The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

"This time the book is in fact about the Mexican Revolution, which included popular armies raised by Emiliano Zapata in the south and Pancho Villa in the north. At one point, those two leaders actually met in Mexico City, but they didn’t find much to talk about or they found it awkward to talk to each other because, among other reasons, Pancho Villa was a teetotaler and Zapata thought that a talk between revolutionary generals should include toasting with mezcal or some drinking. This is a massive book—it’s close to a thousand pages. Pancho Villa is a figure around whom many myths have accumulated over time. On the one hand, he’s somebody about whom we know quite a bit because he was friendly with a number of intellectuals or journalists during his lifetime, who observed him at close quarters and then gave us character sketches of him. On the other hand, we know quite little about his origins because he was a self-mythologiser. He would tell his life story in different ways to different people who asked him about it. This biography is by Friedrich Katz, who was one of the great historians of the Mexican Revolution. Katz was a social historian, and he spends quite a bit of time explaining to us, if we can’t know exactly the origins of Pancho Villa himself, what was the milieu that he came from. What was the social milieu that produced the Mexican Revolution in the north, which was originally the most important location of revolutionary activity? But he always returns to the life story of this amazing, larger-than-life figure, Pancho Villa. What wasn’t he before he became a military revolutionary leader? He was born on a hacienda (an agricultural estate) to a tenant or a sharecropper or an agricultural labourer. He left that estate in his early teens, though I’m not sure if that is known with certainty. As the story goes, he left because the administrator of that hacienda raped Villa’s sister, and Villa avenged his sister’s assault by killing the administrator, and that’s how he first became an outlaw. It’s a story that is very resonant because in Mexico, especially in Northern Mexico at the time, a lot of social power was concentrated in these large land holdings, whose owners or administrators exercised not only economic power but also a lot of quasi-judicial coercion over the people living on their estates. Certainly, this experience of hacienda owners or hacienda administrators raping or ‘seducing’ the daughters of people who live on their land is very plausible. “He always returns to the life story of this amazing, larger-than-life figure, Pancho Villa” This book is, in part, an attempt to demythologise Pancho Villa. Friedrich Katz tells us that there’s no evidence in Villa’s early criminal files of him having murdered that administrator. While it seems very plausible that he might have left the hacienda because of abuses carried out by the hacienda owner or the hacienda administrator, it seems less likely that he would have killed that person and gotten away with it, and that this fact would not have come up in police investigations into him later in life. At any rate, after he left the hacienda, Pancho Villa became a bandit. He spent some of his time holding up people and robbing travellers and there seems to be a Robin Hood element to this. There’s the idea that he’s a ‘social bandit’—the phrase coined by English Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm—that is, somebody who is able to blend in with the ordinary population because they direct their criminality against the dominant classes, against rich people, and they might even be seen by the popular classes as heroes for their exploits. However, Villa was not only a bandit before he joined the Mexican Revolution. He also, at some point, settled down and seems to have worked at various occupations—including as a guardsman for North American mining companies, transporting bullion out of mines. He tried to establish himself as a shopkeeper in Chihuahua City. It’s still impossible to come up with the chronology of his life and say, ‘This is when he did this. This is when he did that.’ But from Katz we get the idea that he led an early life that was a mixture of criminal activities and licit, even respectable activities. Yes, very much so. The revolution itself started as a successful attempt to overthrow a regime in which landowners were immensely powerful. That regime was presided over by President Porfirio Díaz, who, when the revolution broke out, had ruled Mexico dictatorially for the last thirty-four years—more or less, with one interruption early on in his rule. Eventually, though, the revolution descended into a fight between different revolutionary factions. There was a lot of conflict within the revolutionary coalition that was ultimately about what ‘democracy’ should mean. Francisco Madero, the revolution’s early leader, thought that it was enough to overthrow Porfirio Díaz, the dictator, and then start an electoral democracy, which had already been Mexico’s political system for most of the time since Mexico’s independence in 1821. But other revolutionary factions (including the one eventually led by Villa) wanted a more radical agrarian revolution—a revolution with a social dimension on top of the political dimension."