MCM Books News

La Voz de Amor , released in September 2016, is a book of Spanish poetry written by Servando Cárdenas. The poet looks at love from a romantic, familial, patriotic, cultural and spiritual perspective and provides great insights into Tejano culture. The book is also a labor of love for co-editor Alfredo E. Cárdenas, son of the poet. His co-editor, Javier Villarreal, Ph.D. is a recently retired professor of Spanish at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

In October 1915, 18-year-old Jesus Martinez was arrested by an Army guard at the Brownsville train station on—well there was no reason to arrest him other than he was suspected of being a bandit, perhaps involved in recent attacks against innocent “Americans”. He was a Mexican, afterall. Martinez carried with him a letter that raised suspicions even more. The investigation into the contents of the letter led authorities to a surprising conclusion.

Late in the evening of Oct, 19, 1915, men believed to be rebels fighting under the flag of the Plan of San Diego attacked the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico passenger train at Olmitos, Texas six miles south of San Benito. When the smoke cleared, three people—three “Americans” as the newspapers pointed out—were dead.

MCM Books will soon release its second book. La Voz de Amor is scheduled for release later this summer, perhaps as soon as the end of July. The book is a collection of Spanish poetry written by Servando Cardenas, mostly in the 1930s although several date to the 1940s and at least one to the 1970s.

Scholars have found the Plan de San Diego (PSD) of great interest and for decades have produced a large body of works on the incident, in doing so expanding on fields such as Tejano history, Borderlands history, or Mexican history. Most recently, historians Charles H. Harris and Louis R. Sadler published the episode’s most comprehensive scholarly study under the title of The Plan de San Diego: Tejano Rebellion, Mexican Intrigue (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). What lacks at this point, however, is a source that fills the needs of the reading public and instructs it on the dimensions of this struggle that burst forth in South Texas in the year 1915. Alfredo E. Cárdenas’s Balo’s War : A Novel About the Plan of San Diego (Corpus Christi: MCM Books, 2015) addresses that call.

A map appearing in the Aug. 12, 1915 issue of the San Antonio Express reported that “murders and raids have terrorized the people of he Lower Rio Grande Valley from Zapata County to the gulf and to the north beyond Norias.” These“murders and raids” were prompted by the Plan of San Diego that had been uncovered in January 1915 with the arrest of Basilio Ramos in McAllen.

The Houston Post reported on Aug. 21, 1915 that U.S. Army officers in automobiles, infantrymen on foot and cavalry were chasing a group of Carrancista soldiers that had crossed the Rio Grande River with intentions of joining up with supporters of the Plan of San Diego near Falfurrias in Brooks County, Texas. The Corpus Christi Caller & Daily Herald headlined “Bandits Gathering Near Falfurrias.”