As a Chicano, I’d rather be branded a “bad Mexican” than a “good” one, because in the United States the latter suggests a person of obsequious character. More defiant Chicanas/os may view such sycophants as vendidos, traitors to their community, in the pursuit of material advancement. Kelly Lytle Hernández’s Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands trenchantly analyzes the audacious agency of Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) members that made them “malos mexicanos” (bad Mexicans) in the eyes of Porfirio Díaz, Mexico’s ruthless, U.S.-backed president-dictator. During El Porfiriato, as the era of his reign (1876–1911) was infamously known, Díaz usurped the resource-rich lands of Indigenous peoples, granting them to partisan jefes políticos and foreign investors. By 1900, the emergent U.S. colonial power alone exploited 130 million acres of Mexico’s arable, mineral-rich tracts. And this theft would spread.
At the start of its movement in 1905, the...
University of California Press