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The Head of Pancho Villa
By Eduardo Barraza
BARRIOZONA
August 28, 2006
“...Villa's epitaph was a universal sigh of regret and relief.”
Anita Brenner / Idols Behind Altars
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In the revolutionary ideals for the democratic project that was being outlined for Mexico at the beginning of the XX Century,
Pancho Villa found an ample artery to express his intense social inconformity. The theory of the revolution, enunciated by
Francisco I. Madero, became the cause of his revolt, and the platform for his violent expression, which he perceived as a
just and legitimate attitude of protest against the same social injustices that had chastised him as an outlaw.
Academically, Villa was an uneducated man, but he had an incredible intuition of social causes, which in its more brutal
state, turned him into a career criminal, and into an antisocial element of an unequal and oppressive system. Villa, the
thief, perceived that the emerging revolution was the language with which he could express himself, and thus he
incorporated to fight with all the strength of his indomitable character. He transformed himself into a revolutionary agent,
accredited by his own marginalized condition.
Villa stood out for his cleverness, his sagacity and for his surprising aggressiveness, but this implacable Mexican guerrilla
excelled more, substantially, because he himself was a born product of the discrimination, the abuse and the poverty of
his social context. Villa evolved from being the victim to the avenger of his own segregated identity, a reason that explains
why the poor and exploited people identified with him. The caudillo was the people itself on a horse, a voice and collective
expression of the pauper, of those who yearned for a social emancipation. Through Villa, already as an element of the
cathartic revolution, the outcry for justice found a spokesman to promote social change. Villa was a frightful and emotional
discharge for the repressed cry of the less privileged, of the citizen bent down by the excessive stick of abuse.
As a social phenomenon, Pancho Villa was the sickle that gathered the harvest of seeds of injustice, planted by the elite of
rich people. As a sociological and anthropological manifestation, Villa was a social monster, conceived in the womb of an
outraged society. Out of that monstrous nature, of that frightful being that Villa was, that same minority of rich people
scandalized, as a progenitor who becomes disturbed with the outcome of his own incest, and who has to live with the
nightmare that he engendered it. In the irrationality of his rebellion, Pancho Villa was the vomit of a nation satiated in the
gluttony of despotism, abuse and dictatorship. In his revolutionary reasoning, in contrast, this being –half man and half
horse, half reality and half legend– was a cry of labor to give birth to a more just Mexico.
The duality of the rebellious and revolutionary nature of the so called Centaur of the North, empowered him and disabled
him as well. When he rode on the avenue of the sociopolitical cause, and under the democratic inspiration of Madero, Villa’
s agenda was one of social reform, and his attitude, one of an egalitarian leader. But when the ups and downs of the
revolution stripped him of that avenging expression, Villa returned to travel through his well-known shortcuts of banditry,
and to regroup in the mountains that witnessed his hardening as a bloodthirsty bandit. Villa returned to communicate in
the dialect of revenge and violent hatred. Because of this ambiguity that characterized his life and his death, it is not
possible to classify Villa as a brigand or a revolutionary only, a hero or a villain. His character crossed over not only the
social structures, but also the dimensions of his own guerrilla and military thought, which mythicized him and turned him
into a legendary character. Villa was both: a villain and a hero throughout his life.
Villa was a strong man of great drive, but he also proved to be vulnerable to feelings of marginality, defeat and treason.
Both in his youth and in his adult years, Villa reacted with an instinct that transformed him into a social beast of destructive
wrath, rooted in his own segregated condition. In the years following Madero’s death, the resignation of Victoriano Huerta,
and after Venustiano Carranza was officially recognized by the United States government as President of Mexico, Villa was
kept at the margin of the Mexican government, and was left without the weaponry support that he had initially received from
the United States. In his attempt to overthrow Carranza, Villa suffered humiliating defeats by the military genius of Alvaro
Obregón, who later would become president. His once powerful Division of the North ended up decimated and dispersed,
and his prestige as general, vanished. His expression no longer would return to be one of social justice, but one of
resentment and revenge, attitudes that evoke Doroteo Arango, the boy it is said took revenge for her sister’s rape.
In spite of his eminence as a guerrilla fighter, Villa’s revolutionary vision never became fully developed. His indomitable
and combative nature at the service of the revolutionary cause elevated him as a natural born soldier suitable for war, but
his interest for a social reform was sporadic, and his movement lacked a clear political ideology. Villa did not have the
capacity to establish a legal apparatus to implement a program of social progress of great scale, because his was a
conscience of armed warfare, not of political discernment. His violent protest was a redemptive symbol, but at the same
time, a stigma of punishment.
Nevertheless, in Mexican culture, Villa constitutes not only the institutionalized hero of the revolution, but a popular icon
who personifies the marginalized causes. A cohesive myth that allows Mexican citizens the opportunity for a symbolic
retaliation against the United States, due of the resentment they have toward the military incursions in Mexican soil, and for
perceiving the U.S. as an empire until these days. In Mexican folklore, Villa is a leader who took revenge against the U.S.
with impunity, a fact that has perpetuated his popularity and fame. This also gave place to a revengeful ideology with which
Mexicans see restituted and vindicated themselves. Villa’s cleverness, sagacity, and capacity to elude the powerful enemy,
works as a socio-cultural valve as well, a valve that canalizes the fluid of resentment and rancor of a dispossessed and
subjugated people.
Villa’s life epilogue –the farmer turned brigand, the brigand who transformed into a revolutionary, and the revolutionary who
became a hero– was as violent and bloody as his own guerrilla’s vocation. His death closed the cycle of revenge that
began when Doroteo Arango –epitome of the oppressed farmer– realized his unfavorable social condition. Pancho Villa
was born out of that inconformity, out of a feeling of rejection, and out of the impossibility to obtain justice by legal means.
He was the child of a tyrant and dictatorial government, an anomalous being conceived by the suffering and the pain of an
oppressed society. At the end of his agitated existence, the monster would be annihilated by the same elite that gave birth
to him. In his tombstone, devoid of all peace, Villa’s corpse would be beheaded by somebody who wanted, perhaps, to
make sure the monster would not rebel again.
Copyright © 2006 Hispanic Institute of Social Issues
Grassroots Journalism
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