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“An abundant harvest was reaped in the city of

El Paso from the seed the Magón brothers sowed

in fertile fields.”

—Jesus Rangel¹¹⁷

ON JUNE 24, 1908, the El Paso police raided the

home of Prisciliano Silva, a veteran of the Teresista

rebellion. Silva had already served in prison for tak-

ing part in a Teresista raid on Palomas in 1896.¹¹⁸ The

police found several revolutionary newspapers,

Winchester rifles, six-shooters, 3,000 rounds of

ammunition, 150 homemade bombs, a large cache of

dynamite (provided by IWW miners from Arizona)

and a trunk full of letters written in secret code.¹¹⁹

When the code was finally broken, the police discov-

ered that the letters invariably concluded with strange

slogans, postscripts that read like they were authored

not by aging Teresistas, but dreamers of a different sort:

• The land belongs to those who work it.

• Abolish all social systems unsuitable for the

true development of the human being.

• Two hours of honorable work and the rest

for recreation.

Prisciliano Silva’s house on the corner of First

and Tays Streets, it turned out, was the center of oper-

ations for the Mexican anarchist movement. It was a

decade before the Russian Revolution, but this small

group of Mexican schemers who were found hiding

in South El Paso were trying to pull off one of the

most radical revolutions in world history.

The group feared their ideas were so “advanced”

that they should hide them even from many of their

own supporters. When they founded their movement

around the turn of the century, they called themselves

the Partido Liberal Mexicano. But by the time the PLM

moved its front lines to El Paso—from where they

attempted to launch four armed uprisings between

1906 and 1912—they had also moved ideologically

beyond liberalism. They were no longer content with

political reform or calling for the restoration of the

Liberal Constitution of 1857 as the Teresistas had a

decade before them. They did not want to substitute

a dictator for a liberal president. Now they wanted

nothing short of a full-scale anarchist revolution.

Despite this, Ricardo Flores Magón, the leader of

the Partido Liberal Mexicano, didn’t think it wise to

change their name. In 1908, he sent a coded letter

from his Arizona prison cell explaining his reasons to

his fellow anarchists hiding in El Paso:

If we had called ourselves anarchists from

the beginning, nobody would have listened

to us. Without calling ourselves anarchists

we have gone on planting in minds ideas of

hatred against the possessing class and

against the governmental caste. No liberal

party in the world has the anti-capitalist ten-

dencies like ours that is about to produce a

revolution in Mexico, and this has been

achieved without saying that we are anar-

chists. All, then, is a question of tactics.

As anarchists we know all this well. We

must give land to the people in the course of

the revolution; so that the poor will not be

deceived. There is not a single government

which can benefit the country against the

interests of the bourgeoisie. This you know

well as anarchists, and for that reason, I do

not need to demonstrate it with reasoning or

examples. We must also give the people pos-

session of the factories, mines, etc. In order

not to turn the entire nation against us, we

must follow the same tactics that we have

practiced with such success: we will contin-

ue calling ourselves liberals in the course of

the revolution but in reality we will be prop-

agating anarchy and carrying out anarchistic

acts. We must strip the property of the bour-

geoisie and restore it to the people.¹²⁰

It’s not clear exactly when Ricardo Flores Magón

himself became an anarchist. Ricardo and his brother

Enrique Flores Magón had first been exposed to anar-

chism in Mexico during their youth. In the 1890s, as

law students and activists in Mexico City, they had

studied the writings of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter

Kropotkin—anarchist thinkers who advocated direct

control of the land and factories by the workers and

not by centralized states or private corporations. Later

during their exile in the U.S., the Magón brothers and

other PLM leaders established contacts with several

117

Jesus Mendez Rangel, unpublished memoir (MSS 1700, Box 4, #207), Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

118

Vargas, Tomóchic: La Revolución Adelantada, p. 85.

119

El Paso Herald, June 25, 1908.

120

Ricardo Flores Magón, Correspondencia (1904-1912), pp. 380-381.