Here in the United States, many people marked Cinco de Mayo last week, May 5th, a holiday that commemorates Mexico’s unexpected victory over France in the Battle of Puebla, May 5th, 1862, and is now mostly commemorated by Mexican Americans. The hero of that battle was Porfirio Díaz, who went on to rule as the longtime president of Mexico until he was toppled in the Mexican Revolution by people he called “bad Mexicans.” They’re the focus of an incredible new book that explores the untold story of the Mexican Revolution and the men and women who incited it, and how it relates to the rise of U.S. imperialism and white supremacy.
So, this book about a revolution in Mexico actually begins with a lynching in Texas in 1910, when a young man named Antonio Rodríguez was accused of murdering a white woman. And by the end of the day, a posse of white men and farmers and locals had found Antonio and dragged him by a lasso looped around his neck to a tree at the edge of town in Rocksprings, Texas, and they burned him alive. And that story of a lynching was part of a longer history of anti-Mexican violence, especially in Texas but across the borderlands, in which nearly 500 Mexicans were lynched between the 1870s and the 1920s. And all of this racial violence that Mexicans and Mexican Americans were experiencing was part of the uprising that led to the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
— source democracynow.org | May 10, 2022