Читать книгу Ringside Seat to a Revolution - David Dorado Romo - Страница 57

THE SEEDS OF ANARCHY: THE MAGONISTAS IN EL PASO

Ricardo (left) and Enrique Flores Magón led an anarchist movement which attempted four

separate uprisings from El Paso between 1906 and 1912. (Los Angeles Times, 1916.)

WHILE WALKING AROUND exploring the history of my city, I’ve sometimes stepped into uncharted ter-

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ritory. For instance, I’ve found connections between the Teresista and the anarchist-Magonista movements in El

Paso that, as far as I’m aware, no other historian has examined before. I admit that the evidence I’ve dug up

for the link between them is still a little skimpy. But I get whiffs of that underground network, especially in the

persons of Lauro Aguirre and Prisciliano Silva, who were hardcore activists of both Teresismo and Magonismo.

On other occasions, however, I’ve stepped into what I would call “disputed territory.” The debate among

academic historians over just how important the Magonista movement was in the early stages of the Mexican

Revolution is one example. James Cockroft, author of Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution, believes

its role was crucial. He argues that Magonista journalists not only provided many of the ideological underpin-

nings of the revolution but that during the fighting of 1910-1911 the Magonista guerrilleros kept the revolution

going when the Madero wing of the revolution was faltering. But then on the other side of the ocean, Oxford

historian Alan Knight, in The Mexican Revolution: Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants, has the opposite view of

things. Knight believes the Magonistas had very little impact on the Mexican Revolution. Their only major vic-

tory was in Baja California and it was too far out of the way to overlap much with the Maderista movement.

From the research I’ve done about El Paso and Juárez, I’ve found more evidence to support Cockroft’s posi-

tion and the idea that Madero owed a much larger debt to the Magonistas than Knight gives them credit for.

On this border, as I point out in the following chapter, the threads that connected the two revolutionary move-

ments were wide and extensive.

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