Bad Mexicans is undoubtedly Hernández’s biggest and most ambitious book to date. It is also, in the best possible sense, a decidedly more “popular” than “scholarly” history, brimming with vivid characters, narrative detail, and modern-day resonance. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Hernández discussed her decision to write about the subject as accessibly as possible: “For me, it was when Donald Trump used the phrase ‘bad hombres,’ that I knew that this story needed to be told for a broader audience, because he was stirring up a really dangerous history.” Authorities on both sides of the border have long referred to nonconforming Mexicans as malos or “bad,” with revolutionary-era magonistas foremost among them. “It’s important for what is emerging as one of our largest populations here in the United States,” Hernández said, “to see themselves as protagonists in the American story.”
Ricardo Flores Magón was “brilliant and ill-tempered,” Hernández writes, and “looked more like a girthy professor than a gutsy revolutionary.” From the beginning, dissent seemed part of the Flores Magón family DNA: in 1892, when Ricardo was just seventeen, he was arrested at a student march alongside his older brother Jesús, “a full-time lawyer and a part-time activist.” Not long after, Jesús launched a legal journal that documented indigenous uprisings in Mexico’s north, which eventually landed him in jail for criticizing military officials. For a time, Ricardo followed in his brother’s footsteps, studying law and working as a printer’s assistant before dropping out to travel through southern Mexico, where he witnessed firsthand the subjugation of the rural working class. Upon his return to Mexico City, Ricardo was invited by Jesús, newly released from jail, to help launch a weekly newspaper “to point out and denounce all of the misdeeds of public officers who do not follow the precepts of law.” Stirred by his travels and his reading of anarcho-communist intellectuals like Peter Kropotkin, Ricardo accepted the invitation. Soon their youngest brother, Enrique, would join them as the newspaper’s editor.
The Flores Magón brothers called their paper Regeneración, and their principal target was Mexico’s long-serving autocratic president, Porfirio Díaz, whose rule began in 1876. Díaz was widely credited with having modernized Mexico by overseeing robust economic growth, a dramatic expansion in infrastructure, and a population boom. But for the working class these economic advancements—most of which were financed by US and European interests—had merely served to replace the colonial feudalism of the encomienda system (in which indigenous people were enslaved by Spanish settlers) with the debt peonage of industrial capitalism. Díaz’s vision of “order and progress” was also paired with intensely centralized political power and a robust police state that monitored dissent in the streets, in the fields, and in the press.