one

those who have no history

Once upon a time, the man who would become Pancho Villa told journalist Silvestre Terrazas, “If my mother had been in labor for another twenty-four hours, I would have been born a fortune teller.” It’s not exactly clear why a delay in his birth would produce this sort of transmutation, conversion, or future profession, but nothing could be clearer than that his story would be dominated by tales, legends, rumors, and divergent versions, many of them contradictory and conflicting. One thing is for certain, the event took place on June 5, 1878, at three o’clock in the afternoon.

Years later, certain people who were not present would claim—taking great license without regard to abundant discrepancies—that on this day “a great storm broke out and amidst the thunder and lightning there was a change in the size, color, and path of Venus: a warning written in the sky presaging the difficulties that would challenge the newborn.” Or “when he was born, he was a monster weighing more than eleven pounds with chestnut hair and the enormous eyes of an owl.”

There was nothing special about the place that produced such delirious inventions. A point situated near the end of the world, a tiny hamlet called La Coyotada, four kilometers from a ranch named Río Grande located eight kilometers from San Juan del Río (a minuscule village in the state of Durango in the central part of northern Mexico). And all of this occupied a small space among the immense territory of the Santa Isabel de Berros hacienda.

La Coyotada had no more than five or six tile-roofed adobe houses on the banks of the San Juan River. Lacking windows, the houses had small holes in the walls for ventilation. The whole scene was presided over by a gigantic rock eroded to resemble the head of a duck, which dominated the tiny valley.

A child was born in one of these isolated cottages on a tiny hill. His parents, Agustín and Micaela, would register him with the local authorities under the name Doroteo Arango Arámbula. Later they would baptize him in the Catholic Church as José Doroteo.

These are the facts, but . . . .

For a long time, natives of Durango argued with their uninformed counterparts from the state of Chihuahua over Villa’s birthplace. One time, this author heard a Chihuahuense try to settle a debate with his wife—who was born in Durango—with a phrase connoting both acceptance and defeat, “He might have been born in Durango, but Chihuahua made him a guerrilla.” To which his wife replied with the lyrics from the ballad of Pancho Villa written by Ángel Gallardo, that goes, “Durango, Durango, blessed land, where Pancho Villa, that immortal caudillo, was born.”

Making this innocent dispute more baroque, the Colombians got into the mix, offering exotic information with respect to the youth’s birthplace: Doroteo Arango—the future Colombian Pancho Villa—was, according to a dictionary edited in 1965, the son of a Colombian father (Agustín, a native of Antioquia) and Mexican mother. Pancho, by this account, was born in Medellín (Colombia) and when he was four years old his parents moved to Maracaibo (Venezuela) and then Mexico, establishing themselves in Durango. This ludicrous version originated in the Barcelonan Encyclopedia Sopena during the 1930s.

Even some Americans north of the border dove into this surreal mix, claiming the future Villa’s nationality for themselves. Several members of the US Cavalry’s Tenth Battalion testified in 1914, stating that other officers could confirm it, that Pancho participated in the 1882 campaign against the American Indians—he would have been four years old at the time—that he was from the United States, he was Black, and that he held the rank of First Sergeant. His real name was Goldsby, and he joined the army in Maryland. Goldsby (Villa) ran into trouble at Fort Davies and then crossed the Río Grande, becoming a Mexican bandit who went by the name of Rondota. He was Black, but light-skinned and could pass for a Mexican. The witnesses stated that they had recognized him from photographs, and they crossed the border to talk to him. Further, Pancho Villa enjoyed talking to them and did not deny their version of the story. (Why would he deny it? He would have loved it!)

Suggesting an even more absurd story in 1956, Maurilio T. Álvarez proposed that Villa was Central American. His arguments were not exceptionally consistent. He stated that Villa “drooled” and “wore his hat to the side, like they do in the Las Pampas lowlands—which everyone knows are located in Central America—and not pushed forward like the noble men of the northern country.” He argued that Pancho and his brothers were known by the nickname the Guatemalans, that nobody in Durango or Chihuahua had any dealings with this “kid,” and that he “used words that were unusual for Mexico.”

For his part, the Soviet historian Lavretsky (known by the pseudonym Iósif Grigulévich) assured us that Villa “was a mestizo of Spanish and Indigenous Tarahumara” origin, while John Eisenhower, the son of US President Eisenhower, stated that “Villa was an Indian, there were no Spaniards in his past.” This last affirmation falls short because there are no Tarahumaras in Durango and because Doroteo displayed no Indigenous features. He was what Durango natives call a “güero requemao,” that is, a sunburnt guy with fair skin and brown hair.

Muddying the waters even further, Federico Cervantes, one of Villa’s biographers, assured us that he descended from Basques, based on the undoubtedly Basque origin of the Arango name that means “behind the valley” in that language, and the undoubtedly Basque origin of the name Arámbula.

But it is not only Doroteo Arango’s nationality that was, and remains, widely disputed. Over the years, his father’s identity has been the source of a thousand and one speculations.

Let’s reconstruct them. Agustín Arango and Micaela Arámbula, about whom we have only the barest description (“she was very white”), were married on May 5, 1877 (thirteen months before Doroteo’s birth) in San Fermín de Pánuco, not far from the Río Grande. Pancho’s four grandparents were campesinos from that same region. In the years to come, the couple had four other children: María Ana, born in Río Grande in 1879; José Antonio, born in El Potrero de Parra in 1880; María Martina, born in Río Grande in 1882; and José Hipólito, born in El Mezquite in 1883. The changing locations indicate that the couple were very poor campesinos who worked as sharecroppers on hacienda lands, following work and the harvest from place to place.

His father, Agustín Arango, probably died or abandoned the family around 1884 or 1885 or, having disappeared from the record, died in the mines of San Lucas in 1892. What is not in dispute is that his death or disappearance cast the family in desperate straits and left his wife with five children. Agustín Arango’s character has cast a faint shadow, no one knew him, none of the many testimonials about Villa’s infancy recall him or even mention him, and Villa himself dismisses him with a single phrase in various versions of his autobiography, “My father died when all of us were very young.”

Was this nebulous character, Agustín Arango, Doroteo’s father?

Many years later, Villa confessed to journalist Esperanza Velázquez that the last name Arango belonged to his maternal grandfather who was the son of a Spanish Jew whose last name was Germán. However, his mother had never told him this: “When I was older, I found out that my last name was neither Villa nor Arango. And I only found out who my real father was a few years ago. Some years ago, while we were fighting the Revolution near Parral, I met an old man who knew my mother and my grandfather well. According to what he told me, my father’s last name was Germán, and I never knew this because my mother used the last name Villa. So me and my children are Germáns.”

Yet the story is not very coherent, Arango wasn’t his maternal grandfather’s last name, and his mother never went by Villa.

Making it even more complicated, Villa himself provided different information for the version of his biography dictated to Bauche Alcalde, “My father, Don Agustín Arango, was the bastard son of Jesús Villa.” And following in the footsteps of this recently inaugurated chaotic tradition, one of Villa’s biographers, Ramón Puente, claimed that Villa was originally named Doroteo Arango Germán: “Doroteo’s mother’s real name was Micaela Germán Arámbula. And since Agustín Arango was not his real father, but rather his stepfather, Francisco Villa should have taken his mother’s last name and been called Doroteo Germán.”

And it wouldn’t stop there. Antonio Castellanos called him Francisco Germán and, in passing, changed the place of his birth to a small ranch named Gorgojito; while Montes de Oca contended that the future “leader’s father was a wealthy landowner whose last name was Fermán. Villa was the product of a short love affair between him and a charming local girl named Micaela Arámbula. His progenitor refused to recognize Villa as his son and an individual by the name of Trinidad Arango, who passed for his grandfather, took charge of raising him.” And if all this is not enough, the US folk historian Haldeen Braddy writes that Agustín Arango had “consoled” Doroteo’s mother, Micaela Arámbula, after she was abandoned by the boy’s father (the fact is that Agustín married Micaela thirteen months before the boy was born). And if the reader is not confused enough by now, Doroteo’s brother, Hipólito, stated that “our parents were Agustín Villa and Micaela Arámbula: the records of our baptisms are in the San Juan del Río, Durango parochial archives.” His assertion would be valid if it were not for the fact that their birth certificates have been corrected to read “Villa” where “Arango” was written previously.

So, what to make of this?

Rubén Osorio, one of the most diligent historians of Villismo, tried to disentangle the story of the “Germáns” and discovered that in the region near San Juan del Río there was a rancher named Luis Fermán, whose family was originally from Liechtenstein. This family’s oral tradition claimed that Villa was the illegitimate son of Luis and Micaela, who worked for a time at the Ciénaga de San José Basoco hacienda as a servant. Although this familial lore was not meant for public consumption and may not be factual, it provides a basis for the “Germáns” circling around Villa’s family history. Likewise, it’s clear that photos reproduced by Osorio of Doroteo’s supposed half brother bear a striking resemblance.

There is one argument that appears to refute all the rest and it points us back to the start, that is, the simple beginnings of Agustín and Micaela. Doroteo, Antonio, and Hipólito all look very much alike. Is this their maternal inheritance?

In the end, whether he was the son of the disappearing Agustín or the illegitimate son of the rancher Fermín, Doroteo would have been between six and seven years old when his father abandoned his family or died.

According to Nicolás Fernández, one of Villa’s future lieutenants whose memory was less than trustworthy, a landowner named López Negrete had rented to Doroteo’s father a pair of oxen for planting and his death left the family with a debt of $300 pesos. López Negrete called them to the Santa Isabel de Berros hacienda and told the mother that she had to pay the debt. Doroteo would have been ten years old then and took on the debt. These sorts of details can drive a historian to distraction because they lend credibility where none exists. Nicolás Fernández would recount some forty years later that Doroteo paid $50 pesos’ worth of corn and $25 pesos’ worth of beans that first year.

It seems that the oldest Arango, when he was between eight and ten years old, whether because of the death or disappearance of his father, was forced to work as a woodcutter assisted by his younger brothers, “While I was a woodcutter, I had very few friends and carried on conversations with myself when I wasn’t with the burro, my constant friend.” The burro’s name was Canelo (cinnamon tree), although Guillermo Martínez would later call him Maximiliano.

Those who have no history don’t leave many stories behind. But in Doroteo Arango’s case, the future Pancho Villa, the very absence of history was replaced by an abundance of stories. A landless campesino family, a woman without a husband and five children, hunger, misery. Villa’s future secretary, Enrique Pérez Rul, described how his boss told him that he had to get up at three o’clock in the morning because his job was fifteen kilometers away and he started work at five. Cold in the winter, terrible heat in the summer.

Montes de Oca, who interviewed neighbors in that part of Durango in the 1930s, pointed out that the young Doroteo worked in the countryside, ran errands, and harvested corn.

Curiously, towards 1889 or 1890, when he was eleven or twelve, a burro turned up once again. Purchased with the help of a family friend, a trader named Pablo Valenzuela, Villa roamed around the local towns with the animal selling trinkets, “Bored with woodcutting, I threw myself into commerce.” With his earnings, he was able to buy blankets for his siblings, even if they still had to sleep on the floor. His attire consisted of “sandals, cotton pants, woven straw hats, scarf.”

Montes de Oca reported that Doroteo attended the school in San Juan del Río, but only lasted eight days. Don Francisco Lireno ran the school and earned the nickname “the teacher who loves you” because he declared his love for every woman who crossed his path. One classmate remembered Arango and said that he was “very mischievous and dedicated.” Perhaps that was too much to remember about just the eight days he spent in school? Yet Pancho Villa, in an interview with the New York Times in 1914, would not admit to even these eight days, stating that “I didn’t go to school for a single day in my life.”

Witnesses seem to agree that he was precocious and an admirable card player, “a real strapping kid” with a “robust constitution” who got into frequent squabbles. And to round it out, we also hear that his first love was a campesina from a very poor family. A tall, dark-skinned adolescent named María Encarnación Gómez, who was then working as a servant at the hacienda.

There is one story that loses none of its charm for its lack of veracity: one of the locals in San Juan del Río told José María Jaurrieta that one time while they were kids there was a competition to see who could draw the straightest line in the dirt and Doroteo won hands down, explaining, “You all see the ground, I see the goal.” When it came to drawing lines, Doroteo might have seen the goal, but in a closed society, dominated by poverty, he could see little of his own future.

Pancho Villa’s house, once known as Quinta Luz, was constructed in 1905 and then remodeled and expanded over the next decade. It is now the Francisco Villa house museum and the home of the Historical Museum of the Mexican Revolution in Chihuahua.