The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

By Friedrich Katz

Alongside Moctezuma and Benito Juárez, Pancho Villa is probably the best-known figure in Mexican history. Villa legends pervade not only Mexico but the United States and beyond, existing not only in the popular mind and tradition but in ballads and movies. There are legends of Villa the Robin Hood, Villa the womanizer, and Villa as the only foreigner who has attacked the mainland of the United States since the War of 1812 and gotten away with it.

Whether exaggerated or true to life, these legends have resulted in Pancho Villa the leader obscuring his revolutionary movement, and the myth in turn obscuring the leader. Based on decades of research in the archives of seven countries, this definitive study of Villa aims to separate myth from history. So much attention has focused on Villa himself that the characteristics of his movement, which is unique in Latin American history and in some ways unique among twentieth-century revolutions, have been forgotten or neglected. Villa’s División del Norte was probably the largest revolutionary army that Latin America ever produced. Moreover, this was one of the few revolutionary movements with which a U.S. administration attempted, not only to come to terms, but even to forge an alliance. In contrast to Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro, Villa came from the lower classes of society, had little education, and organized no political party.

The first part of the book deals with Villa’s early life as an outlaw and his emergence as a secondary leader of the Mexican Revolution, and also discusses the special conditions that transformed the state of Chihuahua into a leading center of revolution. In the second part, beginning in 1913, Villa emerges as a national leader. The author analyzes the nature of his revolutionary movement and the impact of Villismo as an ideology and as a social movement. The third part of the book deals with the years 1915 to 1920: Villa’s guerrilla warfare, his attack on Columbus, New Mexico, and his subsequent decline. The last part describes Villa’s surrender, his brief life as a hacendado, his assassination and its aftermath, and the evolution of the Villa legend. The book concludes with an assessment of Villa’s personality and the character and impact of his movement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 1998
• ISBN: 9780804765176

Book preview

Preface

Alongside Moctezuma and Benito Juárez, Pancho Villa is probably the best-known Mexican personality throughout the world. Villa legends pervade not only Mexico but the United States as well and have even reached beyond. They exist not only in the popular mind, in popular tradition, and in popular ballads but in movies made both in Mexico and in Hollywood. There are legends of Villa the Robin Hood, Villa the Napoleon of Mexico, Villa the ruthless killer, Villa the womanizer, and Villa as the only foreigner who has attacked the mainland of the United States since the war of 1812 and gotten away with it. Whether correct or incorrect, exaggerated or true to life, these legends have resulted in Pancho Villa the leader obscuring his movement, and the myths obscuring the leader. So much attention has focused on Villa himself that the characteristics of his movement that in many respects make it unique in Latin America, and in some ways among twentieth-century revolutions, have either been forgotten or neglected. Villa’s Division del Norte was probably the largest revolutionary army that Latin America ever produced. The revolution he led was the only social revolution ever to occur along the border of the United States. It was also one of the few genuine revolutions produced by what might best be described as a frontier region on the American continent.

Perhaps even more exceptional, this was one of the few revolutionary movements with which a U.S. administration in the twentieth century attempted, not only to come to terms, but even to forge an alliance. Equally remarkable, the Villa movement was part of one of the few twentieth-century revolutions that still enjoy enormous legitimacy in its own people’s eyes. In Russia, Leningrad has been renamed St. Petersburg, and in China, students questioned Mao’s revolution on Tiananmen Square, but no one in Mexico is thinking of renaming the streets that bear the names of Villa or of other revolutionary heroes. In fact, not only the official government party but one of the main opposition parties and a newly emerged guerrilla movement in Chiapas all claim to be the legitimate heirs of the revolutionaries of 1910—20, among whom Villa’s movement constituted a decisive force.

Finally, both Villa and the leader of the strongest popular movement in southern Mexico, Emiliano Zapata, differed in significant ways from the revolutionary leaders that emerged elsewhere in the twentieth century. In contrast to such men as Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, or Fidel Castro, all of whom were highly educated intellectuals who led well-organized political movements, both Villa and Zapata came from the lower classes of society, had little education, and organized no political parties. It is on these characteristics of the Villa movement and on the personality of its leader that this book focuses. It seeks to examine the social composition of the movement, about which there is as much debate as about the personality of its leader. While for some it was a genuine peasant movement, others saw it as a revolution dominated by the riffraff of the frontier: cattle rustlers, bandits, marginals, men without roots or ideology. The latter interpretation has been greatly strengthened by the personality of a few of its leaders who managed to pass from history into legend, such as Rodolfo Fierro, the killer, and Tomás Urbina, the bandit. Were these men in fact characteristic of the leadership of Villa’s movement? There are as yet no studies of the vast array of secondary leaders who flocked to Villa’s movement, of the social composition of his army, or of the social basis of his support.

One of the most important criteria for assessing a revolutionary leader, or any political figure for that matter, is what he or she did while in power. Villa controlled Chihuahua for two years, but little has been done to study either the program he developed for the state or the changes he actually implemented.

I faced two major difficulties in writing this book. The first, far less important than the second, is the fact that Villa, unlike the other major revolutionary figures in Mexico such as Zapata, Carranza, and Obregón, left no archive, and the state archives of Chihuahua were destroyed by fire in 1940. What greatly helped me to compensate for this was that when I was completing this book, other archival sources that had long been inaccessible to researchers became available. They included the files of Mexico’s Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, the records of the Sección de Terrenos Nacionales in the archives of the Secretaría de la Reforma Agraria, the files of U.S. military intelligence and the FBI, and the papers of a number of Villa’s collaborators.

The most serious difficulty I had to deal with was to extract the historical truth from the multifaceted layers of legend and myth surrounding Villa. What made this task especially difficult was that, on the one hand, Villa was enamored of his own myths and did his best to embroider them. On the other hand, not one but a whole series of myths surround Villa and his movement: the myths expressed in popular ballads, the myth of the victors, who for many years shaped a hostile official historiography about him, and the Hollywood myths, often very contradictory in nature, to name but a few. These myths colored many of the thousands of articles and memoirs written about Villa. For this reason I have tried as much as possible to rely on contemporary documents, which are far less tainted and affected by the myths.

This book comprises four major parts, ordered chronologically but representing four major phases both in Villa’s life and in the history of Mexico. The first part deals with Villa’s early life as an outlaw and his emergence as a secondary leader of the Mexican Revolution until early 1913. It also assesses the special conditions that transformed Chihuahua into a leading center of revolution and assesses the unique role that Chihuahua played in both 1910—11 and 1912 in the broader history of the Mexican Revolution.

The second part deals with the period when Villa emerged as a national leader and Chihuahua once more became a central area of the Mexican Revolution. It begins with Villa’s dramatic rise to national prominence in 1913 and ends with his disastrous military defeats at the end of 1915. Part 2 assesses the nature of his revolutionary movement in comparison to the other major movements that emerged at the same time in Mexico. It also attempts to assess the impact of Villismo as an ideology and a social movement, and its impact on the state of Chihuahua, Mexico as a whole, and, last but not least, the United States. This is the period in Villa’s life that has been studied most intensely and has given rise to the greatest controversies surrounding his personality and his movement.

The third part of the book deals with the years 1915 to 1920: the nature of Villa’s guerrilla warfare in that period, his attack on Columbus, New Mexico, and its paradoxical results, his reemergence as a national force in 1916—17, and his subsequent decline.

The last part describes Villa’s surrender, his life as a hacendado, his assassination and its aftermath, and the evolution of the Villa legend. Finally, an assessment is made of what conclusions can be reached about Villa’s personality and the character and impact of his movement. The concluding chapter also tries to show where, in the opinion of this author, unanswered questions, persistent discrepancies, and legitimate grounds for continuing debate remain.

This book is by no means the first to have been written about Villa. Outstanding works such as Martin Luis Guzmán’s Memorias de Pancho Villa already exist (see Bibliography). These works, though, tend to focus on the man rather than on his movement, and many of the sources I was able to utilize were unavailable to their authors.

This book pretends neither to give a final answer to the many problems that Villa and his movement have raised nor to resolve the controversies that they have aroused. There is little doubt that new documents relating to and new interpretations of both Villa and his movement will emerge. In addition, as has been the case with Danton, Robespierre, and other major revolutionary figures (and Villa, whatever one may think of him, was a major revolutionary figure), each generation will look at Villa from a different perspective, so that discussions on this subject will continue for a long time to come. What I hope to have achieved is to help clarify the parameters of that debate

Prologue

It was a scene he would have loved. Despite the cold, blustery weather that November day in 1976, throngs of people lined the street in the old city of Parral in the state of Chihuahua. They had heard the news that Pancho Villa’s remains, which were buried in Parral, would, as the result of a decree passed by the Mexican president, be transferred to the Monument of the Revolution in Mexico City. This constituted a belated recognition by a Mexican government of his revolutionary merits. As Villa’s casket, flanked by members of his family, came into view, masses of people began clapping and cheering. Many burst into the old rallying cry of Viva Villa!¹

What would have impressed Villa was the fact that practically none of these enthusiastic spectators had ever known him, since more than 50 years had elapsed since his death, and even the parents of many who now stood on the streets of Parral to watch him go to join the remains of his enemies in the mausoleum of revolutionary heroes in Mexico City had never seen, heard, or met him. It was a measure of the influence he still exercised in his adopted state that so many years after his death, thousands came out to cheer him. Another expression of the emotions his memory aroused was the fact that thousands of others are said to have refused to come out, that many sent harsh letters of protest to the newspapers, and some avidly read Rodrigo Alonso Cortés’s 1972 book Francisco Villa, el quinto jinete del apocalipsis (Pancho Villa, the Fifth Rider of the Apocalypse), which depicts Villa as a monster, and similar works.²

Villa might have expected this mixture of love and hate, of respect and contempt in Mexico. He would have been more surprised to find the same mixture manifesting itself north of the border, in a country for which, in the later years of his life, he had nourished an ever-increasing hatred: the United States. In November 1979, a statue of him was brought to Tucson, Arizona. It aroused emotions that were at least as strong as in Mexico and was greeted with a similar mixture of love and hate, of respect and contempt.³

These competing reactions reflect the contradictions of the man himself and the contradictions within the many legends about him.

The Early Life of Pancho Villa: The Legends

Villa’s early life remains shrouded in mystery. This is partly because in contrast to the other main figures of the Mexican Revolution, he had for many years been an outlaw, roaming through vast areas of northern Mexico.

That fact alone is a major obstacle to anyone wishing to unravel the story of his early life. The task is made even more difficult by the many legends, forged by both friends and foes, through which researchers have to hew their way

There are three basic versions of Villas early life, which I shall call the white legend, the black legend, and the epic legend. The first, based largely on Villa’s own reminiscences, portrays him as a victim of the social and economic system of Porfirian Mexico: a man the authorities prevented from living a quiet, law-abiding life, although he attempted to do so. The black legend portrays him as an evil murderer, with no redeeming qualities. The epic legend, largely based on popular ballads and traditions that seem to have emerged mainly in the course of the revolution, portrays Villa as a far more important personality in prerevolutionary Chihuahua than do either his own account or the black legend. What all three legends have in common is that they are based, not on contemporary documents, but rather on reminiscences, popular ballads, rumors, memoirs, and hearsay. What they also have in common is that none of the three legends, black, white, or epic, is entirely consistent within itself.

The white legend is primarily based on an autobiography that Villa dictated to one of his secretaries, Manuel Bauche Alcalde, at the height of his power in 1914. These memoirs came into the possession of one of Mexico’s greatest novelists, Martin Luis Guzmán, who after some rewriting and editing published part of them as the first part of a 1984 book entitled Memorias de Pancho Villa (Memoirs of Pancho Villa).⁴ In this book, I have relied on Villa’s original memoirs, which - the family of Martin Luis Guzmán generously allowed me to consult.

One of the few aspects of Villa’s life about which all agree is that he was born in 1878, on the Rancho de la Coyotada, part of one of the largest haciendas in the state of Durango, owned by the López Negrete family. His parents, Agustin Arango and Micaela Arambula, were sharecroppers on the hacienda. The child who would later be known as Francisco Villa was baptized Doroteo Arango. (Different opinions exist about his real name.) His father died at an early age, and his mother had to support her five children.

Beyond this point, the white, black, and epic legends begin to diverge.

The White Legend

The tragedy of my life begins on September 22, 1894, when I was sixteen years old, Villa recounts in his memoirs. He was working as a sharecropper on the Hacienda de Gogojito. After his father died, he had become head of his family, consisting of his mother, his brothers Antonio and Hipólito, and two sisters, Marianita, aged 15, and Martina, who was 12.

When he returned home from work that day in 1894, he found Don Agustín López Negrete, the Master, the owner of the lives and honor of us the poor people, standing in front of his mother, who was telling him: Go away from my house! Why do you want to take my daughter?

When he heard these words, the young Doroteo Arango became so furious that he ran to the house of his cousin Romualdo Franco, took the latter’s gun, and shot López Negrete in the foot.

López Negrete began loudly calling for help. Five of his retainers appeared, armed with rifles, and set out to shoot Doroteo. Don’t kill this boy, López Negrete told them, however. Take me home.

Young Arango realized that although the hacendado had prevented him from being killed, he might very well have him arrested, so he quickly mounted his horse and fled:

My conscience told me that I had done the right thing. The master, with five armed men, with all the power at his disposal, had tried to impose a forced contribution of our honor. The sweat of his serfs, the work of his serfs, our constant and tiring labor in order to enrich him, the master, was not sufficient for him. He also needed our women, his serfs; his despotism led to the profanation of our home.

Seeing that I was still free, I got on my horse and headed for the Sierra de la Silla, opposite Gogojito.⁵

From that moment on, Doroteo led the life of an outlaw in the mountains of Durango, relentlessly pursued by the authorities. He tells of how he managed again and again, with almost uncanny skill, to foil or defeat his pursuers as a boy of 16 or 17.

A few months after fleeing into the mountains, he was caught by three men, who jailed him in San Juan del Río. Arango was convinced that he would soon be shot. At 10:00 the next day, they took me out of the room where they had locked me up, in order [for me] to grind a barrel of Nixtamal [dough from which tortillas are made] .⁶ Hitting the guard nearest him with the pestle of the metate, Arango escaped into the Los Remedios mountains, located near the prison.

A few months later, in October 1895, he was caught again when seven men found him asleep and ordered him to surrender. This time Arango managed to foil his captors even more dramatically. He suggested to his captors that they roast some ears of corn before taking him to prison in town. They were hungry, there were seven of them, and they saw no reason to fear the boy they had captured, so they agreed.

What these men did not know was that the boy had a gun hidden under his blanket and a horse grazing nearby. When two of them went to cut corn stalks, and two others had gone to cut wood, Arango got out his gun, opened fire on his three remaining guards, ran to his horse, and once more managed to escape.⁷

He tells proudly of how only a few months later he defeated another party of men sent out to capture him, leading them into an ambush and killing three rurales.⁸

Arango came to feel that the life he had been leading was too dangerous and decided to take new measures both to elude his pursuers and to ease his life as an outlaw. He first decided to change his name. Since his father, Agustín Arango, had been the illegitimate son of Jesus Villa, he now began calling himself Francisco Villa. He became convinced that surviving alone was too difficult and so decided to join two outlaws who were roaming in the vicinity, Ignacio Parra and Refugio Alvarado. Before they accepted him into their company, the two men told him:

Look, young man, if you want to go with us, you have to do everything that we tell you. We know how to kill and rob. We tell you this so that you should not be afraid. These crude words, clear and precise like the blow of a hammer, did not intimidate me.... men who pompously call themselves honest also kill and rob. In the name of the law that they apply for the benefit and protection of the few in order to threaten and sacrifice the many, the high authorities of the people rob and kill with the greatest impunity.⁹

A new and far more agreeable life now began for the newly named Francisco Villa. Instead of being a hunted fugitive, barely managing to survive, he became a successful outlaw, reaping the rewards of banditry. Only one week after joining Parra and Alvarado, his share of the loot came to over 3,000 pesos. This was more than ten times the yearly wage of an agricultural worker in Chihuahua at the time. But it was only the beginning. A short time later, the band robbed a wealthy miner of 150,000 pesos, and Villa left the gang for a time with 50,000 pesos in his pocket. It was a fortune by the standards of the time, but within eleven months, Villa had used it all, mainly by giving it away. In his memoirs, Villa proudly states, I gave it to the poor. His mother received 5,000 pesos, and 4,000 were given to other members of his family. To an old man named Antonio Retana, who had a large family, could not see well, and was extremely poor, Villa gave the means to establish a tailor shop and hired an employee to run it. After eight or ten months I had returned to the poor the money that the rich had taken from them.¹⁰

Having spent all his money, Villa returned to the gang and resumed his life as an outlaw He soon fell out with his partners, however, over the wanton killing by one of them of an old man who had refused to sell him bread. Thereafter, he continued to wander through the mountains of Durango, committing a few robberies, finding new partners, and having repeated shoot-outs with the authorities. Finally, he had had enough of life as an outlaw. One day, I said to Luis Orozco, ‘Hombre, we can’t live like this. Let’s go to Chihuahua and look for work.’ One month later we went to Parral.¹¹

There, Villa labored in a variety of occupations, but was again and again forced to give everything up and flee when the authorities discovered his identity. First he worked as a miner, but he had to give this up after bruising his feet. He then worked for a mason, making bricks. When his identity was discovered, he fled, began stealing cattle, and attempted to sell them on the Chihuahua meat market. When this proved unprofitable, because the interests controlling the meat business would not give him access to the slaughterhouse, he became a miner again. This did not last long, and again because of persecution by the authorities, Villa had to resume life as an outlaw.

In spite of constant persecution, he bought a house in the town of Chihuahua and decided to settle there. It was there, sometime in 1910, that he met Abraham González,

the noble martyr for democracy ... who invited me to fight for the revolution for the rights of the people that had been trampled upon by tyranny. . . . There I understood for the first time that all the suffering, all the hatred, all the rebellions that had accumulated in my soul during so many years of fighting had given me such a strength of conviction and such a clear will that I could offer all this to my country ... to free her from the snakes that were devouring her entrails.¹²

Villa describes himself as a victim of both the despotism of the hacendados and the arbitrariness of the Porfirian authorities. A man with a sense of honor and dignity could take no other course than the one he took when he attacked the hacendado who had sought to outrage his sister. Every attempt he made at giving up life as an outlaw was thwarted by ruthless officials linked either to the government of Durango or to the Creel-Terrazas clan, which dominated Chihuahua.

The picture he paints of himself is not altogether flattering. He mainly, although not always, took from the rich, and sometimes, although less frequently, gave to the poor. He quotes his mother as telling him, My dear son, where did you get so much money? These men are leading you to perdition. You are committing crimes, and it will be on my conscience if I fail to make you understand.¹³

By his own description, he was not an entirely unwilling outlaw. Shortly after he joined Ignacio Parra, the gang leader gave him 3,000 pesos to outfit himself and buy a horse. Instead, Villa preferred to keep the money and steal the horse of a passerby.¹⁴ He could have attempted to give up life as an outlaw earlier and with greater ease had he used the 50,000 pesos he obtained from one of his first robberies to settle down and begin a different life.

Another aspect of his early life that Villa emphasizes is his prowess as a fighting man. As a boy of 16 or 17, he outwitted pursuers sent to catch him four times, killing a number of men in the process. He saw his fight against the authorities as linked in some way to the revolution, but he made no claim to have in any way participated in the many uprisings, protests, and political mobilizations that occurred in Chihuahua before the revolution.

What Villa did insist on is that although he had killed many men, he was not a coldblooded murderer. His victims had either died when Villa had to defend himself or were men who had betrayed him.

The Black Legend

Very different kinds of stories circulated about Villa in Chihuahua. Some of them were picked up in 1914 by U.S. intelligence agents, who attempted to sketch a biographical profile of Villa. One report sent by John Biddle, a colonel on the U.S. general staff, to the chief of the War College Division gave a far more bloodthirsty picture of Villa than the one provided in his autobiography:

One story has it that the sheriff of the county eloped with Villa’s sister and fled to the mountains. Villa pursued him with some ardent men, caught the couple, forced the man to go through a marriage ceremony, made him dig his own grave, and Villa shot him and rolled his body to the grave. One account is that he was incarcerated when fourteen years of age for cattle stealing and a few months after his release was again confined for homicide at Guanavaci[,] Chihuahua.¹⁵

In another report forwarded to U.S. military intelligence, Dr. Carlos Husk, a physician who worked in Mexico for the American Smelting and Refining Company, and who knew Villa well, wrote: In his bandit days, his notoriety was so widespread that nearly every crime committed and unaccounted for in northern Mexico was charged to him, and while there is no doubt that he participated in many, it was physically impossible for him to have accomplished everything in that line that his enemies accused him of, and he, of course, says that he never committed murder in cold blood, only killing those who were seeking him for the same purpose.¹⁶

The most systematic and comprehensive version of the black legend was written by Celia Herrera, a member of a family who developed a kind of blood feud with Villa, and many of whose members Villa killed.¹⁷

Herrera depicts a vicious killer and murderer without any redeeming qualities. Villa became an outlaw, according to her, not because he had avenged the honor of his sister but because he had murdered another boy, a friend of his, with whom he had had an altercation. This was the prelude to a spate of killings that increased in scope, intensity, and gruesomeness from year to year. In 1900, Villa killed Claro Reza, a former companion, a butcher who owed him money and refused to pay up.

In 1902, he joined a gang of criminals headed by an outlaw named José Beltrán. They attacked the house of a man named Inocencio Chávez and pistol-whipped his wife when she refused to tell them where he had hidden his money. In 1904, they attempted to murder a cattleman named Amaya and plunder his house. When they were prevented from carrying out their planned robbery by the arrival of a policeman, they became so furious that they murdered two of Amaya’s cowboys when they encountered them on the street. In 1908, the gang entered the house of Alejandro Muñoz in the town of San Isidro. They requested a large sum of money from him, and when he did not give it to them, they tortured him, cutting off parts of his feet. Then they knifed him to death. On October 13, 1910, they attacked the hacienda of Talamantes, where they found only the owner’s youngest daughter, Josefa Sota. When she refused to hand over her money, they buried her alive.

According to this account, Abraham González never asked Villa to participate in the revolution. In fact, he got involved only by coincidence: he was visiting a girlfriend at a small ranch when a federal force, believing that some revolutionaries were hidden there, attacked it. Thinking that they were pursuing him, Villa shot back and fled. He then decided to join Pascual Orozco, together with his gang. Orozco at first refused, since he considered Villa nothing more than a bandit. While negotiations were going on, federal troops attacked Orozco, Villa joined in responding to the attack, and Orozco reluctantly accepted the bandit into his army. He was to regret this decision, since Villa later stole the pay destined for the revolutionary troops.

Needless to say, according to Herrera, Villa never attempted to settle down and lead a more peaceful and law-abiding life in Chihuahua.

The Epic Legend

What the white and the black legends have in common is that they do not attribute any great political or social importance to Villa prior to the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. The epic legend, by contrast, states that in his years as an outlaw, Villa became the idol of Chihuahua’s peasantry and the scourge of the Terrazas. No one has better described the epic legend than the U.S. correspondent John Reed:

An immense body of popular legend grew up among the peons around his name. There are many traditional songs and ballads, celebrating his exploits—you can hear the shepherds singing them around their fires at night, repeating verses handed down by their fathers or composing others extemporaneously. For instance, they tell the story of how Villa, fired by the story of the misery of the peons at the hacienda of Los Alamos, gathered a small army and descended upon the big house, which he looted and distributed the spoils among the poor people. He drove off thousands of cattle from the Terrazas range and ran them across the border. He would suddenly descend upon a prosperous mine and seize the bullion. When he needed corn he captured a granary belonging to some rich man. He recruited almost openly in the villages, far removed from the well traveled roads and railways, organizing the outlaws of the mountains.¹⁸

The epic legend not only painted Villa as a more influential man than he had described himself in his memoirs but as a more generous one as well. One version of this legend reached all the way to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. In a conversation with the British ambassador, Wilson described Villa as a sort of Robin Hood [who] had spent an eventful life in robbing the rich in order to give to the poor. He had even at one time kept a butcher’s shop for the purpose of distributing to the poor the proceeds of his innumerable cattle raids.¹⁹

It is extremely difficult to separate truth from legend, to determine the veracity of these contradictory accounts, because so few documents exist for this early period of Villa’s life. None of Villa’s accounts of his own life, the accusations of his enemies, and the ballads that form the basis of the epic legend are corroborated by contemporary documents. Villa’s autobiography is based exclusively on his memoirs, while Celia Herrera quotes only one document dealing with Villa’s life prior to the outbreak of the revolution—a report by a local jefe politico stating that in 1907, Villa and some companions had stolen 22 head of cattle and mules.²⁰

Extricating fact from fiction and separating truth from legend with regard to Villa’s early life requires not only examination of all contemporary documents, including a critical evaluation of both Villa’s memoirs and those of his contemporaries, but an understanding of the milieu in which he lived prior to the revolution, that of Mexico’s northern frontier, and above all the state of Chihuahua. It was in many respects a region with a history far different from that of the rest of Mexico, a place where heroism and bloodthirstiness had come together in an inextricable and violent mix.

PART ONE

From Outlaw to Revolutionary

CHAPTER ONE

From the Frontier to the Border

There is enormous animosity against the hacienda for which I have no explanation, and which would have seemed incredible to me, if I did not feel it every moment. Many of the servants whom we considered loyal have greatly disappointed us; they have been captivated by the promises made by the revolutionaries that the lands would be divided among them, and right now all they think about is the realization of such a beautiful dream. Many of them have received great benefits from the hacienda and they are the ones who demand land with the greatest eagerness, not because we have caused them any harm, but because of their desire for their own profit.

—The administrator of the hacienda of Santa Catalina to its owner¹

On the eve of the Spanish Conquest, what is today the state of Chihuahua had been part neither of the Aztec empire nor of the complex civilization known as Mesoamerica, which included the inhabitants of central and southern Mexico. In contrast to Mesoamerica, Chihuahua had no large cities, no dense population living on intensive agriculture, and no highly stratified social groups. Instead, it was thinly populated by groups of hunters, gatherers, and some agriculturists, loosely organized into different tribes. The Aztecs had shown no interest in conquering this nomadic population, to which they collectively referred in the most derisive way as chichimecas, the sons of dogs.

The Aztecs’ lack of interest is not surprising. The vast state of Chihuahua consists mostly of deserts and inhospitable mountain ranges. Large parts of central Chihuahua are taken up by the sand dunes of Samalayuca, while the even more arid Bolsón de Mapimi is located in the southeastern part of the state. The huge Sierra Madre, in western Chihuahua, are mostly just as inhospitable. Agriculture could be practiced only in limited regions, irrigated by rivers and lakes, mainly in the northwestern part of the state and to a lesser degree in eastern Chihuahua near the Conchos River. Some of the most important resources of Chihuahua were of no interest to the Aztecs. There were no cattle to graze on the fertile pastureland in the central part of the state, and the Aztecs lacked the technology to extract its rich mineral ores. They had no use either for its huge timber resources.

Initially, the Spaniards, too, showed little interest in the region. Their attitude changed at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, when large silver mines were discovered near the present cities of Chihuahua and Parral. Spanish settlements were soon established, and haciendas sprang up around them to supply the miners with food and to profit from the mining boom. Since it was difficult to attract laborers or immigrants from central Mexico or from Spain to this vast, undeveloped, and dangerous region, the Spaniards attempted to enslave the local population, most of whom were Tarahumara, whose way of life was predominantly nomadic. When Indian slavery proved to be both unsuccessful (many slaves fled into the Sierra Madre) and illegal (the Spanish Crown soon banned Indian slavery), new methods of influencing the Indians were attempted.

The Jesuits and Franciscans tried to settle them in missions. Although temporarily subdued, the Tarahumara staged a number of uprisings, however, and the majority of them finally faded into the Sierra Madre, where the Spaniards had great difficulty in locating them, and where they resumed their nomadic way of life.²

Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the population of Chihuahua gradually expanded as more mines were developed, new haciendas were set up, and migrants decided to settle there. That expansion abruptly halted in the mid eighteenth century, when Apache raiders began to make their presence felt in Chihuahua. Until then, the Apaches had lived far to the north of Chihuahua, but in the eighteenth century, they were pushed southward by the far more powerful Comanches, and they began raiding Spanish settlements. The few hundred soldiers that Spain had stationed on the frontier were unable to put up an effective resistance, and many of Spain’s hacendados as well as its miners fled southward or into a few large towns.³

Faced with the possible loss of this potentially rich province, the Spanish crown decided to set up a series of fortified settlements inhabited by armed peasant freeholders. Extraordinary benefits were given to migrants from Spain and from central Mexico, as well as to local Indians, who were willing to settle in these military colonies. They were granted large amounts of land and exempted from paying taxes for ten years. Indian military colonists, in contrast to the Indian peasants of central Mexico, who were considered wards of the crown, were given full rights of Spanish citizenship.⁴

By the end of the eighteenth century, these colonists began to be a fighting force able effectively to resist the Apache raiders. When the crown held out not only a stick in the shape of these military colonies but a carrot as well, offering to supply all Apaches who settled near Spanish towns with food, clothing, and alcohol, many of the nomadic raiders settled down. Although it was never completely pacified, the region was more peaceful than ever before. For the first time, the peasant freeholders were able to fully enjoy the fruits of their land and labor, for which they gave credit to the Spanish crown. As a result, when the Mexican war of independence broke out in 1810, not only did the military colonists along New Spain’s northern frontier not join the revolutionaries in central and southern Mexico, but many of them decided to fight on the side of Spain.⁵

A century later, in 1910, after the Mexican government had again pacified the frontier, the descendants of these military colonists took a completely different attitude and fought in the forefront of the Mexican Revolution. The reason for that change in attitude can be found in the development of Chihuahua in the nineteenth century.

The peace the Spanish crown brought to the frontier did not survive Spanish colonial rule. By 1830, the Apaches were raiding again. Weak Mexican governments, generally toppled after one or two years by military coups or by rival political factions, had neither the means nor the will to fight the Apaches. The payments in food and in kind that had kept them peaceful were canceled just as the Apaches began to sense the military weakness of the new Mexican government. The Mexican army was far more adept at staging coups in Mexico City than at fighting Apache raiders. Attacks on haciendas increased to such a degree that by the mid nineteenth century, most hacendados had abandoned their estates. By contrast, the military colonists stayed and fought, since they had nowhere else to go.⁶

Describing this period, the inhabitants of the old military colony of Namiquipa proudly wrote in a petition they drafted at the end of the nineteenth century, all neighboring haciendas had been abandoned because of the constant danger of aggression by the barbarians between 1832 and 1860 and only Namiquipa remained to fight the barbarians and to constitute a lonely bastion of civilization in this remote region.⁷ This was true not only of Namiquipa but of many other military colonies and free villages in large parts of Chihuahua. In these years, they created what was in many respects a unique kind of society in Mexico, limited to northern Chihuahua and a few other regions that were prey to Apache attacks. It was a society that embodied a unique combination of savagery and democracy. Savagery was characteristic of both sides in the conflict. The Apaches frequently killed and tortured their prisoners, including women and children, and the Mexican authorities offered bounties for Apache scalps, also including those of women and children. The savagery at times extended to Tarahumara Indians, who did not raid Mexican settlements but frequently lost their lands and their properties to white and mestizo settlers.⁸

On the other hand, this Chihuahuan society of free rancheros perhaps most closely corresponded to the kind of U.S. frontier society painted in vivid colors by Frederick Jackson Turner. His hypothesis, which captured the minds of generations of Americans, was that the U.S. frontier created a unique kind of self reliant, autonomous, independent farmer. These farmers, according to Turner, were unencumbered by the class differences and power structures of the eastern United States. The state was weak, the traditional wealthy families did not go west, and so a kind of egalitarian, self-reliant society was created in the west of the United States, which largely shaped the mentality of that country.

In recent years, this hypothesis has aroused much controversy in U.S. historiography. ⁹ Some historians argue that land speculators, wealthy landowners, and bankers were very much present in the settlement of what is generally considered the U.S. frontier—as was the state in the shape of the U.S. Army. In much of Chihuahua and some other parts of northern Mexico, the contrary was the case in the period from about 1830 to the 1860s. The state, which in the shape of Spanish colonial authorities, the army, wealthy landowners, and the Catholic church had been present at the genesis of the northern Mexican frontier in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, had largely disappeared in northwestern Chihuahua by the 1830s. Many of the missions that the Jesuits had established vanished toward the end of the colonial period after the order was expelled from New Spain in 1767; the remaining missions were largely abandoned when Spanish rule ended in Mexico in 1821. Wealthy miners and hacendados fled as the Apaches advanced, and bankers and land speculators saw no value in lands that were constantly prey to nomadic attacks. The Mexican federal government and the federal army were far too weak and riven by internal dissension to have any significant presence in Chihuahua and northern Mexico, so the free rancheros were left to their own devices. The society they developed was poor but largely egalitarian. Chihuahuans were self-reliant and self-confident, with a fierce sense of pride in being able to maintain themselves in the face of such adversity. From the 1860s onward, that society would once again be transformed by the return of both the state and the hacendados to Chihuahua. The man who did most to engineer that return was one of the state’s most important, flamboyant, and memorable figures, Luis Terrazas.

The Rise of Luis Terrazas

In the 1860s, after Mexico defeated the French invaders and put an end to Maximilian’s empire, a more stable administration was established. Fearing that Chihuahua would be annexed by the United States if it was not brought firmly under Mexican control, the central government did everything in its power to fight the Apaches. New military colonies were established; settlers were given land if they were ready to fight against the Indian raiders; and, above all, the hacendados were induced to return. The man who was largely responsible for this new policy was Luis Terrazas.

The son of a well-to-do butcher, Terrazas did not come from one of Chihuahua’s ruling families, although he soon married into one of them. He joined the Liberal party in Chihuahua, became one of its leaders, and, in the course of the civil wars between Liberals and Conservatives, became Liberal governor of the state in 1859. Being more adept than his predecessors at fighting off the Apache raiders, he quickly became popular.¹⁰

Terrazas’s organizational talents were not the sole reason for his success. His chief innovation was to divert tax revenues earmarked for the federal government in Mexico City to setting up militias to fight the Indians. While this approach was unpopular in Mexico’s capital, it gained Terrazas prestige and support among many segments of Chihuahua’s population, including its military colonists, who regarded the central authorities as useless exploiters and parasites.

Terrazas did not devote all of his energies to fighting the Apaches. He also used the governorship to acquire some of the largest haciendas in the state. He acquired his largest estate by expropriating the property of another haçendado, Pablo Martinez del Río, who had the misfortune to choose the wrong side in the war between the French and Mexico. He obtained other estates by buying them cheap from hacendados who had abandoned them and saw no way of settling them again. Since he was governor of the state, Terrazas controlled the militia and was able to attract many laborers who had fled the countryside to work on his estates, because he was able to offer them a greater degree of protection than other hacendados. There is no evidence that when he began forming his empire in the 1860s, Terrazas expropriated any of the lands of the peasant freeholders in the military colonies. There were sufficient abandoned estate lands to meet his ambitions, and he needed the fighting power of the military colonists. While Terrazas was governor of the state, his cousin Joaquin Terrazas commanded militia units composed of peasant freeholders who were far more effective in fighting the Apaches than the few federal troops stationed in Chihuahua. The activities of this cousin reflected to the credit of Terrazas, and he gained a large measure of popularity in his native state.

In 1876, the situations of Terrazas and of Mexico profoundly changed when General Porfirio Díaz, one of the heroes of Mexico’s struggle for independence against Napoleon III, carried out a successful military coup and assumed power in Mexico. It was the beginning of the longest dictatorship in the history of Mexico. With the exception of four years from 1880 to 1884 when an ally of Díaz’s, Manuel González, assumed the country’s presidency, Díaz would rule Mexico until 1911, when he was overthrown by a popular uprising. In many respects, the Díaz regime met the fondest hopes of Mexico’s wealthiest men, such as Luis Terrazas.

In economic terms, Mexico underwent unprecedented economic growth. Newly constructed railroads linked Mexico to the United States, as well as to port cities in Mexico. The result was a tremendous increase in foreign investment in Mexico, as well as spectacular economic growth. Between 1884 and 1900, about $1,200,000,000 worth of foreign investment flooded into the country, and the gross national product rose at an annual rate of 8 percent. Mexico now enjoyed an unprecedented era of political stability. Uprisings by members of the elite and the military, which had been the hallmark of Mexico’s history since independence, practically ceased. This was owing not only to the power of the state, whose revenues increased significantly thanks to economic growth and foreign investment, but also to the fact that members of the elite became intermediaries for foreign investors and thus had a major stake in maintaining the political stability that was a precondition for foreign investment. The increasing power of the state and the existence of railroads that greatly increased the mobility of government military forces allowed the regime to crush popular and middle-class uprisings wherever they occurred. Possibilities of political instability were drastically reduced by falsified elections, which led to a rubber-stamp congress that Díaz completely controlled. The result of political growth and economic stability was that Mexico’s upper class were now able to accumulate enormous wealth. They did so not only by becoming intermediaries for foreign investors but also because they were able, thanks to the communication revolution that had taken place in Mexico, to export large amounts of goods both to the United States and to Europe. Díaz’s policies of keeping down popular protest, muzzling the opposition press, preventing the formation of labor unions, and not allowing strikes greatly contributed to this enrichment. So did another of Porfirio Díaz’s policies: large-scale expropriation of land that belonged to village communities.

Unlike other members of Mexico’s ruling class, Luis Terrazas by no means found Díaz’s assumption of power an unmitigated blessing. In 1876, his political acumen had failed him, and instead of siding with Díaz, he had supported his rival, President Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada. As a result supporters of Terrazas were ousted from the governorship of Chihuahua, which was now occupied by a powerful rival of Terrazas’s, Angel Trias. Terrazas thus suffered a setback, but it was by no means a decisive defeat. Díaz’s policy was not to kill or exterminate members of the elite who had opposed him, but to remove them from power, allowing them to enrich themselves by all means at their disposal in the hope that they would thus be dissuaded from engaging in costly and destabilizing uprisings. Thanks to the newly built railroads, Terrazas was able to export huge numbers of cattle to the United States. His family also controlled the largest bank in Chihuahua, the Banco Minero, and played a major role as an intermediary or even as a partner for foreign entrepreneurs who invested in Chihuahua. Terrazas profited, too, from another aspect of Porfirian modernization, the confiscation on a vast scale of lands belonging to communal villages or to small landowners, which would play a decisive role in both Terrazas’s and Díaz’s downfall in 1911.

The fact that he had become one of the richest men in Mexico did not, however, satisfy Terrazas. He wanted to regain political power in his native state. In 1879, he briefly succeeded in doing so. In that year, Terrazas’s rival Angel Trias suffered a sharp decline in popularity when he raised taxes in order to fight the Apaches but had little success to show for it. The people of rural western Chihuahua staged a revolt and forced Trias to resign in favor of Terrazas, and as a consequence the latter once more became governor of Chihuahua. Díaz, who was on the verge of handing power over to his temporary successor Manuel González, was not willing to intervene, and González had no problem with tolerating Terrazas’s assumption of power. In 1884, when Díaz once again became president of Mexico, Terrazas once more lost control of his native state, and it would take eighteen years, until 1903, for him to regain it. In the meantime, though, he would become the wealthiest man in Mexico.

Two developments greatly contributed to Terrazas’s accumulation of new wealth but would have devastating consequences for Chihuahua’s peasant freeholders. In 1885, U.S. troops captured the last major Apache leader, Geronimo, and Apache raids into Mexico practically ceased. And in the same year, Chihuahua was linked by railroads both to central Mexico and to the United States.

All this resulted in an enormous economic boom. Chihuahua’s miners and cattle ranchers were able to sell their products across the border in the United States, and U.S. investors discovered that returns on investments could be very large in Chihuahua. Land prices rose, and the situation of Chihuahua’s peasant freeholders underwent a dramatic change.

The Seeds of Revolution: The Offensive Against Chihuahua’s Free Villages

For years the military colonists who had fought against Apache raiders had been considered the heroes of Chihuahua. Their deeds were sung in corridos (popular ballads). They had marched in triumph through the streets of Ciudad Chihuahua, and governor after governor had praised them for their exploits. The free villagers of Chihuahua saw themselves as defenders of civilization against the barbarians.¹¹ Ironically, however, the destruction of their enemies, the Apaches, also heralded their own elimination as a social class. After the capture of Geronimo, the rulers of Mexico and Chihuahua no longer had any need for the fighting skill and spirit of the military colonists. What they now wanted was their land, the value of which had increased enormously as a result of railway construction, foreign investment, and the economic boom.

In contrast to what had happened a century earlier, when peace between the Spaniards and Apaches gave Chihuahua’s free villagers the possibility of enjoying their lands and rights and had converted them into grateful adherents of the Spanish colonial government, a very different situation arose once peace was established in late-nineteenth-century Chihuahua.

In the years between 1884 and 1910) the state’s free villagers lost most of their lands and their traditional rights and suffered an attack upon their sense of dignity, which was based on their economic independence and freedom from outside interference. These tendencies affected not only the former military colonists but all of Chihuahua’s peasant freeholders. The composition of this population was by no means homogeneous. It embraced at least five groups.

At the top—in a certain sense, the aristocracy of Chihuahua’s free villagers—were the inhabitants of the first five military colonies that Viceroy Teodoro de Croix had set up in 1776. These were Namiquipa, Cruces, Casas Grandes, Janos, and Galeana. These colonies had received a huge amount of land: 112,359 hectares each.¹²

The second group consisted of colonies, such as San Andrés and Cuchillo Parado, that had been founded later, either by the Spanish colonial administration or by the Mexican government, and whose recipients had received far less land than the original five colonies. While the lands of these communities were in part individually owned and sections could be sold either to inhabitants of these villages and towns or to outsiders who wanted to settle there, much of the land was communal and was either utilized jointly—this was the case with pasture-land—or rented out to individual community members.

The third group of free villagers consisted of Indians, mainly Tarahumara. They had obtained their lands from two different sources. Some had received it from the colonial authorities on the same terms under which Indian villages had been allowed to keep their common land in central and southern Mexico. The lands belonged to the community, could not be sold, and were far smaller in extent than those of the military colonies. A second group of Indians had originally possessed no lands of their own but had been settled on missions that officially belonged to the Jesuit order. After the expulsion of the Jesuits by the Spanish crown in 1767, some of them were given the same status as those Indian villages dependent upon the crown. Many of them soon lost their land, because the Jesuits were not there to protect their holdings. The expulsion of some Indians from the former Jesuit properties was followed in the nineteenth century by a more massive process whereby mestizos and whites, who came either from other parts of Chihuahua, from other parts of Mexico, or, after 1848, from territories annexed by the United States, took over much land that had originally belonged to the Indians. Many Indians were forced onto marginal land or into remote mountain regions of the Sierra Madre. Nevertheless, a substantial number of Indian villages still managed to retain land of their own.

The fourth group comprised communities inhabited mainly by squatters who lived either on public land or on abandoned haciendas—at times with the tacit approval of the estate owners, who could thus count on more men to defend their properties from Apache raids.

Finally, there were groups of landless villagers who grazed their cattle on unclaimed public lands.¹³

The expropriation and subjugation of Chihuahua’s free villagers did not proceed smoothly and without major obstacles. Not only were these northern villagers armed, but they had a long fighting tradition. After all, the Apaches, whom they had fought for more than a century, were considered by some observers to be the best guerrilla fighters in the world.

The resentment and shock that the attacks by the federal government, the state government, and the hacendados on their lands and their rights produced among Chihuahua’s peasant freeholders were all the greater since, unlike the situation that existed in central and southern Mexico, these attacks were to a large degree unexpected.

In southern and central Mexico, conflicts over land between hacendados and free villages had a long tradition, going back all the way to the colonial period, and perhaps even to precolonial times. While such conflicts were not absent in the north, they tended until the 1880s to be overshadowed by the common interest of landowners and free villagers in fending off Apache attacks. Land values were low as long as the Indian wars raged, and this had also tended to reduce conflicts between the villagers and the hacendados. In the 1860s, under the governorship of Terrazas and at the initiative of President Benito Juárez, lands were granted to new military colonists and to veterans of the war against the French.¹⁴

In the 1880s, however, the attitudes of both the central government and of the state administration of Chihuahua toward these military colonists underwent a change. The first indication of this was a new government policy with respect to public lands, where traditionally anyone had been able to graze cattle or collect wood.

A large part of the state consisted of such unclaimed land belonging to the central government, which had two different options for disposing of it. The first was to do what the U.S. government had done after the Civil War and proclaim a homestead act to open the land to farmers and small ranchers, which would have contributed, as it did in the United States,¹⁵ to the easing of social tensions and the creation of a kind of safety valve for landless peasants from central Mexico. Such a policy would not have created a predominant class of small landowners in Chihuahua, since the government-owned lands were largely inappropriate for small-scale agriculture, but it would have helped to stabilize the social situation in the state.

The Mexican government instead opted for a very different policy, which was to play a major role in the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution 25 years later. Instead of being opened up or even sold to small settlers, the land was given away or sold in huge chunks. As payment for their work, surveying companies were allowed to keep a third of the public lands they surveyed. The other two-thirds were sold by the government to hacendados or foreign entrepreneurs, with the vague understanding that in return they would bring in colonists from Europe.

The surveying companies began their work on a large scale in 1884. Chihuahua’s free villagers rapidly felt the effects of their activity. With the approval of the federal government, the surveying companies launched their first attack on the five original and largest military colonies, each of which had been adjudicated 112,359 hectares by the Spanish colonial authorities. The surveying companies refused to recognize these properties and attempted (not always successfully) to limit the collective holdings of these five military colonies to 28,080 hectares each. Other communities were affected in more indirect ways by the activities of the surveying companies. Grazing lands that had been part of the public domain, and had thus been accessible to all inhabitants, were suddenly closed off. Wild cattle and game, which could be hunted by everyone at will as long as the land where they roamed was public property, were now closed to Chihuahua’s free villagers. They also lost the right to exploit the woodlands and other resources they had freely enjoyed.¹⁶

The activities of the surveying companies in the years between 1884 and 1892 weakened but did not destroy the economic basis of Chihuahua’s free peasantry. ¹⁷ Chihuahua’s landowners knew the fighting capacities of their erstwhile allies and were afraid of provoking them. A series of measures taken by both the federal and the state governments had already aroused the anger of many of Chihuahua’s villagers. They had lost much of the independence and freedom that they had enjoyed throughout most of the nineteenth century. A law passed in 1884 stated that jefes politicos (i.e., district administrators) would not be elected anymore, but would be appointed by the state authorities. At the same time, their power over the villages was greatly strengthened. In many cases, villagers were not allowed to take cases to the courts without getting prior approval of the new jefes políticos.¹⁸

In 1891, the state government struck another blow at the traditional autonomy of the inhabitants of Chihuahua. A decree was passed whereby district capitals would not elect their own mayors; henceforth, these officials too would be appointed by the state governor. While these measures had generated dissatisfaction among many of Chihuahua’s free villagers, they had, with a few exceptions, not led to any violent reactions. In the first years after they were implemented, some villagers found compensation for the losses they had suffered. Many went to work in newly opened mines or in railway construction. Others utilized the newly built railroads to find work across the border in the United States. Between 1890 and 1893, however, a series of violent uprisings shook Chihuahua, shattering the Porfirian peace in the state.

The First Revolts in the Chihuahuan Countryside