The Plan de San Diego: Tejano Rebellion, Mexican Intrigue by Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler (review)
Harris and Sadler, emeriti history professors from New Mexico State University, began researching die Plan de San Diego (PSD) in 1977, five years after my first essay on the subject was published. The PSD was a response to eruptions in 1915 in South Texas along the Rio Grande River, with raids and violence directed by Mexicans and tejanos (Texans of Mexican ancestry) against the white community. Their goal was to create an independent state open to Mexican, Japanese, and Indian people, with a separate state to be created for blacks. In its second published iteration, the anarchist rhetoric of Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magon, as expressed in their newspaper Regeneration, permeated the PSD document, but nonetheless the declared race war was to go on. A man named Augustin Garza was designated military commander of the Liberating Army of Races and People. The PSD attracted a diverse following, including German and Japanese interests, anarchists, reformists, and cattle rustlers. Suppressors included the U.S. Bureau of Investigation (BI) agents, U.S. Army soldiers, Texas rangers, gunfighters, and vigilantes. In Mexico, the faction of Venustiano Carranza, struggling to obtain diplomatic recognition from President Woodrow Wilson so as to beat out his chief rival Pancho Villa, played both sides of the fence: it encouraged the PSD to show sympathy with the insurgents against American racism but then sought to suppress it once Carranza's recognition had been secured.