The Plan de San Diego: Tejano Rebellion, Mexican Intrigue

The Plan de San Diego: Tejano Rebellion, Mexican Intrigue

 

The Plan de San Diego: Tejano Rebellion, Mexican Intrigue. (“The Mexican Experience”) by Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 338 pages, 2013. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-8032-6477-9

 

Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the Plan de San Diego (PSD)—the explosive 1915 pronunciamiento that called for an insurrection of ethnic-Mexicans in South Texas on twentieth day of February in order to form a “Liberating Army for Races and Peoples.” The document, which went through a few versions, opened by proclaiming “the liberty of the individuals of the black race and its independence of Yankee tyranny which has held us in iniquitous slavery since remote times,” and the “independence and segregation of the states bordering upon the Mexican Nation, which are: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Upper California.” Most disconcerting to contemporaries of the period, and of the present as well, were orders to this “Liberating Army for Races and Peoples” to kill “[e]very North American over sixteen years of age” and a guarantee to the Apache of Arizona that the “lands which have been taken from them shall be returned to them” (1-5). The aftermath resulted in the death of numerous individuals primarily from four counties in South Texas, and the controversy over the motivations and fallout that unfolded in the months after the document was discovered has weighed heavily on the minds of past and present historians. Given the volatile language of the document, and the reciprocal violence that ensued thereafter, the plan has had an incredibly long list of writers from various genres, perspectives, and political persuasions. Harris and Sadler’s, The Plan de San Diego: Tejano Rebellion, Mexican Intrigue is only the latest account to this growing body of literature on this singular event. 

Harris and Sadler’s The Plan de San Diego has one argument to make: “The Plan was written by Mexicans and was used by the Mexican government for its own purposes” (263). The authors’ use of “Mexican” varies depending on the context of their narrative, but here they mean to suggest that the plan was written by Magonistas (followers of the Anarchists Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón); employed by the leaders and followers of the PSD; but exploited by the administration of Mexican President Venustiano Carranza in order to gain diplomatic recognition from the US. Once the US officially recognized Carranza, the raiding ended “as if by magic” (258). The argument, as the authors themselves note, is not an original one and has been made by other authors; however, this is the first time that over 340 pages of paper were corralled in an attempt to make this one suggestion. 

For those historians familiar with the history of warfare, “from above,” the tactic of exploiting local rifts for larger aims has quite a long history and historiography. On the other hand, entire schools of thought have emerged around the question of “Why Men Rebel” in scholarly journals such as Subaltern Studies or Peasant Studies, to name only the most obvious perspectives “from below.” The historiography of Mexico, especially in terms of examining the long social histories of rural uprisings is particularly rich in this regard. Perhaps one of the finest examples that combine histories “from above” with those “from below” is Friedrich Katz’s pioneering global study on the Mexican Revolution, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (1984), a source that is curiously absent from Harris and Sadler’s bibliography—although the title is borrowed directly for their 2009 effort, The Secret War in El Paso: Mexican Revolutionary Intrigue, 1906-1920. Scouring several archives in as many languages, Katz made a series of historical discoveries and observations, including the idea that the Mexican Revolution can be seen as “a case study not only of how local rifts can be exploited for global ends, but of how global rifts can be exploited for local ends.” With a familiarity of German and Spanish language sources, The Secret War in Mexico reads like a sophisticated analysis of global diplomacy, politics, and warfare, but also as an equally sophisticated rendering of the social history of revolutionaries and everyday people. Unfortunately for this reader, and perhaps the larger scholarly world, such a thoughtful narrative balance will not be found in Harris and Sadler’s The Plan de San Diego. From the authors’ perspective, all of the rebels involved in the PSD were “bad” and the Texas Rangers were “good.” 

The Plan de San Diego is essentially ordered chronologically, somewhat biographically, and arranged into twenty two chapters—two of which are a mere five pages long. The book reads as though decades of research findings, along with copious notes for each conceivable connection, were all collected into one large filing cabinet. These findings share some sort of organizational schema that selectively follows the perspective of various state and federal organizations like the Texas Rangers, Bureau of Investigation, or the US Military—and frequently without questioning the sources, motivations, and overall context.

Aside from the clunky delivery, the language of the book harkens back to a discourse employed in the writings of Walter Prescott Webb, the kind of antediluvian worldview that narrates the turbulent context of revolutions like a spaghetti western. The events that transpired in 1915 forced the government of the US to send 110,000 National Guard to region, indicating the seriousness of the situation (262), and one would expect a historical narrative to partly recapture these temporalities. To that end, the events surrounding the publication of El Plan de San Diego will continue to be obscured in historical mystery, and hopefully continue to invite the intrigues of more thoughtful students and scholars.

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Jose Ángel Hernández is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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