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RINGSIDE TO A REVOLUTION
An Underground Cultural History
Of El Paso and Juárez: 1893-1923
By David Dorado Romo
240 Historical photographs and images
Including 15 full-spread photographs
And 30 photographs filling one page.
Trade paper 978-0938317-91-3 $26.95
“Ringside Seat to a Revolution...is
‘people’s history’ at
its best.”
—Howard Zinn
“Thank you for giving
us back our stories.”
—Many students and Mexican-Americans
To David Dorado Romo
after publication
Of Ringside Seat to a Revolution.
El Paso/Juárez served as the tinderbox of the Mexican
Revolution and the tumultuous years to follow. In essays and 240 archival
photographs, David Romo tells the surreal stories at the roots of the greatest
Latin American revolution: The sainted beauty queen Teresita inspires
revolutionary fervor and is rumored to have blessed the first rifles of the
revolutionaries; anarchists publish newspapers and hatch plots against the
hated Porfirio Diaz regime; Mexican outlaw Pancho Villa eats ice cream cones
and rides his Indian motorcycle happily through downtown; El Paso’s gringo
mayor wears silk underwear because he is afraid of Mexican lice; John Reed
contributes a never-before-published essay; young Mexican maids refuse to be
deloused so they shut down the border and back down Pershing’s men in the
process; vegetarian and spiritualist Francisco Madero institutes the Mexican
revolutionary junta in El Paso before crossing into Juárez to his ill-fated
presidency and assassination; and bands play Verdi while firing squads go about
their deadly business. Romo’s work does what Mike Davis’ City of Quartz did for
Los Angeles—it presents a subversive and contrary vision of the sister cities
during this crucial time for both countries.
Truly, the best seats in the house for watching the
spectacle of the Mexican Revolution were located along the Rio Grande in El
Paso, Texas and its sister city Juárez, Chihuahua. Indeed, these cities—like
the city of Boston, Massachusetts, for the American Revolution—served as the
intellectual crucible for the Mexican Revolution. This is where the first
modern revolution of Latin America began. The heroes and images of this
people’s uprising still populate the border’s cultural landscape like ghosts.
But as with so many histories that involve peoples and
cultures of color, we’ve always seen the events through the wrong set of eyes.
David Dorado Romo—a micro-historian, a man with his feet on both sides of the
Rio Grande—gives us new eyes and a re-imagined perspective to witness these
revolutionary years. Through detailed research, archival photographs and great
storytelling, he relates the history of a long-ignored cultural and political
renaissance that was born of the conflict to depose the Díaz Regime and the
bloody struggles that followed. His history helps us define fronterizos, a
hybrid group of people—not wholly Mexican, not wholly American—who played an
essential role in launching the Mexican Revolution. This marvelous cast of
characters includes well known characters like the people’s revolutionary,
Pancho Villa, who rides his Indian motorcycle through the streets of El Paso;
Felipe Angeles who, after a speech of love and prophecy, dies a beautiful death
standing before a firing squad; and Teresa Urrea, la Santa de Cabora, who was
the spiritual inspiration for so many of the paisanos who gave their lives for
Mexico.
But Ringside Seat
is also about insurrection from the perspective of the peripheral characters:
military band musicians who played Verdi operas during executions in Juárez;
filmmakers who came to the border to make silent movies like The Greaser’s Revenge and Guns and Greasers; female bullfighters;
poets; jazz musicians; Anglo pool hustlers reborn as postcard salesmen; Chinese
illegal aliens; arms smugglers; and, of course, revolutionaries,
counterrevolutionaries and counter-counter-revolutionaries.
“David Romo’s Ringside
Seat to a Revolution is a fascinating glimpse into unknown scenes of the
Mexican Revolution of 1911. He takes us into El Paso and Juárez-facing one
another across the Rio Grande-in the years just before and just after the
exciting events of the revolution itself. It is close up and personal
history-through the eyes of an extraordinary cast of characters. It is
‘people’s history’ at its best.”
—Howard Zinn, author of A
People's History of the United States
“David Romo’s micro-history is brilliant. Here you’ll find
what official history seems to ignore: the salt of the earth, the surprising
anecdote, rumors, the absurd.”
—Paco Ignacio Taibo
II, Mexican historian and author
“This is an extraordinary book. For those who love the
tangled history of Texas and Mexico and their tragic border, it’s a treasure.”
―Dallas Morning News
2017 Edition published in
Cooperation with the
William P. Clements Center for
Southwest Studies,
Southern Methodist University
David Dorado Romo,
Ph.D., the son of Mexican
immigrants, is a fronterizo historian
specializing in U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History, Global Migration, Urban
Studies and Public History. Ringside Seat
to a Revolution is the result of his three-year exploration of archives
detailing the cultural and political roots of the Mexican revolution along la
Frontera. Currently, he is the Mellon Resident Scholar at the School for
Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is working on a book titled Mexican
Nazis & Global Pachucos: Propaganda, Intelligence and the Production of
Border Invasion Anxiety. In 2015, he was a Fulbright Research Scholar
at El Colegio de México, in Mexico City. He also the recipient of the
Outstanding Public History Project Award as co-director of the Museo
Urbano from the National Council on Public History.
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