by Jim Miller
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 several newspapers looking for recruits. He even sent 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. AC/DC and Los Tigres del Norte. At the end of the line, the guards regarded me suspiciously as they always seemed to do. They sternly pulled aside the whole family behind me and took them to secondary inspection as I headed to the trolley. On the way back, the train was half empty and I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep with visions of Las Madres Unidas dancing in my head.
3
The next morning I hit the New Sun office early again and started on a piece about Las Madres. It came easily. The women’s faces and stories were fresh in my mind, and I wrote with a sharp-edged anger. I had called the company office and got a generic corporate denial of any knowledge of the situation. Las Madres had found the home address and phone number of the owner, so I called his house and didn’t get any further than “How did you get this number?” They sounded worried and that made me happy. When Neville came in, I showed him what I had started and he loved it.
“We’ll make it a cover piece once you get some pictures,” he said. I called up the freelancer and got on her calendar. The neighborhood tour wasn’t for another two weeks, however, so I had some time to kill. I noticed that the answering machine was blinking and I checked and found a message from the Marine. He could meet me tomorrow. I called to confirm and then left for the day to go to the Historical Society.
Even during the worst bust since the Great Depression, San Diego looked like Disneyland compared to Tijuana. Everything was newer and brighter—at least it seemed that way. I had taken my car to work today so I drove across the Laurel Street bridge off 6th into Balboa Park with the California Tower rising like Xanadu in the bright January sky. It was one of those summer-in-winter days, and the park was a gorgeous apparition in all its Spanish revival glory. I remembered reading that some of the Wobblies who’d fled the second battle of Tijuana ended up working on the construction projects for the Panama California Exposition. It was ironic that they’d escaped from a failed border revolution to help construct an Anglo fantasy of California’s Spanish golden era. It was Spreckels’s fear that the Wobblies would piss on San Diego’s party in 1915 that led to the brutal response to the free speech fighters as early as 1911. Irony heaped upon irony. I smiled at the still-beautiful flowers and fountains and Spreckels Organ Pavilion as I drove to the small lot by the archery range to park.
Down in the basement of the Historical Society, I looked through everything I could find: postcards of dead Wobblies on the battlefield after Mosby’s forces were routed, photos of the crowds being hit by firehouses, a picture of Wobblies posing on a hijacked train in Mexico, a shot of a Wobbly holding up a copy of Industrial Worker with a story about the fight in San Diego, and several portraits of soapboxers speaking to crowds at Heller’s Corner, their arms outstretched, their fists clenched, a sea of men in battered hats below them—tired, scarred, bruised, but defiant faces. I was almost through with the binder when I came upon a striking image of a rough-looking character sitting on the steps outside the I.W.W. headquarters. He had a full beard and a big, flat, boxer’s nose. His upper lip hung over his lower lip. He was staring hard into the camera, with a “get that thing away from me” look. He had on overalls and a black felt hat. On the back of the picture someone had written, “I.W.W. Agitator” and, after that, a different hand had written “Bunco.” I asked the woman behind the counter if she knew anything about the change. She didn’t. I dug out my photocopy of the Wanted poster and reread the description of Gus Blanco or “Bunco.” It certainly could have been him with his beard grown out.
After I was done with the photographs I looked through some old copies of the Labor Leader for news on Bobby or Blanco and struck out. The vertical files had some of the same articles I found at the library, but nothing that referred to individual Wobblies. Leaving the vertical files, I asked for the court records for 1912 and found a record of the arrest of “Buckshot Jack,” but no references to a trial or even a mugshot. Perhaps “Buckshot” never went to trial because he was taken up to run the gauntlet instead. If they had only known, he would have been shipped back to Holtville. Nothing on Blanco.
Finally, I came across the personal papers of a labor leader who had been in the local Communist Party in the 1930s. There were lots of things, letters mostly, about the battles for control of the San Diego Labor Council, but nothing about the I.W.W. until I found some much later letters to his daughter about being interviewed by a college student about the free speec
h fight:I spoke a while last week with a young fellow studying the history of the free speech fights in the teens. He seemed very earnest and disappointed that I had been too young to have been involved in the organizing. I did tell him a few stories about sneaking out to watch the commotion on the streets and remembering the fire hoses and the horrible police swinging away at the crowds. There were stories about people being kidnapped and never being seen again. It seems like another lifetime now. The fellow’s name was Sam Jones.
The letter moved on to other matters. Not much to work with, but I did write down Jones’s name. Maybe he had done a thesis or something. All in all it was a disappointing day. The archivist recommended I try the court records out in the Imperial Valley and then wrote down the titles of a handful of dissertations and Master’s theses on the free speech fight. He also told me to try the Library for Progressive Research in Los Angeles, and Wayne State University’s archives in Detroit. With no new leads and a stack of homework, I left for the day, not sure if my big idea would work out. Perhaps Bobby Flash was lost to history. Hell, I didn’t even know much about my own family’s distant past, no less the history of strangers. Still, I was haunted by the image of Bobby’s face, like my son’s face, receding into the past and merging in my mind’s eye.
Out on the Prado I walked by the reflecting pool, stopped to watch the gigantic koi swimming around lazily, and took a stroll through the botanical garden before heading over to the café by the art museum for a cup of coffee. As I sat down, I remembered that I should write Hank back before too long, so I tore a piece of paper out of my notebook and did my best job of playing a father. I encouraged Hank to stay in school while acknowledging his point about how uninspiring the classes could be. I joked, selfeffacingly and with sufficient irony, about him not following my example in terms of career. I tried to assure him that what seemed like an endless time at home was really not that long. How was his mother, really? Etc. Despite having been at it for over twenty years now, some part of me still felt as if I was putting on an act as a father. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Hank fiercely, but who was I to tell anybody anything about anything? It was funny, in my role as a reporter, I could hammer away at people with no hesitation and no regrets, but as a father I felt unqualified to give the simplest advice. I was utterly humbled by the nakedness of Hank’s need for my love and the possibility that withholding it, even unconsciously, could burden him forever.