In Mexico, his home country, Praxedis Gilberto Guerrero came to be seen as a national martyr and patriot, respected and admired as a revolutionary writer, political organizer and man of action against the oppressive decades-long dictatorship of Mexican President Porfirio Diaz. But in the United States, government authorities considered him an outlaw, a dangerous “anarchist” who needed to be apprehended, imprisoned and silenced.  Praxedis, though, was a very intelligent young man, a master of disguises, and was never caught, and unlike some of his associates, his life did not end in a prison.

Prax, as his family and friends called him, was born in 1882, in Los Altos de Ibarra, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. He was one of the younger sons of a family of hacendados, hacienda owners. Haciendas were large farms or vast plantations, and by late in the 19th Century in Mexico, the economic modernization policies of Porfirio Diaz led to the concentration of lands and wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer families, while the masses of people were becoming landless and more desperately poor. Many Mexicans who had farmed their own lands for generations were forced to go work in the haciendas. While Prax’s family treated their hundreds of workers much better than many other owners did (who in many cases used humans as slaves), life for workers on the hacienda was harsh – doing hard physical labor in a harsh climate from before sun-up until after sundown, six days a week. Nutrition and sanitation was poor, housing primitive, clothing ragged and inadequate, and working wages were so small as to guarantee “debt bondage” for the workers. Because haciendas were often isolated and travel was long and difficult on dirt trails, the workers had to buy their necessities from the hacienda store, where prices were high. And because wages were so little, workers had to buy on credit, and the debt accumulated until there was no hope of ever repaying it back; and the debt was inherited by workers’ children… Any indebted worker trying to flee the haciendas, would be apprehended by the Rurales, the government’s militia. Hence workers were chained to the haciendas, and were virtual slaves.

All this misery and injustice was not lost on Praxedis, who from boyhood hated the system that made his own family prosperous on the backs of others. He joined in the manual labor of the hacienda and worked side by side with the workers, though he was very educated and could have shunned such work as beneath his status.  He developed the habit of giving away his clothes and shoes to the workers’ boys, and demanding that food be given to hungry families. Once he went around to every building on the hacienda and painted, ” This belongs to the workers,” which infuriated his father. Prax came to believe that those who did the actual labor of an enterprise were entitled to share in the profits, and that no human being should be allowed to go without food and other necessities, while others hoarded everything for themselves. And, he reasoned, any political system that perpetuated such inhumane imbalances must be changed. As a teen he began writing articles for newspapers in Mexico addressing these social and political concerns. Prax came to believe that it was better “to die on your feet, than live on your knees”, meaning that people should stand up to fight against the oppression.  And finally, his eloquently stated ideas caught the eye of the dictator’s agents, and he often had to go into hiding when they came around, or he would end up thrown into prison… or summarily executed.

In 1904, when persecution by authorities became too dangerous, Praxedis fled north from Mexico with a small group of friends, including Emilio N. Hernandez, and they went to work for American mining and railroad companies in the western United States. They decided that the U.S. was the only possible place from which to base themselves to lay the groundwork for the revolution to come in Mexico. They labored hard in gold and copper mines, and helped lay the tracks for the rapidly expanding networks of rails. They planned to use their wages to begin buying armaments, making plans and recruiting other Mexican immigrants for their cause… In 1906 they joined a revolutionary political party, founded by Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magon, the PLM (Partido Liberal Mexicano) in Los Angeles, California, whose motto was “Tierra y Libertad” – Land and Liberty.  The Magon brothers and other PLM members were jailed in the U.S. on trumped up charges; and it fell to Prax to keep the cause going. And led by Prax, they accomplished many of their ambitions, and helped to bring about their most important goal: political and social change in their country, Mexico. In 1911, revolution finally exploded in Mexico. But Prax was no longer alive to participate in it: tragedy struck him down at the age of 28… His friends, Emilio included, were devastated… But Prax’s humanitarian ideas lived on and many were incorporated into the new society that ultimately emerged in Mexico from the ten-year long Mexican Revolution…