Fanáticos, Exiles, and Spies: Revolutionary Failures on the US–Mexico Border, 1923–1930 by Julian F. Dodson (review)

To historians of Mexico, it is increasingly clear that the 1920s were a time of political conflict and competition. While the events of that decade paled in comparison to the turmoil and bloodshed of the Mexican Revolution ten years earlier, they nevertheless included political assassinations, multiple military uprisings, and a massive church-state conflict. Moreover, many of these events spilled into the U.S.–Mexico border region as political dissidents were forced into exile.

Julian F. Dodson’s Fanáticos, Exiles, and Spies does much to clarify and elucidate the politics of this period. Dodson provides a detailed overview of the activities and relationships of a group of exiles he calls the revolution’s “losers,” the “disgruntled reactionaries, revolutionaries, and political Catholics . . . who held as their goal the ruin of the government of Plutarco Elías Calles” (109).

The main contribution of this book is not necessarily what it reveals about each of these individual counterrevolutionary movements, all of which have attracted scholarly attention, but rather that it studies them in relation to each other, making clear not only that these movements overlapped, but also that “the violence that scarred the 1920s was not episodic and disconnected but entwined” (181).

To tell this complex story, Dodson deploys the rich archival materials of Mexico’s Confidential Department, which was charged with surveilling Mexican dissidents both inside and outside of national borders. After a brief discussion of the history of intelligence in Mexico in chapter 1, the book proceeds chronologically through several interconnected exile movements. Chapter 2 discusses Adolfo de la Huerta, a prominent politician who went into exile in 1924, where he collaborated with powerful U.S. opponents of Calles, cultivated relationships with other dissidents, and kept “a steady flow of arms and ammunitions” going south across the border (63). De la Huerta was ultimately unable to launch a rebellion from exile, Dodson argues, because he failed to appeal to Mexican Catholics disaffected by Calles’s anticlerical policies.

By contrast, Enrique Estrada, a former secretary of war in exile in Los Angeles, did appeal to these “political Catholics.” In chapter 3, Dodson discusses how Estrada used “the language of outrage over the perceived religious persecution” to recruit supporters from the immigrant community in Southern California (101). Estrada’s 1926 revolt ultimately failed, however, as did similar efforts by De la Huerta, Félix Díaz, and others, because rebels “lacked the essential unity they needed to make their move against the Mexican government” (106).

This unity would be provided after 1926 as Mexican Catholics in exile began a concerted effort to overthrow the Calles regime not only by forging new alliances with other exiles, but also by seeking support from U.S. Catholics. In chapter 4, Dodson provides a review of Catholic activities, with a particularly fascinating focus on Luz Franco de Perches, a member of the Damas Católicas who went into exile in El Paso in 1926 and served as “a key node of communication and information between Mexico and various exile groups” (118). Dodson also provides tantalizing new evidence of arms smuggling by exiled Mexican Catholics and their allies in the Knights of Columbus.

The narrative culminates in chapter 5 with the 1929 rebellion of General José Gonzalo Escobar. Although Escobar’s revolt stemmed primarily from “political and military discontent” within Mexico (162), it was also the last hope of the Catholic exiles, who had spent the 1926– 29 period casting about in search of someone to lead a revolt within the borderlands. Unfortunately for them, the rebellion was thwarted after only three months, thanks in large part to intelligence gathered by the Mexican Confidential Department.

This Escobar revolt also marked the last serious military threat from the borderlands; after 1929, the border would no longer serve as a “springboard for counterrevolutionary conspiracies” (171). By the mid-1930s, the...