The Plan de San Diego

The Plan de San Diego, a 1915 manifesto that proposed a rebellion against US rule in the American Southwest, has attracted sustained scholarly attention since the 1950s. The uprising associated with the Plan began as a series of raids on ranches, irrigation works, and railroads by ethnic Mexicans and quickly developed into a full-blown regional rebellion, in which a small guerrilla army battled local posses, Texas Rangers, and the thousands of federal soldiers dispatched to quell the violence. In response, vigilantes and the Rangers led a far bloodier counterinsurgency that included the indiscriminate harassment of ethnic Mexicans, forcible relocation of rural residents, and mass executions. This episode was recognized at the time as part of the wider unrest, violence, and surveillance brought to the United States–Mexico border by the Mexican Revolution.This latest addition to the corpus of work on the Plan musters new evidence in support of an argument that the authors have made in a variety of publications, beginning with a 1978 article in this journal: that the uprising was enabled, supported, and manipulated by Mexican revolutionary leader Venustiano Carranza in order to gain diplomatic recognition from US President Woodrow Wilson and thereby to cement his position as the dominant power in revolutionary Mexico. As the authors write, Carranza “played Woodrow Wilson like a violin in 1915” (p. 262), using the uprising as a cudgel to secure recognition for his regime as the de facto government of Mexico. They are among the first scholars to examine the papers of Agustín Garza, a close associate of generals in northeastern Mexico affiliated with Carranza. They use an exhaustive investigation of these papers, as well as the records of the US military, the State Department, and the Mexican government, to document the considerable support that Garza funneled to the revolt in the form of weapons and personnel. Those scholars interested in the Garza papers and the connections between Carranza's allies and the Plan de San Diego will find this to be a thorough and detailed guide, much more so than any other work on the Plan de San Diego.Satisfactory and potentially useful as archival recovery, the book is not successful as a piece of historical scholarship. The authors cling tenaciously to a simplistic understanding of historical interpretation, in which if an event can be described accurately in one way it cannot also be analyzed from a different vantage. Since they conclude that Carranza fomented the uprising, any consideration of the local origins of unrest, which other studies have located in the dispossession and disfranchisement of Mexican Americans and which their own evidence suggests prompted numerous local residents to join the revolt, is dismissed as politically correct pandering. (Full disclosure: this reviewer is singled out as one of the most egregious purveyors of such silliness.) It is as though a study documenting the extensive and critical French financial and naval support for the American Revolution concluded that any examination of the motives or ideology of the revolutionaries was simply foolish. Could it not be the case that an event had both an international and a local dimension, that to explore one facet does not require the dismissal of another?The book's central argument about Carranza's manipulation of the uprising remains unproven. Harris and Sadler take Garza's statements as straightforward reflections of historical truth, rather than as efforts to secure what he wanted, whether it be support for the uprising or — decades later — a federal pension warranted by loyal service to the revolution. Convincing evidence of the success of Carranza's supposed strategy of using the uprising would have to come from records of deliberation within the Wilson administration, but Harris and Sadler present no such evidence and seem to have consulted no such sources. The voluminous secondary literature on Wilson and his validation of national self-determination would suggest more fundamental reasons why Carranza more than any other Mexican leader would have appealed to Wilson as a modernizing democrat respectful of the prerogatives of private property and the benefits of open markets. But the authors do not even gesture at this wider context for their central argument.A final shortcoming of the book lies in its tone and moral attitude toward its subject. Contemporary observers, including army officers and local Anglo-Americans hostile to the uprising, were appalled by the slaughter of ethnic Mexicans perpetrated in the name of suppressing the revolt. Texas Rangers threatened J. T. Canales, at the time the only Mexican American state representative, with death for trying to expose these killings. The authors' only reflection on this white supremacist terrorism is to ridicule Canales because his wife conveyed his fear to the Speaker of the House of Representatives (p. 249).This reader concludes that the book's historical sensibility and moral compass do an injustice to the events that it recounts

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