by Jack Beatty
The hacienda was a feudal world with a workforce of debt-chained peons, farm laborers and sharecroppers, a priest to pacify the living, a cemetery to bury the dead, and a prison to punish the disorderly—a ministate ruled by the hacendado, who answered to no man for his appetites.10
In The Old Gringo, Carlos Fuentes’s novel of the Mexican Revolution, General Arroyo, a character with a Villa-like biography, exposes to an American woman the secret wounds of life on the hacienda. An overseer ran it, he explains; the owners visited for recreation:
When the owners came, they got bored and drank cognac. They fought the young bulls. They also went galloping through the tilled fields, terrifying the peons bent over their humble Chihuahua crops, beans, wild lettuce, spindly wheat; they beat the backs of the weakest men with the flat of a machete, and then lassoed the weakest women and then raped them in the hacienda stables while the mothers of the young gentlemen pretended not to hear the screams of our mothers and the fathers of the young gentlemen drank cognac in the library and said, They’re young … They’ll settle down. We did the same.
“The Torches” by Leopoldo Méndez. These peasants appear about to set fire to a hacienda, the “Bastille of the Mexican Revolution.”
The owners might rape aloud; the help copulated in silence: “Here they killed you if you made any noise in bed. If a man and a woman moaned while they slept together, they were whipped … We made love and we gave birth without a sound, señorita.”11
Arroyo’s picture of the hacienda’s regime of submission reveals why “in the oral tradition of many peasant soldiers the revolution itself appeared as a series of hacienda-seizures rather than an overthrow of state power,” according to the Mexican historian Adolfo Gilly. The hacienda was the “Bastille of the Mexican Revolution.”12
During the reign of the military strongman Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910), nearly all of Mexico’s villages lost land to state-promoted haciendas, representing an oligarchy of three thousand families. By 1910, they “owned over half of the nation’s territory.” Díaz also sold vast tracks of land and subsidized U.S. railroads to build five north-south lines twenty-five hundred miles into the interior. The lines bid up land prices, increasing the incentive for haciendas to annex fifty thousand villages.13
Connecting Mexico to the United States and world markets, the railroads created an export boom in cash crops—coffee, sugar, and fruits—but the production of staple crops, the original purpose of the hacienda system, languished. To feed its common people Mexico had to import corn and beans. As food prices rose, the Mexican diet deteriorated. Producing more, the field worker ate less. An old peasant,* a soldier in Villa’s army, explained to the American journalist John Reed why men like him joined the revolution: “When [the revolution] is over, we’ll never, ever, be hungry.”14
Force protected Díaz’s agrarian capitalist revolution from above against rebellion from below. To suppress local revolts, the hacendados furnished a semiofficial militia. Bigger trouble was contained by the Mauser-armed suede-dressed rurales; and by the army, its ranks thickened by the leva (impressment) of captured rebels and outlaws. Recalcitrants were deported to servitude on the hemp plantations of the Yucatán. The hardest cases were shot trying to escape; the ley fuga, a trial-saving expedient, claimed some ten thousand victims under Díaz. To muffle outrage Díaz relied on pan o palo, bread or the stick. Friendly newspapers received pan, subsidies; libel laws silenced the rest.15
Besides force and fraud, the Porfiriato rested on prosperity; when it vanished in the slump beginning in 1908–9, so did the aged dictator’s hold on the urban middle and upper classes. One of them, Francisco I. Madero, scion of a wealthy hacendado family in the northeastern state of Coahuila, challenged Díaz in the presidential election of 1910. When Madero’s call for “a real vote and no boss rule” won cheers wherever he spoke, Díaz jailed Madero for treason, sportingly permitting him to receive 183 votes in the seventh rigged election since 1884. After five months in a San Luis Potosí prison, Madero was paroled on his family’s bond. Allowed the freedom of the city, he galloped away from his guards, rode to the border, and escaped across the Rio Grande. From San Antonio, the thirty-seven-year-old spiritualist, spurred into politics by a visitation from the shade of Benito Juárez (1806–1872), the great liberal reformer who in the late 1860s liberated Mexico from its French invaders and executed the mountebank emperor Maximilian, named himself provisional president. He called for an all-class uprising to oust Díaz commencing on November 20, 1910, and he issued a manifesto, the Plan of San Luis Potosí.16
The plan outlined a series of reforms appealing to Díaz’s middle-class opponents—free elections, a free press, nonreelection of the president and vice president—and if it had stopped there, the revolution would have stopped, too. But Article Three changed everything.
“Through unfair advantage taken of the Law of Untitled Lands, numerous proprietors of small holdings, in their majority Indians, have been dispossessed of their lands,” Madero wrote. “In all fairness, those lands … should be returned to their former owners.” Mexico’s landless poor now had a cause to fight for. Hundreds and then thousands rallied to the son of Mexico’s fifth-richest family, suddenly leader of the greatest rural uprising in a century. “No organized party presided at its birth,” Eric Wolf writes of the fire of revolution ignited by Madero’s vague plan. “No intellectuals prescribed its program, formulated its doctrine, outlined its objectives.” The peasants were in the saddle and rode Madero.17
At dawn on November 20, 1910, at the small Chihuahua ranch of La Cueva Pinta, armed men gathered around campfires to listen to the plan being read aloud. “As they heard the moving words,” the reader, a Madero ally, recalled, “the faces of these simple peasants … showed enormous satisfaction … Some had suffered from the egotism of their masters their whole lives long …; others had seen their small properties confiscated with the full sanction of the government; others had been persecuted … for having avenged the honor of their sisters or wives, violated by the rich and by corrupt authorities … Once the reading of the plan was finished, we all brandished our arms and hands and cried out, ‘Down with the tyrants, long live freedom for all, long live Francisco Madero!…’ They split into four companies and elected their officers. Voted ‘First Commander’ of the first company was one ‘Francisco Villa.’18
Pancho Villa was of the people. Like so many of Mexico’s poor, he had no schooling. “A rifle sight was the only spelling book I knew until I was a grown man,” he told the Los Angeles Times, a line crafted for quotation. The oldest of five children, he was born Doroteo Arango into a sharecropping family on a Durango hacienda in 1878. One day, returning to his house from the fields, so the Villa legend goes, he found his mother confronting the hacendado for ravishing his twelve-year-old sister, Martina. “I went to my cousin Romualdo Franco’s for the pistol he kept there,” he wrote in his myth-making Memoirs, “and returned and fired at Don Agustin and hit him three times.” Villa fled to the sierra and, at sixteen, took up the bandit life, “pursued, wanted dead or alive in every district.” The rurales were on his heels; fame was close behind.19
The young progressive journalist John Reed reported on Villa’s Division of the North for leading American magazines and newspapers in 1913–14, and, while documenting it, spread the Villa myth. “An immense body of popular legend grew up among the peons around his name,” Reed wrote. “There are many traditional songs and ballads, celebrating his exploits—you can hear the shepherds singing them around their fires at night. For instance, they tell the story of how Villa, fired by the misery of the peons at the hacienda of Los Alamos, gathered a small army and descended upon the big house, which he looted and distributed the proceeds to the poor.” And more in that hagiographical vein.
Pancho Villa. Though Woodrow Wilson called him a “patriot and an honorable gentleman,” Villa was a bandit briefly elevated by a revolution that the president saw as “the struggle of a people to come into their own.�
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Woodrow Wilson, a fan of Reed’s work, spoke as if he had imbibed pulque and Villismo around those campfires when he told the British ambassador that his colleagues in Mexico City had Villa all wrong. He was no vicious killer but “a sort of Robin Hood [who] had spent an eventful life in robbing the rich in order to give to the poor.” At worst a good bad man who had “even at one time kept a butcher’s shop for the purpose of distributing to the poor the proceeds of his innumerable cattle raids.”20
The part about the cattle raids was true. As pieced together from official records by Friedrich Katz in his monumental 1998 biography, Villa was a calculating bandit who, if he did not share his loot with the poor, at least did not rob them.
A member of a Durango gang, Doroteo Arango was first arrested in 1901 by a lawman notorious for administering the ley fuga but released by a judge likely bribed by a local “black marketer” Arango supplied with stolen cattle. Four days later he was arrested again, for assaulting a man and stealing his guns. Sentenced to the army, he deserted and quit Durango for the state of Chihuahua over the mountains to the north.
Taking up a new life under the name of the rich man who had sired his father, Villa found work as a miner, mason, brickmaker, and butcher. Foreign mining and railroad corporations hired him as a guard and mule driver. “I needed a good man to take charge of teams and drivers en route,” an English silver miner recalled. “By good I mean good in a fight in case the drivers quarreled or the wagons were held up. I chose a tough specimen who gave me his name as Pancho Villa.” None of the foreign businesses that hired Villa regretted trusting him with payrolls of seven hundred thousand pesos and shipments of precious metals.
But Villa had not renounced all his old ways. A graveyard for bandits, Chihuahua was a garden for rustlers. The landless country people resented the closing of the open range by fifteen haciendas covering twenty-two million hectares (one hectare equals roughly a hundred acres) owned by a single family. Rustlers were seen as “social bandits”—that is, in Eric Hobsbawm’s classic definition, “peasant outlaws whom the lord and the state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported.”21
Before the revolution, then, Villa emerges as a tough, dependable young man and an outlaw on the side who acted out forbidden impulses, more Billy the Kid than Robin Hood, admired for his anarchic individualism, not for sharing his swag with the peasants. Nor had that side of Villa appeared as late as July 1910, when he made the most wanted list for murder. In broad daylight, in the crowded streets of Chihuahua City, and while eating an ice-cream cone, he shot a former gang member who had betrayed him to the police and then slowly rode out of town “with no one daring to follow.” Here, at last, is the stuff of song and legend.22
Recruiting for the revolution, Madero’s agent in Chihuahua offered Villa amnesty for his crimes, including murder. There was one catch: Madero had to win. Another version of Villa’s baptism in revolution has Madero himself meeting with him at the Palacio Hotel in Chihuahua City and, after listening to Villa’s tearful confession of his crimes, promising him absolution in the “Revolution.” For a time, the revolution seemed to exalt Villa but with serial defeat in battle in 1915–16, his killings, stripped of their political alibi, became murders, and the murders massacres.23
Such was the path Villa had followed to La Cueva Pinta and the moment when the soldiers of Madero chose him as first commander of their first company, and, at thirty-two, he entered history. “In personal appearance,” an American doctor who knew him well reported to U.S. military intelligence in 1914, “he is about 5 feet 10 inches in height, weighs about 170 lbs., is well developed in a muscular way; has a heavy protruding lower jaw and badly stained teeth; a rather dandified moderately heavy moustache of the heavy villain variety; crispy kinky black hair of the Negro type.” As Villa’s “most distinguishing features” a reporter singled out “his cruel mouth … and his eyes, bloodshot, protruding, and piercing. Another reporter who saw them blazing at Torreón described them as ‘the eyes of a man who will some day go crazy.’ ”
Villa was a celebrated horseman, a crack shot, a surprising abstainer from tobacco, drink, or drugs, a marked man so fearful of poisoning that at official dinners he swapped plates with his neighbors, and an insatiable womanizer who made “scores of promises of marriage to girls all over Chihuahua” to seduce them and as souvenirs of the occasion sometimes left them with child.24
Politically, Pancho Villa was a virgin. After the revolution, discussing John Reed with a radical Mexican painter who had just returned from Moscow bearing news of Reed’s death, Villa remarked, “Johnny was a good man, a revolutionary … It was from him that I first heard the word socialism. I thought it was a thing, but then Johnny explained that it was a system in which there are no landowners and no capitalism; all men live as brothers and work for the common good.” In 1914, Pancho Villa thought socialism was a thing. Unlike the other historic figure of the Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata, a Morelos horse breaker, for Pancho Villa, returning the land of Mexico to its people was less a passion than a recruiting tool. Villa fought for amnesty, honor, and revenge.25
He quickly showed bravura as a guerrilla commander, raiding a hacienda in November 1910 (and killing its administrator), ambushing a party of federal soldiers at a train station, and, with forty men, rashly attacking seven hundred federals outside the state capital. A ruse saved his party from annihilation. They had set out a long row of sombreros on a nearby mountain top, and as the federals turned their fire on these phantoms, the real rebels made good their retreat.26
It took months of hard fighting, but by July 1911, Porfirio Díaz was residing in Paris. Madero had won—and promptly undid his victory. Repeating the pattern of the Mexican past, he rescinded the land plank of his Plan of Potosí, abandoning the peasants who had joined him for justice. Embracing his enemies in the federal army, Madero turned on his friends, ordering the revolutionary armies to surrender their weapons to officers they had just defeated. He allowed General Huerta to jail Pancho Villa on trumped-up charges; Huerta then put Villa before a firing squad for defying orders and only the last-minute intervention of Madero’s brother saved him. Madero also dispatched a punitive expedition to crush Zapata’s forces in the small southern state of Morelos. Madero wanted to destroy so-called Zapatismo before the lure of land etched in stone in Zapata’s Plan of Ayala, framed by peasants “barely able to sign their names,” sparked new revolts all over Mexico.
Just before the break with Zapata, his most loyal lieutenant in the southern campaign against Díaz, Madero sent a delegation to Morelos to offer amnesty to the Zapatistas if they gave up their arms. “Madero has betrayed me as well as my army, the people of Morelos, and the whole nation,” Zapata told Madero’s emissaries. “Tell him … to take off for Havana, because if not … in a month I’ll be in Mexico City with twenty thousand men, and have the pleasure of going up to Chapultepec castle and dragging him out of there and hanging him from one of the highest trees in the park.”27
Madero turned right after leading a revolution from the left because like all the Mexican elite, Porfirian and revolutionary alike, he dreaded the messianic hopes stirred by his own plan—the “anarchy” below that threatened to pull his propertied world down. Peter Durnovo shared the same fear of the “unconscious … Socialism” of Russia’s peasants, warning Nicholas that “the Russian masses, whether workmen or peasants, are not looking for political rights, which they neither want nor comprehend” but for “social revolution in its most extreme form.”28
“Zapata” by David Alfaro Siqueiros
Madero’s right turn won no praise from the right. On the contrary, the Mexico City papers demanded bloodier measures against Zapata, headlined THE NEW DANGER and THE ATTILA OF THE SOUTH. They urged Madero to undertake “an energetic purificatio
n” of Morelos, a state infected by “this amorphous agrarian socialism, which, given the low intelligence state of the Morelos peasantry, can only take the form of mindless vandalism.” All over Mexico peasants and peons were standing up—driving an English estate owner off his Oaxaca hacienda after he threatened to fire peons for attending a victory parade for revolutionary fighters; striking for a shorter working day, the abolition of the company store, and payment in money instead of in kind at a hacienda in Durango. “The general situation is very bad,” a Chihuahua hacendado wrote Porfirio Díaz in Paris in September 1911. “There is no respect for the constitution, for private property … but rather we have the rule of brutal force of the lower classes, armed with rifles, full of passion, with communist ideas and full of hatred of the upper classes.”
That one of their own had distributed those rifles, licensed those ideas, whipped up that hatred, maddened such men. In an early 1913 letter to Woodrow Wilson, twenty “long-time American residents of Mexico” cast the rightist anger at Francisco Madero in terms the Southern-born president could understand: “Suppose a wealthy white man in Alabama had started in arming the Negroes a few years after the War, offering each a pure democracy, 40 acres and a mule, if they would make him governor. How long would the intelligent whites hesitate in stringing him to the nearest telegraph pole, especially if the Negroes there outnumbered the whites three to one?… That is exactly what Madero did, offering the peons a vote and a free distribution of land.”29
