User:PALOND03/Mexican Revolution

Article Draft
Reaction of Mexican-Americans

While the war was raging in Mexico, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans living in the United States had a multitude of reaction and responses to the war. These responses were not unified, however, as class, race, regional origins, and political ideologies contributed to a large amount of different reactions from the Mexican diaspora in the United States. Furthermore, not all Mexicans had the same citizenship status, with some being immigrants, refugees, exiles, or people whose family had lived in the south-western states from Texas to California since before the Mexican-American War. Within Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, there was a wide political spectrum present, from extreme anarchists, to conservative counterrevolutionaries. Some of these groups included Tejano Progressives who supported the revolution and actively helped out by raising awareness to social justice, and Border Anarchists who were a more radical group that participated in violence.

Journalism and Propaganda

Meanwhile, in the United States, Mexican-Americans created newspapers to help with the war effort, denouncing Diaz's regime as well as professing their support to the revolution. There were multiple newspapers written in the Spanish language, most notably, La Cronica, (The Chronicle in English) created by Nicasio Idar and his family in Laredo, Texas, a city which saw much action as a border town. La Cronica, as well as other Chicano newspapers, would mostly cover stories about the Mexican-American and Tejano communities in the border regions, as well as supporting the revolution. These articles were named fronterizo ("by the border" in English), a newspaper dedicated to describing life in the border regions which would write about Mexican-Americans and their long rooted history and culture pertaining to these lands, as people living by the international border would be called fronterizos (border-dwellers). These fronterizos would start out with two goals: to decry the racism and discrimination experienced by Mexicans and Mexicans-Americans in the United States, and to support the ongoing reforms in Mexico, equating the tyranny of Porfirio Díaz to that of white Texan politicians. A month after the start of the conflict, Idar from La Cronica argued that Mexican immigrants and American born Mexican-Americans should be inspired by the revolution's promise of land reform to fight for more civil rights in the United States. Fronterizos worked to produce a nationalistic perspective placing the borderlands as an integral part of Mexican culture, history, and as a crucial part to the revolution, as the borderlands and its communities have been ignored by both the United States and Mexican governments.

Violence in the Revolution

The violence caused by the Mexican Revolution resulted in Mexican immigration to the United States quintupled from 1910 to 1920, with 100,000 Mexicans entering the United States by 1920, seeking better economic conditions, social stability, and political stability.