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

In part two of this week's episode, Margaret continues her conversation with Kat Abu about the Mexican liberals who became anarchists and sparked a revolution.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 Margaret Kiljoy with me today it's catabou. How are

(00:23):
you Hi?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
I'm great, how are you?

Speaker 1 (00:26):
I'm doing pretty good. My dog is outside. Usually when
I record, he's like right behind me. I was already
telling kat this, but now I'm apparently telling everyone this.
Usually he's like right behind me, and every now and
then I like look back and get the little major.
Dosn't have a dog?

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Is that?

Speaker 1 (00:38):
It's an endorphin machine. You just like look at it
and then you're like, oh, you know.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
So you do that 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 1 (00:48):
Yeah, and then he's like oh, and then he puts
his head back down. It's so good.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Perfect.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
He's a perfect little angel who is probably now scaring
off all the airplanes in the yard because he's learned
that if he barks at air they fly away, so
he will probably do it until 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

(01:14):
my neighbors think I have a giant, scary dog, even
though I don't. That's what this episode is.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
You just have to see Rendraw space. It's I know, perfect. Yeah,
I don't know what this dog looks like.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
I love it. Handsome, handsome, I believe it.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
I believe he's a if you mixed a Muppet and
a tiny German shepherd together. That's such a perfect description
of Rondraw.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
That sounds like the most perfect being that's ever existed.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
I know. The other one is is actually I can
see on screen as Anderson, Yeah, personally right behind me.
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 Anderson's person is our producer named Sophie.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Hi, Sophie, that's my favorite way you've ever introduced to me.
Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Well, it's one of the things you're very good at.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
I hope, so I try really hard.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Also, Ian is our audio engineer, Hi Ian Hi Ian 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 Monday's episode because
it won't make any fucking sense. It's like extra true,
I think this time because you're really coming in in
the middle, like what do you Why do you make

(02:40):
the decisions you do? I mean, I guess anyone can
make any decisions they want. Is relates to this. It's
not hurting anyone except yourself.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
It's just gonna be really confusing because you won't get
all of the awesome backstory and the Louisa shit.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yeah, Louisa doesn't even come back into the story.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
And exactly do you want to miss out on li Lisa?

Speaker 1 (02:59):
No, Margarita doesn't come back in either.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Oh my god, you're gonna sell Lisa and Margarita ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
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
they were the leader, but hates that he's the leader
and has complicated feelings. Is a groucy guy named Ricardo
Flores Magon who is about to flee Mexico after going

(03:28):
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

(03:51):
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 they went penniless. Ricardo's pants were actually patched up

(04:14):
because he couldn't afford new pants, which as an anarchist
punk who wore black panch 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 ad dress before the story is through. Oh fuck,

(04:35):
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 be rude. A lot of the more liberal
ones will 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 revolutionaries

(04:57):
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 giving them

(05:20):
money to start their newspaper backup.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
And I know you said that it's illegal for him
to write, is it illegal for people to read?

Speaker 3 (05:30):
It?

Speaker 1 (05:30):
Is illegal for him to get it into Mexico. Fortunately,
there's a lot of people who don't care about the law, right,
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. A

(05:51):
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,

(06:15):
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 2 (06:23):
Incredible.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
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 or more. I want to focus a bit less

(06:46):
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 entirely lessly for revolution. They fight off assassins, they
get arrested for fighting off their own assassin. At one
point they move from Texas to Saint Louis to get

(07:08):
away from the assassins. Then they have to move to Toronto
in Montreal 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 2 (07:23):
And this is like early nineteen hundreds. So they're taking
like slow ash trains.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
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

(07:49):
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 far 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 brothers or anyone else sitting down

(08:12):
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?
And they put it all together into one document and it,

(08:36):
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
and choose pieces of it. Ever since, the mcgone brothers

(08:57):
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
and it which is just like if you imagine, like
the founding fathers were all like actually radical, you know, yeah, okay,

(09:23):
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.
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

(09:45):
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 and distribute the land fair 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,

(10:10):
it was, it had one one fatal Flaw's say, the
fatal flaw that afflicts the nineteenth and early twentieth century
labor union almost everywhere you look. Sophi's giving me the
look because it came up in the last fucking episode
we did about Irish miners racism.

Speaker 2 (10:30):
God damn it.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
In a This differs wildly from the Maganestas and the
PLM'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

(10:54):
that gets told to workers goddamn everywhere.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
How about get everyone fair wages? Yeah, I mean, it's
like the EPs workers, how they might bone strike for
part timers, Like that's awesome. Yeah, yeah, you know, any
racist you can. Everyone should just be able to live. Yeah,
I know it's crazy.

Speaker 1 (11:15):
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 workers 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,

(11:35):
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 ostato and adensis like
from the US. I hate that there's no English word
for this besides American, which fucking sucks. Everywhere else in

(11:57):
the Western hemisphere is a word for this for US,
which makes sense. Maybe we could just use a Yankee.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
That's the word that ringo, Yeah, I mean that means foreigner.

Speaker 1 (12:07):
Yeah, I wonder. I literally just don't know, I wonder,
you know, in the US, I 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

(12:28):
go 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 2 (12:39):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, fun. Wouldn't it be so much fun? It'd be
like fun money, you know.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
Oh my god. 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 1 (12:53):
Yeah. Like I get paid in dragon Bucks now, but
it has Anderson on it, so I feel good about it.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
Thanks id.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
Yeah. When they die, their children inherit their debt.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
Cool.

Speaker 3 (13:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
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

(13:35):
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.

(13:56):
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 to 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.

(14:19):
And also he's friends with Diaz, so he's able to
skirt even more labor laws than the other people are.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
And Diaz is still in power.

Speaker 1 (14:25):
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 in writing, and
he takes them and then he he politely writes them
back a letter refusing every single one of their demands.

(14:47):
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
man Baker.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
That's just like every Quaker, would I know.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
So the workers stage a walk out. A white manager
starts shooting at them, kills three miners, so they stab
him to death with a candlestick.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
That's such a slow way to die, being stabbed to
death with a candle.

Speaker 1 (15:15):
I think it might be the holder that it's like
the miners go into.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
The wax and thread and they're just like really going
at it.

Speaker 1 (15:24):
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

(15:46):
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 2 (16:09):
I don't understand how you arrest twenty eight thousand people.
Where do you put them?

Speaker 1 (16:13):
I don't fucking know.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
That's insane.

Speaker 1 (16:16):
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 2 (16:24):
Either way. A shit tone.

Speaker 1 (16:25):
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

(16:46):
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 like, frankly, that wasn't
the right way to do it. Everyone figured out what

(17:06):
they were up to. So cells start getting raided in
the US and they find all the explosives and guns.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
Is the US raiding these cells like the New Mexico.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
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 as Sorry. Yeah, I actually I hold you
responsible for this.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
It's all me. It's all on me. I'm so sorry everyone.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
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 2 (17:59):
Now, yeah, things are good.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
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

(18:21):
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 Akiyakon, 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

(18:42):
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 against indigenous villages, as we've

(19:02):
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
editor 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 December

(19:24):
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 2 (19:41):
It's just about to say, yeah, what an insane thing
to do, Like that's just no why did they do that?

Speaker 1 (19:50):
Yeah, just like they're like, hey, let's get some bad
pr for basically no reason you want to do that.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
Like that is like that's like a movie villain thing today,
you know, like a really bad movie to be like, oh,
my workers are striking, let's cut the leaves off the trees,
you know that, just cut down that, Like, don't even
cut down the trees, just cut all the leaves off.

Speaker 1 (20:10):
Yeah, it's like Disney level villain level.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
Ev Yes, it's like Disney knockoff, like when those shitty
like kids studios try to make like a you know, ratitude,
knockoff or whatever. The villain's like comically bad.

Speaker 1 (20:23):
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 2 (20:31):
They're asking AI, They're like, how do we sound that
to our strikers? And then chat JBT is like, cut
all the leaves off.

Speaker 1 (20:38):
Oh my god, that's probably what happened. That's probably what happened,
right you? And know what else is controlled algorithmically?

Speaker 2 (20:45):
Tell me.

Speaker 1 (20:48):
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 back the textile workers. They

(21:10):
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 owners just shut down all the
factories in the area just to just to defeat the union.

(21:32):
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's store refuses to
sell striking worker food. Guys like I got money.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
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 1 (21:54):
I know you could their surplus value.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
You could still get money by selling people who you're
getting no money by doing this. You are so bad
at owning a business.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
One money or zero money.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
I'd rather have one money. If I was a ghoulish
cartoon character that wants to starve workers, I would still
like at least one money.

Speaker 3 (22:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
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 2 (22:27):
Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
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

(22:51):
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

(23:11):
their champagne filled glasses and in unison honored General Martinez
with a toast. They celebrated the massacre. Yeah, it's a.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
Do You're celebrating kids being slaughdered, and at no point
you're not like, oh wow, am I the bad guy here?

Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yeah? Well, they said, are we the baddies? But then
they looked at their sorry, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
If again, they were like, yeah, we're thick, We're good.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
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 morning clothes all the time. So she was a
goth because we've always been here, much like trans people

(23:55):
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 rest

(24:17):
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 macgone, 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 supportive since many of their members are Mexican or

(24:39):
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 floresmcgone. 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

(24:59):
because he's he's pretty sure if they catch him. At
this point, he's one hundred percent going to Mexico and
getting executed. He has 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.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
Yeah, The real question is whether he kept the mustache
when he did that or not.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
I hope to god he did. It's an impressive mustache.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
It is.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
It is.

Speaker 1 (25:29):
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 his own,

(25:51):
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 grauchy when he doesn't
get his way and is like a radical, he's also
just like a misogynist piece of shit, right, mcgone. Ricardo
Floris mcgone is like interesting. He he clearly believes in it,
believes and writes in a lot of feminist principles. And
one of the things that I ran across at one

(26:11):
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 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 is

(26:32):
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

(26:53):
fight for him, so they.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
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
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, to very at least tolerate him and speak positively.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
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 Maganist does they decide they're going to try
their nineteen oh six plan again, only in nineteen oh eight.

(27:37):
They don't really actually change that much about the plan.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
Do they still do it by mail?

Speaker 1 (27:43):
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 and for everyone, for everyone bred.
Insofar as blood must necessarily flow, it will be so

(28:06):
that the conquest we secure will benefit everyone and not
just a certain social cast. Magon 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 nineteen oh seven. He isn't freedom next freed until
until nineteen ten. He keeps trying to be in charge

(28:26):
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 is 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

(28:49):
underwear and then passes his 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 in Mexico. They're planning action 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.

(29:12):
I'm like, oh, yeah, 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 maccamas 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 2 (29:31):
Hey, yeah, well send the ad.

Speaker 1 (29:34):
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

(29:55):
all the army of the 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 of officers show up and they're like,
oh yeah, we're like totally like with you. What's the
plan again? Uh yeah? Several cells get busted this way.

Speaker 2 (30:19):
As many as like last time, or if you.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
Were 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 2 (30:33):
Awesome.

Speaker 1 (30:35):
One of the letters Ricardo had smuggled at 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 Riccardo smuggles out a letter that basically says the

(30:56):
revolution has to be anarchist in nature. In his 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

(31:18):
disguise their true goal.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
Right.

Speaker 1 (31:22):
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

(31:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
And so people don't know that they actually identify with
the different ideology because the word's scary.

Speaker 1 (32:07):
Yeah. Absolutely, And it's been decades since there was like
an anarchist tradition in Mexico of large size and things
like that, you know, right, 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 we're gonna have a revolution on the

(32:29):
following day, it's not a good way to keep things undercover, right.
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

(32:49):
under martial law and hundreds of PLM activists are arrested
and murdered. The US hates them too. They absolutely threaten
US interests in Mexico and even you less 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

(33:10):
of Investigation, one of the very first things they do
in their history is attack the PLM, like, go after
the PLM, 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

(33:31):
except their neighbors were like, you know, these people are
a lot 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 NIMBY is
probably proud of shit of themselves because they they find

(33:52):
bombs and guns and like maps to all the like
banks in the town in northern Mexico where they're going
to go with like.

Speaker 2 (33:59):
No one likes snitch. Yeah, come on guys.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah. So once again the oppression mostly works but doesn't.
At the same time, in Viesca, two hundred PLM 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

(34:23):
like 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 Okiukan, a city in southeast Mexico, the PLM did

(34:45):
the same thing. They empty at 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

(35:07):
Workers of 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

(35:29):
organizing that 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 Maganese as left and right, and they're like,
all right, we'll fucking help you in Vade Mexico whatever,
like all part of the same struggle, right, and this

(35:50):
I think that they were in this one border town
because I think it's Les Vachas 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.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
That's hot.

Speaker 1 (36:10):
Yeah, you know, it makes me happy for 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 Bond, dude. Yeah, good for you, dude. Yeah,
it's like Yellen and German, He's like, what the fuck.

(36:31):
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
think they would rob banks, right, but they wouldn't like
take money from people. This all there's more fighting overall

(36:53):
the uprising. It fails, and no small part because the
Pinkertons and the US government doing all their investigations and shit.
So I think nineteen oh nine, shortly after this, there's
one indigenous Mayo guy. His name is Fernando Polmyraz and
he's like, well, we have a problem. Why don't we
go for the most direct solution that we can think

(37:15):
of for the problem of this dictator. So he waited
for Portfolio Diaz to give a public appearance and then
he shot him.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
But uh oh, yeah, we know how he dies.

Speaker 1 (37:30):
I know, he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
They have those in like nineteen twenty apparently ridiculous, I know,
and the crowd had the assassin's back.

Speaker 1 (37:43):
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. Right now, people fucking hate Diaz. The crowd
who was there to see Diaz speak help his would
be assassin get away safely.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
That's so embarrassing for him, I.

Speaker 1 (38:04):
Know, you know, it's kind of just like it was
a draw, you know, like 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,

(38:25):
and so he's Ricardo Flora's mccon so immediately just goes
back to chainsmoking and sitting over a typewriter. Regeneralcion 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's gonna be full fucking socialism is going

(38:47):
to fucking rule. And the English paper is like, us,
good liberals wish to see more democracy in Mexico, your neighbor.

Speaker 2 (38:59):
Then it's crazy that like he had flowers thrown im
and 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 1 (39:09):
Yeah, US labor movements 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, Oh what about dick pills? We sell

(39:32):
dick pills sometimes more or less. Is that the occasionally
do we sell titty skittles? Does anyone advertise estrogen on
this show?

Speaker 3 (39:43):
I feel like we got offered something for that at
one point, but I don't know.

Speaker 2 (39:49):
If it actually happened. I don't care. I try to
not know as much about our ads.

Speaker 1 (39:55):
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

(40:17):
it doesn't actually impact us one way or the other,
whether or not you do.

Speaker 3 (40:21):
Like a gift for your lawyer that teaches you to
shut the fuck up and not talk to cops.

Speaker 1 (40:25):
Yeah, especially if we're sponsored by Flowers.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
I like Flowers. Yeah. Well that was nice.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
Thanks, here's some ads. Then we're back. So they've started
their newspaper backup, running it out of LA They have
a new slogan Tierra, libertad Land and Liberty, which they
got from friends of the pod, the Russian neurodnicks. We're

(40:54):
early socialists and nihilis in Russia who left the cities
to go organize a Graian communities. He passes on this
slogan to Emiliano Zapata 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.

(41:14):
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 mcgone was more of a liberal,
but now mcgon's gone further left and Madero has gone

(41:35):
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

(41:55):
he wants. Madero writes the anarchists begging for their support,
and mcgon responds by writing an essay. It like publishing
an essay titled Madero is a Traitor to the cause
of liberty. We are now entering mcgon's curmudgeonly fuck stage
where he is mad that no one is as radical

(42:17):
as and now 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.

(42:37):
The Mexican Revolution 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 they played their strengths and they try to invade

(42:59):
Hihuahua State in 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. They're just for a sense of scale,

(43:22):
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, Wow,
which is about.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
That's so much for one guy to own.

Speaker 1 (43:44):
I don't think he's just going to use it. I
don't think he's going to use it all.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
I just don't think you can use seventy million acres.
And I know that's controversial, but I really, I really
think that. Can you imagine that water bill, especially.

Speaker 1 (43:58):
If it's Nevada, right, Lord Jesuits, 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.

Speaker 3 (44:19):
Right.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
So the PLM is like, all right, we're going to
bad Juaha one 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 think this was cowardice, because

(44:44):
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 would have fought whatever. Maybe

(45:08):
if he had led it all at all would have
gone horribly bad, because he's not a fucking general. The
PLM march on Shiuahwa. They're coming from Texas. Their military
leader at this point is a guy named Guilletto 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 on your feet than live on your knees.
It gets attributed to Zapata, but Guierto wrote an essay

(45:30):
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, trying to source it. One time Gietto,
when US 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

(45:53):
shit actually happens in history, some cartoon shit.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (45:57):
Yeah, So they invade, They comer 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 Chua were happy about this. The only
people wo are unhappy about it. Other people control it. Right.
The Federal Army counter attacks and they drive the PLM

(46:19):
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

(46:40):
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
to 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 four who turned
out to be really shitty, like just bad people, and

(47:03):
comrades from the IWW in the US who don't suck.
They take control first of Mexicali, Los Agadonas, Tacte 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

(47:28):
Madero has taken over, like Madero wins OUs Diaz. 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

(47:48):
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

(48:09):
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 their ostensible 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 mcgone doesn't like Madero. Madero

(48:34):
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 mcgone is his
vice president. And he does this. It wins over a
ton of the PLM fighters who come and join his armies. Right,

(48:57):
and this is where weighted to show your hand about
being a radical kind of fucks mcgone and the Maganesism.
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 got murdered by Madero. Yeah,

(49:20):
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 mcgon a fanatic and drops
her support because he won't play nice with Madero. And

(49:43):
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 he ends up
and pushing away His remaining brothers were both his brothers.

(50:04):
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. But he did
not do what almost every other revolutionary leader does at

(50:26):
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 Macgon because he stayed in the US
the whole time, right, and he wasn't like in the
shit the Mexican Revolution continued, but today's the story of

(50:48):
the Maganeste 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 of Mexico because like Madero gets
killed and then someone else comes in power, and someone
comes in power whatever, fucking the sort of revolutionary government
Mexico was like, look, you did a lot do you

(51:08):
want a pension, You can come back to Mexico and
we'll 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 my heart
with remorse.

Speaker 2 (51:28):
Okay, good point.

Speaker 1 (51:29):
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 at shit.
They scrape together enough money for like a shitty printing press.

(51:49):
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 decrying
the treatment of Mexican Americans at the border. He also
prophetically warns that without internationalist revolution, US industry is going

(52:11):
to move to Mexico destroy the economy in Mexico forcing
immigrants from Mexico into the US.

Speaker 2 (52:17):
Hit that one on the head, yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (52:21):
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,
we'll pardon you. But this is fucking magone. His mother
died without him there because she refused to ask him

(52:43):
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. Nothing
to repent for. My life has been lived without my
having any wealth, power, or glory, when I could have

(53:06):
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 oh h. He was found dead
in his cell on November twentieth, nineteen twenty two, in

(53:28):
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
that was killed by seven guards. So he was either

(53:50):
murdered by a guard or he was murdered by medical neglect.

Speaker 2 (53:54):
Either way, that might be what I read in the Britannica. Yeah, yeah,
you didn't want to spoil it. Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
His wife, Maria lives in another twenty six years. She organized
peasants to her last days. She dies in poverty because
she too 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 with She wasn't
like stuck with him. She was with him.

Speaker 2 (54:26):
You know.

Speaker 1 (54:26):
She was of the same sort as him, as far
as I can tell. Yeah, cloth and yeah, now mcgon
is remembered. He is 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 does a lot
of the fighting to make sure that his memory and

(54:46):
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 Campasino movement.
They added revolutionary syndicalism to the mix and the workers movement.
In nineteen thirty seven, Regeneracion went back into production, and

(55:10):
soon it was run by a Federacion 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 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.

(55:32):
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 from like something
something to something Flores Magon and Riccardo Floris Macgon's great

(55:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
Mag And that wasn't, in fact a cool person who
did cool stuff.

Speaker 3 (56:10):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
One of the books I read about this before, they
were like, oh and his wife Maria, And I'm like,
the fuck's that didn't come up earlier? That's not worth
telling me about. You know.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
You're like, so what's his relationship to his life?

Speaker 1 (56:37):
Right? 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

(56:59):
and 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 2 (57:19):
Cool, It's a great story. Thanks, thanks Margaret.

Speaker 1 (57:22):
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 2 (57:33):
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

(57:54):
and all those idiots.

Speaker 1 (57:56):
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. I'll probably go
down with the ship of Twitter. I'm not sure. I
just don't like social media, even though I do it.

(58:19):
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 2 (58:27):
I'll give you an invite code if you grab one
yet I am, I think, are you?

Speaker 3 (58:30):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (58:30):
I actually grabbed Margaret as a user name.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
That's fucking cool.

Speaker 1 (58:35):
Yeah, but it doesn't feel as like elite because there's
actually it's like Margaret dot b K s K.

Speaker 3 (58:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
And also there's no right now I'm following Oh great,
there's no video if they don't even have a betting
and yeah, all these places are just doing it like
half ass, so yeah, yeah, what.

Speaker 1 (58:56):
Are they thinking? But yeah, I'm trying to write more substack.
And you can also follow Sophie around yeah town no, yeah, no,
don't do that.

Speaker 2 (59:08):
If you do that, my dog will fuck you up.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
I will follow iron dot Dragon at Blue sky Dot.

Speaker 3 (59:21):
Exactly did you catch that? If you didn't too fucking bad. Yeah, 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,

(59:42):
and Robert Evans did a really good article to go
along with it on his substack Shatters oone. So I
want to plug that.

Speaker 1 (59:48):
That's what I'm listening to while walking the dog. Yes,
today and tomorrow, oh, possibly dinner tonight.

Speaker 2 (59:55):
That's that seems good. I was listening to walking about Town.
It's great.

Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
Hell yeah, Wow. YouTube can be obsessed with cool Zone
Media like all of us are. That's we got to
bye bye.

Speaker 3 (01:00:09):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (01:00:13):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website.

Speaker 3 (01:00:16):
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple

Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.