Flash. Jim Miller
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a woman on horseback over the border to plant a flag in the name of “suffrage and model government.” With these two stunts under his belt, he then recruited one of the remaining Magónista rebels to the Ferris cause and sent him back across the border to be nearly lynched by angry Wobblies who then elected Jack Mosby, one of their own, as the final commander of the doomed border revolution. I found a photo of Mosby, an unassuming man with a neatly trimmed mustache, wearing a battered fedora, and looking like a librarian with an ammo belt slung across his shoulder.
Led by Mosby, 150 Wobblies and 75 Mexicans took on 560 soldiers of the Mexican army on June 22nd, 1911. Badly outnumbered and low on supplies because of Magón’s refusal to send more, the rebels were routed in three hours, with thirty killed, and the rest fleeing back across the border to be arrested by the United States army. Mosby was shot and killed when he tried to escape military custody. Ferris, shunned by Spreckels, went on the road to enact his version of the farce “The Man from Mexico” on stage. Magón died on the floor of a cell in Leavenworth after having been imprisoned for violating the Espionage Act during the first Red Scare. Bobby Flash? Somehow he made his way back to Holtville to end up on a Wanted poster with Gus Blanco. Then, under another name, he wound up running the gauntlet somewhere in San Diego in 1912. Nothing but traces of a remarkable life. I looked up, and the trolley was heading into San Ysidro. Time for my own trip across the border.
As I walked across the street toward the pedestrian bridge that takes you to the border I noticed the number of gringos headed over was much smaller than the last time I’d been to Tijuana. Almost everyone was Mexican—schoolchildren, maids, janitors, families returning from shopping trips. It seemed the drug wars in the city had scared away large numbers of Americans and forced a good number of Mexicans to do their business in San Diego. The economy probably wasn’t helping either. I wove my way through the labyrinth of concrete, over the footbridge, past the Border Patrol cameras to the big metal turnstile that clanks loudly to announce every living soul leaving or coming home. On the other side, I saw Ricardo, and he met me with a smile and a firm handshake. I started in with my feeble present-tense Spanish, but it quickly became apparent that he spoke perfect English. When I told him that I’d been reading about Ricardo Flores Magón on the trolley, he responded, “No relation, but good choice” with a laugh. We walked by an empty police checkpoint to his car, an old Jeep, parked across the street from the outdoor sports book. I glanced over at a crowd of men drinking Tecates or coffee in styrofoam cups as they stared at the screens monitoring the horse races. We got in the Jeep and drove by a few abandoned curio shops and headed toward the working class section of the city, far from Avenida Revolución, the main tourist strip. The city seemed depressed and tense. I asked Ricardo about the lack of pedestrians coming south.
“Revolución is dead too, man,” he said soberly. “Nothing happening there anymore, even on weekends. The drug wars and the economy in the north are killing the businesses.” The papers had been full of news about murders and big shoot-outs even in broad daylight. Not even the hills where the middle class and the wealthy lived were safe anymore. A newspaper editor had been murdered and others had hired guards. Some police officials had been killed by the drug lords, others were on the take. Tourists had been robbed on the roads south to San Felipe and Ensenada. It was the Wild West. We cruised past a big open-air market full of stalls selling fruit, clothing, small electronic goods, and tacos. I caught a whiff of carne asada coming off a grill. It smelled good and I realized I was hungry. We turned down a street lined with small office fronts and pulled up in front of one with “Justicia” painted on the window.
Inside, I was greeted by a small, pretty woman named Gabriela, who would introduce me to the other women sitting in a circle of small metal chairs, chatting animatedly with each other. The office was small with a big wooden desk that was littered with mail and notebooks. It had a phone but no computer. The women were sitting in a much larger meeting space, a large room with concrete walls and a concrete floor. It would have been ugly if not for the murals someone had painted all over the walls—there were portraits of Zapata, Ché Guevara, Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatista front, and, interestingly, Ricardo Flores Magón, along with some beautiful nods to Mexican folk art including a calavera with fist upraised. I smiled, sat down on one of the metal chairs, and introduced myself. One of the women thanked me for coming and handed me a plate of pan she had made. I thanked her, took a piece, and listened to their stories.
None of the women spoke English so Ricardo and Gabriela served as translators as, one by one, the women told me about their lives. They lived in the neighborhood under an abandoned maquiladora as the letter Neville had passed on to me had said. Apparently the maquiladora up the hill was owned by a man who had closed down the shop without doing any cleanup, so the chemicals involved in making batteries were left under a big canvas tent. Once the tons of abandoned waste from the batteries began to seep into the earth, it entered the well that supplied the barrio down the hill. Worse still, when the rains came in the winter, the chemicals would get washed down the hill, through the dirt streets where their children played. One of the women, Marisol, a stout, kind-faced grandmother with lively eyes, had come with pictures of the waste heap, the neighborhood from above, and children playing soccer, kicking the ball through puddles of toxic waste. I surveyed the pictures and studied Marisol’s face as she explained how it had begun with people getting sick to their stomachs or having their eyes burn for no apparent reason. Then there were strange cases of cancer, lots of them. And finally, mothers started giving birth to babies with terrible birth defects, babies with damaged brains or horrible disfigurements. By then, I was taking notes furiously, as one woman after another added her tale of betrayal.
I was particularly struck by the fact that these women still worked at other factories, for ten or twelve hours a day, and then came home to take care of their families. They woke before dawn, worked at home, at the factory, and at home again, and still found time to organize Las Madres Unidas against all odds. It was jaw-dropping. Another madre, Rosa, a sharp-eyed, middle-aged woman with obvious scars on her wiry arms and her fierce heart, angrily told me how the owner of the company had shut it down overnight, taken out the valuable equipment, and shipped it to China, where he had moved the operation because the labor was even cheaper there. NAFTA and Mexican law forbid such practices, but there were no enforcement clauses. The Mexican government ignored its own labor laws to appease the companies, and the United States ignored the matter altogether. All the while, the owner sat in a big house just across the border without a care in the world, fat and happy, as Rosa put it.
Finally, Isabel, a short, Indian-looking woman in her thirties, wearing a striking, hand-embroidered blouse and blue jeans told me about how the closing of the plant had changed the life of the barrio. Most of the people in the neighborhood had moved there to work for the factory on the hill. They came, built their own houses out of what they could—with no infrastructure, no water, no help from the government or the company. When the company left, they all had to get jobs elsewhere, further away, so the walk took an hour each way. The women had no protection on their walks and some had disappeared like the women in Juarez. They could not trust the police, and the other factory owners would not provide transportation and punished them if they arrived late or left early. It was a house of pain, I thought to myself as I looked into the faces of these women, faces lined with worry, work, and suffering. Still there was fight in them—hope against all odds. I promised them that I would tell their tale and come back to see their neighborhood with a photographer. Then I thanked them for their stories and shook each of their hands like a prayer for more power than I had to redress their great wrongs.
It was dark outside as Ricardo drove me back to the border. He thanked me for coming and I told him it was my pleasure to do what I could to tell this story. We made plans for my return visit to tour the neighborhood. The lights in the hills twinkled a reddish-yellow and car horns blared angrily in the rush hour traffic. He let me off at the end of a long line to get back. “Goodbye, my friend,” he said before driving off into the night. I dropped a coin in a basket at the feet of an ancient Indian woman, who was begging on a dirty wool blanket by the line. Some little girls sold me a pack of gum and I looked over at a line of shops hawking cheap liquor and pharmaceuticals for those returning to the land of the free. In line, I closed my eyes and listened to the distant strains of music from the Mexican street blending with hundreds of car radios talking in Spanish and English.