Ideological zeal overwhelms a sober assessment of the Plan de San Diego in Benjamin Heber Johnson's Revolution in Texas

 

By Robert Mendoza

 

The Caterpillar tracks pressed in the reddish soil fill and then slowly dissolve in the late autumn rain. The razed houses have left a raw, muddy gap in the middle of the 300 block of Davis Avenue . The two houses hadn't been much to look at, unless you were a Western movie fan or you remembered illustrations of Judge Roy Bean's "Law West of the Pecos " on countless barroom walls. Architectural historians call them board and batten, box and strip timber houses. None existed in Laredo prior to 1881, when the advent of the railroad made it possible to import lumber from Eastern sawmills.

My grandparents lived in the house that once stood closest to the river. This was in 1915, just as the Plan de San Diego border crisis was heating up. The Plan de San Diego was a conspiracy that encouraged Texas Mexicans and other minorities to participate in an armed insurrection against the US government.

My grandfather would have followed that summer's trial of Basilio Ramos, Jr., in Brownsville with great interest. Ramos, a Nuevo Laredoan and Plan de San Diego conspirator, also claimed to be a supporter of exiled Mexican President Victoriano Huerta. My grandfather's association with Huerta and his counter-revolutionary activities in Yucatan were the events that had forced my family into exile in Laredo .

Benjamin Heber Johnson's book about the Plan de San Diego , Revolution in Texas , (Yale University Press, 2003) doesn't spend much time in Laredo . This scholarly truancy on the author's part renders his work incomplete, if not abjectly unsatisfactory. Three of the four major conspirators were either Laredoans or former residents. Laredo was a nerve center for Plan de San Diego plotting, recruitment, and propagandizing. Laredo District Attorney John Valls was one of the Plan's most tenacious adversaries, and Laredo courtrooms were the setting for sensational trials of captured insurrectionists. Several sites in the Laredo vicinity were targeted by the Plan's raiders and Laredo was a major staging area for US Army and National Guard troop deployment responding to the border crisis.

Johnson gratefully acknowledges travel support for research at several prestigious Mexican archives, but Revolution in Texas fails to even mention the Mexican Army Generals Pablo Gonzalez and Esteban Fierros. Both men were crucial to the funding and implementation of the Plan de San Diego . Divisional General Gonzalez (later infamous for having Emiliano Zapata killed) oversaw the Plan's operations that were orchestrated by his superior, Venustiano Carranza. Brigadier General Esteban Fierros (born and raised on Matamoros Street in Laredo ) commanded the brigada Fierros, whose mission was to invade the US via the Laredo-Nuevo Laredo railroad.

The two generals' activities are set out in great detail in Pablo Gonzalez' archive, a copy of which is housed at the University of Texas . Since Johnson holds a doctorate from Yale and is a history professor at Southern Methodist University, I can't believe that he is unaware of the generals' roles in the Plan de San Diego . However, his failure to even mention their existence is damning to the reliability of the evidence he advances to support his conclusions.

Revolution in Texas is subtitled, "How a Forgotten Rebellion and its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans." Johnson's thesis is that, prior to the advent of the Plan de San Diego, Texas' Mexican Americans were ambivalent about whether to commit themselves to the exploitative, racist, gringo United States, or remain loyal to the cynically indifferent, albeit culturally comfortable Mexican Republic.

The brutal suppression of the Plan de San Diego by local sheriffs, Texas Rangers, and racist bands of vigilantes convinced Mexican Americans that they needed to attain full civil rights in order to survive in the US . In the tradition of their predecessors who had joined the Mexican Mutualist movement, they rallied behind prominent Mexican-American progressives. Leaders like J. T. Canales and the Idar family lobbied politicians and formed patriotic organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Eventually, such honest hard work prevailed, and we emerged into the era of NAFTA, dusky members of the Bush family, and a national demographic as daunting as J Lo's posterior.

Well, those things did happen, but I am not convinced that the Plan de San Diego played that prominent a part (or any part at all) in affecting the course of Mexican-American social history during the past 88 years. The Plan de San Diego originated as the jailhouse fantasy of a tiny band of crackpots, psychopaths, and opportunistic racists. Venustiano Carranza cynically manipulated them as pawns in his campaign to gain diplomatic recognition from US President Woodrow Wilson.

The Plan de San Diego never received the support of any significant part of the Mexican-American community, and there was never a genuine insurrection, much less a "revolution," as suggested by Johnson's title. The Plan's co-founder Basilio Ramos was turned in by Deodoro Guerra, the first Mexican American he approached, on the opening day of the "revolution." Ramos' fellow conspirators were hunted down by J. T. Canales and his Mexican-American Canales Scouts. The captured raiders (usually uniformed carranzistas) were vigorously prosecuted by Mexican-born John Valls and convicted by Mexican-American juries.

"Los sediciosos," a corrido transcribed by Americo Paredes, clearly sets forth the grievances of Mexican Americans forced to suffer the consequences of Plan de San Diego outrages:

 

Ya la mecha está encendida

Por los puros Mexicanos.

Y los que van a pagarla

Son los mexicotejanos.

 

Now the fuse has been lit

By the Mexican nationalists.

But the price will be paid

By the Texas Mexicans.

 

Revolution in Texas is the second book-length study of the Plan de San Diego . It was preceded in 1992 by James Sandos' Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan de San Diego, 1904-1923. Sandos failed to prove his thesis that the Plan de San Diego was ideologically driven by the anarchist ideals of Ricardo Flores Magon, and formed part of an international war of liberation from capitalism.

Sandos' and Johnson's books are both reconstituted versions of their doctoral dissertations and are published by academic presses. The liberal arts faculties of US universities (especially Yale and University of California ) have long encouraged scholarship critical of US hegemony, and they display a bias favorable to socially progressive internationalism. Both authors have allowed their ideological zeal (post-nationalism in Johnson's case) to overwhelm a more sober assessment of the facts.

I believe that the series of border incidents associated with the Plan de San Diego are more wisely considered within the context of Carranza's efforts to gain US recognition during a crucial phase of the Mexican Revolution. Charles Harris' and Louis Sadler's 1978 piece, "The Plan of San Diego and the Mexican-United States War Crisis of 1916: A Re-examination," remains the most plausible explanation for the advent and short, violent trajectory of the Plan de San Diego .