Palomares, Fernando

PALOMARES, FERNANDO (1882-1951). A trilingual Mayo Indian, a member of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), binational traveling organizer for the PLM and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Palemares was also editor of Libertad y Trabajo. He served as an organizer in Cananea, Arizona, California, IWW Local 12 in Los Angeles and leader of Mexican IWW local in San Diego. He organized a raid into Mexicali for revolution and in an El Paso steel plant. He was indicted and jailed for violation of neutrality and jailed in Leavenworth federal prison. He is immortalized in David Alfaro Siqueiros mural in Belles Artes.

Fernando Palomares was born in Buenavista Sonora into a Mayo family. His uncle took the boy to work at a nearby utopian colony where he learned English in the school. Taught to read and write Spanish, he discovered the “liberal movement” and writings of syndicalist Ricardo Flores Magon. Palomares became a traveling organizer and propogandist for the PLM. Because he could speak Yoeme, the language of Mayos and Yaqui, he went to Cananea, Sonora in 1903 to organize workers in the massive copper mines, part of the binational “copper triangle” linking northern Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. He worked as a miner, landed a job in the company store, and connected with the PLM underground. At night he met with Yoeme- speaking Mayo and Yaqui Indian workers. A massive miners’ strike broke out in 1906, fueled in part by PLM ideas, and prompted him to flee ahead of federal agents. Palomares traveled to the United States to meet the PLM leadership in Saint Louis.

Palomares had already joined the IWW in l905 and begun to organize Mexicans into the IWW. He worked in Arizona among miners and in Phoenix and Los Angeles where he helped form the IWW local. Spanish-speaking PLM organizers such as Palomares spearheaded the organization of Mexicans into the IWW, forming branches that were simultaneously PLM and IWW. These branches differed from other IWW branches, animated by a dual vision of labor organizing and a social revolution in Mexico. He became a prominent traveling organizer and propagandist with both organizations. If a dedicated IWW organizer, his primary loyalty was to the PLM and personally to Flores Magon. In 1908, Palomares and Juan Olivares briefly edited Libertad y Trabajo, a Spanish-language newspaper, as urged by Italian Wobbly Joe Ettor, to reach Mexican workers.

From 1908 to 1910, Palomares traveled from Southern California, through northern and central Mexico, back into the United States, and across the Midwest, Southwest, and the Pacific Northwest in a trip articulating intersecting PLM and IWW interests. Delegated to connect with Yaquis and Mayos regarding plans to launch the revolution in l908, he carried with him PLM letters, confidential memos, and copies of the PLM newspaper, Regeneracion. He met with PLM cadre, delivering clandestine PLM materials, staying in safe houses where he collected mail, money, and from which he wrote reports back to the PLM. When the attempted revolution failed, he crossed back to the United States, from the interior to the West Coast, meeting with Mexican supporters of the PLM along the way. Finally, he headed back to Los Angeles, where Socialist journalist and PLM ally, John Kenneth Turner, wanted his assistance on a series of articles that would become the book, Barbarous Mexico, turning US public opinion against the Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz.

Palomares helped launch the ill-fated revolution into Baja California in l910-1911, an effort focused on Mexicali. Palomares was in San Diego organizing IWW Local 12 among public workers. Mexican gas workers launched a strike in 1910 joined by Italians and Greeks. The strike led to organizing an all-Mexican IWW local in the Imperial Valley of California, adjacent to the Mexicali valley, where many PLM supporters belonged to the IWW. In 1911, the heavily Mexican San Diego local abruptly dissolved itself, leaving for the “Mexican Revolution.” When the revolution failed, Palomares found himself under arrest.

Palomares moved to El Paso, working with PLM, organizing for revolution and unionism in an El Paso foundry with fellow IWW member Rosendo Dorame. Arrested on charges of violating neutrality laws, Palomares and Dorame were sentenced to Leavenworth Prison for a year. Palomares then met and married Basiliza Franco, from a feisty PLM-IWW family whose father, Efran Franco, had been imprisoned with Palomares.

Palomares continued to sell newspapers in Los Angeles. He joined a much changed PLM, and in l937 helped organize agricultural workers in Southern California with the Confederación de Uniones de Campesinos y Obreros Mexicanos (CUCOM), now headed by Guillermo Velarde, the son of PLMIWW organizer, Fernando Velarde. Palomares became a familiar figure in the Plaza of Los Angeles. Larue McCormick, a member of the Communist Party, USA and head the International Labor Defense, remembered that Palomares carried a well-read letter he would show, explaining it was from Vladimir Lenin to Magon and the PLM. According to a well-known yet so far unsubstantiated story, Ricardo Flores Magon sent a packet of Regeneracion to Lenin following the Russian revolution. Palomares took the newspaper packet, with Magon’s letter, to trusted Mexican railway workers at the border who transported the package first to Veracruz, Mexico and then to sailors who carried the packet to Chile, where it was transferred again to trusted sailors who took it to Russia. According to the story, Lenin, who had a particular interest in indigenous workers of Mexico, wrote a letter in return. Palomares died in Los Angeles.

Cienfuegos, Alfonso Torua. El Magonismo en Sonora, 1906=1908: Historia de una Persecución. Hermosillo, Sonora: Universidad de Sonora, 2003.

Weber, Devra Anne. "Wobblies of the Partido Liberal Mexicano: Reenvisioning Internationalist and Transnational Movements through Mexican Lenses", Pacific Historical Review, 2016 85:2, 188-226.

Weber, Devra Anne. ”Mexican Workers in the IWW and the PLM" by Devra Weber, on "IWW History Project" Industrial Workers of the World 1905-1935"
https://depts.washington.edu/iww/mexicaniwws.shtml