For about six months in 1911, on that long finger of land pointing southward from Mexico’s Pacific Coast, an international band of fellow travelers attempted revolution.

The rebels seized Baja California border villages like Mexicali, Los Algodones, and Tijuana, conducting a number of their raids from the backs of hijacked trains. Over the roar of the rails, unfamiliar voices suddenly boomed across town plazas newly bedecked in red banners. Some of the revolutionists spoke in Welsh and Australian brogues, others in the rugged dialects of the US mountain states, others in the studious Spanish of urban Mexican literatis freshly returned from their American exiles. But more familiar accents rang out, too. Other insurrectionists, their voices somewhat muted in the historical record, spoke their minds in the local idioms of the borderlands, as well as in the maligned indigenous languages of Kiliwa, Cocopah, and Kumeyaay.

Within the insurrectionary army, firebrands from the lower tiers of Mexico’s frustrated elite mingled with English-speaking syndicalists from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and both groups rubbed shoulders with dispossessed indigenous farmers who had earlier allied with the liberal revolutionary program based on its promise to subvert the power of the landed hacendado class. A diverse bunch of radicals, reformers, and libertines, the Baja insurrectionists found fellowship in one another through the strikingly capacious ideology of revolutionary Mexican liberalism. “The only thing distinguishing them as an army,” writes the biographer of one international volunteer, was “the anarchist emblem, tiny red bows, pinned to their sleeves.” But there were also straightforward adventurists and opportunists in their midst, including some loudmouthed American chauvinists and at least one likely state informant.