El Plan de San Diego

The plan had more than one life. The January 1915 text was followed by a February 20 version that spoke of liberating the proletariat and a social republic in Texas, and by a third naming San Antonio as headquarters of a Republic of Texas. The July raids were led by Aniceto Pizaña and Luis de la Rosa, South Texas residents loyal to Venustiano Carranza, and they stopped when Washington recognized his government that October. The Handbook of Texas says the evidence points to Carranza's followers, not Huerta's. Mexican and Mexican American residents were killed without trial in the reprisals.

What the plaque says

El Plan de San Diego On January 6, 1915, nine men of Mexican descent met in San Diego, seat of Duval county, and signed El Plan de San Diego, a manifesto calling for political insurrection in response to contemporary social and political events. The proposed rebellion also had international implications, significantly impacting the Mexican revolution and American preparedness for World War I. El Plan de San Diego called for Mexican Americans, African Americans, Native Americans and Japanese Americans to rise in arms throughout the American Southwest on February 20, 1915, using force to separate Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California from the U.S. and establish a new nation. Deodoro Guerra, an Hidalgo County merchant, became aware of the plan on January 24, when Basilio Ramos Jr., a signer of the document, attempted to recruit Guerra to join the uprising. Guerra sent word to Hidalgo County law enforcement officials, who arrested Ramos. Newspaper accounts of the proposed revolt appeared throughout the nation, causing panic and fear to spread. Though nothing happened on February 20, near-daily raids occurred in July in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Many citizens and law enforcement officials resorted to extrajudicial means to terrorize and murder hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. At the request of Governor James Ferguson, President Woodrow Wilson began sending soldiers to the U.S.-Mexico border. Tens of thousands of U.S. Army and National Guard troops deployed. Historians attribute the turmoil from El Plan de San Diego and its period in history to political upheaval and maneuvers from leaders of the Mexican revolution, efforts of Axis powers to keep the U.S. out of WWI, and longstanding ethnic and cultural conflicts between original south Texas settlers of Mexican descent and newcomers. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Duval County Courthouse — 0.2 mi
  A red-brick Classical Revival courthouse of 1916 in San Diego, the seat of a county governed for decades by the Parr family machine.
• King Ranch Visitor Center — 27 mi
  The bus-tour gate to a working ranch of about 825,000 acres, founded on Santa Gertrudis Creek in 1853 and worked from the start by the Kineños, families from Cruillas in Tamaulipas.
• Lipantitlán State Historic Site — 29 mi
  Five undeveloped acres on the Nueces named for the Lipan Apaches who camped here, where Mexico built an earth-and-rail fort that Texans took early in the Revolution.
• Lake Corpus Christi State Park — 31 mi
  A lake park in the South Texas brush country above Mathis, on a reservoir of the Nueces, with a Civilian Conservation Corps refectory and more than 200 bird species.

More markers nearby

• St. Francis de Paula Catholic Church — steps away
• Duval County — 0.3 mi
• Jim Wells County — 9.5 mi
• Alice — 10 mi