Magón

Magón is a Spanish surname most commonly associated with Ricardo Flores Magón, a Mexican anarchist, journalist, and organizer active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Along with his brothers Enrique Flores Magón and Jesús Flores Magón, he helped found the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) and, together, promoted the Magonist movement, which combined libertarian socialist ideas with anti-authoritarian critique of Porfirio Díaz's regime. The Magonists published Regeneración, a newspaper that criticized the regime and advocated labor rights, political liberty, and anti-imperialist reform. The movement spread through Mexico and into Mexican-American communities in the United States, influencing reform and revolutionary currents that fed into the Mexican Revolution beginning in 1910 and later labor struggles.

Ricardo Flores Magón spent much of his life in exile in the United States, where he continued publishing and organizing; he died in a U.S. federal penitentiary in 1922. While Ricardo is the best-known member of the Flores Magón family, the surname is carried by other individuals and families of Spanish origin.

In scholarship, the term Magonismo refers to the ideas and activities associated with the Magónist movement, including advocacy for social justice, workers’ rights, and anti-authoritarian reform. The name Magón thus denotes both a historical family surname and a political current linked to early Mexican anarchism.