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Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire & Revolution in the Borderlands
Kelly Lytle Hernandez
Kelly Lytle Hernández's *Bad Mexicans* recovers a story that shaped both Mexico and the United States yet slipped out of most textbooks: the magonistas, the radical exiles led by Ricardo Flores Magón who organized from within the U.S. to topple the dictator Porfirio Díaz and helped ignite the Mexican Revolution. Hernández, a MacArthur-winning historian, tells it as a border thriller—rebels, spies, and the largest manhunt the young U.S. security state had yet mounted—while making a serious argument about race, labor, and empire in the borderlands. Published by Norton in 2022 to wide acclaim, it's rigorous history written with genuine narrative momentum. For readers interested in the Mexican Revolution, the shared history of the two countries, or how the U.S. built its surveillance apparatus, it's essential and revelatory.
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The author
Kelly Lytle Hernández is a historian at UCLA and a MacArthur Fellow whose work centers on race, immigration, and policing in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, including the acclaimed City of Inmates. She writes as both a rigorous scholar and a public historian.
The book
Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands, published by W. W. Norton in 2022, recovers the magonista movement and its leader Ricardo Flores Magón, who plotted against Porfirio Díaz from U.S. soil and helped spark the Mexican Revolution—prompting an unprecedented cross-border campaign of surveillance and repression.
How it reads
The book won broad praise for pairing archival depth with propulsive storytelling, and it reframes the revolution as a binational event with lasting consequences for American policing and immigration policy. It is recent enough that its interpretations are still being actively discussed.
For more context
The magonistas' repression fed directly into the growth of early U.S. federal surveillance, linking the revolution's prehistory to the origins of the modern security state.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Kelly Lytle Hernandez
- Publisher
- W. W. Norton
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9781324004370
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine