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Hispanic American Historical Review 80.1 (2000) 141-146



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Book Review

The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

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The Life and Times of Pancho Villa. By friedrich katz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Photographs. Appendix. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xv, 985 pp. Cloth, $85.00. Paper, $29.95.

Notwithstanding Zapatismo's recent revival, no Mexican, past or present, has greater name recognition, inside or outside Mexico, than Pancho Villa. Ask workaday Mexicans about this charismatic leader and erstwhile friend of the poor and they may relive Pancho's daring exploits, perhaps lapsing into nostalgic corridos about his stirring victories at Torreón and Zacatecas. Of late, Villa has even undergone a renaissance of sorts, becoming the object of venerated spiritual cults in northern Mexico. For their part, PRIista apologists prefer to consign the Centaur of the North to a decidedly secondary role in the Revolution's pantheon of heroes, portraying him as a destroyer, a common vaquero and bandit, who capriciously took advantage of a chaotic time by ruthlessly catapulting himself into a position of power. As a result, until recently, few statues and monuments have been erected in Villa's memory by the PRI establishment. North Americans share similarly conflicted views, celebrating Villa's audacious machista image while bitterly recalling his Columbus, New Mexico, raid in 1916 which left 17 Americans (and over 100 Villistas) dead and precipitated "Black Jack" Pershing's futile efforts to track down the elusive Villa in the northern Mexican desert.

Contemporaries shared this ambivalent judgment. U.S. investors and Woodrow Wilson blew hot and cold in their support for Villa, initially believing that his strong-arm tactics and disciplined army, the daunting División del Norte, offered the best chance of restoring law and order and ensuring protection for U.S. properties. After two defeats at Celaya in 1915 at the hands of the Constitutional forces commanded by Alvaro Obregón, however, Washington would turn against Villa. German diplomats and British businessmen sought to use the mercurial Villa for their own ends, at times supplying arms, materiel, and intelligence, more often playing him off against rivals and [End Page 141] the United States. Unlike Emiliano Zapata, who has been duly celebrated for his unwavering commitment to the return of communal lands to campesinos, histories, until now, have painted Villa as an unprincipled opportunist, lacking the requisite ideological credentials--agrarian or otherwise. Even Hollywood couldn't make up its mind, first embracing him in newsreels after his early triumphs, then distancing itself after the infamous attack on Columbus, and ultimately rediscovering him when Wallace Beery and Fay Wray starred in the largely sympathetic Viva Villa in 1934. Self-serving memoirs, hagiographic tracts, and contemporary journalistic accounts have only clouded our understanding. More importantly for historians, decidedly less is known about the movement he led.

Given how much historical disagreement has swirled around Villa, it is perhaps surprising that so few serious scholarly works have addressed Villismo. (No doubt, the lack of a central repository of Villa papers has contributed to the dearth of academic studies.) Fortunately, it is hard to imagine a more definitive biography than Friedrich Katz's much-anticipated, nearly 1000-page opus, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa. The author, whose The Secret War in Mexico (1981) placed the Mexican Revolution in a much-needed international context, now helps to demystify the legends surrounding Villa, meticulously tackling the complexities of the man and his movement. The scholarship is quintessential Katz: more than two decades of painstaking research in archives throughout Mexico, the United States, Cuba, and Europe, including recently opened collections at the Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, U.S. Military Intelligence, and the FBI; the private papers of a number of key Villa lieutenants; oral histories; memoirs; and newspapers. Life and Times is organized chronologically into four parts: Villa's early life as an outlaw and subsequent emergence as a regional leader until 1913; the two-year period when he enjoyed national recognition; his debilitating descent into guerrilla warfare from 1915 to 1920; and Villa's surrender, his...

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