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notes introduction 1. Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, 206. 2. Social bandits are “outlaws whom the lord and the state regard as criminal, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes , as champions, avenger, fighter for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case men to be admired, helped and supported” (Eric J. Hobsbawm, Bandits, 13). According to Hobsbawm, Francisco Villa falls into this category. 3. Friedrich Katz, the foremost specialist on Villismo, declared in an interview : “Of all the revolutionary movements, Villismo is the most difficult to classify . . . . In March of 1913 Villa could only count on eight supporters. . . . At the end of that year [1913], without forced conscription, 5,000 armed men followed him [Villa], most of them on horses. What happened in those nine months? This is just one example of the mystery of Francisco Villa” ( Juan José Doñán, “Entrevista con Friedrich Katz,” 11). For the making of the Villista movement in 1913, see Katz, The Life and Times, 203–228. 4. Héctor Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, 42. See also Adolfo Gilly, La revolución interrumpida, 87–105. 5. Jorge Vera Estañol, Historia de la revolución mexicana, 393–405. 6. Jesús Silva Herzog, Breve historia de la revolución mexicana, vol. 1, 47. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 7. Arturo Warman in Enrique Florescano, El nuevo pasado mexicano, 105. 8. Katz, The Life and Times, 566. 9. Ilene O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution, 93. 10. “I do not believe that anyone has the support that Francisco Villa has,” Villa bragged in a 1922 interview. “For this reason the politicians are afraid of me. . . . I am a real soldier . . . I can mobilize 40,000 men in 40 minutes” (Katz, The Life and Times, 756). Villa probably exaggerated his capacity to mobilize his followers; however, he did represent a permanent threat to the Mexican government , and this is one of the reasons he was assassinated. 11. Ibid., 761–768, 771–782. 12. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution, 98. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 95. 17. This procedure is unique to postrevolutionary narratives. 18. Florescano, El nuevo pasado mexicano, 104. 19. Popular consciousness can be defined as “politicized forms of knowledge and identity, that are consensually recognized by subaltern groups during particular historical conjunctures” (Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, “Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico,” in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, 11). 20. The school of subaltern studies originated in India in the 1980s among historians who began questioning and revising elite nationalist versions (guided by the Western tradition of the Enlightenment) of the country’s colonial history. The original objective was to recover the subaltern’s perspective, the Other’s consciousness of historical events the dominant versions of which tended to suppress or distort those events. The school has evolved and, consequently, the emphasis and critical perspectives have shifted and may vary greatly among subalternist scholars. For a summary, see Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism.” See also Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies; Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Subaltern studies have been productively applied to Mexican history; see Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation; and Daniel Nugent, “Rural Revolt in Mexico, Mexican Nationalism and the State, and Forms of U.S. Intervention.” For subaltern studies and the humanities, see Latin American Subaltern Group, “Founding Statement.” For a debate between U.S. historians and literary critics regarding the applicability of subaltern studies to Latin America, see Florencia E. Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History”; and John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation. 21. Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” 1480. 22. Nugent (“Rural Revolt in Mexico,” 17–20) agrees that Guha’s ideas are relevant to the study of Mexican history. 23. Eric Van Young, Mexico’s Regions: Comparative History and Development, 1. 24. The volume edited by Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation , stresses the importance of popular politics and culture in the process of state formation in Mexico. See also Nugent, Rural Revolt in Mexico and U.S. Intervention. 25. Luis González et al. Historia regional y archivos; Thomas Benjamin and Mark Wasserman, eds., Provinces of the Revolution: Essays on Regional Mexican History 1910...