How The Mexican Revolution Shaped The U.S.

Fresh Air

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4.4 • 34.4K Ratings

🗓️ 5 July 2022

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández tells the story of the rebels who fled Mexico to the United States, and helped incite the 1910 Mexican Revolution that overthrew dictator Porfirio Díaz. Hernández spoke with guest interviewer Tonya Mosley about her new book, Bad Mexicans. "People who were being disparaged at that time as 'bad Mexicans' in the United States were those who organized, those who protested against the conditions of what was then known as Juan Crow, a similar form of social marginalization as Jim Crow," Hernández says.

Also, Maureen Corrigan recommends the new novel The Poet's House, which she describes as a wry and vivid story about class, competition, and the magic of art.

And Lloyd Schwartz reviews early recordings by the late violinist Joseph Szigeti.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Not many Americans know much about the Mexican Revolution of 1910.
0:07.0	The impact of that revolution on the U.S. is the subject of the new book Bad Mexicans by our guest historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez.
0:15.0	She spoke with our guest interviewer, Tanya Mosley, host of the podcast Truth Be Told. Here's Tanya with more.
0:22.0	You cannot understand U.S. history without Mexico and Mexicans, says Kelly Lytle Hernandez, and her new book Bad Mexicans, Race, Empire and Revolution in the Borderlands.
0:34.0	The book tells the true story of rebels who from inside of the United States launched the Mexican Revolution of 1910.
0:41.0	The rebels were known as Magonistas. They were journalists, migrant workers and minors who organized thousands of Mexican workers and American dissidents to overthrow a 30-year dictatorship.
0:54.0	writer Kelly Lytle Hernandez is often called a rebel historian for her work which takes a deeper look at historical moments from the vantage point of the marginalized.
1:04.0	Her first book, Migra, a history of the U.S. Border Patrol, was about Mexican immigration to the United States.
1:11.0	Hernandez was awarded the Climates Prize for it in 2010.
1:15.0	Her second book, City of Inmates, is about the history of incarceration in Los Angeles and won the 2018 American Book Award.
1:24.0	Lytle Hernandez currently directs the Million Dollar Hoods project which uses Los Angeles Police data to determine the cost of policing and incarceration.
1:34.0	Lytle Hernandez is a professor of history, African American studies and urban planning at UCLA.
1:40.0	In 2019, she also received a MacArthur Fellowship.
1:44.0	Kelly Lytle Hernandez, welcome to Fresh Air.
1:46.0	Thank you for having me on.
1:49.0	Kelly, it was when former President Donald Trump used that phrase, bad ombre, that you said to yourself,
1:55.0	I've got to write this book, I have to tell this story now.
1:59.0	What was it that made you feel that urgency?
2:02.0	So when President Trump used that rhetoric of deriding, disparaging, characterizing Mexican immigrants, so-called bad ombre,
2:12.0	one I knew that he was denigrating the efforts of many people to improve the conditions of their life through migration.
2:19.0	But he was also stirring a very dangerous pot of rhetoric that has been used against Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans for more than a century.
2:31.0	And at the heart of this story is this concept that a good Mexican is a Mexican who comes to the United States and is docile and is quiet and works and does not protest against inequity.
	...

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