Kelly Lytle Hernández has described growing up in San Diego in the late 1980s, under the watch of police and the border patrol at the height the war on drugs. A school friend’s uncle got deported, devastating the family. Lytle Hernández, who is Black, told the Guardian soon after winning a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 that she herself was “full of stories of being sat on the curb, being accused of being a gang member, being put on a gang list, having my locker opened and searched for drugs.” Curiosity about the threats that surrounded her led Lytle Hernández to become a kind of academic historian detective. Her research brought her to two key factors shaping the American west: US immigration enforcement and mass incarceration. Far-flung archives revealed to her the many ways that laws, policing, borders, and jails have been used to manage social divisions and claim land and labor, while national security, violence, quirky local customs, and racial status (imposed, but sometimes negotiable) shaped institutions and legal regimes.

For her third book, Bad Mexicans, she chronicles a group of rebels in early twentieth-century Mexico known informally as the magonistas, after their leader, the anarchist pamphleteer Ricardo Flores Magón. Mexico’s president at the time was Porfirio Díaz, a former war hero who first came to power in the 1870s and had ruled continuously from 1884. His government was outwardly dressed as a modernizing democracy, but his power was buttressed by patronage. The foreign investors he invited in to develop Mexican land and infrastructure, often American, reaped oligarch-level fortunes in mines, railroads, ranching, timber, and oil works around the country while the vast majority of rural Mexicans remained landless and desperately poor.

In 1901 the newspaper Ricardo Flores Magón co-founded, Regeneración, began to call out the corruption and misrule of the Díaz regime. Flores Magón belonged to a circle of idealists that included two brothers and several intriguing feminists, as well as some socialists, around whom he tamped down (for a time) his growing conviction that both property and the state should cease to exist. Gradually, Regeneración’s message intensified: Díaz was a dictator and had to go. Workers deserved dignity and their lands restored. Facing repeat imprisonment and gag orders, core members of the group decamped to Texas (and later to St. Louis and Los Angeles). They founded a party, the Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), and got issues of their paper into the hands of migrant workers. Organizing into cells, they launched shoestring raids on northern villages, with uneven but attention-getting results. As the movement grew, a Mexican consul hired an American detective to track the leaders down. The U.S postal service found a loophole that permitted spying on PLM mail, and members were never quite safe again.

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Flores Magón and the PLM’s story has been told many times, and he’s a famous figure in Mexico. But Lytle Hernández argues that Americans mostly ignore the interconnected roots of Mexican and American history going back centuries. And this, she says, leaves us less than aware. Threading the magonistas’ travails through the turbulent American experience of the period is her suspenseful counter-story. She summons dozens of historical actors not usually seen on one stage, deftly sounding sometimes contradictory notes of comedy, outrage, conspiracy, bravery, and the misery of life on the run, moving from the PLM’s early underground broadsides to their pursuit by multiple divisions of U.S. law enforcement to Flores Magón’s trial in Los Angeles and his death in Leavenworth prison in 1922. Jack London and Mother Jones make cameo appearances. Supporting characters include the Mexican workers recruited to live in the American southwest in precarious conditions (dubbed “Juan Crow” by historians); the Arizona Rangers who crossed into Mexico to oppose a historic strike; the banker who was Díaz’s power-whisperer with American elites; and the American socialist journalist whose sensational account of Mexican oppression tanked US public opinion of Díaz. She pauses for brief histories of horrific anti-Mexican violence in Texas and the new federal police force created at Teddy Roosevelt’s behest that would soon become the FBI, charged in its early days with handling the magonista case.

In the end Lytle Hernández faults Flores Magón on two counts. One was military strategy. He believed poor Mexicans would rise up given the right conditions; stuck in propaganda mode, he didn’t seem to think through what should happen next. He was also rigid and ornery, refusing to work with allies who wouldn’t follow him all the way into anarchism. When Flores Magón was temporarily sidelined, a fascinating figure emerged to keep the PLM going for a while: Práxedis Guerrero, a young Mexican scion who renounced his family’s hacienda wealth to lead small but daring—and more strategically credible—rebel campaigns.

Meanwhile, in November 1910 in Texas, a white posse burned to death one Antonio Rodríguez, a ranch hand accused of murdering a white woman. Anti-US rioting erupted in Mexico. The US wearied of protecting Díaz, and an opening for change had arrived—but it was a liberal, Francisco Madero, who seized the moment. Regional rebel armies arose in response to Madero’s call for revolt in what turned out to be a frail alliance. Lytle Hernández moves briskly through the tumult of Mexico’s revolution. Gentleness with Díaz holdovers and reluctance to pursue sweeping reform doomed Madero’s brief presidency, which was cut short by his 1913 assassination and followed by four more years of interim governments and fighting. Among the war’s many reverberations to the north: more than one million Mexicans fleeing violence crossed into the United States, preparing a demographic sea change.

Lytle Hernández portrays the magonistas as “ordinary” rebels striving against long odds, noting that when the revolution finally ended, “most of the magonistas’ demands were enshrined—although not enforced—in the 1917 constitution.” The qualification is telling: the PLM imagined and catalyzed change, but they were never able to steward it. And yet American law and immigration enforcement were influenced for a generation and beyond by steps taken to subdue the perceived threat. In the story of home-grown American struggles for economic and racial justice, too, the magonistas merit a chapter. “You cannot understand US history,” Lytle Hernández writes, “without Mexico and Mexicans.”

Sarah Kerr has written for The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, Slate, and Vogue, among other publications.

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Review: Sarah Kerr on ”Bad Mexicans”