3 history books that help us better understand the Texas-Mexico link

Mexican history is Texas history.

The two subjects are so closely intertwined that it is often hard to see where one ends and the other begins.

Consider our shared 1,254-mile border, which, no matter what people tell you, has always been porous. The historical, cultural and social contact across the Rio Grande has been continuous — sometimes tragic, sometimes joyous — since long before the Spanish arrived in the 1500s.

To this day, almost anything that happens in Mexico affects what happens in Texas.

My hold on Mexican history, however, is disgracefully tenuous.

This gloomy state of affairs was brightened recently by three new books and a new friend.

I have known historian Karl Schmitt for just a few weeks, but I already consider him a friend-in-the-making. The Austinite, who turned 100 in July, taught Latin American government at the University of Texas for 30 years, which automatically helps illuminate my historical blind spots.

Currently, I'm working on a newspaper profile about Schmitt's crowded century of living, including his World War II memoirs; he was awarded two Purple Hearts during his European tour of duty.

With an unfailing sense of humor — and more vim and vip at 100 than I can maintain at 67 — Schmitt has helped to push me gently deeper into Mexican history.

Let's not forget that he was born just two years after the end of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).

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Despite the imbalance in our expertise, I introduced a term — "magonistas" — to him.

I borrowed it from the fantastic new book, "Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire and Revolution in the Borderlands" (Norton) by Kelly Lytle Hernández. It refers to the followers of Ricardo Flores Magón, an ardent anarchist who helped spark the Mexican Revolution, and for many years wrote fiery newspaper articles from this side of the border, including bases in Texas.

Hernández's absorbing story complements two other recent reads: "Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest" (Viking) by Fernando Cervantes, and "War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers and an American Invasion" (Simon and Schuster) by Jeff Guinn.

The fact that three publishers of popular books would bring out such serious yet engrossing books about Mexican history in such a short period of time tells me that other readers hunger for this material as well.

It's encouraging, too, that one book came from an acclaimed American scholar and MacArthur "Genius Grant" recipient; another from a Mexican academic with a deep background in the fields of faith, philosophy and geopolitics; and the third from a Texas author of bestselling books who has shown a knack for covering action and crime.

I can't do these books sufficient justice in a single column, but they are now permanent residents on my Texas bookshelves. I'm sure that they will serve as references for historical background again and again.

'Bad Mexicans' helped spark a revolution

Hernández had already written two breakthrough books on history and social justice, "Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol" and "City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion and the Rise of Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965," when, earlier this year, her latest, "Bad Mexicans," became a sensation.

Director of the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, Hernández, in her latest volume, uncovers the parts played by anarchists, socialists and liberals in overthrowing President Porfirio Díaz, the general who defeated the French at the decisive Battle of Puebla in 1862, and who had become Mexico's de facto dictator over the course of seven elections and 31 years of rule. He resigned in 1911 after losing several battles against a loose coalition of revolutionaries.

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Hernández helpfully explains how Díaz evolved from a liberal to an autocrat, and how his forces, official and informal, vigorously smashed down any threat to his power, whether by Indigenous tribes, labor activists, or regional political leaders. He was helped by ultra-wealthy Americans whom Díaz had allowed to sweep up millions of acres of Mexican land while dominating the country's railroads, mines and oil production.

Those powerful Americans, in turn, put enormous pressure on both the Mexican and American governments to suppress dissent and any action against their material interests.

Among the most effective dissidents was Ricardo Flores Magón, who with his brother and other allies put out an anti-regime newspaper that was smuggled to magonistas on both sides of the border. While other intellectuals and activists had criticized the outrages committed by Díaz's people, Flores Magón was the first to condemn the dictator directly and by name.

He paid a price, first in prison conditions that destroyed his health, then on the lam, where he and allies appealed to the disaffected from San Antonio, St. Louis, Montreal, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

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Hernández wrestles with two primary projects: To revive the memory of Flores Magón, whose legacy had been all but erased from most mainstream histories; and to show how powerful Americans — including a group called the "Arizona Rangers" and an investigative agency that served as the precursor to the FBI — violently harassed anti-Díaz Mexicans and Mexican Americans. She was helped in her first project by — of all things — the fact that Díaz and other leaders kept detailed records of their nefarious activities, which historians have been able to sift from the national archives.

Hernández's work is supported by a growing body of evidence regarding the decades-long oppression of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans on this side of the border. Some of that work has been mirrored by the findings of Monica Muñoz Martinez and her colleagues at the University of Texas. Also a "Genius Grant" awardee, Muñoz Martinez's essential book, "The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-American Violence in Texas," informs Guinn's "War on the Border" as well, especially regarding the dark role played by the Texas Rangers during this period.

Hernández is careful to call attention to significant data points, such as the fact that more than 100,000 Mexicans fled to the U.S. in the years before the Mexican Revolution, and more than 1 million during the following chaos.

At times, the connections among all the players and their motivations are not immediately clear. Yet Hernández masterfully weaves it all together into a compelling narrative, parts of which I will read again and again.

Playing the America card in Mexico

Journalist and author Jeff Guinn, based in Fort Worth, is a proven storyteller. He has written a half dozen popular nonfiction books, several of them on sensational subjects, such as his bestseller, "Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson." He's especially good at sweeping action. The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) presents an ideal canvas for such drama.

Smartly, Guinn starts his tale with Pancho Villa's deliberately provocative raid — March 8-9, 1916 — on the border town of Columbus, New Mexico. The Mexican Revolution was well underway by then. Villa's clear aim was to draw U.S. troops across the border, which eventually happened when Gen. John "Black Jack" Pershing led the "Punitive Expedition" deep into Mexican territory from March 14, 1916, to Feb. 7, 1917.

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Villa was delighted to provoke the Americans, since their military presence on Mexican soil not only distracted his rivals among the revolutionaries, it was certain to outrage the Mexican people, who just 60 years earlier had endured a devastating American invasion that wrenched Texas, California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Arizona permanently from Mexican control.

Guinn dismisses the story of Díaz and his long rule pretty swiftly. He's interested in what happened on the ground once the revolution had begun in earnest. As for Flores Magón, he does not even make a cameo appearance.

The long-distance dueling between two such oversized personalities as Villa and Pershing is plenty entertaining and instructive. Bonus: Guinn's clearly delineated maps help, not just with military movements, but with Mexican geography in general, which the average American knows chiefly from major landmarks and the most common routes. The more maps the merrier.

While not as ambitious or profound as Hernández's book, I'll continue to consult "War on the Border" as a guide to the major players and actions of the war.

What the conquests tell us about Texas

Esteemed Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes, a descendant of conquistadors and based at the University of Bristol in the U.K., has written extensively on religious culture, especially in the New World, and can provide crucial background on the intellectual and geopolitical forces that clashed here and in Europe.

I should say at the outset that the word "Texas" does not appear in the index for "Conquistadores." Spanish exploration of the northern reaches of what became New Spain remained sporadic and inconclusive during the period from the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Indies in 1492 and the close of the major conquests in the 1530s.

Whereas the action in Guinn's and Hernández's books slips in and out of Texas geographically, Cervantes can give us only a preview of coming history north of the Rio Grande.

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The early presidios and missions in Texas, for instance, played out the decades-long tensions between the Spanish military and their sometime partners, friars such as the Franciscans, who differed from the start on how to convert the Indigenous peoples as well as how to treat them.

As do many historians, Cervantes places this conquest in the context of the centuries-long Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula by Christians from Muslims. So much of Spain's identity — and I should correct that by saying the entities that would become Spain — is wrapped up in this quest, that Columbus' obsession with reaching Asia by crossing the Atlantic could have been a footnote.

Yet much of the reasoning behind the conversion of the Muslims and Jews back in Spain affected how military leaders, aristocratic landowners and Catholic clergy approached the Indigenous peoples they found here. Meanwhile, back in Europe, monarchs, the Hapsburgs in particular, seemed as much concerned with what was happening in Austria, The Netherlands or even Algeria as a stepping stone to the Holy Land as what lay across the sea.

If Cervantes gets bogged down in the details, it comes in his tracking of the various religious currents of the time. Then again, they influenced the monarchs and clergy, which in turn affected policy in the New World.

Cervantes pulls no punches regarding the brutality of the conquistadors and their exploitation of the Indigenous peoples. Yet he is as much interested in the works of Bartolomeo de Las Casas and other persistent defenders of the same people.

Cervantes cannot avoid the fact that the unlikely exploits of Cortez, Pizarro and other conquistadors make for spellbinding copy. Once again, I got caught up in the drama of it all.

Cervantes helps out by looking more closely at the religious and political views of the Indigenous peoples, which help explain the outcomes. His nimble use of Nahuatl, historically the dominant language of Central Mexico, for instance, not only attests to his research and writing skills, but also to his perhaps misguided trust that the non-Nahuatl-speaking readers can keep up with him.

All three books are good reads.

Michael Barnes writes about the people, places, culture and history of Austin and Texas. He can be reached at mbarnes@statesman.com.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Three absorbing new histories link Texas more closely to Mexico