This article by Fran Shor was originally published in a shorter and slightly different version in the Winter 2025 edition of Fifth Estate, and appears at Mexico Solidarity Media courtesy the author. Thank you, Fran!
Even before taking office, the incoming Trump Administration began discussing the possibility of American military intervention in Mexico to suppress that country’s drug cartels. Now, after the bombing of Venezuela, the kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife, Trump is emboldened to threaten other countries in the region, especially with large oil reserves like Mexico. All these imperialist boasts from the occupant of the White House under the cover of riding the region of drug cartels. While shockingly brazen, it is not without precedent.
The U.S. has a history of imperial intrusion in Mexico in the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, there were instances where immigrants to and citizens of the United States fought alongside Mexican forces that not only opposed American intervention, but also sought to bring about a revolution. From the Mexican-American War of the 19th century (1845-1848) to the Baja Revolution of the early 20th (1911-1912), gringo rebels aligned themselves with Mexico to either combat the American military or to overturn the rule of Wall Street and its Mexican enablers.
We should take inspiration from those gringo rebels who fought on the Mexican side. If not actually taking up arms in defense of Mexico, the least we can do is resist any and all efforts to militarily intervene in that country.
During the Mexican War, a contingent of mostly recent Irish immigrant army recruits deserted the imperial invasion to join with the Mexican military defense. In the case of the Baja Revolution, members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), especially members of Wobbly locals in California, crossed into Mexico to become part of an insurgency to overthrow the dictator, Porfirio Diaz. Although different circumstances and motivations compelled these gringo rebels to fight on the Mexican side, their commitments reveal insights into contesting imperialism and constructing revolutionary change.
The imperial expansion of the U.S. slave republic into Mexican territory was first realized with the establishment of the Republic of Texas in 1836. By the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1845, the Texas population consisted of 100,000 non-slave and 38,000 enslaved inhabitants. In that year, the War Department directed Gen. Zachary Taylor, a future U.S. President, and slave-owning plantation landlord and battle-tested officer of the genocidal Indian Wars, to leave Louisiana and encamp with thousands of troops to Corpus Christi, Texas, and from there to Matamoros, Mexico.
1847 Battle of Churubusco
Among Taylor’s soldiers were some of those who deserted to Mexico. One of them was John Reilly, a former British soldier from Ireland who organized what became St. Patrick’s Battalion (or, in Spanish, the San Patricios) and fought alongside the Mexican army. Many members of the brigade were recent Catholic immigrants, primarily although not exclusively, from Ireland. Given the anti-Catholicism rampant in the U.S. and especially evident among Protestant military officers, Irish Catholic soldiers were targets for harsh treatment and discrimination. In addition, the Texas frontiersmen, known for their vicious campaigns against the Comanche and Mexicans, piled on their prejudicial hatred of Irish and Mexican Catholics.
By August 1846, Reilly had gathered over 200 San Patricios. Sickened by the attacks on civilians and encouraged by Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna to “come over to us” and experience true “Christian hospitality,” the San Patricios became adept at deploying the limited supply of Mexican artillery in several critical engagements with the American military. Their last battle in August 1847 at the Churubusco Monastery, led to the death and capture of the majority of the Battalion members. John Reilly was among those captured. While spared the death penalty (since his desertion happened before the official declaration of war), he endured terrible torture, languishing in prison until the signing of the Treaty of Hidalgo in June 1848.
While denounced as traitors by the U.S. military and proponents of an imperial Manifest Destiny, Reilly and the St. Patrick Battalion achieved grateful recognition for fighting on the Mexican side. Today, the Battalion is revered in both Mexico and Ireland although is an unknown chapter in American history. Their memory has been restored most recently in David Rovics’ song honoring the Battalion and their “treason” in its lyrics. (According to Rovics, it is one of his most requested numbers.) There is a statue of Reilly in his birthplace of Clifden, Ireland. The Irish have returned the favor, and there is a bust of Reilly now in Mexico City’s San Angel Plaza, courtesy of Ireland.
John Reilly monument, Mexico City
Although U.S. troops left Mexico City at the conclusion of the war, U.S. capital continued to spread its tentacles throughout Mexico. By 1900, US capitalists owned one-quarter of all arable Mexican land. By 1910, over half of all American foreign investment went to Mexico. Well-known robber barons, from Gould to Guggenheim to Rockefeller, controlled Mexican railroads, mines, and oil.
From the late 19th through the first decade of the 20th century, Diaz, a corrupt and oppressive enabler of U.S. imperial interests, ruled Mexico with an iron hand. Resistance to the dictatorial regime came from several quarters. Among the most radical critics of Diaz and U.S. capitalists were the Flores Magon brothers, Ricardo, Enrique and Jesús, with their newspaper, Regeneracion, first published in 1900. While Ricardo, in particular, suffered imprisonment in Mexico and the U.S., the Magon brothers, nonetheless, accumulated allies from among other U.S.-based radicals and organizations, such as Emma Goldman and the IWW.
Ricardo & Enrique Flores Magón
Indeed, it was with a contingent from the IWW locals in California that the Magons and their Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) launched the Baja Revolution in Northern Mexico in late January 1911. By the spring of 1911, after capturing a few small towns in the Baja, the ranks of the insurrectos, including legendary Wobbly Joe Hill, began to splinter into different factions.
Mobilizing against the Baja revolutionaries were Mexican and American troops. President William Howard Taft sent 20,000 soldiers, nearly a quarter of the entire U.S. Army, to the Mexican border in California and Texas. Harrison Gray Otis, the notorious anti-union publisher of the Los Angeles, and owner of thousands of acres of Mexican land, lobbied Taft to intervene in support of Diaz. However, other forces in both countries backed the Mexican bourgeois reformer, Francisco Madero, who eventually ousted Diaz in late May 1911.
Enrique Flores Magón with IWW members and family, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, 1923
Ricardo Flores Magon and the IWW were not interested in mere reforms. As Ricardo wrote in his “Manifesto to the Workers of the World” (reprinted in the Wobbly newspaper, Solidarity): “For more than four months the Red Flag has flamed on the battlefields of Mexico, carried aloft by emancipated workers” who opposed the “continuance of social inequality, the capitalist system, the division of the human family into two classes – that of the exploiter and that of the exploited.” The objective of those exploited, argued Magon, was to “expropriate the land and the means of production and hand them over to the people.”
By the end of June 1911, with Mexican and US troops arrayed against them, a number of the IWW contingent, including songwriter and organizer, Joe Hill, managed to escape the clutches of the Mexican federales and the U.S. military. However, most of Hill’s fellow-Wobblies were not as lucky. They faced immediate arrest at the California-Mexican border. (Hill would eventually be arrested on a trumped-up murder charge in Utah and then executed by the state authorities in 1915.) Ricardo Flores Magon would face intermittent imprisonment, finally dying in Leavenworth federal prison in 1922, a victim like many others, including the leadership of the IWW, for the charge of “obstructing the war effort,” a primary component of the 1917 Espionage Act.
Federal Mexican troops prepare to execute a rebel during the Magonista Revolution, Tijuana, 1911.
Nevertheless, the banner of Regeneracion for “Tierra y Libertad” would inspire other Mexican revolutionaries, including Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Once again, the U.S. military intervened to attempt to forestall revolution and to protect oil interests. And, once again, gringo rebels aided their Mexican allies, either as soldiers in Villa’s and Zapata’s forces or among the IWW and anarcho-syndicalist oil workers. Mexico also became a refuge for anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti fleeing from the World War I draft instituted in April 1917.
On one hand, given the history of US imperial arrogance and Trump’s own racism and misogyny, especially with a left-wing Jewish woman now occupying the office of the President of Mexico, such aggression from El Norte might come to pass. On the other hand, we should take inspiration from those gringo rebels who fought on the Mexican side. If not actually taking up arms in defense of Mexico, the least we can do is resist any and all efforts to militarily intervene in that country.
Francis Shor is an Emeritus Professor of History at Wayne State University. He is the author of six non-fiction books in the field of social-cultural history, including Weaponized Whiteness (Haymarket 2021) and Peace Advocacy in the Shadow of War (Palgrave Macmillan 2024), a novel, Passages of Rebellion (IngramSpark 2023), and a self-published hybrid memoir, Pursuing Peace and Justice. Other publications, covering a broad range of topics in 19th and 20th century U. S. and global history, have appeared in scholarly journals and popular online journals. In addition to his academic work, he has been a long-time peace and justice activist, serving previously on the Boards of Peace Action of Michigan (PAMI) and Michigan Coalition for Human Rights (MCHR).
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