nine
seeing the pyramids
Villa—although he was already discharged and retired from the war by presidential order—was not going to miss the Maderistas’ triumphal entrance into Chihuahua. On May 23, they marched down Avenida Juárez as Abraham González and Gen. Rábago reviewed the troops. Villa led a group which included Martín López, Nicolás Fernández, Andrés U. Vargas, Trinidad Rodríguez, and Manuel Ochoa.
The following day, the irregulars were furloughed by Abraham. Nicolás Fernández recalled, “We gave them each a tacked-up horse, a rifle, and $50 pesos.” But as the soldiers were already in possession of the first two items, they only stuck around to wait for the third. Just 650 men would remain on duty under Orozco’s command to act as a regional force.
One group of veterans met with the interim governor to demand land. Abraham cut them short, saying “all in good time,” and suggested that public lands might be put up for sale. The combatants, not happy with the answer, went to see Villa, asking that he intercede on their behalf. One of them asked if the latifundia owners had purchased their land from the nation. Villa ordered the bricklayers who were repairing his house to continue the work without him while he headed up the group to go meet with the governor. Once again, they received the same reply: you have to wait. Jesús Vargas commented, “In the particular case of Chihuahua, this was an aberration because the statistics at the time listed more than 4 million hectares had been counted as national lands.” Yet this referred only to wastelands.
The Porfirian Chihuahua was owned by the Terrazas clan, and it would remain so. Luis Terrazas, according to the journalist Silvestre Terrazas (of no relation) was the “largest cattleman in the world.” He was the proprietor of 2.5 million hectares (10 million acres), plus other smaller properties owned with his son-in-law, Creel, as well as property belonging to his son Luis. He owned half-a-million sheep, twenty-five thousand horses, and the urban transportations systems in Chihuahua, Juárez, and Parral, along with 70 percent of flour production, half the cattle in Chihuahua, the telephone and electrical grids, a monopoly on beets, and the only brewery. All of this bound together through an astonishing network of matrimonial and kinship networks, alliances, businesses, and godfatherhoods that extended into Coahuila and Nuevo León.
The armed Maderismo had without doubt tempered the oligarchy by defeating its most immediate representatives, but it had yet to touch its essence.
The Magonistas were not wrong to say that the Revolution had been a lie and on May 24, they issued their manifesto proposing that the armed struggle continue. But their views were confined to a small minority, for the time being, as the majority of the people of Chihuahua were inclined to give Madero’s government time and they bestowed their trust upon it. They were joined in this by a good part of the nation. Salvador Toscano’s camera captured Francisco Madero’s triumphant march towards the South, his train surrounded by euphoric onlookers. It was a party to beat all parties, the dictator was gone. Villa was, in some ways, left out of the victory celebration. A party to which he should have been invited.
In the meantime, on May 25, accompanied by five of his compañeros, among them his secretary Tomás Franco as well as Martín López, Villa took the train to San Andrés to put his relationship with the Güera Luz Corral in order. Luz’s family had given their blessing and she went to Chihuahua to buy a wedding dress while Villa remained in San Andrés to arrange “the rest.” Luz returned to the town with the only dress she could get on short notice, a gown that was originally sewn for “a señorita from Camargo.” Luz’s purchase spread rumors of Villa’s plans to wed.
On May 27, Francisco Villa and Luz Corral were married at noon in the San Andrés church. Fortunato Casavantes was the best man, standing-in on behalf of the governor, Abraham González. The priest, who was named Muñoz, had an odd exchange with Villa.
“Are you going to confess?” he asked.
“Look, I would need eight days to make my confession, and the wedding is tomorrow. Besides, I would need a bigger heart to tell you all the things that the Lord has granted me license to do.”
One week later, on June 9, 1911, thousands of Chihuahuans in a festive mood welcomed interim governor Abraham González to Ciudad Juárez. The following day, June 10, he took office and Villa arrived from Santa Isabel. He intended to organize a bullfight to benefit the widows and children of fallen revolutionaries. Pancho, dressed like a cowboy, decked out in silver buttons, was cheered when he stepped off the train.
We don’t know who the bullfighters were or whose bulls they were fighting, but we do know that the bullfight—after being postponed on Sunday, June 11 owing to bad weather—became two bullfights, which took place on June 18 and 25, respectively. The day of the first bull fight featured a good mix of sun and shade. Villa watched from his box seats alongside Abraham González and other officials. They collected $232.50 that first day and $173.87 the following Sunday. Villa and Pedro Muñoz organized a dance at the Espinoza estate where one hundred couples danced until dawn.
June 17 provided a story revealing the new Pancho Villa, a man of order. At 2:45 p.m. at Carlos Fuero Street, across from the Pacífico station, a quarrel broke out involving the brothers Mendoza and Teodoro García in which the latter suffered two stab wounds, including a punctured lung. The attackers took off running, leaving García unconscious. Pancho Villa, who was passing by, detained one of the attackers, Jesús, and jumped on a horse to go off after the other, Florencio, who he managed to catch. Having detained both brothers, he delivered them to the police station by car.
Luz and Pancho were to settle in at the house on Décima Street, No. 500, where he had lived on and off for the last years, but it had to be refurbished because they would not be living alone. Instead, they were joined by Pancho’s two brothers, Antonio and Hipólito, Martín López, el Chamaco (the Kid), several relatives of José Sánchez, who had been killed in the hills in Tecolote. Villa had promised to care for Sánchez’s family, which consisted of his sixty-five-year-old mother and three very young sisters—and a boy named José Dolores Palomino, the son of a revolutionary of the same name killed at Casas Grandes.
The house sat in the foothills of the mountains outside the city and the renovations gave it an odd appearance: an entryway led to stairs for to a second-floor bedroom while, on the first floor, there was a room designated as an office, another bedroom, the living room, and two more rooms that served as the dining room and kitchen. Pancho bought a guitar and Luz bought a Singer sewing machine. Everything pointed to Villa having found tranquility and a home. So much so that when, on June 27, he met his old enemies Rosendo Romero and Zeferino Legarreta at Federico Moye’s Nombre de Dios estate against whom he “held an old grudge,” he embraced them after a conversation and considered their past debts settled. Afterwards, Villa “declared that he fully intended to avoid seeking any kind of personal vengeance against his old enemies, whom he forgives for any attacks of which he was the object.”
His old compañeros were missing him. On July 17, a daily local called El Padre Padilla printed requests that he be named military commander of Ciudad Juárez in place of José de la Luz Blanco, but it didn’t go anywhere.
During the night of July 23 and 24, Pancho Villa and Luz Corral left for Mexico City on their honeymoon. A few days prior, El Correo de Chihuahua informed its readers that Col. Villa had “important matters to discuss with Señor Madero,” and that he would take advantage of “the opportunity to spend several days strolling through the capital of the republic.”
Mexico City not only impressed him, but it also made him nervous. The misery provided a stark contrast, it “was like a whitewashed grave where everything inside was turned into a nest of maggots.” Villa and Luz played tourists; they went to the pyramids at Teotihuacán, visited museums, and saw the Basílica de Guadalupe, staying at the Hotel Iturbide for three weeks.
Ramón Puente would place the following words in Villa’s mouth: “Beautiful palaces next to filthy, impoverished houses; fine horses and carriages beside almost naked Indians, ragged, carrying their goods on their backs, fastened by a leather strap across their foreheads; the pulquerías, offering sinful pleasures all around, selling agave alcohol, more repugnant than the popular taverns where people get drunk off nauseating and stupefying liquor; thieves everywhere and a multitude of little kids selling newspapers in the streets and sleeping out in the open on the big shots’ doorways.”
At some point during his trip, Villa met with President Madero in Tehuacán, Puebla. What “important matters” referred to in the press did they take up? We don’t know because there is no record of the conversation. Some days later, the couple returned to Chihuahua. Villa summarized what he saw, “The widely-praised capital gave me more sorrow than joy and I couldn’t understand why it received so many compliments given the eyesores that jump out at you at first glance.”
Upon returning from Mexico City, “Once again, I sank back into the muddy bourgeoisie of private business.” It’s striking that Villa hardly mentioned these months and to what he dedicated his time to in the many versions of his autobiography. Luz Corral would offer a hint, “He would get up at 4 a.m. and go to a ranch called La Boquilla to pick out cattle.” On July 7, Villa applied for a license to import cattle into the city. Cows, then, were his business, just like during his cattle rustling days, even if he didn’t have to steal them anymore. He sold cattle to the state, among other buyers, as an August 9 invoice from city hall shows a payment of $300 pesos for ten steers. La Boquilla, which also went by Las Ánimas, was a ranch divided into two sections on the outskirts of Chihuahua. It had been purchased before the Revolution and, strangely enough, it bordered the properties of Luis Terrazas and Juan Creel.
Everything was peaceful. Villa took to practicing writing, “When I got back home, I started to take my first lessons in reading, which turned out to be more hopeless than I had imagined and practiced writing my name by hand.” He continued organizing cock fights, kept a small pen to raise the birds in, and rode a horse named Garañón.
Was everything as calm as it appeared? In September, he once again fulfilled his extended familial duties, attending the baptism of Fidel Ávila’s daughter in Satevó. However, the Satevó municipal president was bitterly complaining that Villa was supporting “insubordinate” people who loved living off others, and that the town’s “gunslinging and cattle rustling” was unbearable.
Villa let Chihuahua’s local elections pass by without taking an interest. Two old comrades in arms were contending for local office. Pascual Orozco announced he was running against Abraham González (who was protected by Madero), but then withdrew his name, leading to González winning by an overwhelming margin on August 20.
Orozco was an enigmatic figure in those days. Commanding Chihuahua’s irregular troops—and therefore the main forces through which Maderismo maintained order—Orozco was harassed by González, flattered by the oligarchy, and made uneasy by the absence of real land reform. He was ordered to go to Sinaloa to put down a local rising led by a character known as el Agachado (the Hunchback). Orozco’s followers interpreted the move as an attempt to distance him from his troops and this produced a protest of some 2,000 people in Chihuahua in which José Córdoba, his secretary, participated. It’s not clear if Orozco followed the orders or not. In the end, Madero allowed him to remain in Chihuahua.
In September, Villa traveled to Mexico City for a second time in response to an invitation from Madero. Along with Villa, Gustavo Madero, José de la Luz Blanco, and Urbano Flores were all present for the meeting in the Chapultepec Castle. Villa dined with Madero in the castle’s citadel. It seems that—although the accounts were written after the break with Orozco and therefore may have been embellished—Pascual was the major topic of conversation. Madero asked about Orozco’s attitude. Villa summed up the popular opinion: “Orozco spends a lot of time with Don Juan Creel and Alberto Terrazas, and you know all about these gentlemen. That’s all I can say about him.” Madero asked whether Villa would remain loyal to him if Orozco rebelled. Villa gave him assurances, “I don’t have any forces at my disposal because you took them all away from me, but when it will be necessary, I have many people who I’ll be able to call up.”
On October 4, Villa returned from the capital after stopping over in Camargo along with Fidel Ávila, Agustín Moreno, and Francisco Vega where the people of the city threw him a party, mistakenly believing it was his birthday. In September of 1911, while Villa was in Mexico City, a new daughter named Micaela was born to Petra Espinoza, the woman from Parral. And at some point, during that same year, Villa struck up a relationship with Esther Cardona Canales, with whom he would have twins the following year. Both children died at a very young age.
Upon Villa’s return to Chihuahua, Abraham González took office as governor. Many of the old-guard Maderistas took advantage of the occasion to assemble in the city. Horses filled Villa’s patio and men slept on the floor in his kitchen. Three days later, Madero announced that he had named González to his cabinet as Minister of Internal Affairs. The president thus chose to strengthen his executive instead of maintaining an important leader on the ground in the North. Aureliano González took over as interim governor in Chihuahua.
On October 24, Villa and Luz Corral were married by a judge at his house on Décima Street. The civil marriage had not been made official before because, when they were married in San Andrés, the new government had not yet named any local authorities.
One week later, Madero visited Chihuahua. The local Maderistas did not like his vice-presidential candidate Pino Suárez, strongly preferring Vázquez Gómez. Tensions were high, but Madero believed he could win them over. He participated in a public event with Orozco and Abraham where he was jeered.
Villa appeared to stay on the margins of the polemic, but once Madero assumed office on November 6, Pancho wrote to him demanding that he punish those responsible for the Banco Minero hold up, and that he put an end to the Creel dynasty’s abuses. Much ink had been spilled over the matter of the Banco Minero robbery, causing feelings to run high throughout the state. Prior to the Revolution, hundreds of people had been arrested and innocent people had been tortured after $300,000 pesos were supposedly stolen from the bank as authorities conspired to manufacture guilty parties. The people believed that one of the bank’s owners, Juan Creel, had been responsible.
In Villa’s letter, he reminded Madero about “the promises that you made to all your supporters during the Revolution” and hoped that now, as president, he would remember “that one of main causes for which he had fought was the lack of guaranteed rights and the oppression weighing on the people of Chihuahua, including the Creel dynasty’s excesses and abuses of which we were the victims.” Villa demanded that “justice shine its light [. . .] since three unlucky youths—who were guilty of nothing more than having been presented as the unwitting instruments of those truly responsible for that robbery—have already spent three years in prison.” There is no record of Villa getting a response, although the prisoners were indeed released.
