"El Magonista" | Vol. 10, No. 42 | November 23, 2022

A hundred years ago today, on November 21 of 1922, the life of Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón [RFM] was extinguished at the age of 49 – assassinated, actually - while serving a 22-year sentence in a U.S. federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. In 1918, he and his brother Enrique had been arrested, tried, and convicted, along with their close associate Librado Rivera (a Magonista revolutionary uncle of mine, it turns out), on trumped up charges under the draconian 1917 Espionage and Sedition Acts – the unconstitutional sections of which were subsequently repealed by Congress or overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Living in exile in Los Angeles at the time, they had been caught in the brutal raids of the First Red Scare in the United States, launched during and after World War I, which suppressed the anti-imperialist peace movement and the radical wing of the U.S. labor movement led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The Magonistas, too, had denounced World War I as inter-imperialist and enthusiastically supported the anarcho-socialist IWW as it covered the huge wave of militant worker strikes it organized from 1905 to the 1920s from the pages of their combative newspaper Regeneración - founded by RFM in 1900 in Mexico City, when he was still a law student... READ MORE

Andrés Manuel López Obrador campaigned on a promise to humanize migrant policy in Mexico and Central America. What happened?

Douglas Dávila left his home in northwest Venezuela in the dark of night. The oil worker secreted across the border to Colombia on May 9, for fear authorities would arrest him and label him a traitor for leaving his job. Devaluation and inflation meant his monthly salary had fallen to around $40 a month, he said, while his family’s basic expenses were over $600.

Together with his wife, their daughter and granddaughter, and seven other relatives, Dávila took a series of buses and boats before trekking for five days through Panama’s Darien Gap, a notorious 60-mile stretch of roadless jungle that he described as “haunted” by the bodies of migrants left behind without proper burial.

The family split in Costa Rica. Dávila and his wife held back with the children, as the others went ahead. On June 14, his family reached the city of Tapachula, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, where they turned themselves in to authorities.

After waiting just over a month in a migrant shelter in Tapachula, the family was granted humanitarian visas allowing them to continue their journey north without fear of being detained or deported.

The trip north was supposed to be simple. Because they had visas, the family was able to ride commercial buses all the way to the northern city of Monterrey. From there, they bought what should have been their last bus ticket, to the town of Nava, Coahuila, 26 miles south of the U.S. border. But on the final stretch, the bus they were traveling in was halted by state police.

They told the passengers, most of them Venezuelan, to disembark and put their cash and other valuables on the hood of a patrol car. After the bounty had been collected, the police waved the bus on.

A little farther ahead, they were again told to disembark, this time by the National Guard. “They said that to pass here as migrants, our papers were worthless,” said Dávila of the National Guard. After paying off the soldiers with the money they’d managed to keep, their bus was allowed to continue.

Finally, in Nava, the Dávilas pooled what cash remained and hired a private citizen to drive them to Piedras Negras, which shares a crossing with Eagle Pass, Texas... READ MORE

La compleja personalidad de Ricardo Flores Magón (1873-1922) sin duda tiene muchas facetas pero ninguna contradice la enorme coherencia de su incansable lucha política. En este ensayo se muestra su oficio de narrador más que solvente y claramente articulado con el activismo social de toda su vida.

¿Cómo considerar a Ricardo Flores Magón: como un activista revolucionario o como un escritor? O mejor dicho: ¿puede considerarse a uno de los precursores ideológicos de la Revolución Mexicana de 1910, también como un literato? Pocos son quienes así lo hacen; por ejemplo, Luis Leal en su antología Cuentos de la revolución. Ahí, en su presentación al cuento “El apóstol”, publicado por primera vez en enero de 1911 en el número 19 del periódico Regeneración (periódico que, como se sabe, Ricardo dirigió con sus hermanos Jesús y Enrique), Leal escribe al respecto: “Ricardo Flores Magón (nació en San Antonio Eloxochitlán, Oaxaca, el 16 de septiembre) periodista y revolucionario, se valió de la forma del relato para mejor presentar sus ideas y doctrinas sociales”. Más adelante añadirá:

…murió el 21 de Noviembre en la prisión de Leavenworth, Kansas, donde se encontraba encarcelado desde 1918, por sus ideas revolucionarias. Como escritor de relatos supo enfocar escenas dramáticas en las que predominan los conflictos políticos. Su intención principal fue la de expresar sus ideas revolucionarias, las cuales encarnan, en sus relatos, en personajes de la realidad mexicana de la época. Es el primero que escribe cuentos que tratan de la Revolución de 1910.

Leal definirá como un “boceto” a un texto de Flores Magón titulado “Dos revolucionarios”, para mostrar así la lenta transición del cuento realista/modernista al cuento de la Revolución: “Este y otros bocetos de Flores Magón no fueron escritos con intención de crear obra literaria sino con el propósito de iniciar al pueblo mexicano a reclamar sus derechos políticos y sociales. Pero ya apunta hacia lo que será el cuento de la Revolución... LEER MAS

By Erika P. Bucio | Reforma (para leer en Espanol) | NOV. 20, 2022
Photo from Casasola Fund | Translation from Google

The plans for the 1908 rebellion of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) against the Porfirio Díaz regime were smuggled from the Los Angeles County Prison, on a mission carried out by three women: Ethel Duffy Turner, Elizabeth Trowbridge and María Brousse.

On a visit to the Mexican prisoners Ricardo Flores Magón, Librado Rivera and Antonio Villarreal, María dropped her open bag and when she crouched, she picked up the paper that Ricardo slid down the floor, while Ethel and Elizabeth hid the movements with their skirts to circumvent the guard's surveillance.

"We knew what we had done, since John (Kenneth Turner) had told us what that piece of paper contained. We had fulfilled our small, but indispensable cooperation to subtract surreptitiously (...) the plans for the 1908 revolution!

"We, two young women (Ethel and Elizabeth), who until then had led a life without difficulties, had gotten into a plot to overthrow the tyrant," Ethel Duffy Turner narrated in his work Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican Liberal Party, whose first edition dates from 1960... READ MORE

House Democrats are preparing a legislative sprint to send immigration reforms to the Senate before they give up their majority in the lower chamber next year.

The lame-duck push is focusing on a bill to protect so-called Dreamers, beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The decision, announced by House Democratic leaders during a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning in the Capitol, comes just a week after the midterm elections, when both parties were vying for a growing share of Hispanic voters.

The choice to target DACA is itself a recognition that the lame-duck session is unlikely to yield structural change to the country’s broken immigration system.

The DACA bill is separate from a House-passed bill to grant a path to citizenship to millions of farmworkers and a broader immigration proposal to implement a rolling registry — a sort of statute of limitations on illegal entry — for immigrants.

The House approved the farm workforce bill in March 2021, meaning the Senate could take it up before the current Congress ends in January, and a registry bill was introduced in both the House and Senate.

But the DACA bill is the Democrats’ strongest card, and the one they are betting the house on.

Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said the details are still being worked out. But the framework will be a piece of legislation — the Dream and Promise Act — that was passed by the House last year. 

“DACA’s on life support,” Ruiz said. “We need to act with a... READ MORE

By Marianne Levin & Burgess Everett | POLITICO | NOV. 21, 2022
Photo by Drew Angerer

Party leaders are pushing hard for legislation aiding the undocumented population known as "Dreamers" before Republicans take the House. But GOP senators have little interest.

Democrats eager to find a legislative solution before 2023 for young undocumented immigrants are getting a wake-up call: They need votes from Republicans who don’t want to do it.

As the GOP prepares to take the House, top Senate Democrats are desperately proclaiming that the post-election session is the best — and perhaps only — chance for Congress to act in the near term on deportation protections for the immigrants known as “Dreamers.” And with good reason: After the Senate passed a comprehensive bill in 2013, the Republican-controlled House never took it up.

That recent history has Majority Leader Chuck Schumer proclaiming that “we want to get [it] done” and Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin(D-Ill.) saying that “the time to act is now.” But even those on the GOP side who once supported a fix for the deportation-protection program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, are now against it.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said Democrats are “crazy” to try pushing for a deal now: “I think they’re just trying to do it, probably, to please some activist groups.” And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rubio’s only remaining GOP partner on the 2013 bill brokered by the so-called “Gang of Eight,” claims “there’s no way you’re going to get anybody on our side to do an immigration bill with a broken border... READ MORE

 

Senate Democrats are racing against the clock to try to strike an agreement with Republicans to provide a pathway to citizenship for recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The program, launched in 2012, allows undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children to live and work in the United States. But its fate is uncertain amid ongoing litigation that threatens to end the policy.

President Joe Biden, who was serving as vice president when DACA was unveiled, has repeatedly expressed his support for the program and its recipients. But after nearly two years into the administration, the program – and its nearly 600,000 beneficiaries – remain in limbo.

Democrats are betting on the lame-duck session—the period after the midterms and before the new Congress begins—to try to pass legislation addressing DACA recipients before they lose their majority in the House.

“There’s a sword of Damocles over these young people’s heads,” Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey and an original co-sponsor of the bipartisan immigration bill from 2013, told CNN, citing ongoing litigation that could end the program.

“There’s no pathway forward for them if the court ultimately strikes down the whole thing, and so we can’t just wait and hope that the court will do the right thing. We really need to find a legislative fix because I think there are limited – although there are some – but there are limited things that the administration can do itself,” he added... READ MORE

Senate and House leaders seek Republican help to permanently protect undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer told a group of immigrant advocates and reporters at an event Wednesday that his “focus is on Dreamers,” or undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children, during the waning weeks of this Congress.

The New York Democrat, who controls the Senate’s agenda, has said that members of his party were working on legislation to help these immigrants and seeking to reach a deal in the lame duck, while the Democratic party still controls the House.

“My message to Senate Republicans is this: Work with us,” Schumer said in front of the Capitol. “Work with us on this widely supported policy so we can reach agreement that will protect families and strengthen our economy.”

Senate and House leaders kicked off the post-election lame-duck period with similar pledges to prioritize legislation to permanently protect recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, a long-time goal of immigrant advocates.

But even Democratic leaders acknowledge their efforts may fall short, with a slate of legislative tasks quickly filling up Congress’ calendar through the end of the year, opposition from some Republicans and the prospect of an increase in migration levels... READ MORE

 

The program offered beneficiaries a sense of security, but with work permits set to expire in the coming months, many of them are having to consider what comes next for their families.

With the cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an estimated 200,000 children are at risk of losing their parents.

In September, the Trump administration announced it was rescinding DACA pending a six-month delay. The program is an Obama-era initiative that shields undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation, and allows them to work legally in the country. Unless the Republican-controlled Congress passes a law granting them legal status, they could soon be subject to deportation. That uncertainty has instilled fear among many of the nearly 700,000 DACA recipients, but particularly those who are parents of U.S. citizens.

“It’s been really tough, it’s been a rollercoaster of emotion,” said Eliana Fernandez, a DACA recipient and mother of two children, ages 10 and 5. “What’s going to happen with my life, with my work, with my children? I’ve been trying to process everything.”

The vast majority of DACA expirations will come after March 5, 2018. According to the Department of Homeland Security, 275,344 individuals will have their work permits expire next year and 321,920 work permits are set to run out from January through August 2019. That means that hundreds of thousands of immigrants will suddenly be eligible for deportation and lose their ability to work legally in country... READ MORE