Francisco “Pancho” Villa (born José Doroteo Arango Arámbula) was a famous subversive figure of the Mexican Revolution who rose to legendary stature thanks to his unparalleled charisma. His superior leadership skills enabled him to establish deep bonds with his fellow soldiers, and his extraordinary dexterity with both horses and all kinds of weapons bestowed upon him the image of an almost immortal gunslinger and general able to overcome all kind of hardships in the name of La Revolución.
Pancho Villa started his life as a bandit at an early age. Born on June 5, 1878, in San Juan del Rio, Durango, he shot Agustín Lopez Negrete, a hacienda owner who allegedly raped his sister, when he was just sixteen years old. In a story that very closely matches a similar one whose protagonist was Billy the Kid, Villa stole a horse and hunted down, one by one, the eight men who committed the atrocity. After the incident he spent his next six years living in the mountains with some fugitives until he joined a band of outlaws led by the infamous bandit leader Ignacio Parra. After escaping a forceful enlistment into the federal army and becoming a deserter, Villa started robbing wealthier cattle herders and banks, often returning the money he stole to the poor and the needy. Then he settled in Chihuahua and from his base he ruled the territory with a firm hand.
Pancho Villa rose to prominence during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Early in life he developed a reputation as a ruthless bandit, but his actions during the revolution secured his place in history as a daring military hero and fighter for the poor and oppressed. (Library of Congress)
During this early period, roughly from 1900 to 1909, the legend of Villa started to emerge, a legend that portrayed him as some kind of Mexican Robin Hood. According to various accounts he was an idol among the masses of peones (poor hacienda laborers), taking from the rich to give to the poor and feeding starving families with stolen cattle. He was considered a charismatic general who often recruited his new gang members among the local population in towns, saving them from a life of quasi-slave labor for the hacendados (landowners).
He was also a ruthless commander who showed no mercy for traitors. The stories say that he and his personal executioner, Rodolfo “El Carnicero” (“The Butcher”) Fierro, would hunt and kill all the other male family members of those who betrayed him, making him either greatly loved or deeply feared by peasants and soldiers. His anger could easily lead him to fury. In one story he forces a man to dig his own grave before shooting him (an image later borrowed many times by Hollywood movies) or cuts off the feet of a wealthy man who refuses to pay his gang the large sum of money they require.
In 1910, Villa joined forces with the aristocratic revolutionary Francisco Madero, a politician who led a popular uprising against the brutal dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Commanding a powerful army of cavalry guerrilla fighters called Division del Norte (Division of the North), Pancho Villa earned his reputation as one of Mexico’s best gunfighters with the nickname of “El Centauro del Norte” (The Centaur of the North). He led his men to victory many times thanks to his imaginative tactics, powerful cavalry charges, night-time surprise attacks, and the fierce loyalty of his peers. Villa was deeply respected by his soldiers, and he commanded a strong presence among them. Stories say that he often joined them at their campfires, sharing their food and eating with them (ensuring at the same time that no one was going to poison him). Villa’s most elite fighters, the Dorados (Golden Ones), fought with the agility of Apache warriors, being able to fire accurately while on full gallop and then to retreat before the enemy was able to retaliate. Their incredible skill and the charismatic aura of their commander attracted many Hollywood filmmakers and journalists from the United States, for whom Pancho Villa often organized staged battles and posed to be recorded and photographed.
After Madero’s assassination by the usurping general Victoriano Huerta, Pancho Villa joined his forces with Venustiano Carranza and another legendary figure of the Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata, leader of the “Ejército Libertador del Sur” (Liberation Army of the South). Together they were able to overthrow Huerta’s new dictatorship, and in 1913 Villa was named governor of Chihuahua. Here Villa gained much of the local population’s favor by setting in motion his personal social justice agenda. He started issuing his own money, confiscated money from the wealthy and from the banks to build mobile hospitals and railroads, and expropriated vast land holdings to distribute them among soldiers’ widows and dead revolutionaries’ orphaned families.
In 1914, Villa refused to be elected president of Mexico, a title that ended in the hands of Carranza, who rapidly began to impose his new dictatorship, promptly using his power over the press to depict Pancho Villa as a monstrous and brutal bandit leader in order to alienate him from the people’s favor. Yet again Villa confronted an opposing villainous figure with relentless zeal. The fight against such an evil and despotic ruler as Carranza contributed to his reputation as the poor man’s hero in popular Mexican folklore.
Villa’s military campaign against the newly elected President Carranza was brutally interrupted in 1915 when Carranza’s best general, Álvaro Obregón, inflicted a terrible defeat on his army at the Battle of Celaya. Fully entrenched machine gun nests fortified by barbed wires literally massacred Villa’s men, producing almost 4,000 casualties and capturing more than 6,000 soldiers. Obregón’s men were aided by the United States, which gave logistic support after President Woodrow Wilson decided to support Carranza’s forces in hopes of ending the Mexican Revolution as soon as possible. Enraged by this act of betrayal (the United States had supplied Villa’s armies for years with weapons and ammunition), Villa decided to cross the border and attack Columbus, New Mexico, but President Wilson reacted by sending an army of 5,000 men to hunt him down, forcing him to hide with a small contingent of soldiers still loyal to him. According to the legend, during his retreat, in order to expedite his escape from U.S. troops, Villa buried a large hoard of gold and silver bars in a secret location near Santa Cruz.
Pancho Villa kept losing battle after battle until 1920, when Carranza was assassinated. Obregón decided to extend amnesty and an estate of 250,000 acres to Villa in exchange for his retirement. Pancho accepted, but was killed three years later on July 20, 1923, in Parral, Mexico, when a group of seven commandos unloaded 150 big game rifle rounds on him and his Dorados bodyguards. Circumstances surrounding his death are unclear and filled with legendary elements such as the bizarre events that followed, including the exhumation and decapitation of his body. Local rumors say that an American treasure hunter beheaded him to sell his skull to an eccentric millionaire who collected the heads of historic figures. Villa was a very controversial figure that remains alive in popular folklore with tales about his life and his myth still growing to this very day, like those surrounding his legendary buried treasure.
Ambrose Bierce and Pancho Villa
American children traditionally know Ambrose Bierce (1842–ca. 1914) through his Civil War story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and the short film based upon it, both of which underscore the futility of war and the fleeting nature of glory and happiness. Known for his bitter wit, the Civil War veteran disappeared into Mexico in 1913 at the age of 71. His letters home suggest that he went there to die, and he was never seen again. Bierce’s disappearance and links to Pancho Villa (1878–1923) formed the basis of Carlos Fuentes’s novel El Gringo Viejo in the mid-1980s; the English-language version was adapted into the 1989 feature film Old Gringo, in which Gregory Peck portrays the eponymous character, who is terminally ill and wishes to die heroically. Fuentes’s novel and the movie use Bierce’s legendary disappearance to explore the tragic tensions and misunderstandings between the United States and Mexico.
C. Fee
Claudio Butticè
See also Cortez, Gregorio; Murrieta, Joaquín; Outlaw Heroes
Further Reading
Azuela, Mariano. 1915. The Underdogs: A novel of the Mexican Revolution. Translated by Sergio Waisman. New York: Penguin Books.
Braddy, Haldeen. 1948. “Pancho Villa, Folk Hero of the Mexican Border.” Western Folklore 7 (4): 349–355.
Katz, Friedrich. 1974. “Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies.” Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (1): 1–47.
Katz, Friedrich. 1998. The Life and Times of Pancho Villa. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.
Reed, John. 1914. Insurgent Mexico. New York: International.
Sherman, Scott. 2000. “Living La Vida Grande.” Scott Sherman website. http://scottgsherman.com/mexico/livinglavidagrande.php. Accessed June 15, 2015.
Villa, Pancho—Primary Document
Excerpts from The Washington Times on Pancho Villa (1914)
Outlaw heroes occupy a large space in American popular culture, with newspaper and magazine articles, pulp novels, television shows, and movies romanticizing their lives and celebrating their exploits. This long article in the Washington Times describes Mexican bandit and revolutionary leader Pancho Villa as a lover, a fighter, and a crusader for justice on behalf of the rural poor in early twentieth-century Mexico. In an age of yellow journalism, articles that sensationalized criminal behavior increased sales at the newsstand and made publishing the news a profitable business.
THE WASHINGTON TIMES, SUNDAY, MAY 10, 1914.
Story of Villa’s Rise From Bandit to Conqueror Looms as Romance of Battle-Swept Mexico
Genius for Fighting Made Him First the Scourge, Then Liberator, of His Ill-Starred Country.
Price Placed Upon His Head by Diaz When He Slew Jefe Politico to Avenge His Sister’s Honor.
With city after city falling under the fire of constitutionalist lesions, and Huerta at bay making his last stand, “Pancho” Villa, bandit-tactician, looms on the battle-swept horizon of Mexico with greater potency than ever before. Romantic to the extreme is the knowledge that the military genius of the rebel alliance is that same Pancho Villa, who for fifteen years terrorized northern Mexico with his savage banditti and successfully repulsed the efforts of Diaz’s rurales to capture him.
Stories of the man’s character, his aims and hopes, are told every day by those who have had the opportunity of seeing him at close range, and these reports are so widely divergent as still to leave the world in a state of conjecture as to the real Villa….
Known as “The Tiger.”
Thirty-six years ago he first saw the light of day in the state of Durango and later the family moved to Chihuahua. In his growth to manhood he early revealed those attributes which later made him the most feared character in the country, on whose head Diaz set a price of $10,000 in gold. He was always known as the “Tiger,” and this to day describes the man when in the throes of his ungovernable temper.
Upon his father’s death he was left in charge of the ranch and the bringing up to womanhood of his young sister. She is described as a girl of marvelous beauty. He made a practice of taking herds of cattle to market for his more fortunate neighbors and it was on his return over the mountains from a trip of this sort that he found desolation reigning in his mountain home. His sister had disappeared. Suspicion fell upon the local jefe-politico, or city magistrate, who held sway through the country-side as an instrument of the Diaz regime.
Nothing daunted by the high estate of the eloper, Pancho Villa impressed the village priest into service, gathered up a band of his own choice spirits and sprang to the pursuit—The tireless and resourceful chase brought forth all the qualities which afterward caused such terror throughout northern Mexico and later compelled the world to recognize him as that country’s strongest military leader.
The couple were caught in a week. The priest married the girl offhand to the jefe, and Villa made this lieutenant of Diaz sign his own death warrant as the only legal power available. Without hesitancy he stood his unwilling victim against a wall and shot him dead. The priest had given absolution and the body was then and there buried with all rites, after which the party returned over the mountains and took up their lives anew.
Price Set Upon Head.
Diaz was then at the very apex of his despotic power; the peon class was at its very lowest ebb and supremely glad for the privilege of mere living. It is not to be wondered at, then, that official circles were for a time lost in wonder and incredulity that one of the despised peons had done to death a jefe politico. Then the order went forth to Diaz’s rurales: Villa—dead or alive!
The boy, he was only eighteen, fled into the mountain fastnesses. For fifteen years he roamed over Chihuahua and surrounding states, spreading terror among the inhabitants, stealing, looting, burning, killing. The rurales, sent against him in force, seemed powerless, and he become famous for his fights with these Mexican mounted rangers. Finally, Diaz offered $10,000 in gold for the bandit’s head, the rurales redoubled their efforts to effect his capture and relentlessly tracked him from hiding place to hiding place. It is said that in the course of his years of dodging justice that he had fifty pitched battles with the rurales, at times alone, at times in command of kindred spirits, and his rifles have been notched forty-two times, each in commemoration of the slaying of a rurale.
Finally during the progress of the Madero revolt, he made a staunch friend of Raoul Madero, one of the younger brothers of the Mexican martyr, who glorified Villa as a crusader and a hero. Through the good offices of this Madero, Villa was given a command and promised immunity for his crimes. Without waiting for orders from his chief he gathered about fifty of his own band and started on his campaign for Madero.
Sweeps Northern Mexico.
With ever-increasing success, his “army” constantly augmented by recruits, who either feared him or longed to join the force of the famous brigand, he swept over northern Chihuahua and Durango, driving federal garrisons before him until Madero joined forces with him, and the revolution’s success became assured.
He seemed inspired by something far greater than a mere gratitude toward Madero. His fighting was fierce and he fought always with his men, cutting, slashing, cursing, yelling, always in the front urging his followers to greater endeavor, beside himself with the lust of battle. It is said that his hatred for Diaz and the Mexican federal troops, who had hounded him for so many years, was uppermost in his brain and in his assaults against them everything was swept aside except this wild desire to annihilate anything standing for the despot.
With all his illiteracy, he can hardly read or write, and all his reported blood-lust, this man is a born soldier. Not a military genius of the European type but just the tactician strategist for the country in which he is making his fight for the elimination of the dictator. He creates an army from a ragged horde and inspires worship among his troops. He is both feared and loved. Feared because of his ungovernable temper, which strikes forth without warning, and loved for his unassuming qualities. He is more, far more strict with his officers than with his men. He is one of them in appearance, habits and temperament. The peons feel that he has never grown away from them and that he has suffered all their wrongs.
Divides Loot with Troops.
His greatest weakness is his vindictive temper, but he is generous to a fault with his men and always divides all spoils amongst the army. When he took $90,000 in gold from the bank at Parra, one-quarter of the whole amount went to his men and the rest to the “cause.”
Source: “Story of Villa’s Rise.” The Washington Times, May 10, 1914, p. 4.