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Boom: A Journal of California, Vol. 2, Number 4, pps 1–7. ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X. © 2013

by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to

photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions

website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2012.2.4.1.

t h e S t a t e w e ’ r e i n

The march between two cities

rubén martínez

Echoes of Magón

I grew up in Los Angeles, but my family’s far-flung roots instilled in me the idea that I

had the birthright to live in more than one place at a time. My mother emigrated from

El Salvador to California in the late 1950s. My father was born an Angeleno but spent

his formative years bouncing between Los Angeles and Mexico City. As a child and

as a young adult, I traveled on a north-south axis between Los Angeles, Mexico City,

and San Salvador. At one point I told friends I was living in all three places, but of

course that was untenable. After a while, I contented myself with shuttling between

Mexico City and LA.

My father’s tales of his days in “el DF” (Distrito Federal, akin to District of

Columbia) were enthralling to me when I was growing up. The family legend is that

he, an adolescent at the time, walked wild enough on the streets to get kicked out of

school. My father lived with his parents in an apartment in the heart of Colonia Roma,

a much-storied bohemian district with classy Belle Époque and Deco architecture. It

has proven captivating to generations of expats, including William Burroughs and

several of his Beat friends, who lived there at precisely the same time my family

did. I like to imagine my father, a tall, pudgy kid with slicked back hair, strolling

down Álvaro Obregón, the neighborhood’s main drag, rowdy with his friends, while

Burroughs and Kerouac floated by, high and drunk.

Stirred on by these romantic notions and my own adventures in the city, el DF

and I have had quite the affair over nearly three decades. There have been some

long separations (the longest lasted nearly seven years), but right now we’re close—

as is the relationship between my two cities, whose histories have been intricately

braided over the last century. Migration has made LA a palpably Mexican place that

gazes southward, while el DF has been avidly following northern popular trends

for generations. They certainly share some difficulties: chronic traffic congestion,

pollution, a transportation infrastructure that fails to make their far-flung geographies

easily navigable. The differences are complementary, too. Los Angeles gives Mexico

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It’s a force that transforms the point

of origin as much as of arrival.

Protester in el DF. PhOTOgRAPh By CARLOS ADAMPOL gALINDO.

Poster in Los Angeles. PhOTOgRAPh By STEFAN KLOO.

City, a place that can feel yoked by history, a sense of the

future through an eternal pop present. And el DF provides

LA, the pastless paradise, historical depth. Migration is

movement through time and space, a perpetual becoming

that is both a fleeing from and reverence for the past, and

it’s a force that transforms the point of origin as much as

of arrival.

There is also a fluid communication in art and youth styles.

A year ago, our friends José Luis Paredes Pacho and his partner

graciela Kasep took my family to see ¿Neomexicanismos?

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at the Museo de Arte Moderno, where graciela is a curator.

The exhibit featured several artists who had worked and lived

between LA and el DF; it included multimedia artist Rubén

Ortíz-Torres and “performancero” guillermo gómez-Peña,

both of whom happen to be chilangos (Mexico City natives)

who became obsessed with Chicano culture in Los Angeles

even as Chicanos, like me, were heading in droves to Mexico

City, climbing the Pyramid of the Sun to authenticate our

identities. The exhibit underscored that Mexican identity

increasingly has been shaped not in the center but on the

periphery—that is, not in Mexico City, but on the border that

Mexico shares with the United States and beyond it, “México

de afuera” (as Douglas Monroy and other scholars call it),

“Mexico outside,” a vertiginous dialectic of movement and

constant hybridizing.

The roots of the process go back decades. In the 1940s,

Mexican American youth imitated and transformed American

gangster styles, becoming “pachucos” (later “cholos”), who

soon enough appeared in the border towns and, through

reverse migrant currents, wound up on the streets of el DF,

which is Mexico’s own hollywood producer of its celluloid

March on May 23, 2012. PhOTOgRAPh By ANTONIO MALO MALVERDE.

imagination. It was only a matter of time before icons of

Mexican cinema, like Tin Tan, were popularizing “pocho”

(bilingual) slang—a representation that would eventually

make its way back across the border to flash on the screens

of the Mexican theaters of LA.

The crises and opportunities of the global moment we

live in reverberate loudly both north and south. Needless to

say, the drug war profoundly unites my cities, sometimes

in rather surreal fashion. Although in LA I can walk into

a dispensary and be presented with a menu of designer

marijuana, I know that much of the immigrant population

in the immediate vicinity is traumatized by the violence

across the border that results from, among other things, the

massive, repressive, and corrupt machinery of prohibition.

On the other hand, I’ve witnessed the politics of hope in

both places. A little over half a year after I toured Solidarity

Park, Occupy LA’s encampment on the steps of City hall,

I stood beneath the great arches of the “Monumento

de la Revolución” in el DF as students pitched tents and

began holding nightly general assemblies, all part of the

burgeoning #yoSoy132 student movement. Of course, LA

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and el DF belong to a much greater uprising—from Tahrir

Square and the indignados of Spain to the students of

Chile —that echoes other, as we say in Spanish, “coyunturas”

(there is no perfect translation: “juncture,” or “moment,”

but a critical, maybe even historic one). The year 1968

certainly comes to mind, which just happens to be well

represented by an iconic image from Mexico City’s past—

Tommie Smith and John Carlos of the American Olympic

team raising their fists in a Black Power salute at the Estadio

Olímpico Universitario, not far from the birthplace of

#yoSoy132. But lately I’ve been imagining another political

palimpsest, which connects the LA and DF of exactly 100

years ago, through the story of Mexican revolutionary

Ricardo Flores Magón.

The barest outline of Magón’s story is part of institutional

revolutionary memory in Mexico. Because his agitation in

Mexico City predated the uprising of 1910 by several years,

he is known as the “Precursor” of the Revolution. There

is a boulevard named after him and a prominent grave

in the Rotunda de Personas Ilustres. But even though

Occupy LA encampment. PhOTOgRAPh By NEON TOMMy.

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he spent the better part of two decades in LA, there are

no statues or streets bearing his likeness or name in my

hometown, whose media and political elites perfected the

erasure of radical history in the twentieth century. Magón’s

legend in Los Angeles lives on largely in Chicano Studies

and anarchist circles, where his figure wields powerful

influence. you can hear Magón’s ideas in Rage Against the

Machine songs, see his visage on murals in East LA, and

his titles sell briskly at the annual Anarchist Bookfair.

Born in a largely indigenous community in Oaxaca

in 1874, Magón moved to Mexico City to study and first

marched against dictator Porfirio Díaz when he was just

seventeen years old. he started up his own newspaper,

Regeneración, intially a liberal journal that called for

democratic reforms. Díaz’s forces arrested him repeatedly,

I’ve witnessed the politics of hope in both places.

Poster design by Jesus Barraza.

and it became apparent that each term at the infamous rat

and spider-infested Belem Prison only served to further

radicalize him. The regime decided that it would abide

no more impudence and banned Ricardo and his brother

Enrique, who had joined the cause, from publishing

anything at all, ever. This display of brute power shoved the

Magón brothers and several of their sympathizers into exile

and ultimately to Los Angeles.

It is no coincidence that Ricardo Flores Magón wound

up in the City of Angels. Even though it is over 100

miles from the US-Mexico line, during the revolution it

essentially qualified as a border town, receiving hundreds

of thousands of refugees, more than any other place in

the American Southwest. This massive influx laid the

foundation for what would become the most important

and mythologized Mexican barrio in American history: East

LA. There is an ideological symmetry to Magón’s arrival,

as well. In the early 1900s, the city was a hotbed of radical

organizing, notwithstanding its open shop reputation and

the reactionary screeds of the Los Angeles Times. Emma

goldman spent several months in the city giving speeches,

and socialist visionary Job harriman nearly won the

mayor’s office in 1913, eventually founding the Llano del

Rio commune in the Mojave Desert, which Mike Davis

famously proclaimed an “alternative future” in the opening

pages of his classic City of Quartz.

In Los Angeles, Magón promptly set up shop a few

blocks from the Old Plaza, where radical agitators

exhorted the masses from soap boxes. he continued

publishing Regeneración, including sections in English

and Italian, which he smuggled back into Mexico and

also distributed it on this side of the border. It is here

that his definitive ideological identity is forged: now he

turned to anarchism, and his dream was of revolution

not just in Mexico, but across all borders. In “Manifesto

to the Workers of the World,” published in 1911, he

called upon the “comrades of the entire world” to “break

the dorsal spine of tyranny, which is capitalism and

authoritarianism.” The revolution was at hand, Magón

wrote, a “universal cataclysm which will soon break upon

the scene all over the planet.”

When Occupy LA was born in the late fall of 2011, Ricardo

Flores Magón’s ghost hovered over the encampment. A

young activist unfurled a large banner stenciled with his

signature slogan “Tierra y Libertad”—Land and Liberty,

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PhOTOgRAPh By JAVIER ARMAS.

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which was soon taken up in Mexico by Emiliano Zapata.

And the “commune” of Occupy tents recalled Magón’s own

experiment in sustainable living. In between arrests and

prison terms, in the LA neighborhood of Edendale, he and

his closest collaborators ate what they sowed, sold surplus

at market, and enacted equitable gender roles.

Six months after Occupy LA was evicted, my wife and

I, along with our twin daughters, marched alongside the

students of #yoSoy132 on the streets of Mexico City, and

we saw Magón’s bespectacled face undulating on another

banner. A century after his death, Magón continues his

peripatetic march between my two cities.

For his trans-border political activities, Magón gained the

enmity of harrison gray Otis, the conservative publisher of

the Los Angeles Times (rather the Rupert Murdoch of his day,

he counted among his vast holdings upwards of a million

acres of land in Baja California) and the LAPD, which

IMAgE COURTESy OF RUBEN MARTINEZ.

arrested him several times, each conviction leading to a

longer prison sentence. he died at the federal penitentiary

in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1924, and his body returned

to Mexico City in a cortège that was received by tens of

thousands of mourners.

My two cities are intimately bound together, but

traveling between them is no easy thing. There is the

matter of immigration policy and border walls and the

drug war and the generalized wave of crime in Mexico.

Communes in both places still meet the same fate as all

anarchist experiments under capitalism: they are violently

dismantled by the state, or they disintegrate from within,

often because of state infiltration.

Am I bequeathing my daughters a quixotic passion

that they’ll rebel against or embrace, only to have their

generation’s dream of a continental commune crushed?

I know how Magón would have answered that question. b

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