The latest instalment in Charles Harris and Louis Sadler's investigation of turmoil on the US–Mexican border during the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) focuses on disturbances in south Texas that collectively took on the name of the Plan de San Diego, based on a document produced in January 1915 allegedly in the small south Texas town of San Diego. The signatures of nine individuals appear at the bottom, all Hispanic and at least some of them US citizens. Calling for the liberation from US control of the entire northern border ranging from Texas to Upper California (to distinguish the latter from Baja California, still within Mexican national territory according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo), its first clause also announced the intention of freeing ‘individuals of the black race’ and its territory from ‘Yankee tyranny’. The document's harsh provisions included immediate execution of all prisoners – unless these might be held for ransom – and the murder of ‘every North American over sixteen years of age’. Indigenous peoples, specifically the ‘Apaches of Arizona’ along with ‘INDIANS (Redskins)’, would be given ‘every guarantee’, and their territories returned. African-Americans joining the movement would be given a special banner after victory in the states bordering Mexico, and, apparently, aid in conquering six more states of the US to establish their own republic – strangely, those bordering the states already to have been obtained rather than the ones in which most of them still actually lived in the US deep South. The only ‘stranger’ who might be admitted to their ranks must belong to either ‘the Latin, the Negro, or the Japanese race’ (pp. 2–5).
The Plan, a relatively small and almost completely disorganised effort, has attracted a great deal of interest from scholars, and this book is intended, at least in part, to clean up the messiness of the resulting interpretations. Certainly, the Mexican population of the region – US citizens and otherwise – had much to resent about the huge losses of territory almost seven decades earlier after the US–Mexican War, along with the racial and ethnic discrimination that they had suffered there since that event. It did not take long for the original manifesto to attract the attention of the authorities, and one of the principal signatories, Basilio Ramos, was quickly arrested in McAllen, Texas, where he was attempting to enlist support from well-to-do Hispanics. Certainly, the Plan's announced genocidal intentions immediately got the attention of persons in the border area, who were already jittery because of the violence of the Mexican Revolution just across the border. Disturbances continued in what were certainly alarming but not monumental numbers of incidents, carefully documented in the current study, until close to the end of 1915, and then resurfaced for a time in mid-1916. The authors’ thesis is that while the movement originated out of south Texan, not Mexican, grievances, it was taken advantage of by Mexican revolutionary Venustiano Carranza to try to force US recognition of his government, and then later re-emerged briefly in mid-1916 as he and his commanders just south of the border tried to force US president Woodrow Wilson's Pershing Punitive Expedition to pull out of northern Mexico. The writers of the Plan itself, they assert, were magonistas, ideological followers of radical Ricardo Flores Magón, who had been operating along the border and in and out of US prisons for a number of years, starting well prior to the revolution itself. The authors carefully examine archives on both sides of the border, giving us a plausible, empirically based defence of their thesis.
Throughout, the authors give close attention to other historians’ interpretations of the Plan. A particularly convincing clarification involves the numbers of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans killed or fled during the disturbances. Certainly, these people were in a difficult situation, caught between Texas Rangers and US soldiers eager to eliminate anyone who might harbour the revolutionaries and thus fall into the category of ‘Bad Mexican’, and those they regarded as bandits who might at any time demand help, animals and cash. Yet census records show clearly that the populations of two of the Texas counties most affected rose substantially, with only Starr County's numbers decreasing slightly. Further, they question interpretations that conclude, without a great deal of evidence, that thousands of suspected revoltosos and/or innocent Hispanics had been hung or shot by rangers or soldiers during the period; these estimates soar in the historical literature after the assertion by Walter Prescott Webb in his book The Texas Rangers, again without evidence, that 500 to 5,000 died. I strongly agree with Harris and Sadler that the documentation only supports approximately 300 deaths of this nature. South Texas was not heavily populated at this time, and it seems unlikely that a large number of violent deaths would have escaped the historical record.
As for their thesis that Carranza took advantage of the disturbances to put pressure on the US government to do what he wanted them to do – that is, recognise him and later withdraw US troops from Mexican national territory – I find this notion at least possible, though I think it unlikely that Wilson would have responded in the way the authors believe that Carranza hoped. Wilson generally operated with very little interest in what was actually happening along the southern border of his country. He only acted in the region when border issues helped him look strong by sending Pershing into northern Mexico, helping him to get re-elected and improving the political context for increasing arms purchases and beefing up the US military. Meanwhile, Wilson used the opportunity to train Pershing's troops in northern Mexico and National Guard soldiers along the US side of the border in preparation for entrance into the First World War, should that prove necessary.
While this book will no doubt not completely resolve the controversy over this relatively ineffectual conspiracy or series of conspiracies, it is a fine attempt to do so based carefully on what we can actually see in the documentation. It is an important reminder that when dealing with topics that intersect with current racial and binational concerns, it is best to stick closely to the evidence.
