Hearts on Fire
The Incorporation of Francisca J. Mendoza and Felipa Velázquez Into the Anarchomagonista Movement

In memory of my mother, Susana, whose spirit was stronger than her body.

Acknowledgments

To mother, Susana, who taught me to fight, for reminding me every day of my greatness, for her unconditional love (with all of its complications). I love you and miss you everyday. To my father, Salvador, for always being my support, for his infinite patience, for guiding me and loving me.

To my sister, Fernanda, for teaching me what bravery looks like, for (sometimes) lending me a hand when I was scared, for being my older sister and caretaker even across the world. To my sister, Sofía, for always being there, for being comrades in laughter and tears, for being an everything-ologist (from psychologist to chauffeur). I love you, sisters.

To Selene Aladana, my advisor, teacher and friend. For your patience, companionship, guide. For being my inspiration from the day I met you. I deep admiration, respect and love for you.

To Arantxa, for being the Lizzy to my Jane, for your beautiful friendship and teaching throughout the years. To Alquelarre: to Mafi and Andy, my sociologist friends, my confidants, my colleagues in work, party and life. To Said, for your loyalty, for always cheering me on, for sharing Kosako roses with me. To Aaron, Pablo, Tián, Santi, Memo, Jorge, Maikis, and Marcos, for the laughs, the hugs and the conflicts. Your friendship is the greatest gift I've received from the faculty. To all my friends who were with me during parts of this process: Esteban, Jania, Sofía, Chino, Adam, Mariana. To Haza, for taking my hand when I needed it most.

To Rodrigo, for reminding me I could be happy. You gave me the push necessary to finish this thesis. Thank you for everything, I love you.

To all the professors that marked my collegiate life and changed the way I see the world: Selene, Luis Jaime, Margoth, Javier, Mónica, Tere, Esperanza, Leinad. To the Political and Social Science Faculty community, for teaching me so much and being my home. To Dr. Rodrigo Rubén Hernández, Dr. Ana Nahmad, Dr. Layla Sánchez, and Dr. Guadalupe Cortés, for your readings and commentary that helped polish this thesis.

To Dr. Alicia Márquez Murrieta, for allowing me to be her intern and for all the support I received from her.

Finally, a thank you to all the people who fought and who fight to build fair, dignified, good worlds. Thank you for the resistance, rebellion, and resilience.

If we touch the right spots [..] then we've moved things to the breaking point. Then the world becomes more fluid, and change is possible. History isn't a premade tapestry that we've got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can give form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.

Babel, Or the Necessity for Violence, R. F. Kuang

We are proletarian women who live off our work exploited by the accursed bourgeoisie. We are Mexican women who see in the program of the Mexican Liberal Party the redemption of Mexico's slaves. [..] We are women, but we are ready for any sacrifice.

Protesta, Rosa González, et al.

Introduction

The words anarchy, anarchism, anarchic, and others derived from them, have become synonymous with chaos. We have been taught to fear them, to leave them aside, to ignore them as much in our daily lives as in academic research. Fortunately, curiosity is stronger than fear, and it was my curiosity and a book lent by my best friend that led me to become interested in anarchism.

Since then I've found many definitions of anarchism and what it truly means not just in theory, but also in practice. Emma Goldman's definition has become one of my favorites due to its clarity and for tying anarchism to liberty and human dignity instead of equipping it with destruction and chaos. In its theoretical dimension, anarchism,

really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

With regards to anarchism's methods, Goldman says the following, "Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions." Anarchism is not something sought to be built in the future, it something that is built day by day following the ideals of mutual aid and solidarity between persons. It is a theory-praxis that concerns itself as much with individuality as with the collective.

In studying sociology, my interest in anarchism took shape until become the theme of my research. Armed with new and better research tools, I began to look into on the history of anarchism in Mexico, to find... little information regarding the topic. A doubt surfaced, "could it be that anarchism hasn't existed in my country?" Soon enough I learned of Ricardo Flores Magón, the most famous Mexican anarchist. Flores Magón, who founded a party and a newspaper. Flores Magón, who wrote texts where he gave a new interpretation to the anarchism he had learned by reading Pyotr Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Mikhail Bakunin, and other well-known anarchists. Flores Magón, who was not the sole member of his party, the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), nor the sole redactor of his newspaper, Regeneración, nor the sole Magonista.

Then I learned more names of Mexican anarchists: Práxedis Guerrero, Librado Rivera, Manuel Sarabia... When I found more information on the subject, I came to the conclusion that there did exist a history of anarchism in Mexico, but that it was a history that was hidden and made invisible. The next step was to find the women in the history of Mexican anarchism, something that presented difficulties due to the systemic exclusion of women in the research, gathering, and writing of history. It was through zines, conferences, and after school talks that I found the names of some Mexican anarchist women such as Juana Belén Gutiérrez, Margarita Ortega, and Rosaura Gortari.

Fortunately, Rubén Trejo published in 2022 a collection of texts written by women who had participated in Magonismo and the movements tied to it, titled Las magonistas, 1910-1932. Magonismo, a movement that originally sought the installation of true democracy in Mexico, became an anarchist movement in 1911. Most of the texts gathered in Trejo's anthology were written by Mexican anarchist women, which makes Las magonistas an excellent point of departure for the historical gathering of women in the history of anarchism in Mexico.

Now then, this is a sociology thesis, not a history one. Upon learning more about the women anarchists I began to be interested in their lives and their particular ways of living and analyzing anarchism. Women's participation within Magonismo seemed incredibly interesting, moreover, taking into account that women at the start of the 20th century found themselves in an unfavorable position regarding men for multiple reasons, among them being the inability to exercise the right to vote and social norms that relegated them to the domestic sphere. I wanted to know why these women, despite their disadvantage, despite being used in a particular sexual division of labor and despite the risks implied in joining a political movement that opposed the dominant regime, decided to become anarchists.

Sociology, particularly the strains that grant greater methodological importance to the individual, shows that the decisions we take are not completely arbitrary nor dependent on our own will. Personal motivations that lead us to take certain decisions can be explained sociologically. However, it's not about a purely personal question, rather, as the Marxist tradition might say, structural conditions play a fundamental role in our selection. Following Pierre Bourdieu's theory, I hold that sociological work should not center itself in either the individual nor in structures, but rather in the relations between them. Said relations are of correspondence, not co-determination, since subjectivities do not impact structural conditions in the same way that the structural imparts on people.

Likewise, the proposals and ideas Mexican Magonista women reflected in their texts are fundamental since they offer a panorama of their own social context and political goals for the movement, as well as their own interpretations of anarchism. Because of this, the question that guides this research is the following, "what are the corresponding relations between structural conditions and the personal motives that allowed the entry of Francisca J. Mendoza and Felipa Velázquez into the Anarchomagonista movement, which lead them to develop certain theoretical and programmatic proposals between 1911 and 1931?"

Francisca J. Mendoza was a Mexican Anarchomagonista who wrote many political texts between 1911 and 1912 that were published in Regeneración and other papers like to it, such as Sagitario. Information on her personal life is unknown, such as her date of birth, the names of her daughters, and the date of her death. Felipa Velázquez Osuna, originally from Sinaloa, was also an Anarchomagonista, as well as teacher, agrarian, and Civil Registry judge. She wrote poetry, plays, and short texts in prose, all with political content. The texts known to be written by her date between 1926 and 1931. Unfortunately, facts about her personal life are also scarce.

Now, why dedicate a sociological research to them specially? When I chose the two Anarchomagonista women to research them, I followed the following criteria. First, there had to be at least five of their texts to analyze. Second, these texts had to contain enough information on their personal life to situate them in social space. Third, they had to be Mexican. Fourth, most of their texts had to have been written after the publication of the September 23, 1911 The Mexican Liberal Party Manifesto, and before 1931. Fifth, that the strain of anarchism they defended was Anarchomagonismo. And sixth, that one of them had participated in the movement close to its radicalization, at the start of the Magonismo as an anarchist movement, and the other had belong to the movement's final stage, after the death of Flores Magón when the anarchist movement began to weaken in Mexico.

Francisca J. Mendoza, originally from San Luis Potosí, seems to me to be one of the most important Anarchomagonistas due to the great quantity of texts she wrote and the importance she had within PLM as well as in Regeneración. In 1912 she was in charge, alongside two others, of PLM's Organizing Board. This meant she was responsible for Regeneración's publication and the planning of PLM activities. While various aspects of her life remain unknown, Francisca's texts and secondary sources offer enough information on her personal life. Moreover, Francisca was possibly the party's most passionate Anarchomagonista in the years she was a part of it.

Felipa Velázquez, for her part, was a brilliant sinaloense who took part in movement akin to Anarchomagonismo following the death of Ricardo Flores Magón in 1922 and was jailed for it in the Islas Marías in 1930. Fortunately, there is more information available on Felipa and her personal life, both in her texts and in other sources. She called herself an anarchist and her texts leave evidence of her affiliation to Magonista anarchism. Moreover, she was a known figure within the political movements she participated in to the point of still being remembered in Mexicali, where she lived for several years.

The research begins, as mentioned before, in 1911 because it was then that PLM and Regeneración began to openly call themselves anarchists. It ends in 1931 since that was the year that the Federal Labor Law was made public, pushed by then-president Pascual Ortiz Rubio, which was understood by the worker and peasant movements to be the solution to the problems that had led to rebel in the first place. After that year, anarchism in Mexico lost what little strength it had left.

Anarchism and other forms of libertarian struggle have been censored and made invisible in academia as well as in the intellectual left. The latter's interest has centered primarily and greatly on socialist, communist, and Marxist ideologies. Historically, said strains of thought have been in conflict with anarchist strains, which has caused rejections, criticisms, and disparagement between anarchism and the strains associated with and derived from Marxism. However, the movements associated with Marxism have gained greater legitimacy in academia and, consequently, greater research and production of knowledge about them when compared to anarchism.

Appealing to anarchism's emotivity has been a great argument to justify this negligence and the lack of studies of the movement. It has also been accused of being utopian, naive, and lacking a scientific rigor when the main reason why academia rejects anarchism is because it, due to its anti-hierarchical nature, presents a strong criticism to the practices and methods of academics.

Sociology has not been an exception to the academic rejection of anarchism; it and other libertarian practices have been censored, demonized, and made invisible within the sociological canon. It seems curious that a science dedicated to the study of social actions and the different elements that articulate and motivate them has not been interested in trying to explain why, how, and under what circumstances practices such as anarchism emerge. Perhaps sociology rejects anarchist practices for their critical character, the same that might aid in de-naturalizing power structures and offer more horizontal alternatives to academic research.

For Jeff Schantz and Dana Williams, sociology should be interested in anarchism since "Anarchist projects provide a framework for practicing, learning about and exploring new forms of social relationships" (p. 3). Moreover, the authors continue, studying anarchism from the position of sociology offers a new perspective on the impact that hierarchies and authority figures have on social relations, and how persons organize to reinforce them or overthrow them. Anarchism and its representatives offer different diagnosis of modernity and another classification of social actors, as well as of their actions and consequences.

The Italian anarchist, Chiara Bottici, calls "historical amnesia" the decision many leftist traditions and of academia took in censoring anarchism. Instead of studying it with historic rigor, they opted for creating and preserving a negative view of anarchism. Salvaging anarchism is a task necessary to make visible struggles that were essential to important processes, as is the case with Anarchomagonismo and the Mexican Revolution. Particularly, the salvaging of the ideas of the Mexican Anarchomagonistas serve in "enlarging feminist strategies precisely in a moment when different factors increasingly converge to intensify the oppression of women by creating further class, racial, and cultural cleavages among them" (Bottici, 2022, p. 4).

Historical Sociology allows one to think in terms of social processes which have developed across history in such a manner that it is possible to understand that our reality is a product of long processes that escape our control and which have existed before us. Mexican anarchism exists today: there is The Anarchist Federation of Mexico (FAM), the Magonista Autonomous Collective (CAMA), and many social movements, such as feminism, have vindicated anarchist practices such as Black Bloc and anarchist symbols.

It is worth situating this research: we live in a context of femicide, where women are murdered and disappeared. Feminist movements today count on a rich inheritance of many women, among them the Anarchomagonistas, who fought so that today I could have the opportunity to write this text. The history of said women has become part of the history of anti-patriarchal struggles, of Mexico, of social movements, of anarchism, and Latin America. This research is one more step in giving them the place, in history and sociology, that they deserve.

It seems pertinent to situate myself as the researcher. If I'm interested in anarchist ideas and practices, being a student of sociology has led me to be particularly interested in an analysis of modern society realized by various anarchisms. Thanks to the tools granted to me by academia, I'm able to recognize the invisibilization of my guild (women) in studying the social sciences (and all disciplines of human knowledge). Being a woman allows me observe that there is still a ways to go regarding the construction and reconstruction of our history. Likewise, my condition as woman was decisive in choosing to study the contributions of women in the times of Magonismo and to study them as subjects, as protagonists of their own stories.

This thesis relies primarily on Pierre Bourdieu's Field Theory in order to answer the question of the research. The concepts of social space, habitus, trajectory, trajectory deviation, and fields are used to situate the women in the social space and tie them to their material conditions. Thus, Bourdieu's theory allows one to forget the macro and micro binary, and instead study the corresponding relations between both. This makes it possible to explain the historical context as well as personal motivations, the ties they have between them, and understand how said ties allow the preservation and the change of social structures.

The quality of Bourdieu's Field Theory of Historical Sociology is taken up again, since history is necessary within sociology since without it it is impossible to think about and interpret the past, two necessary steps to be able to understand how social positions were created, which sociology seeks to study. Hence why Field Theory seeks to do away with the artificial distinction between Sociology and History since, "we cannot grasp the dynamics of a field if not by a synchronic analysis of its structure and [..] we cannot capture this structure without a historical [..] analysis" (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 106).

I complement Bourdieu's theory with concepts such as anarchist sociology, sex/gender system, female consciousness, and women's collective action in order to explain the pull that Anarchomagonismo had on Francisca and Felipa, taking into account their position within social space as women and members of the proletariat and peasantry. Particularly, I use the concept of anarchist sociology as a sociological perspective that allows for the analysis of the State and other structures of domination, not as necessary evils, but as unnecessary evils.

To this theoretic tool I add Anarchomagonismo, and here it is necessary to make an important theoretical-methodological clearing up. Many anarchists, since the time of Bakunin, have been against the naming of a theory or social movement after one's self. "Kill Your Idols" is a well-known saying among anarchist groups. Hence why I believe that Ricardo Flores Magón would be against the naming of a movement "Magonismo."[1] However, Amada Vollbert Romero offers good arguments to name them and vindicate them as "Anarchomagonistas." The sociologist says that if the name came from a man's last name, said last name is that of Margarita, Ricardo's mother. Margarita Magón came from the Mazatec region in Oaxaca, where Ricardo Flores Magón was born. Vollbert Romero goes on to say that,

although they [Ricardo and his family] didn't spend much time there, I do believe that vindicating the women Magonistas as Magonistas lends us the specificity [..] that implies a localizing of an anarchism that [..] took on other forms [..] and which also grew from other roots (2025, p. 46-50).

Calling them "Anarchomagonistas" is to emphasize within the spatial origin of their anarchism, a vertex that was enriched by communal practices of the region that gave it birth. Thus, although it might seem contradictory at first, calling them Anarchomagonistas seems to be most appropriate to me.

Anarchomagonismo's main ideas are found penned in the PLM Manifesto of 1911. Anarchomagonismo stood against the three-headed hydra: Capital, Authority, and the Clergy, the main enemies of the working class. The defense of human life, the expropriation of private property, and the search for a life marked by happiness and dignity guided Anarchomagonista actions. Likewise, it seems indispensable to mention that the women's Anarchomagonismo occupied a position similar to that of their male comrades, despite having different tasks within the organization. In order to analyze the theoretical and programmatic proposals of Francisca and Felipa is necessary to understand their ideological framework. Equally, understanding the ideology of Anarchomagonismo is crucial to know why the personal motivations of Francisca and Felipa aligned with the movement.

Methodologically, this research leans of two tools. The first is socio-analysis, described by Pierre Bourdieu in Autoanálisis de un sociológo, a tool that is useful in identifying Francisca's and Felipa's habitus and assets. This is with the end of localizing them in social space, understanding their life trajectory, and to explain their personal motives for joining Anarchomagonismo. The second tool is called ethnographic-documentary analysis (EDA). Said tool mixes with ethnography, as a focus to be able to understand the life experience of Francisca and Felipa from their own perspectives, and documentary analysis, such as the study of documents to understand the essence of the messages they contain.

This text is divided into three chapters. The first, "Oppressed Mexico", consists of historical resit of the social and economic conditions of Mexico during the Porfiriato. It talks of the country's first anarchist movement as a predecessor to Anarchomagonismo and of other Mexican anarchist organizations. I also talk about about the Mexican Revolution, particularly about how it affected the social context and social movements that formed armed struggle. I continue with an account of the so-called "Maximato", the period when Mexican anarchism began to lose impetus. The chapter concludes with a telling of the beginning and decline of Anarchomagonismo, PLM, and the paper Regeneración.

Thanks to the reading and commentary of Dr. Rodrigo Rubén Hernández González, I realized that the historical reconstruction I made of the Mexican Revolution is from it its liberal and caudillista interpretation, realized by researchers such as Jesús Silva Herzog (whom I quote several times). In other words. I fell into the trap of seeing the Revolution as a conflict between individuals and not as a class conflict where dominant classes faced off against dominated classes. Due to a lack of time, the changes made to rectify this error have been small, but I hope that they are enough to lean me more towards an anarchist interpretation of the conflict that characterized the Mexican Revolution. Consequently, when I talk of dominated classes I'm referring to the peasantry and the proletariat together, while by dominant classes I am referring to the group made up of the bourgeoisie, military, the State, and the clergy.

The second chapter, "Positions and Perspectives", contains the development of the theoretic tool used in the research. Here is where I take up Pierre Bourdieu's Field Theory, as well as the sociology of Jeff Schantz and Dana Williams. I continue with an elaboration of Anarchomagonismo ideology, and conclude with the defining Gayle Rubin's "sex/gender system", "women's collective action" according to Louise Tilly, and "female consciousness" according to Temma Kaplan.

The third chapter, "Anarchomagonista Mexican Women", is the culmination of the present research. First, I salvage the lives of Francisca and Felipa in order to trace their life trajectories. I then use socio-analysis to analyze said trajectories and thus situate these Anarchomagonistas in the social space of their time. Here is where I begin to explain their personal motivations and how these could be tied to their structural conditions. I continue with an EDA, as previously described, through which I analyze their texts and trace their interpretation of Anarchomagonismo and their lives in general. I conclude the chapter with a comparison of Francisca and Felipa to find the similarities and differences of their cases.

I close this text with "Final Reflections", where I set the ideas that emerged when I did and wrote this research. I again emphasize the importance and relevance of research like this one, where I sought not only shine a light on Mexican anarchism and the women that participated (and participate) in it, but also on other ways to think and act sociologically. Horizontal forms, or as horizontal as possible, that allow the path to utopia, even if we never reach it.

Chapter One: Oppressed Mexico

No man, for as well-intentioned as he may be, can do anything in favor of the poor class when he find himself in a position of power.

—September 23, 1911 Manifesto

The present chapter is divided into three parts. The first is a retelling of the historical social and economic conditions of Mexico during the Porfiriato, which began in 1877 and ended in 1911. It also talks about the country's first anarchist movement, started by Plotino Rhodakanty, as a predecessor of Anarchomagonismo, and of other Mexican anarchist organizations. The second section talks about the Mexican Revolution, with a focus on the social context and how it saw itself reflected in the various movements that gave it form. This section also talks about the first years of the Maximato, since that was the period in which anarchist movements lose strength. Finally, the third section talks of the beginning and decline of Anarchomagonismo, the Mexican Liberal Party, and the newspaper Regeneración, where the most of Mexican anarchism concentrated its strength in the early 20th century.

Porfiriato

The Porfiriato was, according to some,[2] the era in which Mexico experimented with important modernization processes, and tends to be remembered for it despite the questionable model imposed. Said regime's consequences were not suffered by the Chief Head of State, but rather by the Mexican people, they who paid in blood and even with their lives for the realization of the Porfirian Dream. Porfirio Díaz first managed to sit in our country's presidential seat in 1877 and left it in 1880, when Manuel González assumed the charge. González kept the seat warm until 1884, when Díaz was reelected. From then on, until 1911, Díaz found way to stay in power. His time in power was marked by rebellions, strikes, repression, population growth, rapid urbanization and industrialization, and a precarious quality of life for the most of the country's population.[3] The following is a description of the economic, social, and political conditions in Mexico during the Porfiriato.

Population

Porfirio Díaz's Mexico was, in population terms, very different from present-day Mexico. In 1895, the population was 12 million, 637 thousand inhabitants; by 1910 it had grown by 1.2%, reaching 15 million, 160 thousand inhabitants. In 1895, like in 1910, 80% of the population lived in rural centers, settlements of 5 thousand of less. Urban settlements, for their part, experienced a notorious growth. In 1895, 9.2% of the urban population found themselves in great urban centers that numbered 20 thousand inhabitants or more. By 1910, this percentage grew to 11% (Rosenzweig, 1965).

However, just as with the population, the mortality rate in Mexico also increased between 1895 and 1910. Some of the causes for this increase were infectious and contagious diseases, a problem caused by respiratory system and malnutrition. It seems that by 1897 and 1898 there was a bad corn harvest, which could have influenced malnutrition and, consequently, the mortality index. It's possible that this malnutrition could also have been caused and exacerbated by the miserable minimum salary and high price of the Mexican diet's basic groceries.

The average life expectancy was reduced between 1895 and 1910,[4] going from 31 years to 30. Infant mortality experienced an increase during the same time period, going from 305 per million to 335 per million. In 1895, 31 persons per million inhabitants died; by 1910, this number grew to 33.2. All of this had an impact on the population's quality of life, increasing the social ills that bubbled due to the lack of work and decrease of wages. These facts begin to give evidence that, despite the arguments about the "good" that Díaz's government's modernization efforts did for the country, Mexico was not exactly a paradise for the greater part of its population.

Economy

The population growth during these years was possible thanks to the abrupt and massive growth of the means of communication and transportation, commerce, and labor force. The Porfirian symbol of progress is perhaps the railroad. In 1877, the railroad network consisted of 700 kilometers, which primarily extended between the capital and the port of Veracruz. By 1890, the network counted with 10 million kilometers, and in 1910 it extended to almost 20 million kilometers. The railroad extended to every part of the country stemming from its center, reaching the ports and borders. Since the most important commercial cities were found across the Gulf and in the border cities of the North, railroad line development was concentrated between them. This had the consequence of commercial activity to develop even more in these zones, creating greater levels of industrialization and urbanization than the southern and Pacific south zones. Said zones kept their economy up thanks to artisans and sustenance farming.

Before the Porfiriato, the Mexican economy was characterized by craft manufacturing and sustenance farming, with closed internal and self-sufficient markets. With the development of the lines of communication, industry and urbanization, developing the monetary and banking system became an imperative. During Díaz's presidency, the system of sales tax, taxes applied to mercantile activity that began during Spanish colonization, was done away with. This facilitated and stimulated commerce, both in the interior as well as exterior, but it debilitated the municipal economies.

By 1910 there were twenty cities with more than 25 million inhabitants. Aguascalientes, Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Toluca were the cities with a greater population growth than the national average of 1.2%. These cities in the center of the country overflowed with commercial and manufacturer activity which attracted people from rural centers with new job opportunities. Said urban centers benefited, as can be seen, from the railroad growth. Morelia, Puebla, León, and Querétaro also formed part of the railroad network, but they stagnated in growth and did not reach the level of industrial development that the other four center cities did. Mineral and metallurgic industries caused the cities of Chihuahua, Saltillo, and Durango to grow and transform into great centers of said industries. Torreón, for its part, grew because of the cotton industry. Monterrey consolidated itself as a commercial center thanks to the arrival of the railroad to the northern border. In exchange, mining decreased in Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Pachuca, and San Luis Potosí, leaving these cities in economic stagnation. Orizaba grew considerably population-wise, causing a high level of industrialization, but towards the end of Díaz's mandate it found itself with complications that impeded its economic growth. In contrast to these cities, Colima and Oaxaca did experience that which tends to be called "progress". While they were well connected to the rest of the country thanks to the railroad, they remained marginal to it. It is interesting to highlight that Oaxaca found itself filled with indigenous communities that were self-sufficient, such that the arrival of the railroad did not seem to matter much to them.

The "progress" or economic "growth" of the country,[5] as it tends to be called, did not mean an improvement to the quality of life for the majority of the population, a reality made known by their wages. In 1908 the average minimum wage in Mexico was 44 cents. In that same year, in the country's capital, a kilo of rice reached 13.32 cents, while a kilo of beans was priced at 10.84 cents (Silva Herzog, 2011a). Obtaining these two crucial bases of the Mexican diet presented an expense of 30.27% and 24.6%, respectively, of the average Mexican wage. Corn, the basis of the country's diet, rose in price by 38% between 1907 and 1910 (Hart, 2022). The minimum wage varied between regions, the Northern and Gulf zones counting with the greater wages, reaching 68 cents daily in the Gulf. Meanwhile, in the center and south, the daily minimum wage barely reached 34 to 35 cents daily. According to Rosenzweig (1965), there was an increase of the minimum wage in real terms until 1898, when a daily 39 cents was reached. In 1877, the minimum wage was 32.5 cents, which meant that by 1898 it had grown by 20%. However, in 1911, it reached 30.2 cents daily, less than in 1877. The decrease in minimum wage was due to the excessive quantity of labor force, which itself increased thanks to industrialization, urbanization, and the rural-to-urban migration they caused. Wages decreased while the cost of food increased, making life more difficult for working class families. The economic recession of 1907 caused the precarious levels of living for the majority of the population to degrade even more. To this, there was the added bad corn harvests of 1908 and 1909 which caused an increase in imports. Income decreased, employment lessened, and general discontentment increased.

Labor Force

The dispossession of lands forced the peasantry to join the proletariat labor force, which meant a great boon to the French, Spanish, German, English, and American capitalists who found an abundance of working hands in our country. In other words, they found a jobless people struggling to live. In 1895, 4 million, 400 thousand people made up the labor force. By 1910, this number increased to 5 million, 272 thousand. The labor force was in such abundance that it created a problem for the Porfiriato, since it had so many unemployed that were, justifiably, displeased with the government.

In 1910, the labor force, according to the data recovered by Rosenzweig, constituted approximately 5 million, 272 thousand people, of which 4 million, 658 million were male and 614 thousand were women. This means that women made up 11.6% of the total labor force. Of the 614 thousand women employed, 57% worked in the service sector.

By 1910 there were 7 million, 655 thousand, 898 Mexican women,[6] of them, 8% formed part of the working class. According to Carmen Ramos, the increase of women was due to urbanization and industrialization which caused a change in production oriented towards a wider consumption, displacing artisans, and an increase in the service sector, such as the "process of proletarization and manufacturing technification" (Ramos-Escandón, 1999, p. 28).

The data recovered by Ramos differ from those of Rosenzweig with respect to the number of women employed in 1895, 1900, and 1910. According to Ramos, in 1895 there were 840 million women employed; in 1900, this numbered increased to 872 million. However, in 1910, the number of women employed decreased to 778 million. This decrease could have been caused by the 1906-1907 economic crisis, since it was women who where first fired in order to decrease costs. Women worked as seamstresses, flatwork ironers, cigar girls, midwifes, primary school teachers, etc. These jobs were registered in the statistics as waged labor, but we mustn’t forget that it was woman's domestic labor that held up the rest of labor for hundreds of years. It's seen that,

Feminine presence in various waged positing results in, well, a great discrepancy, and in general can be said that women worked in jobs that prolonged the domestic role (domestic service) or that they were present in tasks and activities in which their work was not considered as such, that's to say, it was assumed to be as part to be as part of domestic tasks, as was the case in craft workshops with the weaving petates and textiles (Ramos- Escandón, 1990, pg. 32).

The two industries in which women participated most were the textile and tobacco industry. Their participation in them was a matter of debate since Mexican women were talked about as an infantile being that required masculine protection. Working class newspapers supported female labor as long as it didn't trouble domestic labor, and most jobs in which they participated were those considered to be "feminine", tied to the private sphere and regarded as "pretty", "weak", "delicate".

The Hacienda

To talk of the Porfiriato implies, necessarily, to talk of haciendas, since, as economic units, they were of utmost importance. Haciendas were the product of the Laws of Reform and the 1857 Constitution since they outlawed communal property. Thousands of people who previously cultivated communal properties saw themselves forced to work for the new landowners, the hacendados, as peons with a function similar to that of the serfs of European feudalism.

According to the 1910 population census, there were 840 hacendados, who owned most of the country's land. The hacendado was a city-man who knew nothing of the countryside nor its management, who only waited for his hacienda's administrator to send the money needed in order to squander it in the city. By 1910, the peons who worked in the haciendas received a wage of 18 to 25 cents a day. Thanks to these wages, they company store became an important mechanism of the Mexican economy. Such stores existed within the haciendas, which sold basic food basket articles, such as rice, beans, soap, as well as liquor and other daily commodities. Peon families got what they needed to live, but they lived in debt. The company stores kept record of their debts, which were inherited, and so manged to keep peons in exploitative conditions.

Society

Due to economic conditions, social life in Mexico between 1877 and 1911 was profoundly marked by scarcity, poverty, and violence. It's clear that the moneyed people of the cities lived marvelously: they traveled, dressed in the Parisian or London fashion, and enjoyed the privileges that the Porfirian system provided them. These persons found themselves in the social summit that was the hacendados, bankers, mine owners, and owners of commercial establishments. Within these dominant classes were, of course, those relatives closest to Porfirio Díaz, who made sure of placing them in positions of power, such as state governors or municipal presidents. The dominant classes disdained the local, adored the foreign, and looked down on people they deemed inferior. There was a tight relation between wealth, social prestige, and skin color. It was believed that the closer to white skin, the more "decent" a person was. What could be called a middle class was made up of families of lawyers, normalista professors, well-positioned artisans, engineers, skilled railroad workers, etc. This class earned between fifty to a hundred pesos monthly. People with a lower income, of thirty to forty monthly pesos, lived in very precarious situations[7] and faced 10 to 12-hour workdays.

In the new and developed cities there emerged a new activity: urbanity. This consisted of a series of attributes that meaningfully distinguished the city from the rural world. These attributes, such as literacy (14% of Mexicans knew how to read in 1895; by 1910 it increased to 20%),[8] supposed decency and rationality among others, formed part of the aspirations of the urban workers and led a certain part of the population to identify with the values of the so-called "middle class"; values compatible with those spread by Madero's movement.[9] This characteristic is important because the revolutionary movement acquired different aims and methods of struggle depending on its location.

Porfirist Politics and the Strikes of Cananea and Río Blanco

One of the principle reasons for why Porfirio Díaz was able to stay in power for more than thirty years was due to his ability of keeping his friends happy and near him. Díaz placed his allies in positions of power, such as state governorship, assuring a continuation of his government, not just at the national level, but at the state one as well. This apparent stability, alongside its supposed "peace", was deemed Pax Porfierana. But this peace was a myth since,

Díaz's Mexico was a prominent member of the great tribe of "artificial democracies", States where political practice radically disagreed with the liberal theory to which it was subject to. Mexican politics was saturated with fraud, embezzlement of funds, and nepotism; vices that were judged by critics of the regime, but which were sources of power for Porfirian governors, complemented with the use of brute force (Knight, 2021, pg. 37).

Díaz's government's famous phrase, "Kill Them Hot" perfectly describes his approach to opposition movements. While his municipal authorities were well capable of detecting and suppressing uprisings, the discontent towards the regime grew with every arbitrary fine, arrest, deportation, and assassination. A clear example of the violence exercised during the Porfirian government is the case of the Yaqui people in Sonora. The land defense of the Yaqui people was repressed by the government in order to satisfy the demands of foreign business, such as the Los Angeles Richardson Construction Company. Repressive measures included deportation to Yucatán, where they were forced to work under slavery conditions in henequen fields.

Facing off against the opposition that emerged in the cities ended up being easier for the regime. In the countryside it was a different situation since "the opposition was more anonymous, broken up, and frequently improvised" (Knight, 2012). In the case of the cities, strikes were the greatest blows to the Porfirian monster. The proletariat was legally completely defenseless since no laws existed to regulate work or to protect the working class from labor abuses. Moreover, strikes were illegal and there were punishments for whoever dared asked for a wage increase, such as arrests up to three months and a 25 thousand peso fine. However, this didn't stop the working class from organizing politically by the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century. Groups of textile, railroad, and tobacco industry workers organized into unions in order to demand better working conditions and better wages.

Most of the strikes were suppressed by the Porfirian regime, but not before they destabilized it, as in the case of Cananea and Río Blanco. In 1906, Cananea, Sonora, a liberal club organized thanks to the initiative of Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara, who collaborated in the newspaper Regeneración and exchanged letters with Ricardo Flores Magón. In this liberal club, alike to its brethren throughout the country, there was talk of improving working conditions on a national level and of transforming the country in order to make that a reality. The Cananea liberal club had success thanks the worker discontent, particularly between the workers of the American enterprise, The Cananea Consolidated Copper Company, who not only worked long working days for a small wage, but who also suffered abuse and mistreatment from their superiors, foremen, and American workers. On June 1, 1906, the strike went off, most of the workers demanded a minimum wage of 5 pesos and an eight-hour workday, among other points that manifested into a list of petitions. However, the authorities managed to extinguish the movement by threats to the striking workers, including that of being sent off to fight the Yaqui people. The leaders of the uprising were sentenced to 15 years in prison. Despite its sad outcome, the Cananea Strike is of utmost importance in order to understand the social situation of Porfirian Mexico because it was the first worker struggle in the country seeking an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage that would allow the dignified living of the working class family.

In Río Blanco, Veracruz, the Great Circle of Free Workers was organized by mid-1906. Many affinity circles were organized throughout the country who recognized the Río Blanco circle as the directing organ. The circle's newspaper, Revolución Social, was tied of the ideas spread by the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), founded by the Flores Magón brothers. Said ideas caused panic among the factory owners, such that the employer’s association Puebla Industrial Center forbade worker organizations. Infuriated, they protested through strikes and work stoppages. The Profirian government intervened declaring a resolution in which demanded that the workers returned to the factories on January 7, 1907. On that day, the workers of Río Blanco did not into the factory and impeded entrance to it. The situation quickly escalated into a sacking and burning of the company story, and ended with approximately 200 wound and dead. The striking workers were persecuted and on the following day, before the company store, Rafael Moreno and Manuel Juárez, the president and secretary of the Great Circle of Free Workers respectively, were executed.

The First Anarchist Movements

Porfirio Díaz had to face off against the peasant and urban anarchist movement from the start of his dictatorship. The first whispers of European anarchism reached Mexico from the mouth of a Greek man called Plotino Rhodakanaty in 1861. Rhodakanaty arrived into our country with the hope of seeing that first socialism realized, the utopian socialism of Fourier.[10] His dream quickly saw itself crushed when he couldn't find enough people to form a commune with. He gained employment at a high school where he taught his students about utopian socialism as well as the ideas of Pierre J. Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, European anarchists. In 1865 he organized a cluster of his students into the group called La Social, which also functioned as a secret society. He also founded the school called Escuela del Rayo y del Socialismo in the Chalco Valley. This school taught peasants to read, write, and to organize according to socialist ideals.

La Social sought the dissolution of national and international borders, universal fraternity, equal rights and social standing, "unity and convergence of every individual interest with the common good", and "freedom or integral development of every vocation [..] free for the exercise of all professions [..] rehabilitory and emanicipatory freedom for woman, freedom for the slave of all conditions" (Illades, 2019). In 1878, La Social declared it counted with sixty-two regional sections across the entire country, and in 1880, the anarchists were the main force of the Mexican worker movement. That same year, president Manuel González began repressing anarchist groups, a task Díaz continued until he succeeded. By 1885 there were still agrarian uprisings, though feeble. The Mexican anarchist movement did not resurge in force until 1906, and this time it was through the movement started by the brothers Flores Magón.

Revolution and The Maximato

It is said that the Mexican Revolution started on November 20, 1910; there is little disagreement over this. However, the date it ended is constantly disputed. There are those who hold that it ended with the creation of a new constitution and Venustiano Carranza's government. There are those who believe it ended when Alvaro Obregón was murdered. In any case, this discussion exemplifies the different perspectives with regards to the Revolution's reconstruction.

Violence, death, economic changes, and political crises were the order of the day during the 1907 to 1910 period. By the end of 1910 decade, many revolutionary movements had been defeated by the Constitutionalists, the counter-revolution, but some of the agrarian movements in Baja California persevered. However, the situation in Mexico, in terms of structural conditions, had changed considerably in the decade of the 1920s. This allowed the anarchist and revolutionary movements to be defeated, almost completely, between 1930 and 1931. Here, a general panorama of the Mexico's historical context between 1910 and 1931 is developed, during the revolutionary period and those of the first year of the Maximato.

Madero's Revolution's

In the Northern part of the country, around 1908, a book titled The Presidential Succession, written by Francisco I. Madero, who was not well-known at the time, began to circulate. In his book, Madero plants the idea of creating a political party called The National Democratic Party and, of course, criticized Porfirio Díaz's government. His work's circulation quickly placed Madero on the map, garnering attention, particularly from the middle class and northern population, from where Madero originated. However, he also had popularity among the working class,

The working class' Maderismo obviously had an economic dimension. Its successful development points to the workers seeing a connection between political reforms and economic improvements and, importantly, recruitment came from factories that had a history of labor struggles (Knight, 2021, pg. 89-90).

However, this didn't mean that Maderismo was completely compromised of the dominated classes. Maderismo represented, more so, the aspirations of the middle class that sought to occupy a place within Mexican politics, which had been swept away by the values of urbanity spread by the dominant classes. Maderismo did not ignore the decline of the economic situation, but it opted to solve them through the political route, not the economic one. Madero and his followers were concerned, above all, in a political reform that would oust Díaz from power, and which would turn Mexico into a country with a democratic system. Paraphrasing Alan Knight, Maderismo was an ideological movement that did not count with a plan to transform the country, a necessary transformation for the survival of the dominated classes.

Despite this, Madero gained enough popularity to run for the presidency and become a threat to Díaz, being the candidate of the party he founded to oppose the dictatorship: The National Anti-reelection Party. In June 1910, Madero was jailed in San Luis Potosí for, supposedly, inciting rebellion. His incarceration increased his popularity and the discontent of the Mexican people towards Díaz, who was reelected on June 26 of the same year. Madero left prison on July 22 and escaped to San Antonio, TX. There he wrote the famous Plan of San Luis, dated October 5, 1910. In it, he declared the presidential elections null and talked of the famed "Effective Suffrage, No Reelection". Said document did not have any social or economic reforms, with the sole exception being the third article which talks of agrarian distribution:

Since it is only fair to to restore the lands that were arbitrarily taken from their ancient owners, such provisions and rulings are declared subject to review and it will be demanded that those who acquired them by such immoral manners, or their decedents, to restore them to their primordial owners, and shall also pay a compensation for the damages suffered (Madero quoted in Silva Herzog, 2011a).

As explained well by Silva Herzog, it was thanks to this article that the Maderista Revolution could count on the support of thousands of peasants, including Emiliano Zapata. Most of the revolution's combatants, which is to say the peasantry, did not care much the famed "Effective Suffrage"; the agrarian redistribution was, by far, much more important. In a country that's 80% rural, this is no surprise. The Mexican Revolution was, primarily, a fight for land.

On March 1911, the document titled Plan Político Social was signed, proclaimed in the states of Michoacan, Guerrero, Tlaxcala, Distrito Federal, Puebla, and Campeche. This document recognizes Madero's presidency, and political and social reforms are proposed that were not made explicit in the Plan de San Luis. For example, it establishes protections for the indigenous "race", an eight-hour work day, an increased wages for both sexes, and the abolition of all monopolies is declared. This document's importance resides in that it documented the social and economy worries of the time, worries that, as previously mentioned, were not included in Madero's proposals for the nation.

Madero entered back into the country on February 1911, determined to take Juarez City, which he managed to do some months later. This event caused public opinion to favor Madero, giving him the momentum to once again launch himself for the presidency, and began his running on November of the same year. At the time it seemed as if the country's violent conflicts would end here. But the dominant classes were never going to hand over their land nor power, so the agrarian redistribution never came to pass.

Between November 1911 and February 1913, the new president gained enemies and lost popularity. Not only were the workers and peasants disappointed, but the militant class of the old regime considered Madero and his vice-president, Pino Suárez, as not fulfilling their promises:

In the first place, he hadn't been able to restore peace to the nation; secondly, he was unable throughout his fifteen months in government to recognize and fundamentally attack the country's fundamental ills; thirdly, he had not showcased ability as a statesman; and fourthly, it wasn't just a few who doubted his sincerity and adherence to the doctrine of effective suffrage, due the imposition of Pino Suárez and of some governors on the states. (Silva Herzog, 2011a).

Tensions rose until when, on February 8 1913, there began to be rumors of a military coup in the City of Mexico. General Rafael Mondragón freed, that same day, generals Bernardo Reyes and Felix Díaz, a part of the opposition, and together set out to take the National Palace, kicking off the Decena Tragica. When Madero found out, he left his place of residence of Chapultepec Castle and named Victoriano Huerta as the Chief of the fight against the Felicistas and Reyistas. Huerta got rid of the soldiers loyal to Madero bit by bit, and was thus able to arrest Madero and Pino Suaréz on February 18. They were kept in the National Palace where they were forced to resign from their posts. Finally, on the 22th, they were murdered.

Huerta's Usurper Government

I would like to clarify this section's title. Victoriano Huerta was not "the bad guy" to Madero's "good guy". Both were enemies to the dominated classes. I call his government "Usurper" because it placed itself at the head of political power thanks to a coup d'état, not because he was the sole "villain" of the Mexican Revolution.

Huerta began his running on February 19 1913, just a day after having jailed Madero and Pino Suárez. The United States, through ambassador Henry Wilson, supported the coup and Huerta's presidency. The dominant classes, which include bankers, large corporations, the clergy and the military, feverishly supported Huerta's dictatorship. On the other hand, despite of their displeasure with Madero, the proletariat and the peasantry were completely against Huerta's government.

Another of Huerta's enemies, and a powerful one at that, was Venustiano Carranza, who found himself in the northern part of the country when Huerta told him he had taken control of the presidential seat. Carranza immediately disavowed the coup government and quickly managed to get the legislative power to do so as well. He abandoned his post as the governor of Coahuila and set out to organize armed forces, an army that would later be known as the Constitutionalist Army, in order to take political power. On March 26 1913, the famous Plan de Guadalupe was signed, which called on the people to defend the nation. In it, reestablishing justice was given greater importance than agrarian redistribution or other demands of the popular classes were:

once the armed struggle that the Plan of Guadalupe ceases, it will have to formidably and majestically commence social struggle, the class struggle, whether we ourselves want to or not, and let whatever forces that oppose us to oppose us, new ideas will have to be imposed upon our masses; it is not just about redistributing land and natural wealth; it is something greater and more scared: it is the establishing of justice, it is the seeking of equality, it is the vanishing of power, in order to establish the national economy's equilibrium (Carranza, as cited by Silva Herzog, 2011b).

Carranza did not lack a national project, but this plan was incomplete and centered around the creation of a new constitution, which included laws to protect the proletariat and the peasantry. But its priority was not, nor ever was, a transformation of the country's material conditions to assure the realization of the demands like agrarian redistribution and eight-hour work day. Despite this, the movement headed by Carranza managed to convince the House of the World Worker, an anarchist organization, to join the counter-revolutionary movement. This alliance caused a disunity among various revolutionary movements and sealed the rivalry between the House and the Villistas and Zapatistas.

Carranza and his allies won territory, starting in the northern part of the country. In the south, Huerta fought the forces of Emiliano Zapata, nicknamed "The Attila of the South". The new American president, Woodrow Wilson, quickly rescinded his support of Huerta's government. With so many enemies, Huerta was finally defeated on August 15 1914, the date that General Álvaro Obregón entered Mexico City with the greater part of his army. Five days later, Carranza arrived at the nation's capital, and thus began the Constitutionalist stage of the Revolution.

Zapata and the Struggle Over Land

Zapata and his followers' struggle was, as previously mentioned, centered around securing agrarian redistribution. Zapata was a politicized peasant from Morelos who came from a comfortable and well-known family. When the revolutionary winds blew in from the north, Zapata already counted with a reputation of defender of peasant lands. When he learned of that the Plan de San Luis promised, although vaguely, restitution and redistribution of lands, the Morelense decided to join the Maderista Revolution.

But the Zapatista movement had very different aims, in terms of class, than that of the Madero movement, and Madero tried to convince Zapata to discharge his troops. When Zapata refused, Madero decided to send troops to Cuautla to persuade him, and promised him land redistribution once he was in power. Zapata agreed, but this coincided with Huerta's troops arrival to Cuautla, sent by the Minister of Government. The Zapatistas continued to fight for land and made their beliefs and demands explicit in the November 25, 1911 Plan de Ayala, the same month that Madero's presidency began. This plan condemned Madero for not fulfilling his promises and for trying to repress those who demanded him to be held accountable via armed struggle. The Plan of Ayala has the slogan "Liberty, Justice and Law", and talks about, not just the redistribution of land, but of other resources like water as well:

We declare: The people or citizens who have their titles corresponding to these properties, the lands, mountains and waters that have been usurped by hacendados, scientists, or caciques under the shadow of venal law, will, of course, come into the possession of those goods and properties which they have been dispossessed of in bad faith by our oppressors, at all cost, with weapons in hands, of said possession, and the usurpers who consider themselves entitled to them will present themselves before the special tribunals that shall be established at the triumph of the Revolution (Silva Herzog, 2011b).

The Plan de Ayala, in my opinion, is the document that encompasses the real reason for why thousands of persons fought in the Mexican Revolution. It is worth remembering that Mexico was primarily a rural country that had experienced abuses since its independence from Spain and was trapped in a violent political environment of constant flux. For thousands of people, the only thing they believed they could count on was the land, on the natural resources, that which had not only given them sustenance but also an identity. That is why the Zapatista movement gained so much strength, and why it was able to threaten the governments of Huerta and Carranza.

Upon taking control of the presidency, Huerta tried to persuade Zapata but he did not relent. Instead, he reformed the Plan of Ayala in order to disavow Huerta's government and openly fought against him. Zapata and his followers remained faithful to their principles, which opposed the bourgeois interests of the Constitutionalists. However, they were initially incorporated to the 1814 October Aguascalientes Convention. Said convention had the aim of fixing the date of presidential elections and discussing matters that concerned the Carrancistas, Villistas, Zapatistas and other revolutionary groups. Taking from Silva Herzog, "The arrival of the Zapatista commission marked a new stage in the history of the Convention [..] It cannot be denied that it was since the arrival of the Zapatistas that talks about revolutionary principles, economic reforms and Government programs began" (2011b).

The influence of Zapata and his followers was enormous, as can be seen by the January 6 1915 Law, written by Luis Cabrera, who formed part of the Carrancista movement. The following was established in it:

one of the most general causes of unrest and discontent of the agrarian people of the country has been the dispossession of lands that were granted to the people in the colonial epoch. These dispossessions [..] are realized not just through alienation carried out by political authorities, but also by the arrangement of sales set up by the Secretaries of Development and Hacienda, or by the pretext of marking borders, in order to favor complaints of sabbaticals or unclaimed territory in the service of demarcating companies. All of this with the frequent complicity of political leaders and governors (Cabrera quoted in Silva Herzog, 2011b).

Francisco Villa did not want to be left behind, and on June 1915 he published an agrarian law with some differences to Zapatista movement. The Villista law, as well as the January 1915 law, and, more importantly, the Plan of Ayala, were crucial for the inclusion of Article 27 into the 1917 Constitution, in which (at the time) lands were nationalized and which facilitated agrarian redistribution. At the time, this article was the most advanced one of the new Magna Carta. Unfortunately, Zapata was murdered on 1919 thanks to counter-revolutionary efforts. His fight became one of the emblems of the Revolution due to his faithful determination to protect and defend the peasantry. Without the Zapatista movement, this group would have faced worse conditions and Article 27 never would have existed.

Carranza and the New Constitution

Venustiano Carranza, the First Chief of the Constitutionalist Army and author of the Plan de Guadalupe, was provisionally in charge of the country's executive power from August 13, 1914 to April 30, 1917. The following day he became president and held the post until his death in May 1920. This goes to say that Mexico was, in some places more than others, under his control for six years.

In the first month of his leadership in 1914, various declarations were made that sought to propose political and social reforms. These declarations, issued by the governors in certain states, established an eight-hour workday, minimum wage, abolished the proletariat's debts and company stores, among other points. These decrees pretended to help the peasantry, but their real goal was to weaken and break-up the peasant movement by depriving them of their political power.

By 1916, the economic situation in Mexico was further complicated due to the paper money issued by the Constitutionalist government that constantly devalued. In May, the worker's real wages had decreased considerably, and they decided to declare a strike. Instead of listening to the demands of the proletariat, Carranza opted for their incarceration. The strikes ended in August, demonstrating that, if something was of concern for the Constitutionalist First Chief, it was not the working class.

In September of the same year, Carranza convened a Constituent Congress (to which neither the Zapatistas nor the Villistas were invited to) to reform the 1857 Constitution. The result was the 1917 Constitution, in which articles of utmost importance were added and reformed, such as the aforementioned Article 27. Besides it, it is worth emphasizing Article 3, in which free and lay education is established, and Article 123, the basis of labor legislation. These articles, alongside others, were the product of the influence and fight of the Anarchomagonista movement as well as of other revolutionary movements such as Zapatismo. In 1906, the Mexican Liberal Party published a program which contained,

socioeconomic clauses [that] served as the basis for many innovations of the 1917 Constitution. If the PLM program was the first to publicly and nationwide present the main socioeconomic ideas of the Mexican Revolution, it was also the sole public document that went much further than the 1917 Constitution in many progressive aspects (Ramiréz Reynoso, 1969; p. 446).

The 1906 Program, as well as the 1911 Manifesto (the latter of an explicit anarchist character), influenced the 1917 Constitution,[11] particularly by being documents centered around the demands of the dominated classes and for proposing a national project that treated them as the main social subjects of the country's political and economic structure.

In 1919, the world economy found itself in a fragile state due to the First World War. The United States threatened Carranza with another intervention in case it didn't cede to its economic interests. In addition to this, the Constitutionalist president and his allies had proposed applying the Constitution's Article 27 to protect the dominant classes' private property. This, of course, provoked new problems among the Villistas and Zapatistas which resulted in the murder of Zapata.

Carranza was not happily accepted by the many caudillos of the Revolution, among them Obregón. This one sought to run in the 1920 presidential elections, and so sought as much strength and followers as possible. That same year, in the month of April, the Plan of Agua Prieta[12] was issued, which disavowed Carranza's presidency and accused him of not respecting the popular vote, of moving against the personal rights and state sovereignty, as well as of distorting "the Republic's political organization".[13] Carranza tried to transfer his government to Veracruz but was murdered on May 21. The presidency fell provisionally into the hands of Adolfo De La Huerta, starting the "era of caudillos" (Delgado, 2015).

Obregón In the New Decade

Elections, in the 1920 to 1924 period, were undertaken while De La Huerta was the interim president, and Obregón was elected president. And alongside him, and his successor Plutarco Elías Calles, a new political regime was built, backed specifically by the country's northern regions. The country in which this regime was built was different from that of the 1910 one. The country had gone from 15 million, 150 thousand to 14 million, 334 thousand. The male population had gone from approximately 7 million, 500 thousand to 7 million; and the female population from 7 million, 665 thousand to 7 million, 331 thousand.[14] The Revolution had claimed many lives, and the chaos of the conflict had direct consequences on the daily life of its inhabitants.

The worker and peasant classes, increasingly defeated by the counter-revolutionaries, kept on hoping for an answer to everlasting problems: minimum wage, a shorter workday, agrarian redistribution. The entrepreneurial class, for its part, demanded the defense of private property. Obregón tried to respond to the demands of both groups, allegedly saving "capital by guaranteeing worker's rights" (Delgado, 2015), but in fact only defending the interests of the dominant classes. Perhaps this phrase contains the essential characteristic of Obregón's government: its tepidity, since the task to safeguard capital and the well-being of the working class at the same time was an impossible one.

However, the promise was attractive, so Obregón was able to consolidate the populist caudillo ideology, characterized by the establishing of a relation of seeming mutuality between the government and the working classes. In order for this populist cuadillismo to work, Obregón's government had to tend to the agrarian question. In 1923, through a decree titled Tierra libre, the president established "that every Mexican that lacked land could acquire it from the national and empty ones that were not reserved by the government" (Delgado, 2015). The Agrarian National Party (PNA) was created in this context, with great support from Obregón's government, and it was a very useful tool for manipulating peasant demands.

Obregon's presidency period ended in 1924. Despite this, he remained an important figure in Mexican politics, sometimes joining his successor, Plutarco Elías Calles. In 1927, the Constitution was reformed in order to allow re-election, and Obregón was able to run in the presidential elections, which he won. He was getting ready for his new governorship when he was murdered on July 17, 1928 by a Cristero, José de León Toral. After his death, Emilio Portes Gil began what came to be known as the Maximato with his provisional presidency.

Plutarco Elías Calles and the Beginning of the Maximato

Plutarco Elías Calles began his presidency on December 1924. As in the case of Obregón, Calles had to take charge of the country's reconstruction and reorganization, and so began to center around creating a State with solid bases: populism and the so-called "Class Reconciliation" that Obregón had started. One of the great challenges to Calles's presidency was the Cristero Rebellion, that lasted between 1927 to 1929, which increased political instability and violence even more.

Moreover, a year earlier there was the shrinkage in oil prices, economically destabilizing Mexico once more, since a great part of public works were financially dependent on oil taxes. American businesses kept pressuring for Article 27 to not be applied and thus to exploit our land's natural resources. This provoked discontent among the people, as in the case of Baja California and the Colorado River Land Company, which many peasant organizations protested against.

When Obregón was murdered, an important political crises arose. Calles took advantage of the situation in order to the step away from caudillo governments to civil governments, founded upon law and its institutions. He proposed organizing Mexican politics into national and organic political parties in order to,

end with the violence generated by the ambitions of the "revolutionary family", such as those that fight for a return to the old regime. [..] At the same time, he urged the revolutionary family to organize as one force, as a means to maintain its hegemony and procure peaceful development, abstaining from resorting to violence. The idea of a revolutionary party as unifying agent had been sketched (Delgado, 2015; pg. 148).

What he didn't make explicit was that said revolutionary party would be controlled by him. The period between 1928 and 1935 is known as the "Maximato" because Calles was the "Maximum Chief" of said "revolutionary family". During the provisional government of Emilio Portes Gil, Calles pushed for formation of the National Revolutionary Party (PNR), the party that would avoid political violence and with which he would control the executive branch until 1935. Since Portes Gil was the interim president, elections were once again taken underway, which Pascual Ortiz Rubio won who, despite not finishing his mandate, was important because his government approved the Federal Labor Law that changed the play of worker and anarchist movements, as will be seen later.

Magonismo, The Mexican Liberal Party, and Other Mexican Anarchist Movements

Throughout all the processes and events that have been described, resistance movements were being developed in response to the political and economic crisis caused by the Porfiriato and exacerbated by the Revolution's instability. The following section is dedicated to develop the main characteristics of the anarchist movements in Mexico, to which either Francisca J. Mendoza and Felipa Velázquez very well belonged to, or which influenced their thinking and social context.

Anarchomagonismo

Beginnings: The Founding of Regeneración and the Mexican Liberal Party

Taking from Claudio Lomnitz, "the Partido Liberal Mexicano was in fact more of a movement than a party, and more of an ethos than a movement" (2014, p. xxv). This ethos was, for the most part, one defended and preached by Jesús, Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón. Born in Oaxaca, the brothers began their political life protesting against Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship in 1892, a year of great agrarian discontent due to worker exploitation and the rise in price of the land. From then on, this triad stayed politically active.

On August 7, 1900 Jesús and Ricardo decided to publish a new newspaper, Regeneración, with the goal "to seek remedies and, when necessary, to point out, to denounce all of the misdeeds of public officers who do not follow the precepts of the law, so that public shame brings upon them the justice they deserve" (Lomnitz, 2014, pg. 83). The newspaper's first slogan was "Independent Juridical Newspaper", which corresponded with Ricardo's law training. In the newspaper's first months of existence, it opted to not openly criticizing Díaz nor his government, searching instead to offer a space where to denounce the abuses of judicial power. From December on, however, it began to attack the dictatorship and his entire regime, and it changed its slogan to "Independent Paper of Combat". Due to this, Jesús and Ricardo were jailed on May 1909, and the paper was closed in October of the same year.

Despite this, Regeneración had a strong impact on society, stimulating the foundation of multiple politically critical papers such as El Hijo del Ahuizote and Vesper, the latter being of a feminist hue and headed by Juana Belén Gutiérrez, with whom Ricardo kept correspondence. Regeneración also encouraged the creation of clubs of a liberal hue, which in those years sought to displace Díaz from the presidential seat and establish true democracy in the country. The most important liberal club was founded by Camilo Arriaga, who, days after the first publication of Regeneración, called for a national congress of "authentic liberals" that was to take place on February 5, 1901 in San Luis Potosí.

This congress had three main goals: the creation of a new Liberal Party,[15] to develop the ideological platform of said party, and to spread the idea that the next president did not have to be someone tied to Díaz. This Liberal Party sought, in a certain manner, to overtake of the liberal movement such that it could not be in any way associated with Díaz and his circle. Said action was realized through attacks against the dictatorship in texts published in Regeneración, which resulted in the governmental repression of the liberal clubs and the papers associated with them.

Jesús and Ricardo were set free on March 1902, but they were not able to continue Regeneración's publishing. They opted to publish El Hijo del Ahuizote, whose slogan was "Newsweekly of Opposition and Uncompromising Against All Evil" (Trejo Muños, 2021). The liberals organized around this paper and did not cease their criticism against Díaz. On September 1902, a few months after leaving prison, Ricardo was jailed once again, this time alongside his brother Enrique. After being jailed two more times, Ricardo, alongside with his brother Jesús and his comrades Juan Sarabia and Santiago de la Hoz, decided to go into exile in the United States in 1904 and continue with their anti-Pofirista fight from there.

In this exile, the Flores Magón brothers allowed themselves to again publish Regeneración from November 1904 onwards. Half of all the copies, which reached to be a 22 thousand copies, were sent to Mexico. Persecution, espionage, and repression against the exiled liberals by the American government began from here on out in collaboration with the Mexican government. Thanks to this, Ricardo and Enrique were jailed once again on October 1905, charged with "defamation". Regeneración's offices were sacked and publishing ceased. They were freed on January 1906, and Regeneración renewed its activities the following month. It was in this year that the Mexican Liberal Party was constituted as such, but it was also the year of the first Magonista insurrection failure.

The 1906 Program

While taking refuge to a certain extent in the United States, the Flores Magón brothers, particularly Ricardo, came into contact with the anarchist ideas of Pyotr Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Emma Goldman. Ricardo already held some sympathy to anarchist ideals, but this exposure caused him to become radicalized. His own radicalization did not mean the immediate and absolute radicalization of Regeneración, but it did influence it by increasingly politicizing the liberal's growing discontent against Díaz's government. The Program of the Liberal Party and Manifesto to the Nation began to circulate, signed by Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón, Antonio I. Villarreal, Juan and Manuel Sarabia, Librado Rivera, and Rosalío Bustamante in St. Louis, MO., on July 1, 1906.

In it, there was a call to the people to fight against the Porfirist dictatorship. But the importance of this document cannot be reduced to just this point. The text begins with the Manifesto, declaring that its main goal is to dethrone the dictatorship, and that its basis is the general basis for "implementing a truly democratic system of Government" (Ricardo Flores Magón et al., quoted in Silva Herzog, 2011a). Throughout the Manifesto, the illegality of Díaz's reforms to the 1857 Constitution, the necessity of better education, and the suppression of mandatory military service, as well as outlawing immigration from China,[16] among other points are put into words. Following the Manifesto, the Program is presented, which included the summary of the points expressed in the Manifesto. The first section of the Program is composed of proposals of "Constitutional Reforms", such as "the suppression of presidential and state governor reelections" and "reforming and regulating of the 6th and 7th constitutional articles, removing the restrictions that private life and public peace impose on freedom of speech and the press" (Ricardo Flores Magón et al., quoted in Silva Herzog, 2011a). In the "Improving and Promoting Education" section, there is a proposal to increase the number of primary schools and increase teacher salaries, as well making basic education secular. One of the Program's most important sections is "Capital Labor", which declares the following,

21. Establish a maximum of eight hours of work and a minimum wage in the following proportion: $1.00 for the majority of the country in which the average wage is less than that cited here, and more than $1.00 in those regions where life is more expensive and where this wage would not be sufficient to save the worker from misery.

22. Regulation of domestic services and house work.

23. Take measures to ensure that bosses do not cheat the application of maximum hours and minimum wage through piecework.

24. Complete prohibition of the employment for children under 14 years of age.

25. Require the owners of the mines, factories, workshops, etc. to maintain the best possible condition of cleanliness on their properties and to keep hazardous zones in a condition that provides safety to life of the worker (Ricardo Flores Magón et al., quoted in Silva Herzog, 2011a).

We can see in this section how the Organizing Board of the Mexican Liberal Party kept in mind the main concerns of the Mexican people, provoked by the expropriation of the dominated classes during the Porfierato. The concerns over agrarian redistribution can be seen in the following section, "Lands", in which it is declared that, "The State will give land to whoever requests it, without any other condition than to devote it to agricultural production, and not to sell it. There will be a fixed maximum amount of land that the State can cede to a person" (Ricardo Flores Magón et al., quoted in Silva Herzog, 2011a).

The last section of the Program is titled "General Points", and it the following points are highlighted,

43. Establishing civil equality for every child of the same father, eliminating the differences that the law today establishes between legitimate and illegitimate children.

44. Establishing, whenever possible, rehabilitation prison colonies, instead of jails and penitentiaries which criminals are punished to suffer today.

[..]

48. Defense of the indigenous race (Ricardo Flores Magón et al., quoted in Silva Herzog, 2011a).

Although the PLM Program was not perfect, as can be seen in its rejection of Chinese people, this document is of great importance because it includes social and political reforms that had not been made explicit until then and which were not mentioned in many later documents. It didn't just seek to protect the peasantry and proletariat, it also sought to transforms those aspects that kept them in perpetual oppression, such as the lack of land and labor rights. In analyzing its contents, it's impossible not to agree with Silva Herzog when he describes the document as "a program inspired by dreams of deep transformation, individual and collective improvement in all fields, in all walks of life" (Ricardo Flores Magón et al., quoted in Silva Herzog, 2011a).

The 1906 Revolution

As previously mentioned, the Cananea Strike was in large part inspired and encouraged by the ideas of PLM. Unfortunately, the strike was severely repressed, but it managed to give a strong moral blow to the Porfiriato and inspire members of PLM to continue fighting. After the publishing of the Program in June 1906, the Board set out to overthrow the Díaz government. They divided the Mexican territory into five parts, each with a party delegate. Each zone had to start an armed uprising simultaneously with the others. Uprisings were planned on the border cities and as the date drew nearer, the Board moved to Texas. However, both the American and the Mexican governments learned of the Board's revolutionary plans. Consequently, the Pelemista[17] Revolution failed before it even began. However, it had some positive consequences, among them was the increase of anti-Porfirian sentiment in the United States. But it also increased the surveillance and persecution of the Board's members, leaving it clear to them that a return to Mexico was impossible.

Imprisonment and the Failed 1908 Revolution

Ricardo Flores Magón, Librado Rivera, and Antonio I. Villarreal were captured on August 1907 in Los Angeles. CA. Later, there were many charges made against them, of which the most important was the "violation of the Neutrality Laws", for which Ricardo estimated he would be sentenced to ten to fifteen years in prison. During his incarceration, Villarreal, Rivera and Flores Magón received aid from various anarchist and socialist organizations in the United States. Ricardo's romantic partner, María Brousse, and his adopted daughter, Lucía Norman, organized meetings protesting against the Board members' arrest.

Thanks to them Ricardo managed to smuggle the "secret" plans for another Pelemista armed uprising in 1908 out of prison. This new attempt at revolution was planned for the 25 or 26 of June of the same year, where forty-six organizations tied to PLM would rise up in arms in Mexico. Unfortunately, once again, the Mexican government learned of the plans, and on the night of June 25, 1908, liberal clubs across the country were attacked. Weapons were confiscated and hundreds of persons were jailed. If armed uprisings were made in some parts of the country, they were small and quickly suppressed.

PLM on the Eve of the Revolution and the Maderista Treason

Ever since the failure of the 1906 Revolution, Regeneración had ceased publication but the jailing of the three Board members cause it to not resume until 1910, after Rivera Villarreal and Flores Magón were freed in August of that same year. Despite the failures of 1906 and 1908, in 1910 Regeneración gained strength like never before since it was an election year and the Mexican people were truly sick of Díaz's regime. Therefore, between August and December 1910, "all forces, Socialist and anarchist, American and Mexican, worked together under their natural leaders, the freed men of the Junta Organizadora" (Lomnitz, 2014, pg. 250). It must be added to this that Ricardo Flores Magón and Librado Rivera had established relations with American the anarchists, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Voltairine de Cleyre. This caused PLM to become known internationally.

But during this period the political differences between the members of the Board also grew, which caused it to break into three positions. The first included those who believed, like Antonio I. Villarreal and his sisters, Teresa and Andrea, that Díaz must be overthrown in order so that after his defeat, a real democracy can be established through new presidential elections. This stance was compatible with the ideals of Madero and his followers. The second position was socialist, which were found in Jesús Flores Magón and Manuel Sarabia. For them, Madero's democratic reform was not enough, it was also necessary to push industrialization and unionization so that Mexico would cease being a "backward" country. Lastly, with less followers, was the stance taken by Ricardo Flores Magón and other members of PLM, with more radical tendencies, who declared that, "the revolution's three enemies were capital, government, and the clergy" (Lomnitz, 2014, pg. 256). This was the Anarchomagonista stance, defenders of direct action and enemies of the State.

Tensions rose until PLM broke off relations with Madero. The Maderista movement and Anarchomagonismo began to dispute over means and ends of the rebellion that had begun in the country. Finally, in February 1911, Regeneración published an article titled "Madero is a Traitor to Liberty". Many members left the party, among them, the Villarreal brothers, Manuel Sarabia, Elizabeth Trowbridge, and Ricardo's own brother, Jesús.

The 1911 Manifesto

After the outbreak of the Revolution and the split with Madero, the anarchist tendencies of Ricardo Flores Magón and PLM members were impossible to deny. His ideology was not compatible with what was put forth in the 1906 Program, so on September 23 1911, The Mexican Liberal Party Manifesto was published. From the beginning one can clearly see the party's radicalization since now there's talk of the abolition of private property, "Abolishing that principle means laying waste to every political, economic, social, religious, and moral institution that form the environment which suffocates free initiative and free association between human beings" (Ricardo Flores Magón et al., quoted in Silva Herzog, 2011b). PLM declared war on the trinity of Capital, Government, and Clergy, which they accused of dividing humanity into two social classes: capitalist and worker. The Manifesto continues on to say that,

The Mexican Liberal Party recognizes that every human being, by the sole fact of being born, has the right to enjoy each and every of benefit that modern civilization offers, because these benefits are the product of the effort and sacrifice of the every working class that ever existed (Ricardo Flores Magón et al., quoted in Silva Herzog, 2011b).

The people are called to carry out the expropriation of resources, particularly of the land, and organize around it in an equitable manner and in solidarity. This leaves it clear that it doesn't seek to force the people anything, but rather to remind them that, "worker emancipation must be the work of the workers themselves". The Manifesto ends expressing the uselessness of so-called "democracy" and makes a call to direct action, "Choose, then: a new governor, that is, a new yoke, or redeeming expropriation and the abolition of all religious, political, or whatsoever imposition of another order. Land and Liberty!" (Ricardo Flores Magón et al., quoted in Silva Herzog, 2011b).

The 1911 Manifesto is precisely that, a manifesto, not a program with concrete proposals as was the case of the 1906 text. Its content is primarily ideological, but it doesn't lose importance or political relevance because of that. This document influenced many resistance movements, including Zapatismo and other anarchist movements in Mexico. The Manifesto encompasses the stance of Ricardo Flores Magón and his followers after 1910, a stance that was held for many years. This is one of the most important documents of Mexican anarchism.

Magonista Revolution in Baja California

In Baja California, the Mexican Revolution began with an Anarchomagonista uprising. On January 29, 1911, following the orders of the Flores Magón brothers, a small group of revolutionaries took Mexicali, a small settlement in the northern part of the country that held four hundred and fifty inhabitants. The goal of this taking was "as much the destruction of the dictatorial regime of General Porfirio Díaz as it was to create [..] a socialist republic across the entire northern border of the country" (Trujillo Muñóz, 2022, pg. 26). The leaders of this small army of "citizens of the world" were José María Leyva and Simón Berthold.

Porfirian forces, under the command of Colonel Celso Vega, tried to recapture Mexicali on February 15 of that same year, only to utterly fail. Soon volunteers began to arrive in Mexicali, which included Mexicans, PLM members, Cocopahs, Kiliwas and Paipais peoples, and the American syndicalists known as the "wobblies". There also arrived famous journalists such as Jack London and John Kenneth Turner, the latter was the author of Barbarous Mexico and an ally to the Flores Magón brothers.

The Anarchomagonista forces took another small location called Los Algodones and soon realized that their greatest threat were the bourgeois owners of the big factories, such as Harrison Gray and Harry Chandler, owners of the famous Colorado River Land Company. Additionally, Mexican, as well as American, troops were encircling them and constantly threatening them. On April 1911, there was another battle in which the Porfirist army tried, failing again, to retake Mexicali. It seemed like the Anarchomagonista army, despite its few resources and old equipment, was winning.

Unfortunately, the movement began losing strength in the following two months. The border saw itself compromised thanks to the presence of American soldiers and the slowdown of volunteers and weapons. Despite this, the Anarchomagonistas managed to take Tijuana on May 9. After this battle, PLM was left bankrupt and did not have the resources to maintain the army in the northern part of the country. On May 25 1911, Díaz finally left the presidency, causing many Mexicans to believe that the war was over. The Anarchomagonista Revolution in Baja California was no longer seen, hence, as necessary. Colonel Vega, hungry for vengeance after his defeat in February, attacked Tijuana at a moment when the rebel troops were not ready. By June 22, the Anarchomagonista army had been defeated.

The Anarchomagonista Revolution in Baja California is important not just as an armed movement in the northern border of the country, but because it demonstrates that Anarchomagonismo was not just a predecessor to the Mexican Revolution, but it was also a constitutive part of it, at least in the beginning. It was PLM's most successful military campaign and left the region imbued with a feeling of rebellion for a long time, such that there continued to be revolts against American big businesses into the 1920s. Moreover, as put well by Trujillo, "we must consider the Floresmagonista Revolution as a conflagration that left a mark on both sides of the border, that tests its inhabitants, that imposes new social, economic and political relations" (2022, pg. 103). These new relations allowed the anarchist struggle to persist in the northern border in the following years.

Decline

There are many factors that weakened PLM until it finally fell into political irrelevancy. The campaign's failure in Baja California was one of them. Maderismo's triumph was another, in part because many PLM members opted to leave the party and join Madero. However, the anti-reelectionist victory also implied a campaign of discrediting the PLM's ideals so that they would be seen as barely useful and unnecessary to the dominated classes:

The anarcho-syndicalist ideal was [..] an even more daring step [..] but it was not a step many wanted to take. Ricardo [Flores Magón]'s reasoning was based on the certainty that while the poor did not have a hand in the sources of production, these would only be exchangeable parts. [..] However, for Mexicans in 1911, this revolution could wait. It was better to celebrate the triumph of the moderate Maderista revolution (Trujillo Muñóz, 2022, pg. 85).

Towards the end of 1911, Regeneración barely survived due to lack of funds. By December 1912, Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón, Librado Rivera, and Anselmo Figueroa, the PLM Organizing Board, were jailed again. Despite this, Regeneración continued publishing. On January 1914, the Board members were freed again, only to find that the paper was in danger once again. So, Regeneración ceased being published more a couple months in 1915.

On February 1916, once again, Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón were jailed, accused of distributing "obscene literature", but managed post bail thanks to their lawyers and the efforts of Emma Goldman. Two years later, they were arrested again, accused of homicide and violating the Espionage Act. This was the final blow to Regeneración, since publishing it became practically impossible, and it definitively ended circulation by 1918. And in 1922, in a Leavenworth, KS. prison, Ricardo Flores Magón died.

The End: Ortiz Rubio's Federal Work Code

Why did Mexican anarchism practically ceased to exist after 1931? The end of the anarchist boom began with the defeat of Regeneración and PLM. This happened for multiple reasons. In the first place, PLM's anarchism was not the main ideology of the Revolution's combatants. With Madero's triumph, everything that anarchism promised stopped being seen as indispensable; the dictator was gone and that was what mattered most. Secondly, most of PLM's members were no longer in Mexico, and the physical distance also entailed an ideological distance. Thirdly, PLM was no longer the same after the divisions cause by betrayals after 1911. And fourthly, Ricardo Flores Magón's death ended up depriving PLM of what little structure it still had.

The movements tied to Anarchomagonismo continued on in the country after Flores Magón's death, but never with the strength that PLM had in 1911. When Pascual Ortiz Rubio presented the Federal Work Law between 1929 and 1931, the struggles tied to Anarchomagonismo had been defeated by counter-revolutionary movements. The new Law "delegated to the government the power to recognize unions, approve all strikes, and negotiate compromise arrangements between the concerned parties" (Hart, 2022, pg. 324). The following governments, particularly Lázaro Cardena's, sought to pacify the dominated classes in order to secure the interests of the dominant classes. Certainly, worker and peasant movements continued, but they adopted other ideologies such as Marxism. The real Mexican Revolution, the one that sought transformation for the dominated classes, had been left behind, and with it, the Anarchomagonista dream.

Chapter Two: Positions and Perspectives

This chapter will review the theories and concepts by which the analysis of the lives of Francisca J. Mendoza and Felipa Velázquez will be made in order to answer the question of the research. It begins by taking up of Pierre Bourdieu's focus and theory, who sought to transcend binaries that, to present day, marks sociological research. The theory the author proposes allows for the study of the macro and micro in relation to one another, and thus accomplish a better understanding of social phenomena. His field theory and more important concepts, such as habitus, capital and social trajectory, are taken up. In doing so, the starting point of the analysis of Felipa's and Francisca's structural conditions and personal motivations begins to be outlined.

It goes on with a section on anarchist theory, taking up the approach of Jeff Schantz and Dana Williams, to explain how anarchism, particularly communist anarchism, can be used as a sociological perspective to analyze society and its changes; as well an analysis on Felipa's and Francisca's subjectivities. In the third section, various concepts will be taken up that complement the Bourdieuist-anarchist focus of the analysis. Anarchomagonismo as social thought will also be taken up, in order to understand the ideology of the women of the study. Finally, Gayle Rubin's concept of the "sex/gender system" will be developed, as will the Louise Tilly's "women's collective action", and Temma Kaplan's "female consciousness".

Positions and Dispositions in the Social World: Pierre Bourdieu's Relational Sociology

Pierre Bourdieu, a classic of contemporary sociology, said the following, "all sociology should be historical and all history sociological" (1992, p. 90). Although it runs the risk of sounding redundant, this claim summarizes this work's main theoretical point of departure. The aim is not to talk about Felipa Velázquez and Francisca Mendoza in an individualistic manner, as if they were isolated subjects; it deals with placing them in their particular historical context and analyzing how it was possible for them to be incorporated into the Anarchomagonista movement. However, the goal is not solely to analyze the macro-historic, but to tie its historical context with individual experiences, with their position and trajectory within the social space.

Pierre Bourdieu's field theory allows us to do both by transcending the macro/micro binary in sociological research since, according to the author, "There exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world —particularly in to dominant and dominated in the various fields— and the principle of vision and division that the agents apply to it" (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 12). Both aspects are able to be explained in this way, the historical context and personal motivations, by tying them together and unraveling the way their relation allows for the continuation and the change of social structures.

Field Theory

Within Bourdieu's theory, the social world get to know itself and studies itself as social space. Social space can be thought of as a system of differing social positions. Within this system, every social position is in relation with every other one, but not in equal manner: they are related hierarchically between each other. This means that people are distributed in unequal manner within the social space. Social class is composed of people who share a social position: as much in material conditions as in mental and sensible structures. They share a lifestyle, which is in turn different from that of other social positions.

What allows our movement within social space is the access to different form of power, known as capitals. Bourdieu speaks of four kinds of capital, but the most important ones in determining one's social position within social space are two: economic capital and cultural capital. Economic capital consists in the amount of physical resources a person has access to, particularly money. Cultural capital refers to knowledge, preferences, and consumer practices, commonly known altogether as culture, which a person possesses and is able to capitalize on since they are valued and validated as important and necessary. However, knowledge does not always have the same value. For example, knowing about architecture can be valuable when one finds themselves around architects, but it is not as capitalizable when surrounded by doctors. As will be see in the following chapter, Francisca and Felipa occupied positions marked by a lack of cultural and economic capital according to the dominant parameters, placing them at a disadvantage within social space.

Different social positions regularly relate between each other. The combination of these relations is known as a field:

a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions [..] objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they imposes upon their occupants, agents or institutions, by their present and potential situation (situs) in the structure of the distribution of species of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to the specific profits that are at stake in the field, as well as by their objective relation to other positions (domination, subordination, homology, etc.) (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 97).

The field is a social microcosm with its own rules, which are different to the rules of other fields. Likewise, fields are a historical product, not static. Within each field there are relations of struggle within its members, who dispute control of the field. Within each field there are dominated and dominant,[18] the latter being who gain better conditions as to shape the field in a way that aligns to their particular interests. This means that there is always resistance within the fields, be it to maintain it or change it. Hence, struggle is the engine of the fields. Later I will analyze Francisca's and Felipa's positions in the main field I believe they belonged to: the insurgent or revolutionary field. This position will also be compared to that of the State's, and the way that Francisca and Felipa sought to dismantle the latter.

The concept of the field cannot be completely understood without also understanding the concept of the habitus. The field, according to Bourdieu's metaphor, is a game; is a strategy used to play. While the author defines habitus many times, here I take up the following definition, "a product of history, habitus creates practices, individual and collective, hence history, according the schema engendered by history" (Bourdieu, 2013. p. 88).

Habitus is a historically "structured structure", one that functions as a "structuring structure" in being absorbed by people, in such a way that it molds and guides the way one perceives and acts in the world. Habitus is internalized through social interactions, becoming embodied and shielded within people's mental structures. Habitus is "a socialized subjectivity" (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 166) that guides individual rationality, but that transcends the individual in being a product of history, and hence, subject to changes to the field and the social space. Felipa and Francisca had similar habitus, but not the same one, both marked not just by their position within social space but also by being women. In chapter three we will see in greater depth how both their historical-social context were internalized by them,[19] forming part of their habitus, and with it, guiding their choices with regard to social struggle.

Bourdieu talks about four types of fundamental capital, of which two of them have been defined: economic capital and cultural capital. The following one is social capital, which consists of the web of interpersonal relations a person has. Said relations, based on familiarity and mutual recognition, tend to facilitate access to other resources. Finally, we have symbolic capital, the most abstract of them all since it refers to "the form that one or another of these species [of capital] takes when it is grasped through categories of perception that recognize its specific logic or, if you prefer, misrecognize the arbitrariness of its possession and accumulation" (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 119). Symbolic capital is a way of recognizing and legitimizing whoever possesses capital. Prestige, fame, credit are all way in which symbolic capital is manifested. Capital, as said by Marx, is a social relation: it does not exist on its own. Any thing, under certain conditions can take the shape of capital. The gathering of resources and power that can be used to gain advantages in the field is known as the global volume of capital, or global capital.

People are born into a certain position due to the position inherited from the family. This social position is characterized by the specific way it moves within social space. The inherited habitus is made up not just of practices and mental structures, but also of inherited capitals. Being born into a wealthy family, for example, means having a considerable inheritance of economic capital (that tends to be accompanied by the other capitals). In the case of Felipa Velázquez, she did not inherit economic nor cultural capital since she was a peasant daughter and was born close to the start of the Porfierato, in 1882. As seen in the previous chapter, this epoch was marked by precarious living situations for most of the population, which lived outside of the cities. This, as will be picked up in the next chapter, meant a clear inheritance of agrarian knowledge and subordinate position within the social space for Felipa. Francisca was born into a similar situation to Felipa since, as a proletariat, she also did not inherit capitalizable knowledge and practices.

Habitus and, consequently, inherited capitals mold (but do not determine) the way a person can move within social space,

To a given volume of inherited capital there corresponds a band of more or less equally probable trajectories leading to more or less equivalent positions [..] the shift from one trajectory to another often depends on collective events [..] or individual events (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 110).

By social trajectory, it is understood to be how a person moves throughout their life from one social position to another. Often the social trajectory is delineated by the field and social class of origin, or there is a move to a different, but similar, social position. But, as said in the previous quote, there also exists the possibility of changing trajectory or deviating from the imposed/inherited one. This deviation can be taken as another trajectory that positions the individual in a place of superiority or inferiority with respect to their social position of origin, depending on the evolution of their capital, in terms of volume and structure.

Bourdieu's theory attempts to transcend dichotomies and, in their place, study the social world at two interrelated moments. The first moment in the analysis of positions, of objective structures of the social world. The second is an analysis of the dispositions, of subjective structures. By "dispositions" it is understood to refer to the mechanisms of action, perception, and evaluation with which those agents count on to move within the social space. Habitus implies as much a position in the space as it does a series of dispositions corresponding to its social class. For example, common sense, taste, aesthetic criteria, etc. Those aspects of daily life that seem exclusively individual turn out to also be products of the position they have in the social space, and vary according to said position:

Cumulative exposure to certain social conditions instills in individuals an ensemble of durable and transposable dispositions that internalize the necessities of the extant social environment, inscribing inside the organism the patterned inertia and constraints of external reality (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 13).

Both Francisca and Felipa, saw themselves exposed to specific social conditions caused by Porfirio Díaz's regime, bringing them close to injustice, poverty, and violence. This caused the dispositions of both women to change, from being born in a rural context to becoming two rebel Anarchomagonistas and prolific writers. I will go more in depth about this in the next chapter.

For Bourdieu, it was important to remember the object of study in sociology was not the individual, but rather the double relation between fields and habitus, between the structures and systems by which we perceive, value, and act. First, the field/habitus relation is a relation of conditioning: the habitus is structured, but not determined, by the field. The habitus is the embodiment of the field. Second, it is a relation of building knowledge and meaning, since the habitus is fundamental for granting the field with meaning and value.

Since the habitus and the field are tied, the habitus only activates in relation to certain situations. This is to say that the habitus produces particular discourse and practices according to the structures it is tied to. Hence, in order to know why a person acted in a particular manner we must know their position in social space, as well as their point of origin and the trajectory of positions from one to the other. All of this information finds itself codified within the habitus. The actions of Francisca and Felipa cannot be understood until we understand their habitus, and in order to do that we must analyze, not just their works, but also their biographies. This analysis is central to the content of the third chapter of this work.

With these concepts, it is now possible to take Bourdieu's concept of the State up again, necessary to this work since I seek to find the relations between the structural conditions and personal motivations that lead Mexican woman to become involved in the Anarchomagonista movement, a profoundly anti-State movement. The State is a field that is constantly fighting to preserve the monopoly of legitimized violence and "the power to constitute and impose as universal and universally applicable within a given 'nation,' that is, within the boundaries of a given territory, a common set of coercive norms." (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 112).

Although there are interpretations which consider the power-field and the State-field as the same one,[20] here I consider that the State seeks, and sometimes succeeds, to control the field of power. All the dominant of every field converge in this field, be it to control it or dismantle it. In the case of the insurgent or revolutionary field, the one which Felipa and Francisca belonged to, it doesn't seek to appropriate the State nor any field of power; on the contrary, it seeks to dismantle both. This means that they do not just advocate for the destruction of the State, a dominant element within the field of power, but also the destruction of every form of domination that converge within the field of power.

Anarchist Sociology: Studying Anarchists From Within Anarchism

Anarchism as a social movement began to develop ideologically in 19th century Europe. There is a rich tradition of anarchists texts that transforms anarchism into not just a social movement, but into an ideology, a philosophy, and a way of life. Authors such as Emma Goldman, Pyotr Kropotkin, and Errico Malatesta developed anarchism's theory, offering an explanation of the situations of injustice and inequality lived by the greater part of the population. Stemming from the most basic of principles of anarchism, such as mutual aid, freedom and anti-authoritarianism, the authors realized an analysis of society and its institutions, such as marriage, school and religion. Is this not a form of sociological thought?

Jeff Schantz and Dana Williams certainly believe so. In their book, Anarchy and Society: Reflections on Anarchist Sociology, they develop the concept of an "anarchist sociology" with five possible meanings: as a theme of investigation, sub field, ideology, radical praxis, and, the one I take up, as theoretical perspective. Anarchist sociology can be, as with many theories, a tool to analyze aspects of social life. I go back to Jonathan Purkis, "To develop an anarchist sociology is to offer a different explanation of why particular social problems emerge, based on a different vision of how society is and ought to be" (Quoted in Schantz and Williams, 2013). This section will take up these proposals to, in a way, "anarchize" Pierre Bourdieu's perspective and, thus, complement it in order to be able to answer this work's research question.

The Theory of Domination According to Anarchist Sociology

For Schantz and Williams, anarchism is much more sociological than is commonly believed. According to what these authors set forth, analyzing from the point of anarchist sociology implies starting from a particular position: rejecting structures of domination as necessary and indispensable for societal life. Thus, the State is not thought of as ideal nor as uniquely able to organize society's resources. Every kind of State and State-organization is considered harmful, unnecessary, and undesirable.

It is from this rejection of structures of domination that the authors set a grand[21] theory of domination,[22] which in turn becomes indispensable to anti-authoritarianism, the defense of liberty, and mutual aid. Inequality and its causes has been a recurring theme of research, if not the main one, of sociological theories. Using anarchist sociology as a theoretical lens, inequality can be studied as a consequence of domination. Domination is defined as "patterns of unequal relationships that are executed within hierarchies" (Schantz & Williams, 2013, p. 101). Hierarchies are considered to be "the cultural, traditional, and psychological systems of obedience and command" (Bookchin quoted in Schantz & Williams, 2013, p. 101), which are not necessary tied to social class. Inequality, instead, is the breach between one group's lifestyle and another’s. It is the inequality of access to necessary resources to survive.

Domination, as much in anarchist as in Bourdieuist sociology, is a social relation. It is a consequence of living in a hierarchical system, where persons exist in authority over others. Authority, in turn, is derived from the what position one occupies in social space. As previously mentioned, according to Bourdieu, the position one occupies within social spaces depends of the global capital one possesses.

The solution, then, is not simply to change the ownership of the means of production, rather it is to eradicate the hierarchies that make domination possible. For example, collectivizing the ownership of the means of production would solve the problem of social classes, but it would not eliminate the still-existing hierarchy between men and feminized subjects. This is something that the radicalized Anarchomagonistas were well aware of. They knew that a change in the government alone, like the collectivization of the land, would not solve their problems. That is why they also championed for woman's education and free love, to defy the relations of domination, such as marriage, that had been bestowed and imposed on them.

The theory of domination proposed by Schantz and Williams seeks to discover patterns of domination in societies, and to propose alternatives to them. Another element that forms part of the theory proposed by the authors is the incorporation of class, gender, and race as relations of domination that establish specific hierarchies and cause specific inequalities. Class is a consequence of capitalism, a mode of production based on the proletariat's exploitation by the bourgeoisie, since it is the latter who accumulates wealth thanks to the theft of the proletariat's labor through surplus-value. Capitalism allows the establishing of a hierarchy in which the amount of money one owns determines the position within social space. Abolishing this relation of domination depends on the collectivization of the means of production and the elimination of hierarchical relations between classes. Francisca and Felipa were very aware of this particular relation of domination, and in the following chapter we will see how a critique of it was central in their writings. It will also be possible, from within anarchist sociology, to analyze how this relation of domination in particular permeated the personal motives of said anarchist authors.

Gender functions as a relation of domination in establishing a hierarchy that benefits "men over women [and feminized subjects], elder men over younger men, and heteronormative performance over non-heteronormative behavior" (Schantz & Williams, 2013, p. 114). Gender, according to Joan Scott, is "a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary primary way of signifying relationships of power" (1990, p. 289). Gender mediates politics, the juridical, symbols that constitute the parameters of everyday life interpretation, and the subjective identity of people. Gender also is the primary place where power is articulated. For anarchist sociology, this means that there is no way to analyze relations of domination without also analyzing hierarchies created by gender.

As shown by the social sciences and biology, race is a social construct and not a biological category. For Schantz and Williams, racism is a relation of domination founded on the ideology of white supremacy. On the basis of white supremacy, hierarchy based on "races" is justified, bestowing privileges to white people, or those who meet certain characteristics associated with "whiteness".[23] To eliminate this hierarchy based on race, the ideology of white supremacy would have to be dismantled through a change in the education process, for example.

These three relations of domination are intertwined, something the Magonistas understood well. As will be seen further ahead, these writers talked about the consequences of domination of gender and class during the Porfiriato, analyzing both from within anarchism. It was important for them to attack the hydra's three heads, which were the Church, the State, and Capital. However, they also declared themselves, indirectly, against a fourth head: gender domination.

Anarchist Sociology and Bourdieu's Theory: The Case of the State

Anarchism, "far from being a speculative vision of a future society... is a description of a mode of human organization" (Ward quoted in Schantz & Williams, 2013, p. 24). The anarchist sociology perspective allows us to diagnose society as marked by relations of domination and, consequently, by social inequality. Said diagnosis can be better fit if we adopt a relational focus such as that proposed by Bourdieu. Analysis stemming from anarchism tend to be of a relational character without realizing it, such as the definition of liberty according to Mikhail Bakunin[24] or Emma Goldman's analysis of individualism.[25] Moreover, Bourdieu's sociology is compatible with anarchism because both seek to transcend dualisms. True anarchist sociology is not only historical, but also relational.

Following Schantz and Williams, anarchist sociology "uncovers and makes visible the presence of the State in people's everyday lives, including the internal socialization of the State's rules, ideas, and practices" (2013, p. 23). Taking what was just said, the State, considered from the point of view of Bourdieu's sociology, is considered as a field, a conjunction of relations. The socialist/anarchist Gustav Landauer agreed with him, since he argued that, "Rather than a rigid and reified structure, the State is composed of relationships and processes of interaction and governance" (Schantz & Williams, 2013, p. 26). The State, in being a conjunction of relations from this combined point of view, has direct consequences, which are undesirable, on the internal lives of people. It wouldn't be outlandish, then, to consider the Porfirian, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary State in Mexico to be a decisive factor to the individual motives for Francisca and Felipa to become Anarchomagonistas. The Mexican State had direct consequences as much in the social context as in the internal lives of the writers studied here.

Anarchomagonismo, Sex/Gender System, Women's Collective Action and Female Consciousness: Complementary Concepts

The great theoretic tool that guides the present research is, as can be seen, proposed by Pierre Bourdieu. To this, we have added anarchist sociology as a theoretical lens, and we have clearly laid the intention of fuse them in the analysis carried out in chapter three. These analytical tools, however, are not omnipresent, and for the purposes of this work it will be necessary to complement them with certain concepts. The first of them is Felipa's and Francisca's particular anarchism, which, due to practical reasons, has been deemed "Anarchomagonismo". The second is the "sex/gender system", coined by Gayle Rubin, and taken up here to explain social organization in terms of gender domination during the Porfiriato era, the Revolution, and the start of the Maximato. It will also include the concepts of "women's collective action" and "female consciousness", and their role and impact on the personal motivations of Francisca and Felipa will be evaluated.

The Anarchomagonismo of Francisca and Felipa

The anarchism that came out of the Mexican Liberal Party and the formulations of the Flores Magón brothers, from Ricardo in particular, was greatly influenced by the anarchist communism of Pyotr Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Errico Malatesta. These influences are reflected in the 1911 Manifesto when, for example, it details how resources may be managed during war in order to make sure nobody is left lacking.[26] The organization of resources PLM proposes is clearly influenced by Kropotkin's proposal in his work, The Conquest of Bread. Likewise, Emma Goldman and Ricardo Flores Magón exchanged correspondence. In a few words, this strain of anarchism is characterized by the slogan, "to each according to their need, from each according to the ability". In contrast to the collectivism proposed by Bakunin, communist anarchism eliminates every form of money or work vouchers and so gets rid of markets.

The 1911 Manifesto argues that the cause of the ills of Mexican society was the famed three-headed hydra: "capital, authority, clergy: here is the somber trinity that makes of this beautiful land a paradise for those who have managed to hoard in their claws what has been gained by cunning, violence, and crime" (Silva Herzog, 2011b). In a materialist, and clearly Marxist, analysis of society, PLM distinguishes between two classes: the working class and the possessor class, the latter being a parasite class which should not be granted any sort of fraternity.

Tied to this, PLM and its followers proposed the radical idea that every person had a right to dignified life. PLM's Anarchomagonismo, like most other anarchist strains, is marked by a profound feeling of fraternity, solidarity, and love for others, rousing these quality and challenging the indifference associated with the male handling of emotions. The PLM men, as much as women, wrote on the importance of friendship, love, and companionship. The defense for human life found its justification, according to the Anarchomagonistas, not in the practicality or logic of mutual aid, but in the simple feeling of compassion and human empathy for one another.

This was the ideology that underlined the writings and actions of Francisca and Felipa, with slight variations. Felipa was not part of PLM, but the party's influence can be seen in her texts. In one of her writings, for example, she calls on women to "swell up the libertarian ranks who hoist the red flag of Land and Liberty" (Velázquez quoted in Trejo Muñóz, 2021). She also had correspondence with Librado Rivera, a notable PLM Board member. Moreover, various texts by Felipa were published in two newspapers associated with PLM and in which Rivera directly was a part of, called Sagitario and ¡Avante!

Besides these elements, within the texts of the woman we call "Anarchomagonistas", there are discussions of certain themes associated to the women, such as motherhood, the necessity of access to quality education, and gainful employment. For Francisca, Felipa, and other PLM women, motherhood was one of the natural functions of their gender. They did not question its imposition, but they did advocated for a free, joyful motherhood that taught children about anarchy. Just as with this, there were times when the Anarchomagonistas tended to reinforce some gender roles, but this does not mean that they sought to stay in a subordinate position. It simply demonstrates that they questioned everything they possibly could with the tools they had on hand.

The Sex/Gender System: Being a Woman During the Porfiriato and Revolution

In this chapter we have already talked about gender, conceptually, in two occasions. The first was considering it as a factor that influenced the position Francisca and Felipa occupied within the insurgent field; the second was in taking up the proposals of Schantz and Williams about gender as as relation of domination, which was complemented with Joan W. Scott's definition of gender. But given that this is a research with a gender perspective, it is pertinent develop gender and its role in the structuralization of Mexican society at the end of 19th century and start of the 20th century.

Gender and Its Chains Within Mexican Society

As was seen in the first chapter, in 1910 8% of Mexican women formed part of the labor force, and out of that percentage, 57% worked in the service industry. Working class women were seamstresses, midwives, primary school teachers; they worked as caregivers. This makes the sexual division of labor evident in the aforementioned eras, a division founded in a particular sex/gender system. According to Gayle Rubin, the sex/gender system is "the set of arrangements by which society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which those transformed sexual needs are satisfied" (1986). The arrangements being a product of society (and not of nature) allows us to situate them historically.

Mexican society during the Porfiriato and Revolution placed women in a subordinate position in regards to the men. Free sexuality was a distant dream, birth control a sin, and higher education was just starting to be accessible to women in 1910. The manuals on etiquette at the time, such as the famed Carreño manual,[27] sought to teach women to be "decent". This meant regulating their behavior so that they would not garner "undue" attention from the men, maintain their virginity until marriage, and submit to their husband's desires. These rules were applied, particularly, to women of the dominant class, but they also serve to illustrate the role that women should occupy within Mexican society.

According to Valentina Torres (2001), during the Porfiriato, the means to control women and their actions became harsher and their political and social environment became unstable. Before 1880, social control stayed within the family; with the growth of the cities and increase of population, the control of feminine bodies extended to more public spheres. This is related to the fact that "female socialites represented, with their physical presence and high class and respectable appearance, their husband's economic wealth" (Torres, 2001, p. 285). For Rubin, this would be one more way of exchanging women like money, and for Bourdieu, women offer symbolic capital to the men who married them. In any case, it is evident that the Mexican woman was seen as an object, lacking a personal life, whose mission in life was to maintain the home and make a man happy.

Despite not being bourgeoisie, Felipa and Francisca found themselves constrained by the gender rules of their age. Felipa taught children, and so had received some learning. It was said education, alongside other circumstances of her personal life that will be mentioned later, what allowed her to question the gender rules of her age, such that she wrote the following,

Come, compañeras: come all you women who, submissively and obediently, have lived under this iniquitous system, you whose conscience is benighted because of that infamous seducer, that crooked parasite that grows in the shadow of woman's ignorance, and he who, satisfied with having made her a lunatic, has twisted the mission of the sole creator of the human being: man (Velázquez quoted in Trejo Muñóz, 2021).

Francisca also recognized that she, alongside other women in general, were at a disadvantage with respect to men when she said, for example, that women were "slaves of slave" (Mendoza quoted in González Phillips & López Ruiz, 2024). Using Gayle Rubin's concept makes it easier to understand the specific position that Francisca and Felipa occupied in social space, not just determined by their capitals and habitus, but also by the greatly naturalized and normalized social structures such as relations of gender domination, products of the sex/gender system specific to the era.

Women's Collective Action: Why Rebel as a Group?

The women studied here did not rebel in an individual manner. They joined existing movements, those they shared an ideological base with, because by themselves they had little chance of creating change. The concept of collective action is included here to complement the analysis of Francisca's and Felipa's individual motives. It also allows us to broaden the sketching of the social conditions in which said women found themselves.

Proletarization and Collective Action According to Louise Tilly

In her article, Paths of Proletarianization: Organization of Production, Sexual Division of Labor, and Women's Collective Action, American historian, Louise Tilly, asks what are the conditions under which women's collective action is more or less probable. To this, she analyses how women joined the labor force in the growth of industrial capitalism. She concludes that, like their male counterparts, women went through a process of proletarization: an increase in the number of people whose survival depended on the sale of their labor-power.

Tilly studied the case of France in the 18th and 19th centuries in particular, when industrial capitalism began to grow alongside the number of waged proletariat. Tilly concludes that the patterns of proletarization were "linked systematically" to the patterns of collective action (1995, p. 130). Collective action, according to this writer, was the "group's application of pooled resources to common ends" (Tilly, 1995, p. 129) Keeping this in mind, Tilly managed to see that working class women tended to act collectively when the following conditions were met:

1. They associate with other women who shared the same interests;

2. They can translate these interest into structured association;

3. They have resources they mobilize and deploy;

4. Their employers are depended on their regular supply of labor work;

5. The economic climate was favorable in the sense that, if the women abstained from work, their employers would lose considerable sums of money;

6. Their position is not extraordinary vulnerable;

7. There were, generally, various demands related to the worker's economic situations;

8. Their position, with regard to the domestic situation, allowed them the opportunity to act autonomously.

Although Louise Tilly talked about the working class women of 18th and 19th century France, we can see that said conditions were also present in the political climate that the Anarchomagonista women faced. The following chapter will explain, from within the social and economic conditions of the era, how the involvement of Francisca and Felipa in collective Anarchomagonista action was made possible.

The Female Consciousness of the Anarchomagonistas

For historian Temma Kaplan (1982), it is important to recognize the impact that female socialization had in the creation of a common female consciousness. According to this author, the sexual division of labor had assigned women those job related to care: motherhood, teacher, nurses. In this way, women had the social responsibility to care for and preserve human life. This part of the socialization is internalized in such a way that it has psychological consequences, transforming it into a basis of female consciousness.

Kaplan studied cases of female collective action of 20th century Barcelona where she observed that women organized when their ability to safeguard life was endangered by acts of violence. This means that said need to care for human life guided women to organize as a group, to rebel and, if necessary, to resort to violent acts to fulfill the mission imposed by female socialization.

What's interesting about Kaplan's research is the role that being responsible for care takes on in the creation of female consciousness. What's more interesting for me to take up is that, in effect, during the Porfiriato and the Revolution, Mexican women learned new ways to care for others. This can bee seen in the professions they worked but also in the writings of Francisca and Felipa.

This social responsibility of preserving life gains even more importance in remembering that most of anarchist strains rouse the role of love, friendship, and care for one another through mutual aid as pillars of the society they seek to build. Anarchism, then, also seeks to preserve and care for life. It seems to me that this could have been one of the great attractions that Anarchomagonismo held for women, since it presented itself as a movement that allowed them to care and to fight at the same time. Later, in the following chapter, I will relate this aspect to the particular personal motives of Felipa and Francisca.

Chapter Three: Anarchomagonista Mexican Women

The affliction of others entered into my flesh.

—Simone Weil

Up to now, the information displayed in the present work has been to establish the social context of the anarchists studied here, as well as gathering theories and concepts that will allow the following analysis. This consists of four stages. First we will take up Francisca's and Felipa's biographical data to trace their lives' trajectory. In the second stage, this life trajectory is analyzed through the technique of socio-analysis, as proposed by Pierre Bourdieu in his text Sketch for a Self-Analysis, which allows for identifying Francisca's and Felipa's capitals and habitus in order to locate them in the social space, understand their life trajectories, and begin to explain their personal motives for joining the Anarchomagonista movement, to later link said motives to the structural conditions of their era. This technique is complemented by the concepts of the sex/gender system and the proletarization process, as previously discussed in the second chapter.

In the third place, an ethnographic document analysis (EDA) will be conducted. I've named it so because it combines ethnography with documentary analysis. The latter consists of,

in the examination, breakdown, recognition, and study applied to documents, considering their objective elements, such as type, author, title, page number, editorial, among others; and their general meaning or the essence of the message it contains, which constitutes an essential element for its intellectual retrieval (Fox quoted in Vera & Morillo, 2007).

I've chosen to incorporate documentary analysis since it is impossible to interview Francisca and Felipa, so analyzing their texts seems to me to be the next best option. However, documentary analysis by itself is not enough, since for the purposes of this research it is necessary to find the how Francisca and Felipa understood the events they lived through. To this, I pick up ethnography as a focus, following Rosana Guber. Ethnography, in this sense, "is a conception and practice of knowledge that seeks to understand social phenomena from the perspective of its members" (Guber, 2001).

Through EDA I look for Francisca’s and Felipa's understanding of their lives, their social contexts, and of Anarchomagonismo in order to go on to explain the relationship between their individual motivations and structural conditions. The ethnographic focus allows me to go from the personal to the political and vice-versa. This technique is complemented by the concepts of women's collective action and female consciousness, incorporating them to elucidate how their condition as women played an essential role in their decision to join the Anarchomagonista movement. The socio-analysis allows for the analyzing of social positions while the ethnography allows for the analyzing of dispositions. To conduct an EDA, I first read all of Francisca's and Felipa's writings included in Ruben Trejo's anthology, identifying passages in which said writers talked about their political ideology and personal life. The anthology contains eight texts of Felipa and 34 of Francisca, so I decided to analyze all of Felipa's texts and chose the seven from Francisca that had the most information of her political ideology and persona life. I used all of Felipa's texts in the EDA except for one, titled Letter to a Female Believer, since I used it extensively in the socio-analysis and it would be redundant to include it in the EDA.

Finally, in the fourth stage, both of their analysis will be compared to find similarities and differences between their cases. This comparison will serve as a preamble to the final reflections in this work's research. In four stages, particularly in the second, third, and fourth, I depart from anarchist sociology as a theoretical perspective, which complements and transforms Bourdieu's theory.

Life Trajectories

Francisca J. Mendoza: The Most Prolific Anarchomagonista

Blas Lara (Mariano Gómez Gutiérrez's pseudonym) wrote an autobiographical novel called La vida que yo vivi. Novela histórico-liberal de la Revolucion Mexicana. It is in this novel where we find most of the biographic information about Francisca J. Mendoza. According to Lara, Francisca was from Matehuala, San Luis Potosí. Her birthday is unknown, but the historian Graciela González Phillips (2023) argues that she might have been born in the 1880s, since by 1907 she had three daughters. The father (or fathers) of her daughters also remains unknown, and in a 1911 text, she mentions being the sole provider for her family, made up of her parents and her three daughters.

At some point in her life she moved to the United States, like so many thousand Mexicans, probably because of political repression or the terrible economic situation in the country during Díaz's dictatorship. In 1907, she lived in Bridgeport, Texas, and was part of the "Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez Liberal Club". That same year she met Práxedis Guerrero, who was on tour through some Texas cities. By April 1911 she was still in Bridgeport and was now a part of PLM and Regeneración. In some editions of said newspaper, readers of the paper were asked to contribute to a fundraiser so that Francisca could move to Los Angeles, where the Organizing Board of the PLM was located. This odyssey look longer than expected since she first had to find a safe place for her parents and her three daughters, somewhere her parent’s could work and sustain themselves and their three granddaughters. It is unknown if she found such a place, but by May 1912 Francisca managed to settle down in Los Angeles.

In June 1912, Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón, alongside Librado Rivera and Anselmo L. Figueroa, were imprisoned, so Blas Lara, Rafael Romero Palacios and Francisca were left in charge of the PLM Organizing Board and Regeneración. Between May 1911 and December 1912, Francisca wrote around 30 articles for Regeneración and ¡Tierra!, making her the most prolific Anarchomagonista writer. Most of her writings were reports on the advances and retreats of the Anarchomagonista movement in the country, where there was a section specially dedicated to the Zapatista movement in the south of the country. This reports generally included one or two paragraphs dedicated to spur on the working class to keep fighting,

Forward comrades: resoluteness and vigor will undoubtedly lead us to triumph, for victory belongs to he who knows to keep firm and committed to conquer Bread, Land and Liberty or Death. Down with the Government! Death to Capital! Long Live the Social Revolution! (Mendoza, 2021c, p. 212).

There was split in 1912 within Regeneración when Rafael Romero Palacios, the romantic partner of Francisca at the time, published a text insinuating that Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón, Anselmo L. Figueroa, and Librado Rivera had been bought by the enemy. Francisca took Rafael's side, and both broke ties with Regeneración and PLM. However, when Rafael once again sought to defame Ricardo Flores Magón in 1914 in writing, Francisca wrote to the latter to distance herself from her partner's (or perhaps ex-partner's) accusations. This letter, dated 26 of March 1914 and written in West Tampa, FL., was not published at the time since, according to Blas Lara, it was feared that, "her consort (Rafael) would giver her (Francisca) a beating, since he was in a curious state" (Lara, p. 250). In the letter, Francisca declared that everything Rafael said was published against her will and "at the expense of serious fights". She went on to say, "Comrade Ricardo: I sincerely tell you that I am at my post as a combatant and that is enough for me. [..] I do not covet fame nor glory, I fulfill my task as comrade and, having nothing to be ashamed of, I go forth confident that my deeds will justify that." To this she adds the following, "I wish to express to you my hatred to all that serves to fragment the good labor of we who aspire for the coming of anarchy" (Mendoza quoted in Lara, 2017, p. 251).

Perhaps by then Palacios was no longer her partner, since she mentioned that he "lives in Mexico playing the 'veteran' and 'revolutionary'" and she wrote the letter from Florida, United States. She signs the letter as "Your comrade and sister in anarchy." Unfortunately, after this letter, nothing is known about Francisca. We have not found any information, at the time of writing this thesis, about the place and date of her death, nor any mayor information regarding her life after leaving PLM.

Felipa Velázquez Ozuna: Poet and Anarchist

Felipa Velázquez Ozuna was born on May 1 1882 in Mazatlán, Sinaloa. Her parents, Modesto and Manuela, were peasants. She had a brother named Marcelino, although it is unknown if he was older or younger than her. In 1905 she married Canuto Arellano Toledo, with whom she had eight children: Trinidad, Manuela, Ana María, Francisca, Felipe, Miguel, Soledad, and Narciso. According the historian, Francisco Dueñas,

the first years of her life were spent in the rural region of her ancestors who bolstered in her conscience a strong calling for social and agrarian struggle. Despite her elementary training, she founded a rural school in Bamoa, Sinaloa, and served as the Civil Registry Judge wisely and with complete responsibility (Quoted in Trujillo Muñóz, 2022, p. 165).

Her husband Canuto passed away in 1924, making Felipe solely responsible for providing for her family. She decided to move to the Mexicali Valley,[28] where she began to express her interest for theater and poetry. In Baja California, Felipa lived in Sesbania station, which was later turned into the Cuernavaca Ejido. She began to work in a primary school, but was fired because of her activities in radical peasant groups. Historian Gabriel Trujillo Muñóz relates that Felipa "was out of place [in Mexicali] because she was a rara avis in a medium dominated by men [..] she was the only woman to attend political councils, and was listened to attentively due to her vast agrarian experience in her native Sinaloa" (2022, p. 166).

A poem titled Towards the Fight written by Felipa in Los Mochis, Sinaloa in 1926,[29] was published in Sagitario, an anarchist publication. In 1927, Felipa wrote a letter to Librado Rivera "expressing her support for against his unjust incarceration" (Velázquez quoted in Trejo Muñóz, 2021, p. 586). This lends to the understanding that, since at least 1926, Felipa identified with anarchism, particularly the one inherited from PLM. Due to her agrarian background, it may be speculated that she had heard of anarchism, and perhaps identified with it prior to 1924, the year she migrated to Mexicali.

On March 1930, Felipa planned to present a theater play she had written titled The Bourgeoisie and the Slave together with other peasants. This parody was part of the peasant protests against the Colorado River Land Company, a foreign business that took control of the Mexicali Valley from 1902 to 1937. As mentioned in the first chapter, the Colorado River Land Company was one the main enemies of the Magonista cause in 1911. This cotton business displaced hundreds of Mexicans, among them the Cocopah, in order to be able to become "the biggest cotton farm in the world" (Trujillo Muñóz, 2022, p. 159). Its presence in the valley was a key factor in the organization of the growing Baja Californian society, planting in the people a deep resentment against the company due to its colonial and extractivist practices.

Felipa believed and hoped she would face government repression because of her play, since Emilio Portes Gil's government continued the Porfirist practice of defending foreign investment against his own people. And so it was: according to the testimony of Macrina Lerma, who lived in the Mexicali Valley, on the 20th of May 1930, at midnight, Felipa was arrested together with her brother Marcelino and her children, Sebastián (20 y/o),[30] Francisca (18 y/o), Narciso (11 y/o), and Soledad (8 y/o). The latter of them tells the following regarding Felipa's arrest, "when my mom was taken into the boat to San Felipe, all of her children, even the littlest one, clung to her skirt, crying because they were going to be left abandoned" (Quoted in Trujillo Muñóz, p. 168). According to this anecdote, Felipa urged the soldiers to let her keep her kids, and she went to prison with all of them. However, other sources mention that Felipa arrived to the Islas Marías "with two sons and a daughter, one of them being one of the little ones."[31] What's important here is that some of Felipa's children were imprisoned with her, although we don't know exactly how many.

Felipa was behind bars for six months, during which she wrote a poem about her experience in the infamous jail. It seems that after being freed she returned to Mazatlán, where she stayed until her death in 1949. At the time of writing this thesis, there is no information available on Felipa's life nor her involvement in the anarchist cause after the Islas Marías.

Socio-analysis

In the first chapter there was a description of the social, historical, and economic context in which Francisca and Felipa lived in. Francisca wrote mostly between 1911 and 1912, while Felipa wrote between 1926 and 1930. Hence Francisca's life will be analyzed first, using the analytical tools described in the second chapter through the technique of socio-analysis, which consists in the identifying of capitals to situate a person in social space and analyzing their life trajectories. Later, using the same technique, we will analyze Felipa's life.

Francisca's Capitals and Habitus

Francisca was from Matehuala, San Luis Potosí. Said state, with a population of 568,449 inhabitants in 1895, made up a significant part of the country's mining production. Francisca was a woman in a society marked by a sex/gender system that relegated women to domestic labor and tried to exclude them from every male environment, including politics. Her habitus, her "socialized subjectivity", was deeply influenced by her gender and her social class, as well as by her parent's social class. In a text, An Explanation, published in Regeneración on December 1911, Francisca talks about her experience searching for work in American mines,

We were recently in Thurber, Tex., and having found no work in that mine, we went to Alba, Tex., and from there we came to Como, Tex., in the hopes that here we could work in the mining jobs; but the work suddenly ceased (2021, p. 181).

We don't know what her mother or father worked as, nor about her life in San Luis Potosí. However, taking up the previous quote, I wonder if perhaps her parents worked in the mining industry in San Luis Potosí, since while in the US she looked for work specifically in the mines. Be it true or not, what is true is that Francisca was a proletariat daughter of proletarians who grew up in an era where women experienced a process of proletarization: the increase of the numbers of women who depended on the sale of their labor-power. Under the Porfiriato, San Luis Potosí was one of the states that was economically stagnant. Perhaps that's why Francisca and her family saw themselves forced to migrate to the United States. At this point in her life, Francisca counted with very little cultural and economic capital, since she probably did not have formal higher education.

Thus, Francisca changed fields (in the Bourdieunian sense): from the Mexican proletariat field to the Mexican exiled in the United States field, and eventually to the Anarchomagonista sub-field. With this change, the value of her capitals also changed. In Mexico her proletariat origins was not an admirable condition, in the United States it was just the opposite. Francisca was part of the "Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez" liberal club, in which, like other liberal clubs, meetings and speeches were organized to spread PLM's ideology. Although what we don't know what her schooling was, nor at what age she learned to read a write, her involvement in this liberal club indicates that by 1907 she was not illiterate. This signified a considerable increase to her cultural and global capital, changing her social trajectory. Instead of being rejected because of it, her experience as a proletariat was respected.

On March 1911, one of her texts was published in Regeneración in which she calls herself a member of PLM, which indicates a growth in her cultural and social capital, since she had begun to rub elbows with Ricardo Flores Magón and the other members. The paper launched a campaign that year to raise funds so that Francisca could move to Los Angeles, where the PLM Organizing Board was located. Francisca, a proletariat daughter of proletarians, did not count with enough economic capital to maintain her three daughters, her parents, and herself, and also transfer from Texas to California. But she did count on a growing cultural and social capital that allowed her to lean on Regeneración readers in times of hardship.

Francisca arrived to Los Angeles in the first third of 1912. Once in the city she began to write a little more, to sing and give speeches in Plaza Mexico. According to Ethel Duffy Turner, Francisca was a good singer and guitar player. At this point in her life we can see that her knowledge and practices are not restricted to the worker dimension. Francisca knew music (enough to play guitar well) and was a writer and respected speaker within the ranks of PLM to such a degree that on May 1912, Regeneración published a brief text titled, Francisca J. Mendoza, which said the following,

The brave comrade gives speeches on Sunday afternoons at Plaza Mexico, in Los Angeles. Her speeches, full of interest for the working class, must be heard by every Mexican. She speaks truth without fear, bluntly. Listen to her, Mexicans! Abandon those who, for a couple of cents to get drunk, swindle you. Heed the libertarians, those who wish for every human being to have Bread, Land and Liberty, and shout alongside them, "Long Live Land and Liberty!" (Regeneración, #91, 25 May 1912).

The cultural, social, and symbolic capital Francisca had gathered in a few years were central to her being at the head of the PLM's Organizing Board, together with two male comrades, after the jailing of the previous Board. This position granted her even more capitals, excluding economic, and placed her in a position within social space very different to the one she had prior to 1907.

It is during this era at the head of PLM that Francisca produced the majority of her texts, full of information about the advances and retreats of the Revolution happening in the country, but also filled with anarchist theory. In the text The Red Flag, Francisca quoted Karl Marx, "the working people are now disabused that any Government will make them happy and has resolved to put into practice what Marx said, 'The emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves'" (212, p. 220).

Did Francisca read Marx? Given the presence of the said quote we can say she did, but I dare suggest that what she may have been able to read of Marx were his more famous and brief works, such as The Communist Manifesto and General Statutes of the International Workers Association, the latter being the source of the aforementioned quote. This could have been because, despite the fact that translations of Marx in Mexico appeared in 1883,[32] the first boom of Marxism in Latin America wasn't until 1920.[33] Access to texts like Capital was limited, and even if Francisca was a lettered autodidact, she was also a single mother and proletariat. To read one needs time, which Francisca probably did not have. And it is worth adding that the Marx quote is present in the PLM 1911 Manifesto, which makes this writing, probably, the origin of where Francisca took the words.

However, in one occasion,[34] Francisca referenced Regeneración's library, which included "sociological books". This was the "Regeneración's Sociological Library", announced on October 21 1911, made up of 87 texts, which were sold to a library in Los Angeles.[35] Some of the authors of those books were the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin, Pyotr Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Elisée Reclus, and Max Stirner, as well as the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and the writer Emile Zola, among others. It is highly likely that she didn't read all the texts, but the content of Francisca's writings shows that, at least, she had read Kropotkin, and very likely the rest of the anarchists included in the library. The access to this library could have played a great role in Francisca's accumulation of cultural capital, transforming her into person with knowledge worthy of an intellectual of anarchism.

Unfortunately, in October 1912, Francisca disassociated from PLM after a conflict with the old Board, particularly between Ricardo Flores Magón and Rafael Palacios, Francisca's romantic partner. She sided with her partner and they both left Regeneración and the party. Francisca, at this point in her life, could have taken a different decision, she would have sided with Ricardo and so keep, not just her position in the Organizing Board, but also her global capital. The decision she took cost her her social position in the Anarchomagonista sub-field, losing authority and influence. When Francisca wrote a letter to Ricardo to distance herself from her partner's actions on March 1914, her position within social space changed again. Despite distancing herself from PLM, Francisca kept on being an anarchist, probably till she died. Regrettably, that's up to where the information on Francisca and her life takes us.

Felipa's Capitals and Habitus

Felipa Velázquez hailed from Sinaloa, a state in the Pacific North, which experienced a considerable increase in the labor force during the Porfiriato, but a lesser development of railroad lines. Sinaloa was a state that, by 1910, had a population of 323, 642 inhabitants, with 80% being in the rural settlements. Felipa was "a child of the people, daughter of proletariat parentage" (Velázquez, 2021, p. 600), born and raised in a primarily rural state and, consequently, had a closeness to agrarian struggles from an early age. Just as with Francisca, Felipa grew during the proletarization process of Mexican women.

In a text titled Letter to a Female Believer, Felipa mentions having grown up in a religious household and being a child of illiterate parents, "My parents ignored what criminal education they had themselves received, same with my grandparents, who never learned a letter, nor could grant them to my parents." The Catholicism inherited by Felipa, according to her, was due to the fact that her grandparents were raised under the "terrible dominion of the Inquisition" from Spain. Thus, young Felipa had a childhood marked by the presence of God, "At ten years old I prayed [when] I had ecclesiastic books, all from memory. By twelve, I set up a school with more than 50 kids, who were taught Ripalda's doctrine." (Velázquez, 2021, p. 609). The previous fragment is interesting because it provides three points of information about Felipa's habitus. First, it places her as the first person in her family in three generations (minimum) to learn to read and write. Secondly, it states that Felipa was a teacher by the age of 12. And thirdly, it shows how deeply religion was tied to the life of a young Felipa.

In time, Felipa chose to reject religion and became an atheist. In Letter to a Female Believer, she says that after turning 24, she was excommunicated after a conflict with a priest. While she very well felt "an immense emptiness not going to Church", she also felt "pride in [her] dignity, and rebellion in [her] way of thinking" (Velázquez, 2021, p. 609). At 42 years of age, the age she was when she wrote said letter, Felipa had no intention in going back to the Catholic Church.

It is not known if she had formal studies in being a teacher, but around 1905 she moved to Bamoa, Sinaloa, where she founded a rural school and, moreover, became a Civil Registry judge. Felipa's arrival to said post, as well as the ability to found a school and work in it, indicates that through her profession as a professor, she managed to change her position in social space, from the field (again, in the Bourdieunian conception) of the peasantry to the field of educators, considerably increasing her cultural capital. In being a judge and teacher, she also acquired major social and symbolic capital, transforming into an an authority figure within agrarian groups.

When her husband passed away in 1924, Felipa emigrated to Baja California, where she became involved in the peasant struggles against the Colorado River Land Company. According to the 1921 census, Baja California's North District counted with a population of 23,537 inhabitants, much less than the population in Sinaloa. In the field of Baja California Norte, Felipa's presence stood out since she was a well-known figure given her "vast experience" in the agrarian conflicts of her native state. Despite the fact that the field she unfurled in Sinaloa was similar to her new field, Felipa was the only only woman to assist political councils, as previously mentioned.

Here we should remember that during the Revolution, Mexican society was delineated by a sex/gender system that delegated women to the domestic sphere and jobs related to care work. During the Porfiriato, women could only teach girls in colleges economically dependent on the State. It wasn't until 1905 that they could join the (recently created) normal schools as students, and teach, as aides, in male colleges. Oresta López mentions that "during the Porfiriato and up to the first half of the 20th century, the Pestalozzi's[36] pedagogical discourse held great influence in education, it posed the education of children as natural and convenient female labor" (2006, p. 12). Felipa's work as a professor of a rural school completely corresponded to what was expected of working women, but her participation in political circles was not expected of nor desired. However, Mexican anarchism possessed a nearly 60 year old tradition of holding that women's involvement should not only not be forbidden, but encouraged. Moreover, Baja California had been the stage of an Anarchomagonista revolution, such that the spirit of the movement still breathed in its valleys and in its social struggles, which made it the perfect place for a woman like Felipa.

It was around this time in the northern part of the country that an interest for theater and poetry surged within Felipa, demonstrating once more an increase in her endowment of knowledge and practices. She began writing poems which would later be published in anarchist magazines. The content of her poems is deeply political, since in them she talks of the various kinds of oppression exercised by the State and the Church against the Mexican people. She also began to write theater plays, of which I have found no copies. According to Trujillo, Felipa was incarcerated in the Islas Marías for trying to present one of her plays titled The Bourgeois and the Slave. Being poet and playwright with this kind of content was no small thing, more so since she was a woman of peasant origins.

When Felipa was incarcerated, her social and symbolic capital served to reduce her original sentence, since the members of the agrarian movement pressured the authorities to free the political prisoners of the raid that had arrested Felipa and her family. I have not found any information on what happened to Felipa after she was freed.

Ethnographic-Documentary Analysis: Anarchomagonismo According to Francisca and Felipa

There is an ethnographic-documentary analysis (EDA) if some of Francisca Mendoza's and Felipa Velázquez's texts in the following sub-sections. Seven of Francisca's texts and six of Felipa's texts are taken up, with which I reconstruct the vision each had with regards to Anarchomagonismo to later tie these vision to their personal lives. The first part of the analysis corresponds to Francisca's texts, while the second corresponds to Felipa's texts.

Francisca's Texts

What did anarchism mean to Francisca? What can be found in her texts that may illustrate her political ideology and personal life, and how did these influence each other? The following ethnographic-documentary analysis has four moments corresponding to four localized elements in the Francisca's texts which allows us to answer, with socio-analysis, the previous questions.

To conduct an EDA I've selected the following seven of Francisca's texts:

• In Defense of Mexicans

• Forward, Children of the People!

• The Red Flag

• "Peace! Peace!" Yells the Frightened Dwarf Madero

• The Abyss of Curses

• Liberty! Equality and Fraternity!

• The Woman Rebel

The Necessity for Revolution

In each of her texts, Francisca makes her passion for anarchism clear. For her, it was the only path to liberation, not just for women, but for the entire proletariat. In her text The Red Flag (where she quotes Marx), there is a paragraph that summarizes her position regarding revolution and its liberatory character,

revolution is not created by personal ambition, but by the conviction of the producing classes who see in her the sole remedy to the ills that they have suffered for so long, who once believed in good faith that we would heal our circumstance by ridding ourselves of the old yoke by placing a new one; but now the working people is disabused that any Government will make them happy and resolve to put into practice what the great writer Marx said, "The emancipation of the workers will be work of the workers themselves." So, then, brothers in chains, Forward! Until We Have Conquered Bread, Land and Liberty for all (Mendoza, 2021, p. 220).

Francisca's ideals can be seen represented in this fragment. First, Francisca does not hold that revolution can be a sum of individual actions; it must necessarily be collective. Second, she sets the Anarchomagonista revolution as the sole solution to the violence suffered by the working classes. She rejects all forms of government and called on the proletariat to fight for the same. Third, she calls for the conquest of bread, land and liberty for all. Adhering to what was first proposed by Kropotkin and, later, PLM, she advocates no just for liberty, but rather for food and a way to feed the entire population.

Anarchism, according to Francisca, was the only revolution possible. Guided by this conviction, Francisca writes the following,

Imbeciles! You do not understand that [anarchy] is the most pure and beautiful ideal that exists at the present, given that it is the only one that shelters the workers, and that in understanding it, the masses of disinherited will end with the corrupt system of this accursed society that exploits us and terrorizes us. Forward rebels, and forever forward, damned whoever doesn't like it! (2021, p. 204).

Francisca believed that, if the working class managed to better understand anarchism and what it championed, particularly Anarchomagonismo, they would realize that it was only through it that they could free themselves from the cause of all their ills: the capitalist system. Capitalism was, in her eyes, a monster that attacked and devoured the proletariat, "Comrades, how long will we put up with the monster called capitalism that cynically exploits us, assaults us, and robs us? Is the experience of so many centuries not enough to set an end to the thieving bourgeoisie?" (Mendoza, 2021, p. 182). It is rare to find one of her writings that does not call to fight for "Land and Liberty!", or that doesn't emphatically condemn "the powerful enemies of the proletariat: capital, authority, clergy" (Mendoza, 2021, p. 183).

According to Francisca, government and authority were the backbone that held up the capitalist system of exploitation, violence, and misery. Through theft (or expropriation, to use a Marxists term), the bourgeoisie and governing class horded the wealth produced by the working class. Religion was the third main enemy of the disinherited, since it kept the population in a state of ignorance which made them more susceptible to accept abuse.

The lives of the dominated classes were disposable to the people in power, Madero included,

we understand that for the bandit Madero —as for the rulers of the world over— the greater or lesser amount of deaths of workers, disguised in the soldier's uniform, in the revolutionary field, means nothing since they will destroy each other given that the Government, capital and religion wish to remain eternally above the mass of unconscious beings we call "the people" in order to live comfortably without having to work, although to achieve this it may be necessary to sacrifice more victims that are already sacrificed daily in the mines, in the fields, in the workshops, and in every place where the worker has to go to gain a miserable salary that is not enough to satisfy basic needs (Mendoza, 2021, p. 332).

The lives where not only sacrificed in the field of battle, but also in the workplaces that had deplorable conditions. Francisca argued that being a victim of capitalist exploitation, of sacrificing one's body in an effort to survive, was to also lose one's life. Another place where worker's lives were sacrificed were the jails, which were full of victims of the Government and the bourgeoisie. Capitalism, religion and the State were accomplices, working together to oppress the people of the peasant and working classes.

Woman Rebels

Francisca was a Mexican proletariat woman living in exile. As a woman, her options were limited by comparison to those of her male counterparts. However, it was precisely this position as a limited woman that allowed her analyze, from within Anarchomagonismo, the injustices exercised against her and against Mexican women. Her text The Woman Rebel is where her principle beliefs are located with regard to woman and her role in the revolutionary struggle. The presence of female consciousness that Kaplan speaks of can be discerned in the following sentence,

the woman rebel materializes as a being forever equal to man, her mission on the land is the greatest and most beautiful one ever known; since it is the one that makes men and women conscious that a day not far off, they will form a society of free and equal beings (Mendoza, 2021, p. 548).

While Francisca was very well a "rebel woman" for thinking that she was equal in every sense to a man, she was still a woman of her time. Female consciousness at the time was similar to that of the women of Barcelona in the 20th century that Kaplan studied in the sense that caring for life, imposed by female socialization, was also internalized by the Mexican women.

This could be one of the reasons why, for Francisca, motherhood was the main purpose of women, because reproduction and caring for life depended on them. Without these two things, the Anarchomagonista ideal would be impossible to realize. Francisca emphasized the importance that this motherhood be realized in better conditions and in companionship with a worthy, brave revolutionary male, not a male who would not rebel and settle with the violence around him. Francisca reaffirms this belief in the following fragment,

We, women who have suffered misery's horrors alongside man and our sons, always working but enjoying nothing, it is convenient that we are the first to rebel against the present state of things, disregarding the stupid worries and murmurs of the unconscious, be it of women or men, since we must regard these beings as brutalized by the misery [..] Women, slaves of slave, rouse your male comrades to shake off the yoke that oppresses everyone all the same. Reject the lies and tall tales of frocked men [..] and swell up the ranks of the female libertarians who, together with the rebels, create propaganda by the pen, word, and the rifle or dynamite, destroying the lair where all the wolves of power, of money, and of religion live. Forward, Woman Libertarians! (Mendoza, 2021, p. 548).

Within these lines there is also a deeper analysis of her personal life and how it was tied to economic and social structures. Francisca mentions that women, including herself, had had to survive in an environment marked by misery and nonexistent joy of life, and that said misery was able to keep people in a state of misery. Women were subjugated to subjugated men, relegated to the domestic sphere, and should rebel, not just against their cowardly male companions, but also against all who actively participated in their oppression. Francisca was a single mother of three kids, completely responsible for their lives and well-being. Caring for her daughters' lives, in a society marked by violence, and consequent misery, was a responsibility that Francisca chose to fulfill through Anarchomagonismo.

Happiness, Fraternity and Equality

After reading the texts of Francisca and other members of PLM, including some of the Flores Magón brothers, I've noticed that emotions played a central role in Anarchomagonista writing and action. Not only is the rage and desperation that the Anarchomagonistas felt evident, but also we can see that they announced their political plans with great sentimentality.[37] For example, the 1911 Manifesto announced that PLM sought to destroy the despotic system in order to "create a new one of love, of equality, of justice, of fraternity, of liberty" (Quoted in Silva Herzog, 2011a). Male and female Anarchomagonistas acknowledged the presence of "negative" feelings, such as rage, anger, sadness, but also the presence of feelings of love for one's neighbor and the wishing of a life marked by happiness.

If there was anyone frustrated and furious at the Porfirista regime it was Francisca. These feelings were present in almost all of her texts, and occasionally mixed with her hopes for the future that Anarchomagonismo envisioned, as in the following fragment,

That's how every revolutionary should act, so that this accursed society that keeps us submerged in the most utter tyranny and abjection end, and instead we will raise a new one where we are all the same, living happily without rulers to kill us, without monks to brutalize or deceive us, and without thieving bourgeoisie to steal from us (Mendoza, 2021, p. 370-371).

According to Francisca, the revolution in Mexico should be an economic one and its goal was to secure the happiness of the working class in general. Happiness, like emancipation, depended on the workers themselves, as did recovering that which the dominant classes had taken from them. However, happiness (at the time) was associated with a life after death, a myth from religion that Francisca denounced as a brutalizing mechanism to make the proletariat passively accept the violence exercised upon it,

Since the worker does not wish to believe that his happiness is in this world as preached to him by the brutalizers of humanity, be they called monks or "ministers of god"; he will now see and (with good reason) that true happiness is here on earth and in conquering it he will believe in the triumph of the Social Revolution (Mendoza, 2021, p. 390-391).

The Anarchomagonista revolution did not represent, according to Francisca, an opportunity to gain power and establish a new hierarchy where she and her counterparts held higher positions. Revolution was a way to obtain that which the tyrant regime had taken from her, from her parents and her daughters: happiness, peace, a dignified life. It was the only way that allowed her, a female proletariat, to reverse the seemingly inescapable misery.

The Legitimate Use of Violence to Fight

Unfortunately, happiness, equality, and well-being could not be gained through pacifist struggle. Hence Francisca fervently defended that use of violence as a tool in the struggle. It was method of direct action,[38] as seen in the following fragment, against private property, "brothers, destroy all in your path that reeks of capital and authority. Blow up the jails and convents with dynamite, burn documents,"[39] and against the enemies of the Anarchomagonista struggle, "Caution, revolutionaries! Do not leave alive those who have lead you to the slaughterhouse for political gain: execute them, keep on fighting without leaders, for your economic freedom" (Mendoza, 2021, p. 201). In multiple texts she calls her comrades to arms to kill the bourgeoisie, the political class, and members of the Church for being "snakes", "tyrants", "thieves", and "hangmen".

The only way in which said enemies could be redeemed was if they chose to work like the dominated classes had,

If you wish to live, Mister aristocrats, relinquish the frock coat and cane, in their place grasp the plow and pick, letting your brothers, the proletariat, see that you will be equals and that, like them, you will work to live, otherwise you will suffer the consequences, because we the proletariat have decided to put an end to your wickedness and effrontery (Mendoza, 2021, p. 339).

Francisca distrusted the dominant class to the point of suggesting that it would be better to murder "the snakes" than to jail them because, whenever they had the chance, they would seek to crush the revolutionaries. Violence was a revolutionary mechanism as legitimate as the pen and propaganda. With the death of the bourgeoisie would come the death of the capitalist system.

It's not that Francisca was a violent person just because or that she took pleasure in human suffering. On the contrary, her experience, and that of thousands of people living in Porfirist Mexico, had been so cruel, marked by aspects such as political persecution, horrible labor conditions and killings, that (in her view) the only possible way to end her own and the people's misery was a violent revolution, "Comrade workers, strike a mortal blow to capitalism by destroying authority and religion which are the basis on which this monster rests who threatens to devour us if we do not defend ourselves with the rifle, or by means of redeeming dynamite" (Mendoza, 2021, p. 332).

Francisca and Her Pen

Francisca's texts leave behind evidence that for her, Anarchomagonismo was the path to obtain a dignified and happy life, economic stability, and justice for the dispossessed and victims of the State, capitalism and religion. Her decision to defend and promote the use of violence as a tool of struggle was a product of the frustration and impotence at experiencing oppression and State violence firsthand. Women's participation in the Anarchomagonista struggle was essential for Francisca, since without them the movement had no future. Francisca did not write or fight to gain power, but to destroy it.

Felipa's Texts

Same as with Francisca, in this section I have conducted an ethnographic-documentary analysis with Felipa's texts in order to understand the meaning that Anarchomagonismo had in her life, as well as tracing the correlation between her personal life and her political ideology. The texts gathered are the following four poems,

• Towards the Fight

• Rebel, Dear People

• To You, Woman

• In the Islas Marías

and the prose texts,

• A Call to Women

• Of Our Correspondence

• The Creed

Mexican Society According to Felipa and the Importance of Anarchy

The way Felipa wrote reveals the deep relation there was between her emotions and her political ideology. She felt a deep love for humanity and sought to incite the Mexican people to defend itself against the every oppression they experienced day after day. In her poem, Towards the Fight, she expresses the following, "I feel the desire most ardent/ To save humanity/ And with spirit fervent/ I labor for equality./ I abhor villainy,/ Curse tyranny,/ Love fraternity,/ Despise the bourgeoisie."Felipa ends another poem, Rebel, Dear People!, assuring the people that her fight is for their liberty, "Know I'm by your side,/ That your sorrows are mine." These fragments show how committed she was in the fight against despotism, in great part because of her despise of the bourgeoisie, whom she associated as the cause of the ills that haunted humanity, but also because she felt it was her duty to take part in the fight.

This sense of duty is also present in A Call to Women, where she talks about her personal life and her concern for other people who have lived through what she has,

I hope that in hearing my tale, you will not be shown to be unyielding to the call made by the tender voice of a daughter of the people, a daughter of proletariat parents, and that has had for many years withstood the oppressive chain of tyranny. But this voice, it is an anxious scream of wounded humanity who suffers and who wakes before the terrible injustice... (Velázquez, 2021c. p. 600).

As seen previously, Felipa was the daughter of Modesto and Manuela, peasants and illiterates who were in turn children of illiterate parents. Such that it seems that her infancy was marked by the negative consequences of the Porfiriato: violence, hunger, political repression and poverty for most of the country. These experiences were crucial to the building of her political ideology, as shown in her writings.

Her poem, Rebel, Dear People!, describes the daily life of a person from the working class, marked by the brutality of the bourgeoisie,

That insolent bourgeois/ who has no soul,/ He enjoys watching you oblige
to such cruel exploitation;/ And although your energy withers/ due to malnutrition,/ without a shred of compassion/ he enslaves and exploits you./ Because you have received/ a smaller salary,/ that does not cover even partially/ a single great need (Bloodfruit/Malvivientes, 2026, p. 8-9).

Felipa saw the working class as suffering, not just because of the physical wearing down implied in most jobs, but also by malnutrition as a consequence of the miserable wage that kept the working class in a situation of perpetual poverty.

Felipa had observed that people who dared to think differently were repressed, as she herself was when she was jailed in 1930 in the Islas Marías. Her experience lead her reflect on the role prisons in the repression of the working class and in the creating of more crime,

What was the intention/ that to correct evil/ the inquisition had to be imposed?/ This is not natural./ [..] it only creates murderers/ thieves and criminals/ and rabble of evildoers,/ far from curing evil (Velázquez, 2021f, p. 625).

Mexican society was, to Felipa, marked by the brutality of the bourgeoisie against the Mexican people, which it exploited, starved to death, and condemned to suffer in a variety of ways, as well as fomented violence through the inhuman repression of prisoners. Because of this and much more, just as Francisca, Felipa was angry and frustrated with the Mexican government, particularly that under Elías Calles during the Maximato.

The solution was to fight and rebel against the oppressors, "Come [..] swell up the libertarian ranks who hoist the red flag of Land and Liberty [..] only then can we gain true happiness that is found in the anarchy that is Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" (Velazquez, 2021, p. 602). Felipa, just as Francisca, believed that the fundamental point to insurgency must be the seeking of happiness, which could only be conquered through anarchy, "I believe in our Holy Mother of Anarchy who doesn't forgive cowards; [..] I believe in the resurrection of the slaves into a free life, and in ever-lasting life of eternal joy, and in human emancipation. Amen!" (Bloodfruit/Malvivientes, 2026, p. 15).

Religion as an Enemy

The text to which the previous fragment belongs to, titled The Creed, exemplifies Felipa's rejection of religion. As its title indicates, it is a writing that offers an alternative version to the Christian prayer of the same name. As explained earlier in the chapter, the Catholic upbringing Felipa received caused her eventual disassociation from religion, to the point of opposing it and despising it. The Creed contains the following lines,

I believe in the knowledge of the wise, and in the development of Science, Anarchy's only daughter, who was conceived by the act of the spirit or minds of dreamers, who were slandered, persecuted and sacrificed; they suffered under the power of henchmen, bourgeoisie and bishops [..] (Bloodfruit/Malvivientes, 2026, p. 15).

Felipa rejected religion and God as principle sources of human knowledge. In her eyes, the bourgeoisie as well as bishops were equally to blame for the oppression the Mexican people lived under, especially the women. Man relied on religion to keep woman under submission, "Man can benigh woman's mind by hiding the truth, by intimidating her, by making her believe from infancy in ghosts, demons, hells, glories and whatever invisible ruse he can invent to brutalize us, knowing that the more ignorant we are, the more submissive we will be" (Velázquez, 2021, p. 601). Every Anarchomagonista, like Francisca, opposed religion. However, in Felipa's language, an even deeper rejection is perceived, it was a recurrent theme and thus demonstrated the deep mark that religious education had left in her. Felipa associated religion with a powerful enemy, one she knew intimately, and thus sought for the working class to understand the following, "The task of the worker/ Will be emancipation,/ Waiting not for a Creator/ to grant us His benediction" (Bloodfruit/Malvivientes, 2026, p. 9).

Unchained Women

Being a woman was one of the two strongest pillars in Felipa's political ideology. She knew that being one put her in a disadvantageous position in social space, a fact she passionately opposed. She recognized that being a woman could affect her impact and credibility as a writer, but this did not stop her, "But my duty it is then/ To keep illuminating them,/ Although mine is a woman's voice/ I keep on preaching the dream" (Bloodfruit/Malvivientes, 2026, p. 8).

In her poem, To You, Woman!, Felipa incites women to fight against the sex/gender system that oppressed them,

You, woman, who endures low,/ [..] Do you not feel pain piercing/ And desire to rebel eventually?/ [..] If man humiliates you thoughtlessly,/ Why do your eyes cloud weeping?/ [..] Mind setting about action/ To break the chain oppressive,/ You will leave that horrid oppression/ That you have lived, woman, til present./ Fight, then, for your emancipation;/ Be brave, woman, be not reverential,/ For your rights as woman/ You are free as man (2026, p. 11-12).

If Felipa very well recognized that the bourgeoisie, clergy and government were the main enemies of the working class, she also identified the role men played in the specific oppression women suffered. She believed that her duty, and that of all women as well, was to push herself and her family to reach anarchy, where they would finally reach freedom and happiness, "And defend well your duty,/ Bring your son, your husband, your brother,/ To embrace them in fraternal clasp;/ And joined in sweet harmony,/ Where, all holding hands,/ We walk towards anarchy." (Bloodfruit/Malvivientes, 2026, p. 12-13). It was in libertarian struggle where "conscious and committed, virile and fighting" women were found who sought "the well-being, happiness, and emancipation of women" (Velázquez, 2021, p. 600). Anarchism would not only free the working class from the three-headed hydra, but also women from the chains that came with being a woman in Mexico.

Anarchic Motherhood

Felipa tied her writings on the emancipation of woman with motherhood. The latter was a sensitive and important theme for Felipa, who was a mother of eight. Being a mother was one of the main reasons why Felipa defended anarchism, as expressed in the following lines of the poem, Towards to Fight, "And like the mother I am/ And a sister to that slave,/ That's why I go on welcoming/ The destruction of everything depraved" (2026, p. 9).

In Felipa's texts we are also able to locate elements of the female consciousness described by Kaplan. Felipa considered that she should fight not just because it was her duty as a woman, but also because it was her duty as a mother to protect life. This responsibility of caring for life could only be realized, in her opinion, by joining the libertarian ranks and promoting the anarchic education of infants. Felipa believed that without questioning religion and the power of the bourgeoisie that came with anarchism, mothers would be condemned to instruct their children to slavery and ignorance, as expressed in the following fragment, "should we educate our little ones to also be blind, by leading them into the most frightful of chaos, slavery; then we will also be the reason why our children may serve as [..] flesh cannons, or flesh brothels" (2021, p. 601).

The solution was to raise them from an anarchist perspective, as described by Felipa in the following paragraph,

Let us raise our children without inculcating fear in them, without creeds [..] letting them see that to not work is not dignified, and that it is living at the expense of the producers; that the exploiter is a vampire who sucks the blood of the worker, that every human being on Earth shares the same rights, and that we all stand up to see all of humanity as equals; but let us never teach our children that we owe our life to invisible or imaginary beings to whom we must sacrifice ourselves for. We shouldn't make them servile nor obedient to a voice of any boss or tyrant (2021, p. 601-602).

Felipa practiced what she preached in her daily life as a mother. According to her text, Of Our Correspondence, her eight year old daughter had grown, "far from religious beliefs and harm", which caused her to get in trouble with her teacher by questioning the existence of God. We can see once again how important rejecting religion was for Felipa, who sought to keep her children far from God to make sure that they kept their own criteria and not be forced to kiss "clay monkeys" (2021, p. 603).

Besides teaching them to question the bourgeoisie, government and Church, Felipa sought for her children to understand the importance of work, and how absurd the hierarchies that assured of existence of domination of class and gender were. Perhaps it is her way of practicing motherhood where one can see the deep connection of the co-determination between Felipa's personal life and political life.

Felipa and Her Poetry

Felipa found within Anarchomagonismo the tools to oppose what she considered to be the great enemies of the Mexican people: religion, the State, capitalism. Just as Francisca, Felipa vindicated feelings and made them part of her Anarchomagonista praxis. Her condition of woman and mother lead her to incite female participation in the struggle and to propose ways of motherhood that did not reproduce dominating dynamics. Through poetry and prose, Felipa fought for her descendants, for the peasant class to which she belonged, and for herself.

Francisca and Felipa: Similarities and Differences

Francisca and Felipa were two Mexican women who became Anarchomagonistas and wrote with regards to different circumstances. Francisca was a woman of approximately thirty (in 1911) who lived in exile while Mexico while the Revolution was underway. Felipa had her peak as a writer at 44 while living in a region of the country that was greatly affected by foreign economic intervention.

Despite this, there are more similarities between them than there are differences. Both were both and raised under the Porfiriato, a dictatorship whose modernizing project aggravated life for the majority of the Mexican people. The nonexistence of democracy, political repression, and economic violence, as well as the process that Louise Tilly calls "proletarization", constituted the Mexican State to such a degree that it took control of the field of power, generating an ensemble of relations of domination such as class, gender and race. Following the view of anarchist sociology proposed by Schantz and Williams, I argue that said relations were internalized in Francisca's and Felipa's habitus, which had direct consequences in their lives and outlook.

Both were born into working class families, with little cultural and economic capital. However, later on they diverted from their social trajectories thanks to their capital's evolution: Francisca transformed into a prolific writer and important member of PLM's Organizing Board; while Felipa became a teacher, Civil Registry judge and poetess. Both of their habitus were marked by their respective social origin (very alike between them), the State's makeup, and their condition as women and capitals. The internalization of these elements made it so that they could not ignore the events around them, which directly affected them, their families, and the persons they shared a social class with. This internalization process was one of the main reasons why both decided to join the Anarchomagonista movement.

Tied to this is the factor of female consciousness that lead them to care for and protect life, exacerbated by their own experiences with motherhood. By both being victims and survivors of governments that placed gaining power first and the lives of the working class last, neither wanted their children to live in the misery and poverty they had experienced themselves. Francisca and Felipa found an opportunity within Anarchomagonismo to defend and protect themselves as well as others.

In joining Anarchomagonismo, both began to defend its ideals, such as being against capital, authority, the clergy and whatever else threatened the happiness and well-being of the Mexican people. Rejecting these elements was not born out of their involvement with Anarchomagonismo; it was in said movement that they found the explanation as to why they opposed the State, religion, and the bourgeoisie. Anarchomagonismo allowed them to understand the origin of the many oppressions they had lived through and to formulate a plan to eliminate them.

Francisca wrote most of her texts during Madero's government, who had promised to look after the interests of the Mexican people, but who only defended the bourgeoisie and other dominant classes. This lead to agrarian and worker crisis, which became the order of the day until 1930. Felipa, in exchange, wrote at a time when the governments of Obregón and Elías Calles y Portes Gil ignored the demands regarding agrarian redistribution that had been promised the Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution. The demand for the distribution of land, a fundamental characteristic of the Revolution, marked the social contexts in which Francisca and Felipa wrote in.

As I mentioned in the second chapter, Francisca and Felipa were able to act in a collective manner because their contexts fulfilled most the conditions established by Louise Tilly in explaining the collective action of women in Barcelona of the 20th century. Felipa and Francisca associated with women (and men) who shared the same interests as them and who were part of social movements with solid internal structures. Forming part of their respective collectives, they counted with resources to mobilize: the press, protests, education. Both were part of the working class, depended on wages. They were part of strikes and actions that economically hurt the bourgeoisie, such as the owners of the Colorado River Land Company. Fortunately, they didn't live in circumstances of extreme poverty, and Francisca received monetary aid thanks to fundraising organized by PLM. Francisca and Felipa were heads of the household, whose husband had passed away (Felipa) or was not present in their lives (Francisca[40]). Felipa had eight children, while Francisca had three daughters and was also in charge of her parents. These women rebelled alongside thousands of people who were fed up with economic precariousness not just because they wanted to, but because they could.

An analysis of the life trajectories of Francisca and Felipa offer an explanation for their involvement into the Anarchomagonista movement, as well as to their theoretic and programmatic proposals. It demonstrates, moreover, the corresponding relations between their structural conditions and personal motives. Their voices were a reflection and an echo of thousands of Mexican women tired of the violence, repression, murder, invisibilization, and obscurity.

Final Reflections

What has been presented in the previous pages has been with the purpose of analyzing, from within sociology, the participation of Mexican women in the Anarchomagonista movement between 1911 and 1931. To this, it was necessary to evaluate the social, political, and economic conditions they lived, as well as their particular life trajectories. Only in conjunction with these elements is it possible to understand why Francisca J. Mendoza and Felipa Velázquez rebelled from within Anarchomagonismo,

The historical overview in the first chapter shows that their lives were marked by different kinds of violence and repression. Under the Porfiriato, Mexico had a majority rural population that increased alongside commerce and the workforce, thanks to the means of communication and transportation. Unemployment increased the workforce, provoking lower salaries, longer working days, and raised food prices. The haciendas, which served as the main economic organism during the Porfiriato, functioned in provoking an even greater economic disparity by offering precarious wages to their peons and forcing them to become indebted to company stores.

The people who profited thanks to the Porfiriato's economic order were those belonging to the dominant classes: the bourgeoisie, politicians close to Díaz, and outstanding members of the Church. These were the persons who benefited from Pax Porfiriana, that stability achieved through political repression and the implementation of artificial democracies founded on fraud, violence, and nepotism.

Political and economic violence marked Mexican social life throughout the Porfiriato. People of the dominant classes benefited from said conditions while the rest of the population had to survive the laboral exploitation, repression, racism and classism. Political repression was such that strikes were forbidden. However, this did not stop people from rebelling against Díaz, organizing in movements that managed to destabilize the regime such as the strikes of Cananea and Río Blanco. The subjugation of said strikes only increased the desire for rebellion in the Mexican people.

These conditions allowed the flourishing of the Mexican Liberal Party and their paper, Regeneración The brothers Jesús, Enrique, and Ricardo Flores Magón founded Regeneración in 1900 with the initial aim of denouncing juridical injustices without directly attacking Porfirio Díaz. However, the newspaper and its editors soon began to attack the chief leader, which provoked Jesús' and Ricardo's jailing. Regeneración inspired the publication of other combative newspapers and pushed on the forming of liberal clubs.

The Flores Magón brothers, as well as other Regeneración sympathizers, saw themselves forced to flee the country. In their exile to the United States they founded the Mexican Liberal Party and published the Program and Manifesto to the Mexican Nation of the Liberal Mexican Party in 1906, a document which invited the people to rebel against Díaz and demand the installment of true democracy, among other points. PLM planned two armed uprisings which failed, one in 1906 and another in 1908, but which were the direct consequence of discontent among the people.

All the rage and fatigue in the country resulted in the start of the Revolution of November 1910. The first part of the Revolution, lead by Francisco Madero, was concerned with expelling the dictator from the presidential seat and turning Mexico into a democratic country. In ignoring the question of agrarian redistribution in order to defend private property, Maderismo provoked discontent and a rejection among the dominated classes even when it managed to displace Díaz. The political change was unserviceable for the majority of the population while there was no economic change to accompany it, and PLM was very conscious of the fact. And so it was that in September 1911 the Manifesto of the Mexican Liberal Party was published, where the party made it clear that their posture had become anarchist, seeking the abolition of State and private property. The ideas plastered in this document became the ideological basis of Anarchomagonismo.

Besides having the bad fortune of being born in Mexico during Díaz's presidencies, Francisca and Felipa were at a disadvantage by being women. They had to face political violence, economic instability and the sex/gender system. Women who dared think differently were persecuted, not just by the Porfirist regime, but also by the governments that followed. Many women like Francisca lived through political repression even in exile, while Felipa was jailed in the Islas Marías due to her activism.

Like the men, Mexican women lacked decent wages and working conditions. Likewise, they had to do domestic labor which were not recognized as work. When women were incorporated into the textile and tobacco industries, where there was more female involvement, Mexican society became scandalized. Women, who had also undergone a process of proletarization, saw themselves forced to join the labor force to maintain themselves as well as their families, but were reproached and infantilized because of it.

The sex/gender system at the time demanded that women be decent, stay virgins until marriage, and submit to the men. The economic and political crisis of the Porfiriato caused the means of controlling women's bodies to endure. Now, the sex/gender system affected Mexican women differently according to their class. Women from the dominated class had their own problems stemming from their being a woman, such as the stigma around being part of the female labor force, a lack of labor rights, and the difficulty of being trained in a profession.

One can also see within political activism the consequences of the sex/gender system. Women were not considered as essential to political discourse, as shown in the fact that they had no right to vote. Outside of institutions, women had to deal with other obstacles. Many women could not participate in political movements because the labor hey did, payed or not, took up most of their time. The participation in worker movements was little desired by male comrades, apart from some movements such as that of Anarchomagonismo. Because of this, Felipa Velázquez' involvement, within the agrarian movement, stood out since she was the only woman present in the political councils she participated in.

Francisca J. Mendoza and Felipa Velázquez were women who belonged to the dominated class. The information about Francisca's life, as previously mentioned, is scarce. However, the information available allows us to theorize about her origins. It is very likely that her family were miners, since she was from a state that is known for mining and that in her writings she mentions seeking work in mining companies in the United States.

When she formed part of PLM and Regeneración, Francisca was head of her family, composed of her three daughters, mother and father. In order to be able to move to Los Angeles, where the PLM Organizing Board was at, Francisca counted on the fundraising done in her name by Regeneración. Francisca was, in short, a proletariat daughter of proletarians, who grew during the Porfirist dictatorship and suffered because of it.

Felipa Velázquez was a daughter of peasants. She lived her infancy in the countryside, an experience that led her to be an avid social warrior. She grew up in a religious household, being the first in her family in at least tree generations to learn to read and write. Felipa was from Sinaloa, who had her first teaching experience at 12 years old. Her rural education points to having lived firsthand the difficulties of peasant life, worsened by the dictatorship and the Revolution.

The exact personal motivations that lead Francisca and Felipa to join the Anarchomagonista movement are impossible to know since there's no way to ask them directly. However, with all that has been shown in this work, I've sought to develop plausible theories to explain their involvement, through an analysis of their writings and historico-social contexts.

In order to explain the involvement of Francisca and Felipa within Anarchomagonismo it is necessary to explain their habitus and field. When the Porfirian State controlled the field of power, certain relations of domination were established based on class, race, and gender. Both women lived firsthand the violence provoked by said relations of domination which, alongside practices by the Mexican State, were internalized by them through their habitus. Just like class, violence is something done to the body.

Francisca and Felipa, apart from being working class women, were two women limited by the sex/gender system of their time. The female socialization of the time taught them to look forward to motherhood and to prioritize the care of others over caring for themselves. Both of them were mothers and that experience molded their way of analyzing their own social conditions, seeking to protect their daughters and sons from the atrocities they had to withstand. Francisca and Felipa rebelled when their ability to protect life, a duty internalized by women, was endangered.

Anarchomagonismo offered them a place where they could enjoy a status similar to that of the men. It allowed them to diagnose the structural conditions and find in them the causes of violence and oppression. At the same time, Anarchomagonismo was a movement that called for the clinging on to fury, to fight against injustices. It called for caring for your neighbor, prioritizing love and caring for love. It offered women an opportunity to participate in the political sphere, of continuing their work of caring for lives, of fighting against those factors that personally affected them.

Likewise, associating with the Anarchomagonista movement, where there were other men and women who shared their ideas, was one of the conditions that allowed them to rebel collectively. They also fulfilled with most of the rest of the condition as set bu Louise Tilly, such as being dependent on a wage but not living in poverty, and that their domestic activities did not impede them from political action.

Thanks to the fact that they were able to act collectively, they were also able to realize certain theoretical and programmatic proposals within Anarchomagonismo. According to Francisca and Felipa, the three enemies of the Mexican proletariat were Capital, the Church, and the State. These three enemies mutually supported each other in order to maintain Mexican men and women in slavery: the Church kept the people ignorant so that Capital could keep on exploiting them, and both the Church and Capital were protected by the State. Due to this, Francisca and Felipa did not believe in reformist movements, such as those proposed by Madero, Carranza, Obregón, and Elías Calles. The problem had to be stripped from the root, all the heads of the hydra had to be severed.

To fulfill with said goal, both defended the necessity of an Anarchomagonista revolution that had direct action as a method, through which the means of production could be expropriated and returned to the Mexican people. Only thus would the tyranny and violence they exercised over the dominated classes could be brought to an end. While neither of the two women were pacifists, Francisca was the more enthusiastic of the two about violent methods of direct action, such as assassinating the bourgeoisie and rulers.

Anarchomagonismo was not just the best path to liberation for the dominated classes from the claws of the State, Capital, and Church; it was also the most suitable path to free women from the oppression directly tied to their gender that they experienced in daily life. Francisca and Felipa had different approached to this theme. Francisca sought to foment women's participation into Anarchomagonismo and thus fight alongside their brothers. In the case that a man did not join the libertarian ranks, the woman should distance herself from him since only a coward would shy from the rifle. On the other hand, Felipa sought to remind Mexican women that they did not have to endure neither humiliation nor abuse from men. For her, women would find the tools to free themselves from the oppressive chains of the sex/gender system in Anarchomagonismo. Both writers addressed peasant and worker women in order to incite them to fight for their rights. In a certain way, it could be said that Francisca saw them primarily from their condition of being workers and peasants, while Felipa saw them as primarily from their condition of women.

This is also reflected in the importance both authors gave to motherhood. Both were women and considered motherhood to be something natural and expected of women. However, they sought to propose other ways of being a mother within Anarchomagonismo. Francisca believed that being a mother was the most important task anyone could do, since it didn't just create life but also taught men and women to defend liberty and create a better society. In it being such an important task, it was just and necessary for motherhood to be realized in better conditions and with the help of a man who was brave and worthy enough to fight for his freedom and that of his offspring. Felipa deepened her analysis a little more regarding motherhood, particularly in the role that mothers played in the education of their sons and daughters. Education should be carried out in an anarchist manner, one that taught infants to be free beings, to work in a dignified manner, and to rebel against any form of slavery.

I have cited Bourdieu and his theories in multiple occasions in this work, but here I would like to go back to the following quote, "Cumulative exposure to certain social conditions instills in individuals an ensemble of durable and transposable dispositions that internalize the necessities of the extant social environment, inscribing inside the organism the patterned inertia and constraints of external reality" (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 13). This sentence summarizes the lived process of Francisca J. Mendoza an Felipa Velázquez that tied their subjective lives to the objective conditions that surrounded them.

There are corresponding relations between the subjective conditions of people and the structural conditions of the time and place they find themselves in. However, it is important to clear up that subjective conditions do not impact structural conditions in the same way that structural conditions impact subjective conditions. Subjective conditions are the embodiment of structural conditions, but this does not have in the same way vice-versa. This does not mean that subjective conditions have no impact on structural conditions. The internalization of structural condition is what makes symbolic violence possible, which in turns perpetuates structural domination. Structural change is not possible if it is not accompanied with a transformation of cognitive structures.

This research has been an attempt to describe said relations corresponding to a specific situation: Francisca J. Mendoza's and Felipa Velázquez's incorporation into the Anarchomagonista movement. It was thus that I sought to find the reasons why they decided to rebel, perhaps in an attempt to find the secret formula that may be repeated to inspire a new generation of women to adopt Anarchomagonista protest methods. But such a formula does not exist, because people have free will, we have the ability to choose differently. That's why the habitus is not the sole determinant factor of behavior, and that's why trajectory diversions don't always happen. It is not possible, in this case, to know, with certainty, the real reasons why Francisca and Felipa became Anarchomagonistas; However, this research does propose plausible proposals of their personal motivations.

This does not mean that theorizing over it has no value for sociology. In my opinion, it is crucial for sociologists to excuse the reasons why people rebel, preferably with a view on gender from within relational sociologies. In the case of the present work, inquiring into relations that correspond between social structures and cognitive structures lead me to understand the impact that the violence and repression of the Porfiriato had on the Mexican people. Oppression is not and was not experienced by statistics or historical data, but by people. Figuring out why people rebelled in other social and temporal contexts can lead us to better understand our past and better understand other reality together their respective social mechanisms. Inquiring into why people rebel today in Mexico can lead sociologists to understand the faults of out structures and social relations, and perhaps then understand that rebellion is not just a decision, it is also a need.

Studying the women of their era also allows us to learn, from within historical sociology, about how they lived and what social life was like back then. It allows us to distance ourselves from an individualist vision of history, where we concentrate on the big "revolutionaries" like Carranza, Madero, Obregón, or even Ricardo Flores Magón and Emiliano Zapata. They were undoubtedly important figures, but they were not the only people who lived through the Mexican Revolution. Those who truly saw this armed conflict were the dominated classes, the peasantry and the proletariat, and it was them who most suffered its consequences. Likewise, studying women opens the door to know more about their living, which tends to be ignored and undervalued.

Francisca and Felipa have much to teach us. They understood, way before the time of sentipensares and radical tenderness, that praxis resides not just in political life, but also in daily life. Studying them made me realize that it is impossible to separate their political ideology from their personal lives. It is possible to learn from them that, truly, the personal is political, and that our day by day should also be transformed so that our political discourse may be coherent. That's why they emphasize transforming motherhood into anarchic motherhood, in such a way that social change begins from infancy and at home.

They also teach us methods of struggle such as writing, propaganda, communal action, teaching, motherhood, friendship, and other kinds of direct action. Francisca and Felipa demonstrate that the struggle is diverse and that everyone can fight from within their own personal trenches. In these struggles we can find solace and alternatives before the oppressive structures that we live and experience firsthand, from the family to the State. Life, Francisca and Felipa tells us, can be dignified and it is worth fighting for it, with what tools we have and in the ways we can.

References

Additional References

[1] See also: Lomnitz, C. (2014) The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón.

[2] See: Elisa Speckman Guerra (2018).

[3] The bourgeoisie and dominant classes enriched themselves on the backs of the dominated classes, and hegemony's historical retelling of the Porfiriato and Mexican Revolution call this "economic growth".

[4] The first population census in Mexico such as we know it was done in 1895. Before this, one had been made in 1821, upon the country's independence.

[5] Or, rather, the expropriation of the dominated classes.

[6] Third Population Census of the United Mexican States (1919).

[7] Silva Herzog, 2011a.2/23/26/ 7:57:00 PM

[8] Knight, 2012.2/23/26 7:57:00 PM

[9] Knight, 2012.

[10] Illades, 2019.

[11] Although the 1906 Program had greater weight in the writing of the Constitution because it was a political program with concrete proposals. Later we will see that the 1911 Manifesto was an ideological document, not a political program.

[12] Penned by Plutarco Elías Calles.

[13] Plan de Agua Prieta.

[14] Source: INEGI, 1920 Census.

[15] The first Liberal Party was founded in the time of Juárez.

[16] This xenophobic element originates in the country's precarious economic situation. The labor force allotted to Chinese immigrants was more profitable to foreign businesses, such that many Mexicans felt that they were stealing their jobs in a context of high unemployment and economic crises.

[17] "Pelemista" is derived from the Mexican Liberal Party's acronym in Spanish, PLM.

[18] Being dominant or dominated is not a matter of essence, but a position one occupies within a certain field.

[19] The internalization is not a conscious affair. It occurs within the first socialization since infancy, embodying itself in the subconscious until it appears natural.

[20] Including Bourdieu himself.

[21] The original text says the following: "Brian Martin (2007), writing in the scholarly peer-reviewed journal Anarchist Studies, claimed that certain anarchist theories are in need of further development, including ‘a high-level grand theory of domination, oppression, inequality and/or hierarchy... A grand theory of domination would be a specific anarchist contribution’ (108).” By the adjective "grand", it refers to a theory capable of explaining a great deal of processes and events of sociological importance.

[22] While Schantz and Williams see this grand theory as necessary, David Graeber regarded it as contradictory and advocated instead for a theoretical base stemming from anarchism, particularly from anarchist anthropology. See Graeber, D. (2004). Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.

[23] Whiteness can also be regarded as a consequence of a particular process of socialization. There are black and Asian people, and first peoples who, having been socialized in a particular manner, have learned to ignore and deny their racialization, and who instead opt to behave in the "whitest" way possible. Barack Obama, former president of the USA, can be considered as a whitened person by having occupied a position of power from which he chose to oppress other racialized people.

[24] Liberty, according to Bakunin, was a product of human association. It is a socio-historic product, not a natural right, and can only be fully obtained within society.

[25] For Goldman, society's reorganization would not be achieved solely through redistribution of wealth and a change to social structures, rather also and necessarily through a change of the internal lives of people.

[26] See: "The Conquest of Bread".

[27] Manual de Urbanidad y Buenas Manera, "Urbanity and Good Manners Manual", was written by Manuel Antonio Carreño and first published in 1854.

[28] Both Trejo and Trujillo Muñóz mention Felipa moving to Baja California in 1924, saying she stayed there until she was arrested in 1930. However, a writing by Felipa, published in ¡Avante! in July 1928, was signed Estación Naranjo, Sinaloa. It is just a point to take into account and consider that Felipa did not live in the Mexicali Valley without interruptions between 1924 and 1930.

[29] Another point that casts doubt on Felipa's stay in the Mexicali Valley.

[30] In the list of Felipa Velázquez's kid's names given by the historian Gabriel Trujillo, the name Sebastián does not show up. Perhaps it was middle name of one of the other sons, Felipe or Miguel.

[31] "En las Islas Marías", ¡Paso!, #9, January 1932.

[32] Hart, (2022).

[33] Illades, (2008).

[34] Mendoza (2021). "En defensa de los mexicanos", In Defense of the Mexicans.

[35] Biblioteca Sociologica Regeneración — Ricardo Flores Magón, s/f.

[36] Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was a Swiss pedagogue whose method centered on the integral formation of people with an emphasis on developing moral and religious conscience.

[37] I do not "sentimentality" in a negative sense. On the contrary, I believe that anarchism stands out from the other social movements because it has shamelessly recognized the role that feelings, particularly that of love, play in the political act. I use "sentimentality" to refer to the central role that feelings occupy within Anarchomagonista texts.

[38] Direct action refers to all the mechanisms and actions realized by the social actors not mediated by institutions of social order.

[39] This is part of the history of direct action in Mexico. It shows that Black Bloc was not created by feminism nor other existing social movements. Anarchomagonismo is a fundamental part in the history of direct action of the social movements in Mexico.

[40] I have not found any information on Francisca's romantic partner or partners, but it is known that when she began writing for Regeneración that she was single and the only one taking care of her family.