Ricardo Flores Magón station

Neighbouring stations

• BLine BSan Lázaro ← Ricardo Flores Magón → Romero Rubio

The story behind the icon

The station silhouette is the bust of Ricardo Flores Magón.

Ricardo Flores Magón is the greatest and most important revolutionary, or as Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama would put it: "Perhaps none greater among Mexican revolutionaries than Ricardo Flores Magón". He was born in Oaxaca on 16 September 1873. He studied law and from 1893, after taking an active part in student protests, began contributing to the newspaper El Demócrata, from whose pages he levelled harsh criticism at President Porfirio Díaz.

Years later, on 7 August 1900, he founded with his brothers the newspaper Regeneración, which became an instrument for fighting the Porfirian regime and which forced him into exile in 1904 in the United States, where he settled in the city of Saint Louis, Missouri. There, in 1906, he founded with his brother Enrique the Mexican Liberal Party, which exerted great influence over the working class and the agrarian movement, since its founding manifesto not only criticised the government's dictatorship but demanded an eight-hour working day, a compulsory day of rest on Sundays and the distribution of land to peasants.

At the head of the Liberal Party, ever closer to the anarcho-communism proposed by Peter Kropotkin but improved by the conviction that a party was needed to make the revolution, the Flores Magón brothers organised the strikes at Cananea and Río Blanco: without doubt, triggers of the Revolution. This party was the main driving force of that movement, having begun guerrilla action as early as 1907.

With the general outbreak of the Revolution in 1910 to overthrow the dictator Porfirio Díaz, the following year they promoted the insurrection in Baja California. They took Mexicali and Tijuana and tried, unsuccessfully, to found an anarchist republic, but lacking support they were defeated by government troops and had to fall back into the United States.

In 1918, together with Librado Rivera, he published a revolutionary manifesto addressed to anarchists worldwide, for which the American authorities sentenced him to 20 years in prison. Flores Magón endured a cruel and merciless prison regime.

He died almost blind, a victim of diabetes, on 20 November 1922 in the federal penitentiary of Leavenworth, Kansas.