Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands

Few Americans today know the significance of Ricardo Flores Mag鏮 (1874-1922) and the magonistas, a group of agitators who challenged Mexican dictator Porfirio D燰z in the early twentieth century. But distinguished historian Kelly Lytle Hern嫕dez argues their cross-border insurgency, launched from U.S. soil, was a landmark revolt against the U.S. empire and the suffocating power Anglo-Americans held over Mexican lives.

Through protest and armed rebellion, the magonistas ignited the 1910 Mexican Revolution, which upended North America. Their story reads like a thriller, with the rebels evading an international manhunt amid a swirl of love affairs, betrayals, and dramatic battlefield raids. Pursued by the nascent FBI, the rebels wrote in secret code and organized thousands of workers to their cause. Lytle Hernandez documents how the magonista uprising, and the failed Anglo-American campaign to stop them, proved foundational to the history of race, immigration, and violence in the United States.