They resumed publishing their newspaper in the United States and smuggled it back into Mexico, often hidden between the pages of Sears, Roebuck catalogues. As the crisis in Mexico intensified, Regeneración became the main tribunal of the Mexican Revolution, distributed clandestinely throughout the country, and, famously, read out loud by campfire light to the troops of Emilaiano Zapata.
Flores Magón, who is celebrated in Mexican secondary school textbooks as a “precursor” of the revolution, remained in exile in the United States for the last eighteen years of his life. Although Ricardo Flores Magón, his brother Enrique, and a substantial number of displaced Mexican revolutionaries focused primarily on political developments in Mexico, they also set up a series of PLM clubs in the Southwest and California. Those clubs attracted Mexican migrant workers, some of whom began to call themselves Magonistas. The clubs were linked through Regeneración and several other local, less regular PLM newspapers. Club leaders read the newspapers out loud to assembled groups of workers, who then discussed the situation in Mexico and their own troubles in the United States.
The hub of PLM power was Los Angeles, which was still an agricultural town in 1907 when the Flores Magón brothers settled there, and already was the center of the Mexican community in the United States. The PLM’s LA clubhouse became a center of multilingual, multiethnic activity where socialists and Wobblies famous and obscure mixed with Magonistas. Regeneración, its back page printed in English, built up an LA circulation of 10,000, making it both the first bilingual paper in California and the largest Spanish-language newspaper in town. The PLM club, which was also considered a Spanish-speaking IWW local, had 400 active members, most of whom were farm workers.12
Elsewhere in California, Spanish-speaking IWW locals were filled with people who were also Magonistas. San Diego had a joint IWW-PLM local, and the highly active Fresno Wobbly local had a large number of Mexican workers. Given the loose attitude of the two anarchist groups toward questions of formal membership, among the rank-and-file the primary differences between Wobblies and Magonistas were language and nationality rather than ideology or practice.13
The PLM clubs and IWW locals were not just debating societies and places to hang out. In San Diego in 1910, a joint IWW-PLM local organized a strike at the local gas and electric company that won equal pay for equal work. That same year a fight for free speech that ultimately did so much to popularize the IWW among California farm workers, began in Fresno in the midst of a battle to organize Mexican workers who were being contracted to build a dam on the outskirts of town. In hop fields, vineyards, sugar refineries, and citrus orchards, many farm worker walkouts were joint Wobbly-Magonista efforts.
The PLM and the IWW went down together. In 1918, Ricardo Flores Magón, along with other PLM and IWW leaders, was convicted of violating the Espionage Act in 1918 for “obstructing the war effort.” At Leavenworth Penitentiary, in Kansas, he had a cell next to Ralph Chaplin, a prominent Wobbly poet, cartoonist, and songwriter. They did their time translating the poetry of a slain Magonista soldier, Práxedis Guerrero. For Ricardo, it was the last time of his life. The new Mexican government offered its help, but he declined because he deplored the government’s conduct following the revolution. He died in jail, in 1922.14
The IWW and PLM, along with most other anarchist groups, did not survive as effective organizations after World War I. The Bolshevik victory in Russia seemed to confirm that Communist parties, not anarchist ones, were the best vehicle for fighting capitalism. But Magonismo never totally disappeared from the California fields. Remaining underground in unfavorable times such as 1939, Magonismo has reappeared whenever farm workers have had an opportunity to fight. It is there when they slow down on the job, sabotage the crops, or strike at the beginning of a harvest. Magonistas played a part in Imperial Valley melon and lettuce strikes in the late 1920s. They worked together with other militants when California farm workers shook the state in the early 1930s. A generation later a few Magonistas would play a small role as the movement that produced the UFW was getting under way. And in 1979, the ghost of Ricardo Flores Magón would make a cameo appearance at one of the most dramatic moments in UFW history.
For the young Cesar Chavez, in 1939, that was not only an unknown future, it was an unknown past. The Chavez family was unconnected to any political tendency. More than that, families like the Chavezes were, in a sense, at an angle to history. Displaced Mexican homesteaders were only a tiny part of the great migration made famous by Steinbeck. In fact, across the 1930s, Mexicans who hit the road with all their worldly possessions were overwhelmingly headed not west, but south, to Mexico, driven by a combination of necessity, nativist attacks, and Mexican government inducements. Unacquainted with established farm worker traditions and communal networks in California, the Chavez family might easily have regarded isolation and loss as the steady state of people who work for wages in the fields.
More typical of the Mexican experience in California is the story of one of the other founders of the UFW, Gilbert Padilla.* Padilla was born the same year as Chavez, 1927, but unlike the latter he was “born into the migrant stream,” in the Hamburg labor camp in Los Banos, Merced County, located in central California, where his family was picking cotton. Gilbert’s parents, his paternal grandmother, and three uncles had come to the United States from Mexico in 1917, traveling on a troop train carrying revolutionary soldiers to Juárez. After crossing the border at El Paso, the Padilla clan went to Needles, California, worked on the railroad, and lived in railroad camps. In 1920 the family moved to Azusa, a town in East Los Angeles County. Gilbert’s father built a house, and most of the family worked in the nearby fields and orchards. They started migrating north to Los Banos in the Central Valley in 1926, leaving in June and returning in December or January.15
Padilla cannot recall when he first started working in the fields, as it was always so. Often he worked with his dad and his eight brothers and sisters on the same crew. Padilla remembers his first miniature cotton sack tied around his waist. It wasn’t cute; he hated it. Unlike Chavez, he didn’t associate the work with the loss of home or childhood. Working in the California fields was his childhood. Later that would seem an injustice, but at the time it was just hard work.
Padilla says he learned about work from his dad and about justice from his mom. Juana Cabrera Padilla had little children to care for and food to prepare, and Gilbert listened to her stories at home in the kitchen. She and the rest of the Padillas had paid two centavos each to cross the border, where U.S. agents had sprayed her and the others with DDT, a synthetic pesticide. She called it the most degrading moment of her life. She talked about how hard life had been back in Mexico and about the early hopes for the revolution. She had strong opinions and delivered a running commentary on contemporary politics: on Herbert Hoover (she hated him), FDR (she liked him), and war (it was the most hateful of all). She had learned English listening to the radio but refused to speak it. She was the first person Gilbert Padilla heard talk about equality.
The Padillas had been part of the migration of more than a million Mexicans who came to the United States between the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and the beginning of the Depression in 1930. Pushed out by economic disaster in the Mexican countryside and the violence of the revolution and attracted by the growing demand for labor and the relatively high wages in the U.S., most of the migrants settled in the Southwest and California. Many worked in the fields, and as early as 1920 California farm journals were running stories about the “Mexican Harvest.” In the decade that followed, the Mexican population of California more than doubled, and by 1930 Mexicans were the vast majority, perhaps 80 percent, of the state’s 200,000 farm workers. When the Depression hit, most of them had been doing farmwork for a good many years and were familiar with the California scene. Like the Padillas, they traveled a regular migratory route; they knew the crops, the contractors, the small towns of the Central Valley, the labor camps, the limits and opportunities of any potential fight.16
This community of people, connected to one another through networks of extended families and self-help organizations called mutualistas, was badly battered by the Depression. Blamed for the unemployment of white “American” workers,
