El Plan de San Diego
San Diego, Duval County, Texas
Marker Inscription
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)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On January 6, 1915, nine men of Mexican descent gathered in San Diego, Texas, and signed a manifesto calling for armed insurrection to wrest the Southwest from the United States and forge a new nation — enlisting Mexican Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and Japanese Americans. The plot was betrayed almost at once when a signer tried to recruit the wrong man, and no rising came on the appointed day. But near-daily raids that summer in the Lower Rio Grande Valley triggered a wave of extrajudicial killings, as law officers and vigilantes murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ethnic Mexicans, prompting President Wilson to flood the border with troops.
Why it matters
El Plan de San Diego opened one of the bloodiest chapters of anti-Mexican violence in American history, entangled with the Mexican Revolution and the run-up to World War I along a militarized border.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The year 1915 found South Texas in a state of deep tension. Just across the Rio Grande, the Mexican Revolution was raging, sending shockwaves — and refugees, rumors, and rival factions — north across the border. At the same time, the Great War had erupted in Europe, and though the United States was not yet a combatant, the whole world was on edge and foreign intrigue crossed the border along with everything else.
Duval County and the broader Lower Rio Grande Valley were the meeting point of two peoples and two histories. Families of Mexican descent had lived on this land for generations, long predating the current border, while newer Anglo arrivals were reshaping the region's land ownership and politics. Longstanding resentments over land, power, and belonging simmered beneath the surface.
San Diego, the seat of Duval County, sat in the middle of this volatile landscape — a small town in a borderland where the pressures of revolution abroad and inequality at home were building toward a breaking point.
People & events
On January 6, 1915, nine men of Mexican descent met in San Diego and put their names to a manifesto that has come down to us as El Plan de San Diego. It was a stunning document: a call for armed insurrection to break the Southwest away from the United States and forge a new nation, summoning Mexican Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and Japanese Americans to rise together on a set date the following month.
The plot unraveled almost as soon as it was hatched. Later in January, one of the signers, Basilio Ramos Jr., tried to recruit a Hidalgo County merchant named Deodoro Guerra into the uprising. Guerra instead alerted law enforcement, and Ramos was arrested. Word of the plan spread through newspapers across the country, and with it a wave of panic and fear far out of proportion to the handful of men involved.
The appointed day of rebellion came and went with nothing. But the story did not end there. That summer brought near-daily raids in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, and the response was catastrophic. Vigilantes and law officers turned to extrajudicial violence, terrorizing and killing ethnic Mexicans on a horrifying scale — hundreds, and by some accounts far more. Alarmed, and at the request of the state's governor, President Woodrow Wilson poured tens of thousands of U.S. Army and National Guard troops onto the border.
Its place in the American story
El Plan de San Diego opened one of the darkest and least-remembered chapters of violence in American history. The bloodshed that followed — much of it directed at people whose families had lived in Texas for generations — stands as a grim reminder of how quickly fear can curdle into lawlessness, and how a border community can pay the price for anxieties born far away.
What makes this episode so significant is how many currents of history run through it at once. It was tangled up with the Mexican Revolution, with the fraught neutrality of a United States drifting toward the World War, and with deep-rooted conflicts over land and belonging in the borderlands. Historians have pointed to all of these forces at work, which is precisely why the events resist any single, simple explanation.
It also complicates the familiar national story. The Southwest is often remembered through the lens of expansion and settlement, but this marker insists on a harder truth: that the making of the border was also a story of violence, injustice, and communities caught in between. Remembering it honestly is part of telling the whole American story.
If you visit
Come to San Diego expecting to reflect rather than to be dazzled. This is a place where the significance lies not in any grand structure but in what happened here — a quiet county seat where nine men once set down words that would ripple across the nation and help unleash a terrible summer of violence.
Read the marker slowly, and give weight to what it names plainly: not only the plot itself, but the extrajudicial killings that followed. Markers that tell hard histories deserve a moment of stillness. Standing here, you're at the source of a story that reached from a small Texas town to the White House and the U.S.–Mexico border as a whole.
If your travels take you through the ranchlands and small towns of the South Texas borderland, let this stop reframe the landscape around you. Beneath the calm of the present lies a layered and sometimes painful past — and this unassuming marker is one of the few places where that past is set down for travelers to encounter and remember.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Basilio Ramos Jr.
- · Deodoro Guerra
- · James Ferguson
- · Woodrow Wilson
Related events
- · Mexican Revolution
- · World War I
Themes & tags
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