The Mexican Revolution’s Losers: Exiles and Unholy Alliances along the US-Mexico Border

The decade of the 1920s in Mexico was plagued by a level of revolutionary violence comparable to that of the previous decade of fratricidal warfare and, as this paper illustrates, much of the violence was orchestrated by Mexican exiles living along the border in the United States. Since the triumph of the rebellion that brought the Sonorans to power in 1920, the aim of counterrevolutionary exiles had been to wage war against the Mexican government from without by supplying their supporters in Mexico with money and weapons. In exile, the political enmities that pitted these exile groups against each other evaporated. The common condition of exile and statelessness drew disparate groups together in strange ways. Anticlerical revolutionaries made arrangements with Catholic exiles, and old porfirians found allies among the remnants of the very same revolutionary military that had ousted them from power. These disparate groups were able to justify their unholy alliances under the common goal of wresting power from the administration of President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924-1928). They followed a longer tradition among exiles based on the understanding that plots against the government in Mexico City could be much more easily hatched in the relative safety provided by the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. They gathered armies, drafted manifestos denouncing the Calles government, and armed citizens for military engagements against the federal government from within and without Mexican national territory utilizing networks of Mexican migrants, devout Catholics, political sympathizers, as well as familial connections established over centuries of migration across the border. This study seeks to more fully understand the nature of those networks.