Flash. Jim Miller
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with no need of a kiss or a song. Just lucky I guess. I couldn’t see well through the blood dripping into my eyes but I stayed low and kept my head covered with my arms as I limped through the gauntlet. There was a whole lot of cursing blending together and stupid yelling about anarchy and godlessness and the lesson I was getting from those pious gentlemen with such brave souls. I remember staggering out the back end of the line and being told that if I ever came back, they’d find a nice spot to bury me on some of their pretty real estate. If I learned a lesson there, though, it was that I was through with non-violence. Poor Giovanni’s corpse was a sterner teacher than his pretty words.
As told by I.W.W. agitator, Buckshot Jack
I stopped dead and reread the name, flipped back through the file to the mugshot with the same name. When I asked the librarian who had made the correction and changed the name to Bobby Flash on the back of the picture, he didn’t know. He walked back to check with the main archivist. No luck. The file was put together years ago by a librarian who had passed away. I read the rest of the article that included another account of the gauntlet, but no more on Bobby Flash or his partner, Gus Blanco. Still, this was an interesting piece in the puzzle. I thought for a whimsical moment about my mysterious great grandfather and let myself ponder the possibility that this could be him. No way, I thought, pulling myself back to the task, it was far too interesting a story for my sad family.
I had the librarian copy The Sun article and looked through the rest of the file. No more leads. When the librarian came back to take the file, he recommended I try the Historical Society in Balboa Park. I thanked him and went down to the stacks to find a book on the Magónista revolt of 1911 that I’d been meaning to read. I grabbed it, checked it out, and left the building.
Outside the library it was a beautiful January day, but I hardly noticed that as I walked toward the trolley to meet Ricardo Flores in Tijuana. I was still stuck in my head, thinking about Bobby Flash. Had he been one of the group of Wobblies who were forced to walk back along the railroad tracks toward Los Angeles? Had he been so badly injured that he been taken to a local hospital? There had been nothing in the article beyond the account of the gauntlet. I was still ruminating when I got to the transit center. I absent-mindedly picked up a copy of the LA Times at a news rack and had to run to hop on the trolley to San Ysidro. I found an empty pair of seats by the window and put my satchel with the library book and my notes in it on the seat next to me. I glanced across the aisle at a Mexican woman sitting with her two little boys. They had bags full of souvenirs from the San Diego Zoo.
I looked out the window at a utility box that still had a fading Obama “Hope” poster plastered on it. During the campaign, I had been skeptical about the vagueness of Obama’s messianic appeal, just as I had been brought to tears when he spoke on more than one occasion. It was a battle between my middle-aged pessimism and some deep need for, well, hope. I think more than a few people felt that way. The front page of the Times had a story about things going badly in Afghanistan, one about more lay-offs, another about the latest California budget debacle, and an in-depth piece on rising global instability due to the economic crisis. I couldn’t help but think of the parallels between the beginning of the last century and this one: the economic and political polarization, the anger at “the bosses” as the Wobblies would say. Now though, people weren’t in the streets, at least not yet. People didn’t know who to shoot.
I looked up at a bunch of teenage kids jumping on board in National City. What kind of future would these kids have? It was hard to say. There were dark clouds on the horizon, but sometimes it was times like these that made people stand up. At the next stop, a pair of soldiers got on board in their white uniforms complete with hats. They were talking loudly about sex with prostitutes. I picked up the book on the Magónista revolt and flipped to the middle to look at a black-and-white photo of Ricardo Flores Magón and his brother, Enrique. Both men had thick curly hair and identical handlebar mustaches. Ricardo’s serious expression and little round glasses gave him the aura of a philosopher.
The desert revolution was an international affair, inspired by the Magón brothers who ran the insurgency from their exile in General Otis’s Los Angeles, just after the LA Times building was bombed by a pair of angry AFL labor activists, the McNamera brothers. That bombing led to a wave of anti-labor hysteria in Southern California, thus making the Magónista’s assault on the sparsely populated border region improbable. The fact that both Otis and Spreckels had extensive land, water, and railroad holdings also assured that the odds were against them. Nonetheless, in January 1911 at the I.W.W. headquarters in Holtville, California, a group of mostly Mexican rebels loyal to Magón planned an attack on Mexicali. Soon afterwards, the rebel band captured Mexicali in a predawn raid, killing only the town jailor. Poor sap. The initial success of the raid led to a wave of support from famous voices on the left like Jack London and Emma Goldman, who spoke in San Diego to help rally workers to the cause. The rebels’ biggest backers in the US were the Wobblies and Italian anarchists, both of whose philosophies were in line with Magón’s mix of Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Marx’s. Simply put, Magón called upon the workers to “take immediate possession of the land, the machinery, the means of transportation and the buildings, without waiting for any law to decree it.” Brutally treated by the Diaz dictatorship, and deeply committed to a utopian vision of communal society, Magón’s idealism made him both admirable and seemingly unable to reconcile his dream with political reality. This last malady was something I had a soft spot for. Go figure.
Soon after the success at Mexicali, the rebels took Tecate, where they held off a lackluster attempt by the Mexican army to retake Mexicali. Despite this early success, factional squabbling broke out, and several leadership changes took place in the field. Many of the Mexicans who began the revolt left to fight with Madero, who was also challenging the Diaz regime. This resulted in the odd fact that a majority of the Magónista army was comprised of American Wobblies mixed with a few soldiers of fortune. With Magón permanently ensconced in Los Angeles, sending more anarchist pamphlets than bullets, the leadership ultimately fell to Caryl Rhys Pryce, a Welsh soldier of fortune who had fought in India and South Africa. A surreal pairing, I thought. Pryce fashioned himself a revolutionary and joined the Magónistas after reading a book on the murderous Diaz regime. His biggest victory came when he disobeyed orders from Magón, who wanted him to march east and fight the Mexican army, and instead turned westward to take Tijuana on May 9th, 1911. After a fierce fight, a rebel force of 220 men won a battle in which 32 people died. So the big victory had been an accident of sorts. You had to love it. I turned the page and glanced at a picture of Pryce standing with his hands on his hips, looking like a character in a TV Western. There was a crowd of men at his side, but their faces were indistinguishable. Could one have been Bobby Flash?
I looked at another picture of rebels standing in front of a line of storefronts where someone had replaced the Mexican flag with one reading, “Tierra y Libertad.” It was after this victory that things turned bizarre, and dozens of sightseers from San Diego, who had watched the battle from afar like a football game, flooded the town to loot the shops. With Magón still in Los Angeles, refusing to provide more aid to the untrustworthy Pryce, the rebels turned to revolutionary tourism and gambling to raise funds. It was a kind of Wobbly Vegas. Apparently, San Diegans were fascinated with the rugged revolutionary army, and would pay to take pictures with the wild mix of cowboys, Wobbly hobos, mercenaries, black army deserters, Mexicans, Indians, and random opportunists. I turned the page and stared at a photo of a group of Wobblies, Cocopah Indians, and African-American deserters, still in US uniforms, posing for a shot. No Bobby Flash.
It was during this period that Pryce met Daredevil Dick Ferris. I spotted a picture of Ferris, a pasty, pudgy specimen wearing a hat that made him look like a fading dandy. Today he’d be doing infomercials, I thought. Anyway, Ferris was a booster hired to drum up PR for San Diego and its upcoming Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park. A shameless huckster, Ferris befriended Pryce, brought him to San Diego and sought to persuade him to support Ferris’s notion of a “white man’s republic” in lower Baja, Mexico. When Pryce proved to be of no use (he was arrested on his way back to Mexico and later abandoned the revolution altogether to act in Western movies), Ferris invented an imaginary invading army, going so far as to give a letter to the Mexican consul threatening an attack if Mexico refused to sell Lower Baja, and placing an ad in