Introduction
Francisco “Pancho” Villa is often said to have led the only invasion of the continental United States since the Civil War. Of course, such statements overlook many acts of armed resistance on the part of Native nations, but, just as egregiously, they ignore another crucial chapter of the Mexican Revolution. In the year preceding Villa’s 9 March 1916 assault on Columbus, New Mexico, men such as Agustín Solis de la Garza waged a guerilla war in South Texas. Taking aim at the twinned forces of capitalist dispossession and racial discrimination, these so-called Sediciosos (“Seditionists”) spent the summer of 1915 attacking everything from ranches to railways. Into the fall, the Sediciosos were able to hide in Tamaulipas, but that winter, US officials coerced their Mexican counterparts into collaborating on the counterinsurgency. Within months, Texas Rangers and US soldiers thus defeated the Sediciosos; thirsty for vengeance, these forces then spent the following years slaughtering thousands of other Mexicans and Mexican Americans.
In South Texas, these events still echo through everyday life: singers still perform a corrido called “Los Sediciosos,” and elders still recount memories of “La Matanza” (González; Martinez). Elsewhere, both the rebellion and its repression are encountered most often in the pages of Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez. Written between 1936 and 1940 but not published until 1990, this bildungsroman follows a boy as he is defined and divided by his United States citizenship—announced in his first and middle names, “George” and “Washington”—and his ethnoracial identity—his father, Gumersindo Gómez, is “from the interior of Mexico” (19), and his mother, María García, is a fourth-generation Tejana (20). These tensions come to an early climax in “Part I: Los Sediciosos / The Seditionists”: in 1915–16, Gumersindo idealizes the United States yet is shot as a suspected rebel; meanwhile, María’s brothers take up arms against white supremacy yet survive the subsequent reprisals. As the narration moves past “Gumersindo’s swollen face” to show the García brothers on their last raid (21), it positions its young protagonist among multiple models of assimilation and anti-assimilation. With the story of the Sediciosos, it conveys the complexity of growing up in the borderlands.
Since the Sediciosos turned out to be compelling literary characters, it should come as no surprise that they were also literary creators. But while these Mexicans and Mexican Americans made at least 27,000 copies of at least seven distinct broadsides and handbills, they have not received recognition for their aesthetically adventurous blend of anarchism, agrarianism, and anti-imperialism.Footnote 1 To some extent, this has been an issue of access: before the 2013 creation of the Agustín Solis de la Garza Collection, the Sediciosos’ writings were so scattered that even their most important publication, “Plan de San Diego, Texas,” was said to exist only in an English translation (made neither by sympathizer nor by scholar, but by “J. R. Harold, Immigrant Inspector”). Yet as is often the case, poor access has led to poor analysis, such as when Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler dismiss the “Plan” as “ridiculous” (31), and when James A. Sandos disparages “the handbills” as “inarticulate” (107). Against such arguments, the likes of Trinidad Gonzales, Kelly Lytle Hernández, and Benjamin Heber Johnson have engaged more generously with the actions of the Sediciosos—with their secret meetings, with their sneak attacks, and with the tragic results. By extending this generosity to the Sediciosos’ war of words, we can deepen our appreciation for the print culture we now label Latinx.
Like many other activist and artistic manifestos, the text “Manifiesto ¡¡A los pueblos oprimidos de América!!,” which I have translated as “Manifesto to the Oppressed Peoples of America!,” is incredibly violent: to create a “Socialist Republic” out of Texas and neighboring states, it calls for killing almost all white men between the ages of sixteen and seventy (see fig. 1).Footnote 2 In its enthusiasm for “executions,” the text has big blind spots: while offering “every guarantee” to “the Apache Indians,” it ignores how these and other Indigenous Peoples have resisted Spanish-speaking settlers far longer than English-speaking ones. Clearly, the violence is as unthinkable as the ignorance is predictable. But just as clearly, other parts of the project are laudable. In the six-paragraph preamble, the twenty-eight-clause plan, and a rousing conclusion (complete with comedic pseudonymous signatures; see fig. 2), we can see the contours of a coalition whose “skin is black, brown, coppery, or yellow.” And by repudiating cruel clauses such as VIII and XVI–XVIII, we can perceive new paths toward abolition, defined not only as the end of “barefaced enslavement” but also the end of “prisons.” Ultimately, we can catch glimpses of reparation—for the lands lost in the Texas Revolution and United States-Mexico War, for the labor extracted by “a class of criminals,” and for the lives snuffed out by “lynching.”
First page of “Manifiesto,” courtesy of Margaret H. McAllen Memorial Archives, Museum of South Texas History.
Second page of “Manifiesto,” courtesy of Margaret H. McAllen Memorial Archives, Museum of South Texas History.
Before we can pursue such political possibilities, we must understand the underlying aesthetic strategies. With a serpentine first sentence that slithers over 120 words in both the Spanish original and my English translation, the Sediciosos announce their allegiance to two print cultures. Joining what John Alba Cutler terms “Latinx modernism,” they use fragmentary forms to explore “the collision of two different modernities: the abiding modernity of European coloniality … and the new modernity of US conquest” (576). However, even as their calls to the “continent of Columbus” echo Caribbean writer-activists like José Martí, and even as their critiques of the Anglo “Colossus” evoke South American thinkers like José Enrique Rodó, their project remains rooted in Mexican revolutionaries from Enrique Flores Magón to Emiliano Zapata: early exemplars of what Gloria Anzaldúa terms “border culture,” the Sediciosos insist on their identity as people whose “wild tongues can’t be tamed” (120). By participating in these print cultures, they prove that they are not simply the subject of texts but also sources for a world of textuality. In 1915–16, this world ended up “irrigating battlefields with … blood.” Going forward, might it help us stay afloat in the “river of abuse that rushes through the United States”?
THE REVOLUTIONARY CONGRESS convened by the Plan proclaimed in San Diego, Texas—facing the full delicacy and difficulty of starting and sustaining a movement that is destined to reconquer the liberties and sovereignties that are each day trampled, and knowing that its voice shall be more than a cry in the desert—is calling on the various oppressed peoples of the continent of Columbus to give an energetic “ENOUGH” to all the abuses, infamies, and barbarities committed by a dirty mass of men that does not merit the name nation yet that calls itself the “Colossus” of the United States of North America—a pungent pile of filth that contaminates a cultivated field yet that declares itself the granary of the world.
Yankee pride has reached new limits: no longer content with the daily lynching of men, it now dedicates itself to the larger lynching of a whole people, a whole race, and a whole continent.… It is against this arrogance that we must rise up unanimously; it is against this insolence that we must fight without regard for political and religious creeds, or for ethnic and social characteristics; it is against this odious idol that we must wage a no-quarter war and, if necessary, unleash a river of blood: by meeting force with force, we can reassert our rights and prerogatives as men who feel, think, love, and work like any of those arrogant “white men,” and indeed who surpass them even though our skin is black, brown, coppery, or yellow.
Now that we are conscious of our rights as men—of our rights as humans—it is impossible for us to close our eyes to the river of abuse that rushes through the United States and that becomes a wild waterfall in Texas. Among those proletarians who are said to differ racially from the Septentrional Pigs, this waterfall washes away the interiority and dignity so essential to resisting capitalist vanity, leaving the racialized with little choice but to continue their unimaginably hard work for a class of criminals—no, for a class of cannibals. And even as this waterfall enriches the planet’s preeminent enslavers, it pays the workers only in racial hatred: while shutting the Mexican man, the Black man, and the Yellow man out of Schools, Hotels, Theaters, Railroads, and other Public Establishments, it gives the supposedly superior (but actually savage) “white man” his choice of segregated spaces.
This abominable situation is further aggravated not only by the daily assassination of thinking Men but also by the ever more intense exploitation of farmworkers, the vast majority of whom are Black, Mexican, or of another Latino origin. After capitalists conspire to depreciate the value of cotton and other crops—that is, after they conspire to pay laughably low wages—even farmworkers who deny bread to their children end up in debt to thieving merchants, and indeed end up back in barefaced enslavement.
In future publications, we shall continue to corroborate these overwhelming hardships in their many variations, but for the moment, the opportunities presented by the ongoing world war are driving us to take decisive action: in the United States of the North, we proclaim a SOCIAL REVOLUTION that shall start in Texas and then spread through New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah.
To direct the development of this REVOLUTION TO EMANCIPATE THE PEOPLES, PLACES, AND RACES OF AMERICA, we constitute a Revolutionary Congress whose members swear—not only on their lives but also before the wider world—to fulfill every part of the following:
REVOLUTIONARY PLAN OF SAN DIEGO, TEXAS
I. The version of this Plan proclaimed on 6 January 1915 remains in full force. However, it now contains additional clauses.
II. The abolition of racial hatred and the eradication of its root causes.
III. The proclamation of the Socialist Republic of Texas: drawing on states such as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, our Independent State will be filled with all our allies and free from all our enemies.
IV. The transfer of cultivated lands to the proletariat; initially, preference will be given to sharecroppers, field workers, and the movement’s combatants, but, eventually, the priority will be complete communization.
V. Among combatants, the equal distribution of all property seized in (but not repurposed as part of) the struggle.
VI. Among all proletarian families who support our cause (whether in the United States or in Mexico), the similarly equitable distribution of agricultural tools and supplies.
VII. The demolition of all jails and prisons; the abolition of other brutalizing institutions.
VIII. The execution of enemies, whether they are combatants, civil authorities, capitalist exploiters, or those who drown out our developing consciousness.
IX. The abolition of all kinds of physical and moral exploitation of the proletariat.
X. The establishment of State-of-the-Art Schools, where children of all colors and classes can lay the groundwork for Society’s future felicity, and where the pedagogy is based on and builds toward UNIVERSAL LOVE.
XI. The communization of the means of transportation and the means of agricultural production; to ensure that the lands make it into the hands of the dispossessed, proclamations shall be circulated throughout all countries inviting proletarians into our movement.
XII. The forces that are fighting for this Plan—and that are therefore fighting against the Government and capital of the United States of North America—shall use any means necessary until they have freed Black communities from the Yankee tyranny that has kept them submerged in the most iniquitous slavery, and indeed until they have achieved the absolute desegregation of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah.
XIII. To implement the preceding clauses, the Revolutionary Congress shall assemble an Army, which shall be commanded by Expert Military Leaders and ultimately a Supreme Military Leader; for a Flag, the Army shall never fly anything but a RED CLOTH with white words that run diagonally to declare: LIBERTY, EQUALITY, AND INDEPENDENCE.
XIV. Upon capturing enemy communities, Leaders shall attempt by whatever means are at their disposal to take possession of arms and funds; by distributing these resources in dialogue with their Superior Officers, these leaders shall give our cause the greatest possible chance of success.
XV. To maintain order in captured communities and thus help the revolutionary movement, leaders must appoint authorities who are committed to sociological ideals, who are already working on behalf of the exploited classes, and who are known for self-denial in the service of their cause.
XVI. Neither enemy soldiers nor private citizens shall be incarcerated indefinitely. On the contrary, they should only be held long enough to check their commitment to the cause or to force them to furnish us with funds. If they fail the first test or when they finish the second step, they shall without exception be executed.
XVII. Regardless of race or nationality, all strangers who are found with weapons that they cannot justify shall certainly be executed.Footnote 1
XVIII. All North Americans who fall under the power of the revolutionary forces shall certainly be executed; the only ones who shall be spared shall be elders of more than seventy years, children of less than sixteen years, and women of all ages. On no account shall mercy be extended to traitors to our oppressed races.
XIX. The Apache Indians of Arizona and the redskins of the Territory shall be given every guarantee; they shall receive the lands of which they have been robbed, and they shall help us in our cause.
XX. All appointments and promotions that are approved by lower-ranking leaders shall be recognized by Superior Officers; this clause extends to those who have yet to enlist.
XXI. Once in our possession, the abovementioned States shall be proclaimed an Independent Republic. Later, representatives of all who have implemented the ideals of our Plan can meet for a democratic discussion about being annexed by Mexico, which may yet be the Government best situated to serve as our common mother.
XXII. Outside the abovementioned states, we shall assist the free Black race in acquiring six additional states to constitute in whatever form they choose, provided that form is communal.
XXIII. Because this is a no-quarter war, no leaders—not even the Highest Leaders—shall negotiate with enemies until the Revolution has achieved its aims. Neither shall these leaders admit into our ranks anyone who is not of the Black race, the Latin race, the Mongolian race, or the Copper race, unless that person has unconditional admiration for revolutionary principles.
XXIV. Regardless of their nationality—and regardless of their role in writing this Plan—no present or future combatant shall disavow any decision that is made by a Superior Officer and that is sanctioned by a majority of other combatants, nor shall they help any two-faced bastards trying to take down our movement.
XXV. As soon as possible, the Provisional Committee in charge of our Congress shall call local leaders to a larger Assembly in a well-situated city. At this Assembly, the local leaders shall solidify a Permanent Board of Directors that can add to and innovate on the Plan in whatever ways will be beneficial for the development of the Revolution and the defense of its interests.
XXVI. Above all, our movement aims to achieve the INDEPENDENCE of the BLACKS and the ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL EMANCIPATION of the workers, freeing all from the clutches of North American capitalism and Yankee imperialism. In this struggle, no workers—and especially not racialized workers—should expect moral or financial assistance from any government, not even the Mexican government.
XXVII. This Plan can only be changed in ways that benefit our cause. While the Revolutionary Congress has the legal authority to make minor additions or subtractions, only the Permanent Board of Directors can convene the more scrupulous conversations necessary for fundamental modifications. Should these authorities be unavailable during an emergency, smaller groups should stage a democratic discussion, as described in clause XXI.
XXVIII. Changing circumstances have made it necessary to expand on the earlier version of the Revolutionary Plan of San Diego, Texas; as of now, there are TWENTY-EIGHT clauses that must be strictly observed.
Such are the fundamental principles of the Plan for which we are struggling—and for which we shall keep struggling—without rest.
Our unshakeable faith in these loving principles is the key to our triumph. Because we are working toward our future, we do not care how much we sacrifice in the intervening struggle; because our children shall sit in the generous shade of the trees that shall sprout from our slogans, we do not mind irrigating the battlefields with our blood.
Ultimately, we hope that our struggle can propagate across the planet: breaking through the borders of the Republic of which we dream, we hope that our struggle can bring its fertile force to all the oppressed peoples and to all the denigrated races, for today they are caught in chains, but soon they shall fling these chains in the faces of their oppressors to take their proper place in a universal brotherhood.
Drafted, developed, and ratified by the REVOLUTIONARY CONGRESS OF SAN DIEGO, TEXAS, in San Diego, Texas, on the twentieth day of February, nineteen fifteen.
THE REVOLUTIONARY CONGRESS: President J. Z. Walcker; Secretary J. R. Becker; Treasurer J. N. Nagazaqui; Vice President F. F. Lippi; Prosecretary P. Veeni; Subtreasurer Jonás Bub; W. Córcega; Inctlaca Ubaqui; Lead General León Caballo. Signatures Here.
