after someone drained a 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
going to take all this stuff, right, because there's a
lot of bandits in Mexico throughout all this time and

(36:22):
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 from him with a sword and then give it

(36:43):
to everyone.

Speaker 2 (36:45):
Great strategy, I know, I know.

Speaker 1 (36:48):
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.

(37:11):
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

(37:31):
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

(37:54):
movement of combined anarchist and indigenous and anarchist indigenous struggle
that influenced the later movement of Emiliano Zapata is a
revolutionary war hero 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

(38:19):
influenced the pata and then influence 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 3 (38:37):
You know what's cooler, magpie having no ads, which automatically
increases your sex appeal by like, I don't know, two
hundred and fifty two percent.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
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 3 (39:00):
I would say it's I would say it's both.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
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 3 (39:25):
More understanding why I have the nickname I have Now.

Speaker 1 (39:30):
When I think about executing three hundred prisoners on Good Friday,
how is that not just literally blood sacrifice to the god?

Speaker 3 (39:37):
I mean, you're not wrong, like it is. It is
like a weird version of the wicker Man, but in mass.

Speaker 1 (39:46):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:55):
I went with Sarah Marshall, Oh my God.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
And it wolves.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
They like they like they Wickerman are from yeah about
basically they're still being Pagans on Ireland. In England.

Speaker 3 (40:11):
They like anoint the It was amazing. They like anoint
the cop by rubbing their blonde hair on him, and
then they burn him alive.

Speaker 1 (40:20):
Yeahah, like I like my favorite medieval song.

Speaker 3 (40:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (40:40):
It's fucking based. Okay, but it's it's supposed to be horror,
but it is the funniest movie I've seen in a
very long time. And they're all just like like horny, yeah, yeah, anyway,
here's some horny ads.

Speaker 3 (40:59):
This isn't this is become a plug for nineteen seventy
threes for the wicker Man. And if I could anoint
somebody with my blonde hair, I fucking was.

Speaker 1 (41:17):
And we are back. 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 except by a technicality. Every time,

(41:42):
every book is always 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.

(42:04):
And this was 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 2 (42:20):
No.

Speaker 1 (42:20):
In eighteen sixty eight, the struggle moved to Tolonta 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

(42:42):
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 fourteen 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,

(43:05):
it's fucking bad, so they strike. They win. 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

(43:27):
they even allow some employers. And you can only 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 mostly 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. They're like, all right, well are they cool,

(43:49):
and people are yeah, they're cool. So so the Iron
Dragon you can be in.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
Yeah, I mean I was just gonna say that should
just be like normal, that's how that should be. Yeah,
Like if you're uncool, you don't get to be in
the group.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
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 you're not cool. Yeah exactly, you're just not.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
Your trans employees want to eat food every day. It
turns out.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
That's crazy, that's insane. Come on, yeah, that's too much.

Speaker 3 (44:26):
Yeah wait, I think you just called secretly just called
me cool.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
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 3 (44:48):
But oh my gosh, it's the last person I thought
you were going to say.

Speaker 1 (44:54):
Yeah, that's why it's funny. The read in 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

(45:14):
historians didn't bother writing down their fucking names. So I
have a hard time writing them back into it.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
Shout out to Louis Islence again.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
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 Maganistas 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 story back into the fucking story. The
first two books I read about the Maganestas fucking didn't anyway. Whatever,

(45:45):
I'm not bitter, Wait, yeah, I am okay. In the meantime,
our man portfolio Diaz, the hero Sinco de Maya. He
is not our man. He is a fucking bastard, not
even a baddie, as I have learned, He's just a bastard.
He comes to pass.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Let's let me see if he's a baddie. How do
you spell his name?

Speaker 1 (46:03):
Oh? Portfolio okay, so po r f I r io.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
Okay cool. Oh he is not a battie, you know,
he's definitely not a batty. He's a bastard.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
Yeah, No, Kata is confirmed.

Speaker 3 (46:18):
Kata is confirmed.

Speaker 1 (46:19):
Yeah, I'm I'm double checking and I agree completely. So
he sucks. 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, and that's like his
whole thing. He loses a couple of times, so he

(46:41):
stages a coup and then wins, which is a way
that people in the US have tried recently to win.
But he becomes a 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 pre it's allowed to be president. Basically,

(47:02):
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 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

(47:23):
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 went down under him. Everyone was poorer
and more fucked than during the like decades of chaos.

(47:45):
I don't really like him, is what I'm trying to say, Margaret.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
Have you considered that maybe the rich people really benefited
from that system? Huh?

Speaker 1 (47:53):
Oh there were winners.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
Yeah, exactly, So you can't be mad. You know, you
got to take someone, Yeah, takes them? Yeah, whatever the
other one is, I'm tired.

Speaker 1 (48:04):
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, and he removed limits on land

(48:24):
ownership and seized even more fucking land from indigenous people
causing huge uprisings, one of which I the Yachi 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 like, this is his own fucking
amazing story. Does this?

Speaker 3 (48:42):
Does this fucker like die painfully? Like what's happening?

Speaker 1 (48:46):
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. I know, which means it's.

Speaker 3 (48:56):
Probably all exiles.

Speaker 1 (48:59):
Cool. Okay, Wait one we're finding out because this is
the kind of thing that.

Speaker 3 (49:04):
Yeah, you're talking about someone who truly fucking sucks. And
I'm like, all right, where does the come up in?

Speaker 1 (49:12):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (49:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (49:24):
Bad, mainly to old age study doc.

Speaker 3 (49:30):
Yeah, damn it, magpie, I mean exile. Cool.

Speaker 2 (49:37):
Oh, officially this is from Britannica. Officially, he died of
a heart attack that it was speculated he'd been murdered
by prison guards or died of medical neglect.

Speaker 3 (49:48):
Yes, there it is, baby like, No, this is totally
this is a different person.

Speaker 1 (49:54):
Character.

Speaker 2 (49:57):
I got it. He just had that with Paris, probably
got like a stipend or something.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
Fuck this Yeah, oh I was excited, all right, all right,
fucking old age.

Speaker 1 (50:05):
Yeah, the before I 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 socialists supported him because he made vague promises about reform.
He kept none of them. The anarchists, of course, didn't

(50:26):
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 his 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 socialists actual actions, both labor

(50:47):
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

(51:09):
by troops. Agrarian revolters were hunted down. Leftists were killed,
often by what was called leg 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 2 (51:31):
Escape from Mexico no.

Speaker 1 (51:33):
Like escape from captivity. Like if a cop comes up
to you and he's like come with me, and you're
like I don't wanna, then they can be like, ah,
well now I get to kill you. Right.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Oh that's so strange and only happens in this one time,
I know.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
That's what's Yeah. Ten thousand people met their death to
leif fuga. 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

(52:06):
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

(52:27):
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,

(52:47):
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 we get to the Maganistas. This would be where
we make you wait till next week. But there's more,
because I naha a lot in this one.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
Let's get it.

Speaker 1 (53:11):
Ricardo Flores macgone 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

(53:33):
in law to a house fire. Mcgone's father had a
really fucking rough life.

Speaker 2 (53:41):
That's so sad.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
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

(54:02):
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

(54:24):
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
lived for a little while. That is interesting enough that
I want to stick it in. The folks there were like,

(54:44):
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

(55:07):
for kicking out the church. The survivors flee to the US.
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

(55:28):
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 this uprising,
and that book that I recommend to everyone is called
Bad Mexicans by Kelly Leidel Hernandez. That is the book
to read about maganestas. It's worth reading. Like there's some

(55:50):
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, this is your book.
The older mcgon brother, his name is Hajzus, he goes
to jail for writing about what happened in that uprising
along the way before the burning of the town. Their

(56:12):
father dies because he had a fucking hard life, and
the mother moves them to Mexico City so that her
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 gets so hot and demand the

(56:34):
release of prisoners, and so a lot of the prisoners
get set free, which is a thing that's happened a
lot in history, 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 in the newspapers. First, he edits for
the El Democrata, which was shut down by Diaz. When
the newspaper was raided after only three months of existing,

(56:55):
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 2 (57:11):
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 cleaner.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
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. I think

(57:42):
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. And maybe it's

(58:03):
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, 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 be a bohemian and

(58:25):
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 2 (58:39):
We're doing a batty test on this guy.

Speaker 1 (58:41):
His brother's hotter. His brother, Enrique is definitely hotter.

Speaker 3 (58:46):
Damn.

Speaker 2 (58:46):
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 3 (58:56):
I like that magpipe predetermined.

Speaker 2 (58:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, no, you were totally right.

Speaker 1 (59:02):
I look up photos of the good guys.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
Yeah yeah, okay, they passed the batty test, especially if
you know't you're dressing an all black hang out with
your mom. Yeah hey yeah, sex workers Yeah yeah, all right,
body approved?

Speaker 1 (59:15):
Yeah no, I yeah, so.

Speaker 2 (59:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:21):
In nineteen hundred, he and Jesus start a paper that
changes the world, is called regeneration On and it was
mostly originally a legal paper. It covers issues 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 nineteen

(59:41):
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 that'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 partic pat
in a seditious congress. Ricardo is there to speak for

(01:00:04):
a 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

(01:00:26):
didn't 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 Bakunin, 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 mind for theory and practice, which is

(01:00:47):
likely where 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

(01:01:10):
was a woman named Juanna Belen Guterrez de Mendoza, and
she was indigenous. She's from the Coxcuin 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

(01:01:33):
mine workers like her husband, and whenever she was arrested
and asked to write down her name on the booking form,
she wrote to Desicion Rebellion, Yeah, that's awesome. And then
I'm also really excited because I'm very mad. I think
people know this. I literally have the words sedition tattooed
on my knuckles, and I got really mad about January

(01:01:54):
sixth because of this. I'm like really fucking bitter.

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
They ruin everything. Fine, you know, it's just like, come on, guys.

Speaker 3 (01:02:04):
I know.

Speaker 1 (01:02:07):
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 the culture

(01:02:29):
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. I really like it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
That's awesome. You don't want the women to run things? Yeah,
I get them to run the revolution with you.

Speaker 1 (01:02:42):
Yeah. Later, she's going to join a Miliano 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 Pacunan, Cropocin, and
Prudana into Spanish. Yeah, she's at this fucking congress. Most

(01:03:03):
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 his style at the time, and he gets
up there and he shouts the administration of Beforeio Diaz

(01:03:25):
is a dena FEBEs, and everyone hisses at him because
they're like, Noah, 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
with applause and rarely like like speak truth the power,

(01:03:46):
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 Florismagon 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 okay, the revolution doesn't start for ten years.

(01:04:07):
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 bunch of fucking convictions. I just don't want

(01:04:28):
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 bringing
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

(01:04:48):
first 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 at the State and Act did 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 one at least

(01:05:10):
one of his other brothers 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

(01:05:33):
and Ricardo write for it 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 on 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

(01:05:54):
sons free and they can be with you when you
die if you tell them to just fucking stop. 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 2 (01:06:17):
That's awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:06:18):
Yeah, she fucking goes hard. What about us?

Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
That's awesome?

Speaker 1 (01:06:22):
From street fighting the French.

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
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 1 (01:06:36):
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

(01:06:58):
convicted there. It's a cess pit 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,

(01:07:21):
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

(01:07:42):
eleven years who's been fucking waiting.

Speaker 2 (01:07:46):
How long were they in jail for eleven years?

Speaker 1 (01:07:48):
No, he goes to jail a lot. They've been engaged
for eleven years. That particular stint was like two years.
So yeah, Jesus 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 happen during the revolution, and he

(01:08:10):
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

(01:08:30):
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 Ardiaga, 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

(01:08:52):
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

(01:09:15):
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,
soph you could be this guy. You could be the

(01:09:37):
iron magone. Okay, all right, No, I think you're still
the Iron Dragon. I'm sorry, Iron Dragon.

Speaker 3 (01:09:44):
But Dragon sound schooler.

Speaker 2 (01:09:45):
Yeah, Dragon sounds way cool.

Speaker 1 (01:09:47):
I'm sorry the Iron Flower. Okay, anyway. Uh So, most
people just think he's a stubborn, fucking an asshole. Frankly,
like mcgone, does not make friends. He he converts people
into revolutionaries, but no one fucking likes him. But he

(01:10:07):
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

(01:10:27):
later by the Supreme Court declared that it was illegal
for any periodical in Mexico to carry anything written by
any of the Floresmagon brothers.

Speaker 2 (01:10:37):
Oh that'll stop them for sure. That's the way to
stop a journal is.

Speaker 1 (01:10:42):
Could you imagine just if someone was like, here's the
Kataboulah the lower.

Speaker 2 (01:10:47):
Yeah, I'd be like, oh fucking sick, Like, let me
violate this as many times as possible.

Speaker 1 (01:10:52):
Your books will sell very well.

Speaker 2 (01:10:54):
It will sell so well, Like I just can't imagine
ever being like, oh I want these people, these journalists,
they're obviously very committed to stop writing something. Let's make
a law against them specifically, Like that would never work
in any any hero of journalism ever. Yeah, unless you're
a garbage journalist. And in that case the law is
not going to.

Speaker 1 (01:11:13):
It wouldn't have done anyeth They wouldn't have needed the
law of your garbage journalist 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, you know, Kelly, I kill me, do it. Yeah,
So they don't want to get killed and they want
to keep writing, so they have to flee Mexico, which

(01:11:34):
we'll talk about on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 (01:11:37):
Done.

Speaker 2 (01:11:39):
That was so cool.

Speaker 1 (01:11:41):
But before we talk about that, let's talk about you.
Let's talk about how people can see you tell the
journalists the thing you think I would know the verb
for my own job. You plug your pluggables. That's it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:00):
Go. There are now a billion social media platforms. So many.
There are so many, and I'm so tired. My TikTok
is katmaboo. My blue sky is that too. My Twitter
is up with gazali cat. My Instagram is k Alba Gazale,
which is also my thread's account. If you go on

(01:12:21):
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 1 (01:12:30):
Yeah, hey, Sophie.

Speaker 3 (01:12:36):
You can just follo out cool zone media. That would
make me happy. Anderson is barking in the background, so
that doesn't make her happy.

Speaker 1 (01:12:45):
No, apparently you shouldn't follow Sophie.

Speaker 3 (01:12:49):
You should follow, Okay, Anderson, what do you want? She
wants you to follow my instagram so you can see
photos of her. Oh, okay, is that why going to
talk you how to that you can do that yourselves?

Speaker 1 (01:13:01):
I remember which your Twitter?

Speaker 3 (01:13:03):
That's my that's my Twitter, Oh my Twitter. I post
photos over there too.

Speaker 1 (01:13:08):
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,

(01:13:28):
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 2 (01:13:36):
But agreed, we'll see the EU all on Wednesday. Part
money to buy food, that's right, and read about a
personal life.

Speaker 1 (01:13:43):
Yeah, I mean cool and.

Speaker 3 (01:13:47):
We'll be back on Wednesday. By cool People Who did.
Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com. Check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.