Velarde, Fernando

VELARDE, FERNANDO (1873-1926). A bilingual blacksmith and a committed Marxist, Fernando Velarde was an auto-didact, orator, writer, editor, member of the Socialist Labor Party, and a traveling organizer for the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and, briefly, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). His father, Rafael Velarde, a blacksmith, introduced him to Marx’s writings. By the l880s Arizona Territory, where they lived, was increasingly tied to US capitalist development, marked by expanding agricultural fields and US owned copper mines in Arizona and northern Mexico. By 1900 the White population began to surpass that of Mexicans, moving the Territory towards White supremacist statehood. Full citizenship would be limited to White “Americans,” and Mexicans would be denied civil and property rights once guaranteed by treaty.

In 1906, Mexican workers at the Cananea copper mines just south of the border launched a massive strike, fueled by revolutionary ideas and labor grievances. The PLM, led by Ricardo Flores Magon, was a Mexican social movement calling for revolution and had organized in Cananea. It reached people through its newspaper, Regeneracion, sent through the mails and carried by traveling organizer propogandists who trekked over half of the United States and Mexico. The strike’s brutal binational repression spurred organizing elsewhere and galvanized US and Mexican efforts to suppress and stop the PLM.

Thus it was that in July, a month after the strike, Velarde wrote Regeneracion’s editor, elated that the 1906 PLM plan had “finally” addressed the “complete industrial freedom of the industrial proletariat.” In this letter, intercepted by the Mexican government, Velarde identified himself as a member of the Socialist Labor Party, praised Daniel de Leon, and added that “ all concerns of race, creed and nationalities must be put aside, and proclaim the principles of Karl Marx who said: Workers of all countries Unite because [sic] you have a world to win and nothing but your chains to lose.” He joined a clandestine PLM group in Phoenix and continued to work with the PLM.

The IWW’s 1905 founding seemed another step towards “complete industrial freedom.” The IWW differed from most White unions with its inclusive welcome to all workers into one big union, undifferentiated by race, creed and nationality. Velarde formed Phoenix IWW Local 272 in 1906. As elsewhere, Velarde and his PLM compatriots enrolled Mexicans into active entities that were simultaneously IWW and PLM. Mexican IWW branches were thus usually synonymous with the PLM: members belonged to both organizations, organized for both, and understood their fights as intrinsically related. In 1908 Velarde formed a second all-Mexican Spanish speaking branch of Local 272. When well-known Scottish anarchist Tom Bell visited in 1910, he enthusiastically remembered its 500 active Mexican members. In 1909 Velarde founded and edited, La Union Industrial, the first Spanish language IWW newspaper, advertised as the “only Spanish paper teaching revolution industrial syndicalism.” The paper’s content reflected readers’ dual interests with articles from and about the PLM and IWW.

Velarde was often on the road, leaving town for weeks to organize in far-flung areas. He remained connected to a binational web of PLM and IWW organizers. Velarde’s wife, Eloisa Monreal, and family shared in his commitment to revolutionary change and probably his reading practice. His daughter Evelyn remembered his trips to Florida to work and his work among Mexican laborers in lumber in Texas or Louisiana. The Velarde house served as a refuge for traveling organizers of both the IWW and the PLM. They hid fugitive PLM members, including the Magon brothers, and sheltered traveling organizers with the IWW. They collectively mourned the execution of Joe Hill in 1915, and the children were kept home from school to memorialize their friend.

In 1911 the Velarde family moved to Southern California, the center of PLM, with two IWW unions (one “the Brazo Latino” ) and a hub of the Mexican revolution. Velardo reestablished his blacksmith business, resumed his traveling organizing and work with the PLM and the “brazo Latin.” Velarde wrote for two Los Angeles Spanish language papers, Huelga General (1913-1914), and El Rebelde (1914-1917). Each was an IWW newspaper, yet funded by the Mexican Propaganda League of Los Angeles and outside the purview of the Executive Board that had refused support to Mexican organizers or Spanish-language newspapers. He wrote didactic articles about class struggle and news: these papers no longer carried PLM perspectives or news.

When the Mexican Revolution erupted in 1910, Socialists and many PLM allies supported Francisco Madero. Velarde supported Madero while continuing his support of the PLM. He led two Grupo Regeneracions to support the newspaper and joined an International Committee of the Mexican Liberal Party whose published letter of support from international activists distinguished between PLM’s principles and that of reformist land owner Madero. Increasing raids, indictments and imprisonment of PLM leaders led to a 1918 federal indictment of the Magons for violating the US neutrality law. The IWW was suppressed in l919 with raids and imprisonments. Ricardo Flores Magon was imprisoned in Leavenworth’s federal penitentiary where he died in 1922. Velarde gave an oration at Magon’s (first) funeral, in East Los Angeles.

In 1926 Velarde died in an apparent accident. Yet, as Bell noted, Velarde’s “fine family - all of them - are still active in the IWW movement.” Son Guillermo became a leading organizer in the Confederación de Uniones de Campesinos y Obreros Mexicanos (CUCOM) a Los Angeles area federation of Mexican unions. In 1933, CUCOM instigated a wave of southern California agricultural strikes with multiethnic allies including the CPUSA. Migrant agricultural workers carried this strike north, helping launch a de facto general strike which tore across California agriculture. In the late 1930s Guillermo joined the effort to expand the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) to agricultural workers with the multi-ethnic United Cannery and Agricultural Workers Union of America (UCAPAWA-CIO). Daughter Evelyn Velarde [Benson] worked with CUCOM and would later help organize the Comision Feminil in Los Angeles during the Chicano movement.

Velarde, indigenous, strikingly tall, well read, and articulate, appears from personal accounts to have been charismatic and well-respected. Bell claimed Velarde was ‘the most skillful and successful organizer I ever met, a splendid man in every way, intelligent, witty, good-humored, well-informed, quite fearless, a man of excellent good sense and character who commanded the respect even of his enemies.” Jesus Gonzalez Monroy, PLM stalwart and one-time member of the inner PLM circle, remembered Velarde vividly as” the most active and most intelligent of all the leaders” of the time.

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