[ In Chicago, Mexican workers formed the ranks of a proletariat
that drew from these historical experiences and contemporary events in
Mexico, moving into left politics and communist-led U.S. labor unions
during the years of the Great Depression.] [[link removed]]

REVOLUTIONARY MEXICO IN CHICAGO   [[link removed]]

 

Justin Akers Chacón
January 1, 2020
Monthly Review
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_ In Chicago, Mexican workers formed the ranks of a proletariat that
drew from these historical experiences and contemporary events in
Mexico, moving into left politics and communist-led U.S. labor unions
during the years of the Great Depression. _

,

 

John H. Flores, _The Mexican Revolution in Chicago: Immigration
Politics from the Early Twentieth Century to the Cold
War_ (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 252 pages,
$28, paperback.

In August 1927, Juanita Guevara pulled out a .32 caliber pistol from
her purse, shooting and killing a Chicago police officer. She was
defending herself from the oncoming cop, who was enraged after
witnessing her slap a white man across the face. The man had
deliberately ridden his bicycle into her 10-year-old son on the
sidewalk and Juanita would not stand for it. Both the cop and the
cyclist were Polish and expressed resentment toward the growing
Mexican population in “their” Back of the Yards neighborhood in
Chicago. Guevara served only four months in prison and was released
thanks to a large public campaign organized in the Mexican barrios
that convinced a jury that she was justified in her actions.

In _The Mexican Revolution in Chicago: Immigration Politics from the
Early Twentieth Century to the Cold War_, John H. Flores uses the
story of Juanita Guevara to illustrate the growth of the Mexican
population in 1920s Chicago and how migrant communities situated and
organized themselves politically in an often-hostile social
environment. Drawing from political experiences in Mexico, Flores
identifies and explores the evolution of a Mexican population whose
identities and loyalties were shaped and divided by the Mexican
revolutionary and counterrevolutionary processes in _la patria _(the
homeland). As he puts it, “each revolutionary faction (the liberals,
radicals, and traditionalists) organized societies and coalitions;
held meetings, events, and fund-raisers; delivered statements to the
Mexican public through the Spanish-language press; and stressed the
dignity of their constituencies” (4).

Flores periodizes the history and dichotomizes the political actors,
beginning with the _revolutionary generation_: liberal nationalists
versus traditionalists and _cristeros_ (Catholic rebels in the
Cristero War) between 1910 and 1930. This generation is followed by an
epoch of radical socialists and proletarians who contested the
political terrain of the Mexican barrios against anti-Communist
Catholics who found ideological convergence with a repressive U.S.
state from the 1930s to the 1950s.

The Revolutionary Generation: Liberal Nationalists Organize Their
Communities

Like Los Angeles, early twentieth-century Chicago’s Mexican
population was predominantly middle and working class, without the
presence of an established elite (_rico_) population like those of New
Mexico and South Texas. The first Mexicans who came to the city
included exiles and migrants from the middle classes who carried with
them liberal and nationalist ideals. While some of these aligned with
the more radical aspirations of the revolutionaries associated with
Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican Liberal Party who were actively
operating throughout the Southwest, they were largely small
shopkeepers and professionals who saw themselves as the arbiters of
the well-being of the larger Mexican population.

The liberals believed that an organized political identity and
community activism raised the social consciousness of the Mexican
population. Drawing from the popular intellectual tenets of the
Mexican Revolution, they aimed to instill these values among their
people. These stood in opposition to the imperialist nature of the
United States, which they characterized as a function of the state and
ruling class—not of the common people. They took positions against
all forms of U.S. interventionism in the Americas and formed alliances
with others in the nationalist milieu, such as Puerto Ricans, Cubans,
and Nicaraguans. Mexican liberals joined with Nicaraguans who actively
opposed the U.S. occupation of their country by U.S. military forces
from 1912 to 1933. They cheered on Augusto Sandino and the armed
resistance campaign of his followers that set back the efforts of U.S.
marines, with _mexicanos _comparing the Nicaraguan fighters to
Pancho Villa and _villista_ resistance, and the marines to John J.
Pershing’s Punitive Expedition into Mexico in 1916.1
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They also opposed the racial oppression and violence against Mexicans,
which was commonplace in 1920s Chicago, when the eugenics movement was
at its height and informed policies of racial segregation across
cities and towns throughout the Midwest. Mexican liberals condemned
police brutality, protested the segregation of public spaces, and
organized the monitoring of court proceedings to document and object
to any discriminatory practices against Mexican defendants. They
advocated for some degree of equality for women (while not challenging
patriarchy directly) and supported the campaign to restrict the
activities of the Catholic Church in Mexico. Liberals also defended
incoming migrants from Mexico, forming organizations like the
Immigrants Protective League, which counseled newcomers on legal
rights, supported resources for English-language acquisition, and
provided other services to assist with integration.

Constructing a Mexican Identity

In the period before the Mexican Revolution, liberals in Chicago
promoted nationalist conceptions of identity and education, while also
embracing the idea of U.S. citizenship for Mexicans. Originally,
liberals organized through settlement houses in the city, one of the
products of the white middle-class reform campaigns of the 1900–1910
Progressive movement. They raised money from wealthy philanthropists
to build adult schools in immigrant communities to foster so-called
Americanization. This referred to the project of imposing white
Anglo-Saxon cultural norms and capitalist values on immigrant
communities to accelerate assimilation and social conformity.

Liberal nationalists who arrived in Chicago during the revolutionary
period rejected Anglo assimilation for Mexicans, which put them in
direct conflict with the Anglo administrators of the settlement houses
and the project of Americanization. They eventually pooled their
resources to form their own patriotic societies to commemorate
important Mexican holidays, launch community betterment projects, and
build cultural schools for their children. To name one example, they
started the Centro Mexicano, a type of cultural center that included a
school for Mexican children to be instilled with cultural and national
pride and learn English alongside Spanish. Three of these centers
operated in the different Mexican barrios in the 1920s as an
alternative to the settlement houses and the assimilationist curricula
of public schools.

Through these centers, the liberals espoused a _mexicanidad_ that
was secular, nationalist, and promoted a _mestizo_ identity that
accounted for indigenous ancestry and roots. Children were taught to
embrace their _mestizaje_, retain their Spanish while learning
English, and see themselves as _mexicanos_ _de afuera _(Mexicans
from abroad) instead of Americans. Furthermore, the liberals rejected
the idea that Mexicans had to become U.S. citizens to attain equality,
in fact they discouraged it.

They promoted political and historical literacy and drew from
Mexico’s rich literary traditions by establishing bookstores,
libraries, and their own press in every Mexican neighborhood. As
Flores describes, “nearly every Mexican-owned pool hall and grocery
store sold Spanish-language newspapers, books, and magazines” (75).
Through their ingress into the spheres of social and political life of
Chicago’s Mexican community, liberals found themselves in conflict
with Mexican conservatives.

Counterrevolution in Chicago: Traditionalists and Cristeros

Liberals vied for influence over their brethren’s education,
understanding of identity, and even nominal women’s rights. This
brought them into direct conflict with another political current
operating in the same social terrain: the conservative
counterrevolution. Traditional Mexican conservatives, especially those
integrated into the daily life of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago,
militated against the efforts of the liberals.

The conservatives were significantly bolstered in their efforts by an
influx of militant partisans and reactionary clergy who fled to or
exiled themselves in the United States, many of whom resettled in
Chicago during the Cristero War (1926–29), which was a revolt of
sections of the Catholic Church against the postrevolutionary state
then led by Plutarco Elias Calles. Church clergy and peasant
adherents, especially based in the Bajío region of Mexico
(Aguascalientes, Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Querétaro), rose up in arms
against the secularization of the postrevolutionary state and the
government’s imposition of constitutional restrictions on church
activity in politics.

The xxxxxx of traditionalists in Chicago opposed in principle the
work of the liberals, whose approach encouraged critical thinking that
questioned the legitimacy of Christianity itself. Furthermore, the
liberals represented the embodiment of the defeat of the
conservatives’ postcolonial way of life, which had structured their
social identity and political consciousness through the Catholic
Church. In fact, they organized their oppositional activities and
received support and resources from the church, which now included
exiled Mexican clergy warmly embraced and integrated into the local
diocese. Within the barrios, they formed their own clubs and
associations designed to counter liberalism in all aspects.

Through their influence in the public schools as well as within
Catholic schools, they pushed for curricula that promoted Spanish
historiography. This associated the whiteness of Spanish European
heritage, the Catholic religion, and the continuity of Spanish
colonial institutions and cultural practice as the saving graces of
Mexican identity. This erased all elements of indigenous cultural and
national heritage, painting Spaniards as Christ-like saviors of the
supposedly savage Mexicans. This converged with the dominant white
nationalist ideology firmly ensconced in ruling circles of the day.

Conservatives supported the active role of the Catholic Church in all
aspects of social and political life, including a rejection of
women’s equality and affirmation of their role as subordinate to the
man of the household. While women could receive basic education, their
continued sexual and political repression was seen as crucial for the
reproduction of a Catholic social community, especially in a changing
world.

The essence of Mexican citizenship was thus linked more closely to the
church than to the nation. In this sense, they encouraged Mexicans to
become U.S. citizens and fully assimilate since they could freely be
Catholics without the restrictions experienced in Mexico. Unlike the
liberals, who saw education as a way to instill Mexican identity and
political values—and therefore social consciousness—the
traditionalists treated education as a model for individual
self-improvement, both spiritually through the church and materially
through economic gain. This aligned them more closely with the
Progressive goals of education as a means for immigrants to assimilate
more seamlessly into an Anglocentric capitalist system.

The presence of cristeros imbued the traditionalists with a level of
militancy and resolve previously absent. They created their own clubs
linked to region, religion, and shared military experiences.
Opposition to the liberals even went so far as organizing physical
attacks against them and their meetings. Using churches as a base,
conservatives also organized among new migrants. Their prominence grew
into the 1930s for two main reasons. The first is that the liberals,
who were often small business owners, were decimated by the economic
depression, losing their businesses and eventually becoming fragmented
as a class. The second reason is that anti-liberalism began to
dovetail with the emerging apparatus of anticommunism in the U.S.
state, as the new migrant wave from Mexico espoused more open sympathy
with the tenets of radicalism and socialism.

Proletarian Chicago: Frente Popular Antiimperialista

The first significant waves of working-class Mexican migration poured
into the Southwest and fanned out across the Midwest in the 1920s.
Midwestern growers and industrialists deployed agents deep into Mexico
to recruit thousands of workers to labor in the fields and industrial
and manufacturing plants. Migrants then followed the agricultural
harvests through the grain belt states or into urban industrial
centers like Chicago, Detroit, Gary, and Cleveland. As many as
eighteen thousand migrants found their way to Chicago each year during
this period, with portions of these waves permanently settling. By
1930, twenty thousand Mexican workers lived in the city and comprised
40 percent of the railway maintenance workforce, 12 percent of
metalworkers, 5 percent of meatpackers, and 15 percent of all cement,
rug, manufacturing, and fruit-packing workers.

The Mexican working class has a long history of self-organization.
Since the mid–nineteenth century, they
formed _mutualistas_ (mutual aid societies) to collectivize their
social needs. The societies increasingly took on the form of
proto-labor unions during the periods of intense class struggle that
characterized the latter years of the José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz
Mori dictatorship. When they crossed the border as labor migrants,
Mexican workers brought their historical memory and these
organizational forms along with them, reconstructing mutualistas
across the Southwest and into the Midwest. In Chicago, Mexican workers
formed the ranks of a proletariat that drew from these historical
experiences and contemporary events in Mexico, moving into left
politics and communist-led U.S. labor unions during the years of the
Great Depression.

Migrant workers coming to Chicago in the 1930s were influenced and
shaped by the rise in class struggle in Mexico, especially during
the _sexenio _of radical reformist Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40).2
[[link removed]] Flores
documents case studies of some of these workers who participated in
strikes, industrial union organizing, and political mobilizations led
by either the Mexican Communist Party or the Confederation of Mexican
Workers (CTM), a national union movement they helped spearhead. They
later heeded the call by a new generation of working-class Mexican
leaders in the barrio, turning to socialist politics and class-based
organization as a way out of capitalist crisis.

During the Popular Front period, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union called
on Communists around the world to organize opposition to the growing
fascist threat to Russia by abandoning class-war rhetoric and joining
with so-called progressive bourgeoisies in the capitalist countries in
a common fight against Adolf Hitler. Communist Parties around the
world obliged. In the United States, the Communist Party aligned
itself with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, while
the Mexican Communist Party supported Lázaro Cárdenas and the
National Revolutionary Party (later named the Institutional
Revolutionary Party). Through popular front organizations, they
abandoned class struggle politics in favor of a rhetorically
nationalist and antifascist politics that provided critical support
for these administrations against their domestic rivals. This was
especially the case in the arena of labor organizing. Roosevelt and
Cárdenas gave indirect sanction to the Communists to organize workers
into new industrial unions that would essentially become loyal to
these mainstream parties instead of the radicals.

Class Mobilization

Despite the Faustian character of the bargain, Mexican socialists in
Chicago were emboldened to recruit Mexican workers into the Chicago
(and other Midwest chapters) of the Popular Anti-imperialist Front
(FPA), extensions of the popular front campaign established in the
urban and industrial centers across Mexico. _Frentistas_ (members of
the Front) organized three chapters in the city. Working-class
migrants joined the FPA, which co-organized Mexicans alongside other
groups of workers in union organizing drives, unemployment marches,
protests for civil rights, and other actions. Accordingly, they were
also beaten, brutalized, and persecuted by the state. Several
mexicanos were among those shot and beaten at the infamous Little
Steel Strike at Republic Steel mill in the south side of Chicago in
1937, at which the Memorial Day Massacre occurred. The massacre
involved police shooting and killing ten unarmed demonstrators and
beating another twenty-eight, resulting in serious head injuries and
leaving nine people permanently disabled.

Like the liberals of the previous generation, the frentistas tried to
raise class consciousness through political gatherings where they gave
speeches, discussed politics, and analyzed global events from a
socialist perspective. They expounded on the events of the Cuban sugar
workers’ general strike against U.S. sugar mill owners in 1933, the
Spanish Revolution and Civil War, the strike movements in Mexico, the
nationalization of U.S. oil companies in 1938, and other similar
developments. They also established radical libraries and bookstores
in the city, and distributed radical Mexican literature and
periodicals.

Like the liberals, the frentistas also viewed the education of the
next generation as critical to their project of radical social
transformation. They viewed education as a vehicle for radical
socioeconomic change, not spiritual or upward mobility or individual
aggrandizement. They called on Cárdenas and the CTM to establish
formal relations with their like-minded _paisanos _in _el
norte_ and fund an educational program akin to the new socialist
curriculum being adapted in public schools and the workers’
universities being created and launched by CTM leader Vicente Lombardo
Toledano.

They also sought to incorporate and defend migrants, and developed a
critique of imperialism that blamed capitalist plunder for the
displacement of their compatriots. They reasoned that if imperialism
allowed capital to move freely and openly throughout Latin America,
people displaced by imperialism should therefore also have the right
to migrate and be treated in an equally hospitable way in the United
States. Frentistas worked directly with the U.S. Communist Party,
jointly touring speakers across Mexican barrios and using frentistas
to organize Mexicans into the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO). This included significant organizing campaigns in the
Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee and Steel Workers Organizing
Committee drives that brought thousands into the industrial union
movement.

State Repression of Revolutionary México de Afuera

For their radicalism, frentistas were banned from the settlement
houses and moved their work wholly into the CIO unions. They were also
targeted by the conservative traditionalists, with the most far-right
and reactionary elements aligning with the openly fascist Sinarquista
movement in Mexico, which sought to align Mexico with the Axis powers
as the world moved toward the Second World War. Nevertheless, the
biggest threat to the popular front movement was the U.S. state, which
set out to crush all vestiges of the Communist Party, radical labor
unionism, and the nascent multiracial civil rights movement emerging
from this milieu.

In the last section of the book, Flores details how the U.S. ruling
class built up an array of forces in the state and federal
legislatures, law enforcement, the media, and other areas to deploy
the law and mobilize public opinion against the growing threat of a
radical-led, organized, multiracial working-class movement.

Democrats and Republicans alike passed and supported legislation that
criminalized the Communist Party, as well as membership in any of its
aligned groups. This raft of repressive policies also singled out
immigrants and long-term resident noncitizens for special targeting
for their left-wing political activity.

A whole generation of Mexican radicals, comprised of key organizers of
the Mexican working class into CIO unions from Chicago to San Diego,
were detained and deported. By the early 1950s, the federal government
expanded its mission of repression to the Mexican working-class
population as a whole, especially in those cities, towns, and regions
with the highest rates of CIO-affiliated union density. This carried
into the CIO itself, where an emboldened right-wing minority used this
assault as leverage to oust the Communist leadership and expel the
eleven multiracial unions created under their watch—all with
bipartisan support. In Chicago, deportations depleted the Mexican
population from 20,000 in 1930 to 7,200 by 1940. What the conservative
traditionalists could not do—rid themselves of their liberal and
radical adversaries—the state accomplished with the full force of
law.

Flores’s book is essential reading for understanding how Mexican
revolutionary politics influenced migrant workers who moved to the
United States in the 1920s and ’30s. He carefully documents the
regional characteristics, transnational odysseys, political
ideologies, and lived experiences in the United States of the
different waves of Mexican migrants and how they reconstituted their
communities and political affiliations in Chicago in an effort to
establish influence within the Mexican barrios. His use of individual
case studies brings this into clearer focus, as we retrace individual
journeys through collective history. While Flores presents his
information in an objective manner, sympathy for his subjects comes
out in the narrative.

Along with several other recent texts that document the important
social and political characteristics of Mexican working-class migrants
in the 1930s and ’40s, _The Mexican Revolution in Chicago _is an
integral part of a new canon of important historical literature on
Mexican immigrant workers in U.S. history. This is especially relevant
as immigrant workers once again make up a significant share of the
U.S. working class and show a strong prounion proclivity while the
union movement is attacked and in long-term decline. This book is
particularly relevant for immigrant workers and young people today,
who are poised to learn a great deal by understanding the lessons of
struggle and resistance of those who came before as they go through
similar experiences of racial and class oppression.

Notes

* ↩
[[link removed]] Francisco
“Pancho” Villa was a Mexican general and one of the most prominent
figures of the Mexican Revolution. The Punitive Expedition, also known
as the Pancho Villa Expedition or the Mexican Expedition, was an
unsuccessful military operation conducted by the U.S. Army
against villista forces during the Mexican Revolution.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Sexenio refers
to the six-year term limit on the Mexican presidency.

_JUSTIN AKERS CHACÓN is an activist and educator in the San
Diego-Tijuana border region. He is the author of Radicals in the
Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the
Mexican-American Working Class (Haymarket Books, 2018) and coauthor
with Mike Davis of No One Is Illegal (Haymarket Books, 2006, 2018)._

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