History Francisco (Pancho) Villa
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SPOILER ALERT - HISTORY....This post is based on my interest to understand parts of the hisotry of our neighbor to the south. So this not about my ride, just part of the history of the Mexico through the life of one of its main participants.
I like to understand the history of different places that I visit, and Hidalgo del Parral in the Mexican state of Chihuahua has some history that I found particularly interesting. This post is all that, the life and times of Pancho Villa. I visited his museum.
(Francisco) Pancho Villa
Francisco "Pancho" Villa born José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, 5 June 1878 – 20 July 1923) was a Mexican revolutionary and general in the Mexican Revolution. He was a key figure in the revolutionary movement that forced out President Porfirio Díaz and brought Francisco I. Madero to power in 1911. When Madero was ousted by a coup led by General Victoriano Huerta in February 1913, Villa joined the anti-Huerta forces in the Constitutionalist Army led by Venustiano Carranza. After the defeat and exile of Huerta in July 1914, Villa broke with Carranza. Villa dominated the meeting of revolutionary generals that excluded Carranza and helped create a coalition government. Emiliano Zapata and Villa became formal allies in this period. Like Zapata, Villa was strongly in favor of land reform, but did not implement it when he had power.[4] At the height of his power and popularity in late 1914 and early 1915, the U.S. considered recognizing Villa as Mexico's legitimate authority.
In life, Villa helped fashion his own image as an internationally known revolutionary hero, starring as himself in Hollywood films and giving interviews to foreign journalists.
U.S. Expedition to capture Villa
In
response to Villa's raid on Columbus, President Wilson sent 5,000 U.S. Army
soldiers under the command of General Frederick Funston, who oversaw John Pershing as
he pursued Villa through Mexico. Employing aircraft and trucks for the first
time in U.S. Army history, Pershing's force fruitlessly pursued Villa until
February 1917. Villa eluded them, but some of his senior commanders, including
Colonel Candelario Cervantes, General Francisco Beltrán, Beltrán's son, Villa's
second-in-command Julio Cárdenas,
and a total of 190 of his men were killed during the expedition.
The
Carranza government and the Mexican population were against U.S. troops
violating Mexican territories. There were several demonstrations of opposition
to the Punitive Expedition. During the expedition, Carranza's forces captured
one of Villa's top generals, Pablo López, and executed him on 5 June 1916.
Death
On 20 July 1923, Villa was assassinated in an ambush while
visiting Parral, most likely on the orders of political enemies Plutarco
Elías Calles and President Alvaro Obregón. He frequently made
trips from his ranch to Parral, where he generally felt secure, for banking and
other errands, Villa usually was accompanied by his large entourage of
armed Dorados, or bodyguards, but for some unknown reason on that
day he had gone into the town without most of them, taking with him only three
bodyguards and two other ranch employees. He went to pick up a consignment of
gold from the local bank with which to pay his Canutillo ranch staff. While
driving back through the city in his black 1919 Dodge touring car, Villa
passed by a school, and a pumpkinseed vendor ran toward his car and shouted
"Viva Villa!", a signal to a group of seven riflemen who then
appeared in the middle of the road and fired more than 40 rounds into the
automobile. In the fusillade, nine dumdum bullets, normally used for
hunting big game, hit Villa in the head and upper chest, killing him instantly.
After his death he was excluded from the pantheon of revolutionary heroes until the Sonoran generals Obregón and Calles, whom he battled during the Revolution were gone from the political stage. Villa's exclusion from the official narrative of the Revolution might have contributed to his continued posthumous popular acclaim. He was celebrated during the Revolution and long afterward by corridos, films about his life and novels by prominent writers. In 1976, his remains were reburied in the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City in a huge public ceremony.
Early Life
Villa
told a number of conflicting stories about his early life. According to most
sources, he was born on 5 June 1878, and named José Doroteo Arango Arámbula at
birth. As a child, he received some education from a local church-run school,
but was not proficient in more than basic literacy. His father was a
sharecropper named Agustín Arango, and his mother was Micaela Arámbula. He grew
up at the Rancho de la Coyotada, one of the largest haciendas
in the state of Durango. The family's residence now houses the Casa
de Pancho Villa historic
museum in San Juan del Rio. Doroteo later
claimed to be the son of the bandit Agustín Villa, but according to at least
one scholar, "the identity of his real father is still unknown,” He
was the oldest of five children. He quit school to
help his mother after his father died, and worked as a sharecropper,
muleskinner, butcher, bricklayer, and foreman for a U.S. railway company. According
to his dictated remembrances, published as Memorias de Pancho Villa, at
the age of 16 he moved to Chihuahua, but soon returned to Durango to track down
and kill an hacienda owner named Agustín López Negrete who had raped his
sister, afterward stealing a horse and fleeing to the Sierra
Madre Occidental region
of Durango, where he roamed the hills as a thief. Eventually, he became a
member of a bandit band where he went by the name "Arango”. In 1898
he was arrested for gun and mule theft.
In
1902, the rurales, the crack rural police force of President Porfirio
Díaz, arrested Pancho for stealing mules and for assault. Because of his
connections with the powerful Pablo Valenzuela, who allegedly had been a
recipient of goods stolen by Villa/Arango, he was spared the death sentence
sometimes imposed on captured bandits. Pancho Villa was forcibly inducted into
the Federal Army, a practice often adopted under the Diaz regime to deal with
troublemakers. Several months later, he deserted and fled to the neighboring
state of Chihuahua. He tried to work as a butcher in Hidalgo del Parro but
was forced out of business by the Terrazas-Creel monopoly. In 1903, after
killing an army officer and stealing his horse, he was no longer known as
Arango but Francisco "Pancho" Villa after his paternal
grandfather, Jesús Villa. However, others claim he appropriated the name from a
bandit from Coahuila. He was known to his friends as La
Cucaracha or
("the cockroach").
Until
1910, Villa is said to have alternated episodes of thievery with more
legitimate pursuits. At one point he was employed as a miner, but that
stint did not have a major impact on him. Villa's outlook on banditry
changed after he met Abraham González, the local
representative for presidential candidate Francisco Madero, a rich hacendado turned
politician from the northern state of Coahuila, who opposed the continued rule
of Díaz and convinced Villa that through his banditry he could fight for the
people and hurt the hacienda owners.
At
the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Villa was 32 years old.
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