Early critics of the Porfirio Díaz regime and editors of the influential newspaper Regeneración, Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón escaped to the United States in 1904. Here, with Ricardo as the leader and most prolific writer, they founded the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) in 1906 and facilitated oppositional transnational networks of readers, political clubs, and other organizations. From their arrival they were constantly pursued and imprisoned by coordinated Mexican and US law enforcement and private detective agencies, but their cause gained US radical and worker support. With the outbreak of the 1910 Mexican Revolution the PLM splintered, with many members joining Madero’s forces, while the Flores Magón brothers and the PLM nucleus refused to compromise. They had moved beyond a liberal critique of a dictatorship to an anarchist oppositional stance to the state and private property. While not called Magonismo at the time, their ideological and organizational principles left a legacy in both Mexico and the United States greatly associated with the brothers. During World War I, a time of a growing nativist red scare in the United States, they turned from a relative nuisance to a foreign radical threat to US authorities. Ricardo died in Leavenworth federal penitentiary in 1922 and Enrique was deported to Mexico, where he promoted the brothers’ legacy within the postrevolutionary order. Although the PLM leadership opposed the new regime, their 1906 Program inspired much of the 1917 Constitution, and several of their comrades played influential roles in the new regime. In the United States many of the networks and mutual aid initiatives that engaged with the Flores Magón brothers continued to bear fruit, well into the emergence of the Chicana/o Movement.
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Latinx Popular Culture and Social Conflict: Comics, Graphic Novels, and Film
Frederick Luis Aldama
Despite Latinxs being the largest growing demographic in the United States, their experiences and identities continue to be underrepresented and misrepresented in the mainstream pop cultural imaginary. However, for all the negative stereotypes and restrictive ways that the mainstream boxes in Latinxs, Latinx musicians, writers, artists, comic book creators, and performers actively metabolize all cultural phenomena to clear positive spaces of empowerment and to make new perception, thought, and feeling about Latinx identities and experiences. It is important to understand, though, that Latinxs today consume all variety of cultural phenomena. For corporate America, therefore, the Latinx demographic represents a huge buying demographic. Viewed through cynical and skeptical eyes, increased representation of Latinxs in mainstream comic books and film results from this push to capture the Latinx consumer market. Within mainstream comic books and films, Latinx subjects are rarely the protagonists. However, Latinx comic book and film creators are actively creating Latinx protagonists within richly rendered Latinx story worlds. Latinx comic book and film creators work in all the storytelling genres and modes (realism, sci-fi, romance, memoir, biography, among many others) to clear new spaces for the expression of Latinx subjectivities and experiences.
