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| My grandparents Eusebia Villalobos Gonzalez, Mitic, Jalisco |
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| Nicolas Gonzalez, two who ultimately escaped the madness |
By the first three days of June 1906, Mexican president Porfirio
Diaz's stranglehold on power was shaky. Wall Street and American investors were losing faith in the old leader. Thirty-years of Porfirio may have been too much, even for his most fervent followers. He did much for
Mexico during his early reign, bringing in foreign investment to create railroads, electricity,
construction, agriculture, much of it, of course, to benefit the foreigners, but over
the years, the Mexican people grew poorer, while the rich grew richer.
Diaz ruled with the proverbial "iron fist," crushing his opposition by punishing them with impunity, locking many of them up
in the hellish Belem prison in the slums of Mexico City, where political prisoners in the basement lived in fecal matter and garbage. When the Yaqui in
northern Mexico began fighting back about their squalid living conditions and the
loss of their lands to foreign interests, Porfirio stopped their rebellion by putting
their leaders and men on trains and boats and shipping them off to the hot
jungles of the Yucatan where they slaved on henequin plantations, hunted down
if they tried to escape, most dying under harsh conditions.
By 1906, journalists, artists, "thinker", and opposition business and political leaders, fearful of Diaz's sham elections, political corruption, brutal law enforcement methods, had been tilling the soil
of disruption, enlightening the public, most of whom were already suffering
under Porfirio’s dictatorial rule. In the countryside, anyone loyal to Diaz could do
whatever he pleased and those who disagreed were persecuted. Since Diaz paid his loyalists so little in cash, many took
their pay by expropriating lands and possessions from ranchers and villagers, while feeling free to kidnap and sexual abuse any girl or woman they chose. If husbands or
families fought back, the law and courts turned a blind eye, as most were
complicit in the corruption and sexual exploitation, not unlike what, possibly, happened to my own family and the families of many friends.
Foreign interests controlled
much of Mexico through Diaz, especially America’s captains of industry and wealthy
entrepreneurs, who owned millions of acres of land, mostly in northern Mexico, as Europeans controlled the land to the south, the petroleum industry in Campeche and the Yucatan. Though there was a law which stated foreigners could not own land within
a-hundred-kilometers of the border, Porfirio’s government saw no need to enforce the
law. Experiencing the corruption, injustice, and loss of lands, Mexican ranchers and workers had already begun migrating north, suffering enough of Porfirio’s indignities, as some foreign investors questioned the stability of his government.
William C. Greene had built a mining
empire in the Mexican town of Cananea, across from the Arizona border, along with holdings in lumber, railroad, and ranching. The
Anglos who worked for Greene lived in the town of La Mesa, according to UCLA historian
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, a settlement with a “post office, cemetery, park,
school, church, bank, business offices, stores, saloons, a municipal building,
and brand-new housing. It was worlds apart from Ronquillo, where Mexican miners”
(a skilled trade) “and their families lived in homes slapped together in trash.” Hundreds of miners and their families were dying from “diseases of the pulmonary tract,” a
sickness known as ‘miner’s lung,’ as "ribbons of green smoke rained speckles of lead."
When Greene had announced he was cutting
the Mexican miners pay from 3 pesos-a day, while increasing the American managers and miners’ pay up from $5.00 a day, the workers decided to strike. Mexicans pay
was also in "script," which could only be used at Greene’s company store, where
prices for goods and food were astronomically high. In such stores, workers often took out loans to buy food and goods, which meant they often owed the store more money than they earned each day.
Primed by labor leaders and journalists supporting the cause, on June 1, the miners, dressed in their Sunday finest, approached Greene’s “seven-chimney
home” hoping to negotiate better wages and working conditions. They were met by Greene’s impatient and irascible managers, the Metcalf brothers, who, in short,
rejected the striker’s three main demands: equal pay with Anglo workers, an eight-hour
day, and the opportunity to become managers, or, at least, to negotiate the
terms. The Metcalf brothers also rejected any talk of negotiations.
Two-thousand-strong, the workers demanded to talk
to Greene. They were warned if they did not disperse, they’d be hit with water hoses. The miners stood their ground. Greene’s men turned on the hose,
and in the chaos, shots rang out. Three miners fell, dead. The
Metcalf brothers carried weapons, so it was assumed one of them fired the shots. The
miners rushed the brothers with miner’s candle sticks. When it was over, along with the dead miners, lay the Metcalf
brothers, miner’s candles sticking out their backs. Greene’s large lumber yard went up in flames, according to Hernandez, “Americans standing
at the border 40-miles away, pointed at the sky glowing orange….”
The miners, hoping for justice, carried their
dead to the city hall. Instead, they were met by more of Greene’s armed men who
opened fire. The miners ran back to their homes, seeking safety, pursued by
Greene’s men who shot them down, by the end, massacring forty-miners, including children.
Word quickly spread across the border that Mexicans were slaughtering
Americans. William Randolf Herast, known for “yellow journalism,” immediately called
it a “race war,” hoping to incite anger among Yankees north of the border and pressing for the U.S. to invade
Mexico, which is what he’d always wanted, going back to when the U.S. took
Cuba and the Philippines from Spain.
Vigilantes joined the Arizona Rangers who came seeking vengeance for any American deaths. They had no idea how the events at Cananea had unfolded. When they crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, they ignored Mexico's sovereignty laws with the U.S. Porfirio Diaz’s brutal rural police force, also entered Cananea, adding to the confusion on the streets. Though, by the end of June 1st, the strike was over, the residue of racism, hatred, and violence had begun.
On the 2nd and 3rd, word spread throughout Mexico that the U.S. had invaded the country. As Kelly Hernandez wrote in her book, Bad Mexicans, a term Diaz used for any Mexican who opposed his rule, “Mexico City’s newspaper El Tiempo claimed, “Invasion del territorio nacional por tropas norteamericanos.” The comment left Mexican wondering if the presidency of Porfirio Dias could not protect the country’s sovereignty from a bunch of vigilantes and Arizona Rangers, maybe it was time for Diaz to go and a new government to take his place.
The shouts of revolution began. Mexican journalists, opposition politicians, and even some American industrialists, took up the cry, and four years later, Mexico burst
into revolution, the first great revolution of the twentieth century, preceding
the Russian and Chinese revolutions. It introduced the world to names like Zapata, Villa, Madero, Obregon, Carranza, Flores Magon, Librado Rivera, writers Elisa Acuna and Juana
Belen Gutierrez de Mendoza, and novelists Mariano Azuela, and Agustin Yanes.
It changed the course of history, both Mexican
and American, inflicting an estimated million deaths, mostly civilian, on the Mexican people and causing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to flee north, where they built new lives for themselves and their families, in towns and cities across the American
Southwest into Kansas and Michigan. At the time, they were embraced by U.S. industries who welcomed the workers, especially as America would enter two world wars, buttressed by Mexican labor, as well as Mexicans in uniform, many who would make the "ultimate
sacrifice" and call the United States "home."
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