ISMAEL RIVERA: We have a phrase - if we don't know where we come from, we don't know where we go. (Speaking Spanish).

We're in the historic center of Mexico's capital, Mexico City, a massive city of over 8 million people with tour guide Ismael Rivera (ph).

RIVERA: (Speaking Spanish) My name is Ismael Rivera. I was born in Mexico City.

ABDELFATAH: I can't help but go on a historic tour of pretty much everywhere I visit now.

RIVERA: Underneath here, there's three Aztec temples dedicated to the sun, to the wind and...

ABDELFATAH: Ismael guides us through winding streets, past towering Gothic churches, ancient Aztec temple sites, ornately engraved Spanish colonial arches, a salsa class in one square and a busy market with taco vendors every 2 feet - the smell is delicious, like, unreal. And then we find ourselves in a quieter place, surrounded by tall trees, fountains with statues of Greek gods and these vibrant purple flowers called jacarandas.

RIVERA: This is Alameda Park. It was the first one in American continent.

ABDELFATAH: Alameda Central Park was built in the 16th century. It sits right off of Cinco de Mayo Avenue.

RIVERA: And Diego Rivera paints a mural about this park.

ABDELFATAH: Diego Rivera, who's considered one of the greatest Mexican painters of the 20th century, called this mural (speaking Spanish) - Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central.

ABDELFATAH: A replica of the mural stretches maybe 50-feet long across the side of a building at one end of the park.

RIVERA: It's divided in different periods - pre-Hispanic period, colonial period.

ABDELFATAH: The mural basically tells the entire history of Mexico, from the fall of the Aztec empire in the 16th century when the Spanish conquerors arrived to a revolution in the 20th century in images - like a modern-day cave painting. It's a swirl of colors with a tightly packed crowd of people all along the bottom. The faces are Indigenous, African and European, central characters from Mexico's past.

RIVERA: We're seeing a guy with bloody hands. He's Hernan Cortes.

ABDELFATAH: The leader of the Spanish invasion.

RIVERA: And the blood is the blood of the Native people.

ABDELFATAH: And as you move right across the mural, you see the influence of Catholicism on Mexico.

RIVERA: We see the nun.

ABDELFATAH: A nun in a black hooded veil, then you see an American general in uniform.

RIVERA: They were the war...

ABDELFATAH: War between the U.S...

ABDELFATAH: There's men in suits, gunslinging farmers in sombreros, women in Victorian gowns alongside women in traditional huipil dresses, including...

ABDELFATAH: But perhaps the most striking character is a man who sits right around the middle of the mural and looms above all the other characters. He has a head of bright white hair with an impressive mustache to match and is dressed in a dark blue military uniform overrun with medals.

RIVERA: He is Porfirio Diaz.

ABDELFATAH: Porfirio Diaz, the general who ruled Mexico for 35 years.

ABDELFATAH: Porfirio Diaz is at the center of the mural and of modern Mexican history thanks to a single day in May.

KELLY LYTLE HERNANDEZ: May 5 of 1862.

ABDELFATAH: May 5 - Cinco de Mayo. On that day, an epic battle was fought, a battle fought and won by Mexicans against foreign aggression, a battle that helped shape the future of Mexico and the U.S.

HERNANDEZ: And that battle is led by several generals, but one of them was Porfirio Diaz.

HERNANDEZ: That is what we celebrate when we celebrate Cinco de Mayo.

This is Kelly Lytle Hernandez. She's a professor of history at UCLA and author of a new book called "Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, And Revolution In The Borderland."

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Colorful dancers and dozens of bands will be performing up and down San Diego Avenue through the heart...

HERNANDEZ: So I grew up in San Diego, Calif.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: ...One of the largest Cinco de Mayo event on the West Coast.

HERNANDEZ: And oh, gosh, you know, I don't know if I remember a lot about Cinco de Mayo outside of a couple school festivals, maybe a couple of things at local fairs. As a child, you know, a regular African American kid growing up in the borderlands, I witnessed a lot of what was happening around the border and immigration and border policing as I was growing up.

ARABLOUEI: But Kelly says she learned very little about Mexican history in school. And Cinco de Mayo remained this abstract thing - a fun party in the San Diego streets, divorced from a particular time and place, until she studied that history as an adult.

MAURICIO TENORIO-TRILLO: What is Cinco de Mayo? Cinco de Mayo is a celebration of the Mexican victory in one battle.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Happening now - thousands flooding downtown Tulsa celebrating Cinco de Mayo.

TENORIO-TRILLO: And now it's like St. Patrick days, you know.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Bringing smiles and also big business to different restaurants.

TENORIO-TRILLO: Cinco de Mayo sale.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Let me just take a shot here to get the thing started.

TENORIO-TRILLO: A cerveza, fiesta, whatever.

ARABLOUEI: This is Mauricio Tenorio Trillo. He's a history professor at the University of Chicago.

TENORIO-TRILLO: I'm also professor at the Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas in Mexico City.

ARABLOUEI: Growing up in Mexico City, Mauricio had a similar experience to Kelly Lytle Hernandez but in reverse on the other side of the border. For a long time, he wasn't taught much about U.S. history.

TENORIO-TRILLO: It's all about Mexico, Mexico, a very, you know, self-contained. And the problem is Mexico, the U.S. and Canada have shared a common history for a long time.

TENORIO-TRILLO: Cinco de Mayo is one of those things because it represents historically a common past between Mexican and Americans.

ARABLOUEI: But what does it mean to share a common past? Where does the story of one country end and the other begin? Does history have a border?

ABDELFATAH: And on this episode of THROUGHLINE from NPR, we're traveling back to the original Cinco de Mayo and exploring how it helped shape the future of two young border nations as they were figuring out who to become in a rapidly changing world that was shedding old empires and making way for a new economic order.

JEFF: Hi. This is Jeff (ph) in Kawasaki, Japan. And you're listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Part 1 - the first Cinco de Mayo.

HERNANDEZ: Porfirio Diaz was born in 1830 in Oaxaca, Mexico.

ARABLOUEI: Oaxaca is a state in the south of Mexico, along the Pacific coast. It's known for beautiful mountains and large Indigenous communities. It's here that Porfirio Diaz, the guy with the head of white hair and chest full of medals at the top of that mural, grew up.

HERNANDEZ: His dad died when he was 3 years old, leaving his mother to raise him and his siblings. He, like many Mexicans during the time, was hungry, poorly housed and underfed, and he had to struggle to make his way through life.

HERNANDEZ: During this time, not only is Mexico struggling economically, but it's pretty much constantly at war - civil war in particular.

ARABLOUEI: Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821. And almost immediately...

HERNANDEZ: Two major factions among Mexicans - the conservatives and the liberals - start to do battle with one another for control over the Mexican state, and it flips back and forth. There are 50 coups in Mexico. Porfirio Diaz grows up while Mexico's in this crisis of hunger, of disease, of war, of poverty.

ARABLOUEI: Much like its neighbor to the north, the U.S., this newly minted nation was facing an identity crisis, trying to figure out who it wanted to be now that it was no longer a colony and grappling with what to do with the system the Spanish had left behind.

HERNANDEZ: The Spanish developed a system called the Casta system.

ARABLOUEI: This Casta or caste system set up a racial hierarchy in Mexico, with people of Spanish descent at the top, mixed-race populations in the middle, known as mulattos and mestizos. Indigenous and African people were at the bottom. Porfirio Diaz was mestizo.

ABDELFATAH: The Casta system helped create a parallel economic system, with most of the wealth concentrated in the hands of people of Spanish descent. And after independence, a lot of the internal battles centered on the system. Conservatives wanted to preserve the old way of doing things, and liberals wanted to create a new, more equal system.

UNIDENTIFIED CHOIR: (Singing in non-English language).

ABDELFATAH: Amid the chaos, Porfirio's mother sent him and his brother off to seminary, hoping they would become priests and be shielded from all the turmoil. Porfirio reluctantly agreed.

HERNANDEZ: Porfirio Diaz was not really determined to be a man of faith. Instead, he was really into athletics. He built a home gym for him and his brother. That's who Porfirio Diaz was.

ABDELFATAH: And in 1846, while Porfirio was stuck in seminary, something happened that sent a jolt of inspiration through him.

HERNANDEZ: The United States decides to invade Mexico and to seize the northern half of the Mexican land base.

ABDELFATAH: And after two bloody years of fighting, in 1848, Mexico was forced to give up a huge chunk of its land to the U.S., increasing the size of the U.S. by one-third.

HERNANDEZ: So the United States had already acquired Texas by the beginning of the U.S.-Mexico war but at the end of the war was able to seize California - what became California, Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Colorado, Utah, Nevada, I mean, a massive amount of land. I think it's about 330 million acres.

TENORIO-TRILLO: The Mexican-American War was a founding moment for both Mexico as a nation and Mexican nationalism. But it is also a very important founding moment for the United States. This is, in fact, the great American Imperial War.

ABDELFATAH: It was the birth of a new empire that was only beginning to define itself.

ARABLOUEI: Just like Porfirio Diaz. At age 19, he drops out of seminary and...

HERNANDEZ: He joins the liberal faction and emerges as a quite influential and successful general in the liberal army.

ARABLOUEI: It's in those battles that Porfirio Diaz built his reputation.

HERNANDEZ: On one hand, he was always sure to feed his front-line troops first, right? So he knew how to build loyalty in that sense. But he also often used high levels of violence to compel people to obey his commands. And so he had both of those sides to him. And it made him both a wildly popular and feared man.

ARABLOUEI: Porfirio was willing to do whatever it took to advance the liberal cause. And this attitude made Porfirio's mentor, Benito Juarez, who was influential in liberal politics, kind of nervous. He once said...

HERNANDEZ: Quote, "if we're not careful, Porfirio could kill us while crying."

ABDELFATAH: In 1861, Benito Juarez became president of Mexico, the same year that Abraham Lincoln became president of the United States. Lincoln and Juarez had a lot in common as leaders. Both were defenders of a vision of equality and liberation. Internal conflicts raged on both sides of the border. In the U.S...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: The people of South Carolina.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: The people of Mississippi.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: The people of Florida.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: The people of Alabama.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: The people of Louisiana.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: The people of Texas.

ABDELFATAH: Seven states in the southern U.S. seceded from the Union.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Our decision is made. We embrace the alternative of separation.

ABDELFATAH: Soon after, the American Civil War broke out.

ABDELFATAH: And in Mexico, conservatives reached out to France for help taking back their country. Napoleon III had been waiting for an opportunity to rebuild the French empire in the Americas.

HERNANDEZ: And that is the moment that Napoleon III decides to strike in Mexico.

HERNANDEZ: They dock at the ports of Veracruz and Tampico. And they have to march across Mexico to Mexico City to occupy the heart of the country...

HERNANDEZ: ...And along the way, face extraordinary and constant guerrilla fighting from the liberals, led by Benito Juarez, Porfirio Diaz and many others, who are, you know, attacking the caravans along the way to Mexico City.

ARABLOUEI: Their resistance slowed down the French but didn't stop them. And after weeks of battles across the Mexican countryside, the French reached the town of Puebla, the final stop before Mexico City. And on May 5, 1862, Cinco de Mayo, the battle of Puebla began.

HERNANDEZ: There were liberal troops stationed all around the city of Puebla. And around noon, the French troops descend upon the city. They kick in basically the front barricades, the back barricades. And they are overrunning the city.

HERNANDEZ: And Porfirio Diaz and his troops...

ARABLOUEI: Comprised mostly of indigenous fighters.

HERNANDEZ: ...Were hiding in a church in the center of town. And just at the right moment, they came crashing out of that church. And they led hand-to-hand battles across the city that were extraordinarily lethal. I mean, hundreds died within hours. But it was enough to force the French into retreat. And Porfirio Diaz chased them down.

TENORIO-TRILLO: This victory in Pueblo became very important because it's a symbol of winning at least one episode in a difficult moment to a very famous army, the French army.

HERNANDEZ: An indigenous army besting and defeating the French.

TENORIO-TRILLO: Which then was interpreted by Mexican communities in the U.S. as a very important moment, both because they are Mexicans and because they are Americans.

ARABLOUEI: They viewed the fight against the French in Mexico and the fight against the Confederacy in the U.S. as two sides of the same coin, the fate of one intimately linked with the fate of the other. And it was no accident people were hearing about this battle even across the border. In the U.S., Porfirio Diaz was making sure of that.

HERNANDEZ: He's a brilliant communications strategist. And he strategically turned the Cinco de Mayo Festival or celebration into a celebration of his power and his reign and made it something that was celebrated across Mexico and even in diasporic Mexican communities in the United States.

ARABLOUEI: Just as fast as his stardom grew, so too did his political power. And at a certain point...

HERNANDEZ: He begins to challenge his former mentor, in particular, Benito Juarez, for the presidency.

ABDELFATAH: And when he failed to win against him in elections...

HERNANDEZ: He turns, fairly quickly, to the military and coup d'etats.

ARABLOUEI: So he staged a coup, but it failed. And afterwards, he began raising money from Mexican exiles and U.S. investors. Then Porfirio Diaz launched a second coup.

HERNANDEZ: And the second, in 1876, is successful.

TENORIO-TRILLO: For the common man or woman in Mexico, this was just another coup d'etat. They have seen plenty of them. So it was just business as usual.

ABDELFATAH: But before long, they would come to realize it was anything but that. Coming up, a dictator is born, and across the border, a new revolt takes shape.

MACKENZIE GEORGE: Hi. This is Mackenzie George. I'm from Halifax, Nova Scotia. And you're listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10: Part 2 - Laboratory of Empire.

ABDELFATAH: It's 1893, and Margarita Magon has just been evicted from her home in Mexico City, forced to wade through the muddy streets for days in search of a new place to live.

ABDELFATAH: She eventually settles in a neighborhood one American journalist calls a microbic spot which should be avoided. But it'll have to do.

ABDELFATAH: Margarita Magon once had high hopes for her life back when she was growing up in Oaxaca, the same world Porfirio Diaz had grown up in.

HERNANDEZ: And she had actually fought in the liberal army beside Porfirio Diaz.

ABDELFATAH: It was on the battlefields against the French where she met her husband, Teodoro Flores. And after the victory at the Battle of Puebla on Cinco de Mayo, Teodoro had marched into Mexico City alongside Porfirio Diaz.

HERNANDEZ: The family actually moved from Oaxaca to Mexico City once Porfirio Diaz becomes president with the hope and expectation that the father of Teodoro Flores would be able to get a job and have some financial security in Mexico City under the Diaz administration.

ABDELFATAH: But pretty quickly, that hope began to fall apart. Margarita's husband, Teodoro Flores, stopped receiving his government pension. And when he reached out to Porfirio Diaz about it...

HERNANDEZ: He does little more than send a signed photograph of himself back to the family. And the family continues to spin into financial disaster until Teodoro passes. He dies, leaving the family in dire straits.

ABDELFATAH: Margarita was on her own, trying to raise her three sons.

HERNANDEZ: Jesus, Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magon. And they were born, you know, just prior to or early in the Diaz administration.

ABDELFATAH: Porfirio Diaz became president in 1877 and would stay president for most of the next 35 years. So as the Flores Magon brothers grew up, Porfirio Diaz loomed large over their lives just as he did in the lives of every person in Mexico during that time. He was the never-ending president, determined to stay in power and remake Mexico for the modern era.

HERNANDEZ: First thing he does is he shuts down what had really become a bandit economy. And he runs around arresting and, frankly, having murdered many of the people and merchants who are involved in the bandit economy.

ARABLOUEI: That bandit economy paired with all the political turmoil had destabilized Mexico since independence. And Porfirio Diaz was coming in and saying, we need to have order to have progress. Orden y progreso quickly became his motto.

HERNANDEZ: And once he gets control of all of that, you know, then he's able to turn toward domestic economic development. And this is where U.S. investors are really, really important.

ARABLOUEI: He invited U.S. investors to come to Mexico and tap into its many resources - land, ports, minerals - which was great timing for the U.S., who was looking to build its economic empire.

HERNANDEZ: The first people to respond to this invitation - really open invitation are the railroad barons, right? We finished the transcontinental railroad, and the people who had led the construction really look up and look around and say, what's next? And as soon as Porfirio Diaz reaches out, they reach back. And they begin to build the railroads into Mexico. And by 1885, you get the first railroad that's connecting Mexico City to the United States. And those railroads are the first penetration that makes it possible for the building of a U.S.-Mexican economy.

ARABLOUEI: It was the Gilded Age, the era of mass industrialization. And more and more American and European investors started showing up in Mexico, including so-called robber barons like Rockefeller and Guggenheim, investing in everything from mining to oil to agriculture.

HERNANDEZ: And that's the signature piece of the Diaz administration - is the penetration of the Mexican economy by U.S. investors and turning it into, quote, "a treasure house for the world."

ARABLOUEI: On the surface, all this investment was great for Mexico, building up its infrastructure and bringing much-needed peace to the country after decades of instability.

HERNANDEZ: But there was an underbelly to all of this.

ABDELFATAH: Ricardo Flores Magon, Margarita's middle son, was away at law school around the time she was forced to wade through the muddy streets of Mexico City, looking for a place to stay. Feeling lost and confused, he dropped out of law school and...

HERNANDEZ: Enters into what his older brother calls his, quote, "stormy period."

ABDELFATAH: Ricardo went back to his family roots, traveling across the mountains of Oaxaca on his way to the Yucatan in the east.

HERNANDEZ: And he's, you know, visiting brothels, hanging out in cafes and learning about what it's like for many people, especially the migrants who are being pushed out of their home communities, who are working as sex workers and migrant laborers.

ABDELFATAH: Ricardo was beginning to understand that the cost of progress was high.

HERNANDEZ: So to be able to build all of those railroads, Porfirio Diaz was able to push through a set of laws that made it possible to expropriate communities, Indigenous communities in particular. And so they were extraordinarily vulnerable to land theft, essentially. And millions of campesinos and Indigenous communities became landless during the Porfirio Diaz regime.

ABDELFATAH: Some people resisted and were violently suppressed. Others were recruited to move to the U.S. by American companies. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred immigration from China, had created a labor shortage.

HERNANDEZ: It was the arrival of U.S. investors that sparked the beginning of mass migration to the United States.

ABDELFATAH: And for those who stayed...

HERNANDEZ: This profound dislocation led to them - forced them - to become wage laborers, usually very low-wage laborers in factories and haciendas.

ABDELFATAH: Haciendas were a remnant of the Spanish colonial period, operating a lot like feudalism had back in Europe. These large estates were owned by a privileged elite class, and they basically kept their workers in check by keeping them in debt.

TENORIO-TRILLO: And they have to keep working because they owe money to the hacienda.

ABDELFATAH: As more and more money streamed into Mexico, conditions for workers on these haciendas got worse and worse, leading Ricardo Flores Magon to conclude that Mexico had become a den of thieves, a laboratory for American empire and that the average Mexican worker was being left behind.

HERNANDEZ: And he returns home committed now to working with his older brother, Jesus, who's a lawyer and an activist, to bringing social reform to Mexico.

ARABLOUEI: By the turn of the 20th century, Ricardo and Jesus Flores Magon had gotten a newspaper off the ground in Mexico City called Regeneracion - Regeneration.

HERNANDEZ: In which they become increasingly vocally critical of the Diaz administration, calling it a - which nobody else would do during this time period - naming it a dictatorship.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #11: The Diaz regime is an absolute monarchy, a military dictatorship. Citizens are slaves.

HERNANDEZ: They work with a broader group of people who had become writers against the regime.

ARABLOUEI: And pretty soon what had begun as a family affair had grown into a movement. They called themselves Liberals, but also became known as the Magonistas. At first, Porfirio Diaz paid little attention to what they were up to.

HERNANDEZ: But as soon as they suggest that they're going to run someone against him in the upcoming presidential election, he has them all arrested and has the newspaper shut down.

ARABLOUEI: They go to jail for almost a year.

HERNANDEZ: They get back out.

HERNANDEZ: Diaz once again has them arrested.

ARABLOUEI: And it goes on and on like that for a couple of years.

HERNANDEZ: Until 1903, when Diaz has a gag order issued, and it prohibits any newspaper in Mexico from publishing any of the rebels' words. And they're, quite honestly, you know, frightened for their lives, that they've spent years in opposition to the Diaz regime and wondering, you know, when his patience is going to run out. And so in early 1904, they leave Mexico City very quietly, and they move to Laredo, Texas, with every intention of restarting their newspaper, Regeneracion, and trying to incite a revolution against Diaz from north of the border.

ARABLOUEI: But Diaz had spies in the U.S. tracking their every move. So the Magonistas traveled from city to city, gradually moving farther and farther away from the border, until finally they found themselves in St. Louis, Mo. And there, they established a political party.

HERNANDEZ: And soon they are building an army from St. Louis. They're putting the pieces together for outright revolt in Mexico.

ARABLOUEI: But even St. Louis wasn't far enough.

ABDELFATAH: Using his connections in the U.S., Porfirio Diaz managed to get Ricardo Flores Magon arrested there. And after he was bailed out of jail, Ricardo and the movement went underground.

HERNANDEZ: Living as fugitives, living on the run.

ABDELFATAH: All the while, they're continuing to publish the newspaper and connecting with like-minded thinkers in the U.S. Their message in favor of workers' rights and against capitalist exploitation was resonating because...

TENORIO-TRILLO: The countryside everywhere is terribly exploitative.

ABDELFATAH: From Russia to the Caribbean to the U.S., workers were being exploited in the name of order and progress, with a few at the top reaping the rewards.

TENORIO-TRILLO: So the idea of a beautiful countryside full of middle class is un-existent anywhere in the world. So it's just part of the same weltanschauung, the same worldview that is happening at the moment.

ABDELFATAH: Now, if you're wondering what the U.S. government thought about the fact that the Magonistas were attempting to stage a revolution in Mexico from the U.S., well, they weren't happy about it. At first, they mostly played a supporting role in Porfirio's resistance to the movement. But in 1906, something happened that pushed the U.S. to take a front-and-center role in taking down the Magonistas.

HERNANDEZ: There is an incredible strike, a labor strike, that happens in northern Mexico on June 1 of 1906.

ABDELFATAH: An American-owned mining company had set up shop in a town called Cananea. The managers of this company were white Americans who lived at the top of a hill in luxury.

HERNANDEZ: While they reserved all the low-wage, dangerous, dirty labor for Mexican workers and forced them to live in a segregated area of town, beneath where the mines would drop all of their most noxious gases. And so the workers in Cananea said, no more.

ABDELFATAH: They organized a strike to demand better wages and better working conditions. They then marched up the hill to where the American enclave lived. But the men standing guard wouldn't let them pass.

HERNANDEZ: And tell them, turn back.

ABDELFATAH: They refused. Then one of the managers turned on a fire hose and began directing it at the marchers.

HERNANDEZ: And all chaos breaks loose.

HERNANDEZ: Very quickly, the lumberyard is a total inferno.

HERNANDEZ: A killing spree begins in the streets of Cananea. And as the fire begins to lit the sky, about 40 miles away, in Arizona, Americans are looking south, seeing that Cananea is burning. They know that something is wrong.

ABDELFATAH: In the end, the strikers were defeated. The company prevailed. And...

HERNANDEZ: Most of the Mexican workers are grieving and tending to their dead.

ARABLOUEI: This incident got more Mexicans on both sides of the border wondering how the Americans had come to have so much power over the land and the law in Mexico, pushing more people to join the Magonistas. As they built up their army throughout the summer of 1906, the U.S. was getting very worried. A threat to Porfirio Diaz was a threat to the economic empire the U.S. had been building up.

HERNANDEZ: You got to know that at this time, one half of all U.S. foreign investments were in Diaz's Mexico. So this was a major issue for U.S. investors, large and small.

ARABLOUEI: Over the next couple of years, the Magonistas launched several raids in protest of Porfirio Diaz across Mexico, the deadliest taking place in June 1908. And throughout that time, the U.S. Marshals Service was tracking down and arresting the Magonistas wherever they could, Texas, Missouri, California. And then U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt turned up the heat.

HERNANDEZ: By happenstance, the bureau of investigation is established by Teddy Roosevelt.

ARABLOUEI: Otherwise known as the FBI.

HERNANDEZ: Following the Magonista's raids of June of 1908, several of the early bureau of investigation agents were turned to dedicate themselves to tracking down the Magonistas and suppressing their uprising. So it's a funny thing, you know? I think a lot of people know about the FBI. Some have heard about its history. But almost no one talks about how tracking down Mexican revolutionaries was one of the FBI's very first cases.

ARABLOUEI: Things weren't looking good for the Magonistas. Now they were running from Porfirio's spies, the U.S. Marshals Service and the newly minted FBI. But they had undoubtedly tapped into something real, a deep anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist frustration among the workers of Mexico and the world. More than 40 years after Porfirio Diaz fought tyranny on Cinco de Mayo, a new struggle was emerging against Porfirio Diaz, a struggle voiced in a small newspaper which lit a fire that refused to go out.

ABDELFATAH: Coming up, the fire rages out of control.

SAMUEL CHOI: This is Samuel Choi (ph) from San Diego, Calif. You're listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #12: Part 3, (non-English language spoken).

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #13: Your triumph will be very brilliant. And it will have incalculable consequences for our beloved Mexico.

ARABLOUEI: On November 16, 1908, a man named Francisco Madero claims to have been visited by a spirit.

HERNANDEZ: As a transcendentalist, he spoke to the dead.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #13: We have been working and preparing everything. And now that the spirits are ready, all we need is the powerful electric current your book will produce.

ARABLOUEI: Details are sparse, but Francisco Madero says the spirit was applauding him for a book he was writing, a book that would produce a powerful electrical current in Mexico, a current of democracy.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #13: You must find a man who is clever, false, hypocritical. You already know the antithesis with which you must answer him against cleverness (ph), loyalty against falseness, sincerity against hypocrisy, frankness.

ARABLOUEI: Madero refers to the spirit only as Bejota (ph), B.J. Most historians believe B.J. is short for Benito Juarez.

HERNANDEZ: Former mentor of Porfirio Diaz.

ARABLOUEI: And that he was instructing him to challenge Porfirio Diaz. Shortly after the spirit first visited him, Madero went on to become the main threat to Porfirio Diaz's reign.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #14: May our heavenly father shine upon your head his (inaudible) of love and goodness.

HERNANDEZ: So Francisco Madero is this - another fascinating character.

ARABLOUEI: Francisco Madero came from a very different world than Ricardo Flores Magon. His family was the fifth richest in Mexico, a family who lived comfortably under Porfirio Diaz's regime. He traveled to the U.S. and Europe, even went to college in Berkeley, Calif. He was destined for business, not politics. But when Madero began to see the brutality of the Diaz regime, he began to question it and slowly pushed back. Eventually, he found himself at the forefront of a movement with the main goal of bringing democracy to Mexico.

ABDELFATAH: While the Magonistas were doing their best to avoid capture by American authorities, Madero was building up his own name. In 1909, after he was visited by that spirit, he published a book criticizing Porfirio Diaz's unconstitutional methods called "The Presidential Succession Of 1910." And like the prophecy predicted, the book generated a powerful current of democracy among the Mexican people. Madero was saying it was time for free and fair elections in Mexico, something that would be impossible to achieve with Porfirio Diaz in power.

HERNANDEZ: And so he takes all of his wealth, and he launches a major campaign against Porfirio Diaz, runs for president against him, becomes wildly popular over the course of this campaign where thousands of people would come out to see him. Diaz would literally have the lights turned off so that they couldn't see him. But the people would come out with torches to illuminate the night so that they could see Madero, the great so-called apostle of democracy.

ABDELFATAH: Diaz responded forcefully, arresting thousands associated with Madero's movement, including Madero himself. He was sent to jail in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi, and it's from his prison cell that Francisco Madero learned Diaz won another election.

HERNANDEZ: Diaz wins once again. I think it was his seventh term in office at that point.

ARABLOUEI: It would be easy to assume that with Madero in jail and the Magonistas stairs on the run from the FBI that Porfirio Diaz would never leave office. But...

HERNANDEZ: In many ways, Diaz, he was old and nearly deaf, and he was alone. In 1910, the Magonistas U.S. had helped turn popular opinion in the United States, at least among progressives, against Diaz. You start to hear Diaz being described as a tyrant, as a brute. And so one of the most successful campaigns of the Magonistas against the Diaz regime is not just the military campaigns, but retaking the narrative.

ARABLOUEI: And even conservatives in the U.S. were rethinking their opinion of Diaz.

HERNANDEZ: You know, between 1908 and 1910, he had tried to regain some control over the Mexican economy by largely nationalizing the railroads, changing the rules. And many U.S. investors began to see him as a - really as a ingrate - right? - he was ungrateful, and that he was no longer protecting their interests to the degree that they wanted.

ARABLOUEI: And that set the stage for a sea change.

ABDELFATAH: Back in that jail cell in San Luis Potosi, Madero had decided after losing the election that he was done playing by the rules.

HERNANDEZ: It's clear on his mind that the only way to unseat Porfirio Diaz, it's not going to be through the political process, but it's going to be through an armed uprising.

ABDELFATAH: From his cell, Madero sent letters to his followers, working tirelessly to drum up a plan to get rid of Porfirio Diaz once and for all, what he called the Plan of San Luis Potosi. And in late October 1910, Madero escaped from jail with help from his wealthy family. He then went to San Antonio, Texas, and began putting his plan into action, reaching out to other rebels critical of Porfirio Diaz, including the Magonistas.

HERNANDEZ: Madero had a long relationship with the Magonistas. In fact, it was Madero who had sent him a $2,000 check to help them (inaudible) from San Antonio. But when they reached back out to him and said we need more money because we've got an army and we need to start buying guns and start this armed revolution, Madero consistently said, no, no, no. We don't need an armed revolution. We need to move through the established political process to remove Diaz from power. But when Madero himself lost the election, he came around to the Magonista's point of view.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #15: Governments have to protect the right of property above all of the rights. Do not expect, then, that Madero will attack the right of property in favor of the proletariat.

ABDELFATAH: The Magonistas weren't exactly jumping at the chance to work with Madero. They viewed him as an elite snob who didn't really share their concerns for the average worker.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #15: Open your eyes. Remember a phrase simple and true, as truth indestructible - the emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves.

ABDELFATAH: But they eventually agreed to work together long enough to overthrow Porfirio Diaz.

ARABLOUEI: Across Mexico, Diaz battled with Madero's rebels and a number of other factions. The fighting lasted a few months. But in the end, Porfirio Diaz, seeing the writing on the wall, decided to go into exile.

HERNANDEZ: They run Diaz out of office by spring of 1911.

ARABLOUEI: He flees to Europe, where he lives out the rest of his life.

HERNANDEZ: And that's the end of el Porfiriato.

ARABLOUEI: Francisco Madero was soon elected president but had one major problem - how to make everyone happy.

TENORIO-TRILLO: When the revolution starts, it is first a democratic revolution, basically elite problem. Some parts of the middle classes' intellectuals want access and democracy, and it seems that it's going to be an elite problem. And then it starts a massive revolution. But what is the massive revolution about? About everything. Some want a social revolution (ph). Some want an anarchist revolution (ph). Some just want to loot and take revenge. Revolutions are often like that, you know? Once the whole thing starts, it is not one single thing.

ABDELFATAH: Just a couple years into the revolution, President Madero was betrayed and assassinated, while the Magonistas continue to write and resist from a distance, in and out of prison. Different factions with different visions for the future of Mexico battled for years, and the country descended into a decade of instability.

HERNANDEZ: You know, it's a very difficult revolution. It's extraordinarily violent. It has a lot of twists and turns and coups within it.

TENORIO-TRILLO: The revolution becomes a way of life.

ABDELFATAH: But through that time, the vision of the Magonistas, of a more equal society, more workers' rights and economic progress for all, was kept alive.

HERNANDEZ: By the end of the revolution, which many people date in 1917 with the adoption of a new Mexican constitution, the new constitution enshrines many of the ideals and ideas of the Magonistas, about workmen's compensation, about a minimum wage, about maximum working hours, about ending child labor, about preventing foreign investors from owning land close to the border. And that is what the Magonistas had been fighting for. That document becomes the platform for many important debates within Mexico and on the global stage about the rights of workers, rights of the poor. And so it's a really important document in Mexican history but also in global history.

ABDELFATAH: The revolution left as many as 2 million dead, and another million people fled Mexico, seeking refuge in the United States.

HERNANDEZ: So one of the impacts of the Mexican Revolution, at least on the United States, is the birth of the Mexican American population. And those million refugees who arrived in the 1910s become the parents and the grandparents and the great-grandparents of Mexican American generations to come.

ARABLOUEI: So eventually, a generation after the mass migration, Mexican Americans in the U.S. reclaimed Cinco de Mayo as a symbol of anti-imperialist resistance, part of a budding Chicano movement in the U.S. And around the 1980s, beer companies saw Cinco de Mayo as a smart business strategy and helped the holiday go mainstream.

ABDELFATAH: Mauricio Tenorio Trillo says the story of Cinco de Mayo and everything that followed reveals two countries that have been attached at the hip, connected since their founding by land, culture, business and people, yet often in denial of the commonalities they share, both then and now.

TENORIO-TRILLO: And at some point, we will look and find out that we have a common body, that the survival of one face or the other depends on the body. And there was no past, there is no present, and there will be no future, if not common, for the United States and Mexico.

ABDELFATAH: That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.

ARABLOUEI: I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And you've been listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR.

ABDELFATAH: This episode was produced by me.

LAWRENCE WU, BYLINE: Lawrence Wu.

LAINE KAPLAN-LEVENSON, BYLINE: Laine Kaplan-Levenson.

JULIE CAINE, BYLINE: Julie Caine.

VICTOR YVELLEZ, BYLINE: Victor Yvellez.

YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.

CASEY MINER, BYLINE: Casey Miner.

KUMARI DEVARAJAN, BYLINE: Kumari Devarajan.

ARABLOUEI: Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Volkl.

ABDELFATAH: Thank you to Hector Gonzalez (ph), Pedro Luna, Ricci Jobe (ph), Carlos Yvellez (ph), Pablo Luna (ph), Lawrence Wu and Chris Short (ph) for their voiceover work. Thanks also to Tamar Charney and Anya Grundmann.

ARABLOUEI: This episode was mixed by Josh Newell.

ABDELFATAH: Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes...

ARABLOUEI: And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline@npr.org or hit us up on Twitter at @throughlinenpr.

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