Bad Mexicans by Kelly Lytle Hernández

Author:Kelly Lytle Hernández
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

The United States vs. Ricardo Flores Magón

IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT WHEN ANSELMO FIGUEROA KNOCKED on Job Harriman’s door. They knew one another from the local Socialist Club. Harriman let him in and listened as Figueroa, an active member of the PLM foco in Los Angeles, explained why Harriman, a criminal defense attorney and one of the nation’s most prominent socialists, should take the case of the three Mexican men arrested that afternoon. The jailed men, he said, were political prisoners captured as part of a cross-border counterinsurgency campaign to stop a revolution from starting in Mexico, and a revolution in Mexico would strike a blow against U.S. capitalists. Without Díaz, U.S. investors such as the Rockefellers, the Guggenheims, William Randolph Hearst, and Edward Doheny would no longer be able to make and multiply their fortunes in Mexico. Without the profits they extracted from Mexican land and labor, this who’s who of U.S. capitalists would have fewer resources at the ready to suppress the U.S. labor movement. In this way, the fate of the U.S. labor movement was bound to the success of a revolution in Mexico.

Harriman understood the stakes. Harrison Gray Otis, owner of the Los Angeles Times as well as nearly a million acres of land in Mexico, was a leading figure in the local Merchant and Manufacturers Association (MMA), which was driving an “open shop” campaign in Los Angeles at the time. If that campaign was successful, labor unions would effectively be prohibited from organizing workers in the city. In turn, the nation’s socialists, joined by many labor unions, were locked in battle against Otis and the MMA in Los Angeles. The PLM uprising was a threat to a significant portion of Otis’s wealth. Harriman took the case.

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