The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

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The historical figure known as Pancho Villa, hero of the Mexican Revolution, is shrouded in considerable mystery. His enemies presented him as a bandit and murderer, one who thought nothing of slaughtering innocent civilians and looting their villages. His followers considered him to be something of a Robin Hood forced to take action against the government only after stoically enduring its oppression for years. And hagiographers have assigned to Villa an important role in shaping the Mexican Revolution--an uprising that he joined somewhat late. That he was a bandit Villa never denied, but he protested being called a murderer: he killed only when attacked or betrayed, he said. Elements of many other stories made their way into American government reports, however, and went on to color the historical record. (That government, under the administration of Woodrow Wilson, took a considerable interest in Villa after he led an armed raid on the little New Mexico town of Columbus, making off with weapons and supplies.) University of Chicago historian Friedrich Katz carefully separates what can be reliably said about Villa's life from the tidbits of legend and celebration, and the extensive picture of Villa that he gives us (his book weighs in at nearly 1,000 pages) is no less interesting for all his debunking. Students of Mexican history will find much of value in Katz's researches. --Gregory McNamee


From Publishers Weekly
What this immense biography paradoxically proves is that it takes a major figure of major accomplishment to sustain a narrative of such length. The legendary Pancho Villa could barely sustain such tonnage; the real one?a slippery, semi-literate, largely nonpolitical outlaw whose opportunities on the national stage were inglorious and brief?can't. Katz, a University of Chicago professor of Latin American history and author of The Secret War in Mexico, has extracted every milligram of fact to weigh against the legendary life. Villa emerges as one thuggish upstart among many, who happened to enter American consciousness by invading a sliver (Columbus, N.Mex.) of the lower 48?the only time that had happened since the War of 1812?and afforded Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing the opportunity for an inconsequential but romanticized "Punitive Expedition." Although a charismatic leader, Villa did not make much of his (brief) control of revolutionary Chihuahua, and, in fact, the scourge of the landowner class ended his life as a hacendado. Bought off with someone else's confiscated land in 1920, he lived on this once grand estate of 163,000 acres until assassins got him in 1923 at the age of 45. Having deflated the legendary Villa, this description of the sleazy, sanguinary Mexico of pillagers and predators seems an extremely long footnote to history. 20 illustrations. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Kerr
...the research here obviously represents decades of devotion, and it is formidable.... Over and over, Katz strives to place Villa in a global context.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Carlos Fuentes
...a masterpiece of contemporary historiography.... Diligent, extremely well-documented, fluid and elegant at all times, Friedrich Katz presents Mexicans with our ghosts--alive.


From Kirkus Reviews
paper 0-8047-3046-6 The definitive biography of a Mexican revolutionary reckoned a monster by some, a hero by many more. Francisco Villa's origins, writes University of Chicago historian Katz (The Ancient American Civilizations, 1972), have long b een obscured in legend; Villa himself gave differing accounts of his rise. The sources seem to agree, however, that Villa was a minor bandit who managed through canny self-promotion to remake himself, as American president Woodrow Wilson put it, into ``a sort of Robin Hood [who] had spent an eventful life in robbing the rich in order to give to the poor.'' Katz places Villa's rise to revolutionary leadership in the context of social unrest in 19th-century northern Mexico, when the comparatively wealthy st ate of Chihuahua attempted to break away from the rule of Mexico City, precipitating a nationwide power struggle. At the beginning of that revolution, Katz discovers, Villa had been working as a muleteer for an American mining company and was locally reno wned for his knowledge of cockfighting; his chief ambition seems to have been to set up a butcher shop in the capital city. Instead, Villa took advantage of the unrest to raise an army to wage war against national leaders Francisco Madero and Porfirio Daz . He also forged an unlikely alliance of the Chihuahuan oligarchy and the revolutionary peasantry, crossed into the US to raid arsenals and granaries, and ranged throughout Mexico to commit strategically innovative acts of guerilla warfare. Through misjud gments, however, Villa lost important battles in the north, and his army, now full of unwilling conscripts instead of volunteers, disintegrated in 1915. Assassinated in 1923 while staging an attempted comeback, Villa continues to influence Mexican politic s after his death, with candidates even today invoking his name. Katz speculates that had Villa survived to lead the nation, he would have instituted important land reforms and established a more democratic government than the quasi-dictatorship that foll owed. An important, well-written contribution to Mexican history. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


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The lifework of a great historian, this book is without rival as a biography of one of the enigmatic figures of the 20th century. . . . With scrupulous detail and objectivity, and with a fluid narrative, style this is the book on Villa that has long been awaited by both scholars and general readers. — Adolfo Gilly


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