seventy one
almost the end
“You come back from revolutions a sick man. I was distracted, preoccupied for a time. Any noise startled me. I could hardly sleep at night. I awoke, drenched in sweat, with seizures. I dreamed they were going to kill me. Clear as day, I saw myself cut up by the bullets.”
At the end of the twentieth century in the C. Burton Saunders Memorial in Berryville, Arkansas, a town lost somewhere in the southern United States, the museum’s administrators proudly displayed the genuine spurs of Pancho Villa behind a window.
From Villista Domitilo Mendoza’s dreams to the fake spurs in Berryville, everything today is memory. In Mexico and across the southern strip of the United States, Villa remains an object of intense curiosity; memory is nothing but a wise mix of echoes of forgotten things and recollections that keep coming back. Shreds of this story appear and disappear in thousands of corners as the years pass, hidden, or almost hidden, as if asking permission to, once again, be told.
In a market in Ciudad Juárez, we find impossible photographs on sale, alongside jackets and sarapes.
“At the time, Villa’s people cut off Obregón’s arm to get him out of the handcuffs, that’s how they stopped him from being executed,” explains the vendor.
“We also have photos of when he was in Chapultepec, jabbering with Benjamín Argumedo.”
No matter how much I insisted that Obregón lost his arm to a cannon shot in Santa Ana and that Argumedo was fleeing from Villa because he was a Colorado and Huertista at the time, their version seemed better than mine.
The last time I checked, there were 422,000 entries in my favorite search engine related to Villismo (333,249 in Google). There are all manner of things associated with Pancho Villa’s name: mariachis for hire, commemorative coins, computer games (“Pancho Villa, Dead or Alive!,” Sierra Madre Games, $12), several dozen films, books, tourist guides, dolls, saddlebags, Villa’s real saddle, restaurants in Moscow, race horses, taquerias, cocktails, Centauros de Juárez motorcycle club, a Dominican Army text explaining the Battle of Torreón, notices for three pieces for mezzo soprano and piano titled “Pancho Villa,” which Rob Zuidam composed in Amsterdam in 1922, an offer to sell college term papers about Villa (click to order “PANCHO VILLA: Career of Mexican General & Revolucionario,” 20 pages, 12 sources, 9 citations, $136), and even an exotic announcement hinting at a sexual encounter, no less significant for its irreverence: “I am the granddaughter of Pancho Villa and everyone in Atotonilco wants it from me.”
No less powerful are the altars to a subterranean and surprisingly powerful popular cult. Over many months, Paloma and Jorge Lavelle furnished this author with items they found in the Merced Balbuena neighborhood of Mexico City in little shops scattered in the way back of the Sonora Market: tiny lead soldiers; kitsch plaster statues of a transvestite Villa, with curly eyelashes made from human hair; silver medals dedicated to Pancho Villa, “the cunning one”; candles that “bring a lot of luck” with an image of him in his pith helmet stamped in white; and saint cards that show his photo or a drawing on one side and an oration on the back “to the martyred spirit of Pancho Villa,” which, if recited “for nine days in the late afternoon,” is very effective, along with others which invoke “you, who knew how to defeat your enemies, help me in my business dealings and my sufferings.”
Adolfo Carrasco Vargas, Hidalgo de Parral’s chronicler, wrote an odd article titled, “The Strange Occurrence of the Number 7 in the Life and Death of General Francisco Villa.” He found 200 relationships with the number 7: the members of his family, the number of letters in each of their names (Hipólito without an H to make it fit), the name Durango, the first and second last name of the man who raped his sister Martina, the names of the gunmen Ignacio (Parra) and Refugio (Alvarado), the years of struggle (1913–1920), July (the number of the month in 1923), the number of assassins (there were nine), and the number of men riding in his car the day he was killed. If he’d made the same effort, he could have done the same with the number 5, or 8.
From one cult to the next, Villa is generous in unfurling his ample wings; he covers everything. The rumor that Villa “smoked pot” has made its way through the internet and several pages that promote legalization affirm the fact with a photo (even if it’s turned green) taken the very moment of his surrender where he is seated and smoking with Ornelas. Further, they refer to verses in “La Cucaracha” (“he had no marijuana to smoke”) to support their ideology. I have heard the same argument from the mouth of the worthy Villista Héctor Carreón, but he hasn’t shown me the slightest proof. Even though Adán Uro remembered that “Villa didn’t even know how to light a cigarette,” the tune keeps on playing.
Objects associated with Villa have become secular relics, material for unreal and very real museums, or the business of entertainment. Days after Pancho Villa’s death, some gringos passed through Parral and tried to buy the Dodge Brothers, but they couldn’t find anyone to sell it to them. They were offering $15,000. As luck would have it, the car, replete with bullet holes, ended up in the hands of Luz Corral and it stayed in the yard of the house on Décima Street in Chihuahua as a silent reminder that the house belonged to a man assassinated at the end of a gun. And there it remained to be admired until 1952 when it disappeared. Public opinion, alerted by the press, kicked up a tremendous fuss, what’s called “a good fight” in Mexico. After the theft of Villa’s head, this crime would not stand. Luz Corral, who always lived under economic conditions approaching destitution, explained that she had rented it to an entrepreneur named Houston to organize a tour in the United States and that the car was in a garage in El Paso. García Valseca’s newspaper chain began campaigning as he believed this was a prologue to the car being sold. It almost provoked a binational conflict. In the end, the car was returned to Quinta Luz. Having survived that venture, David Romo recounts how a none-too-bright governor of Chihuahua once said that the “car was damaged by the bullets” and ordered it repaired, nearly destroying its historical and testimonial value. Fortunately, all they did was polish it up a bit if we compare its current state to the images in Salvador Toscano’s Memorias de un mexicano.
Villa’s mark lives on through his pistols as well, both real and fictitious. On August 2, 1955, Villa’s “reputed and genuine” pistol was robbed from the International Museum in El Paso on Montero street. The thieves entered at two o’clock in the morning and broke the glass, leaving silently without taking anything else. It was an homage. It was not the same pistol that he was carrying when he was killed, a Smith & Wesson .44-caliber long barrel. Photos of that gun have been preserved in La Prensa’s archives in Mexico City while the gun itself remained in the hands of officers from the Attorney General’s office until it was stolen by one of them for fetishistic or financial ends. In the Pancho Villa Museum in Columbus, there’s a five-shot .45-caliber Colt on display, supposedly the one Abraham González presented to Villa in 1911. It is primitively engraved and overlaid with gold and nickel, with mother-of-pearl handles which can’t be original. The serial number is 14881. In the 1960s, the pistol Villa used in Juárez, given to him by Jesús Moreno in 1911, was found in the third tribunal of the criminal court’s safe, a .44 Colt inscribed Gen. Francisco Villa. U. del Parral, 1911. However, it must have been just one more of Villismo’s apocryphal remains scattered over the length and width of Mexico because Villa was just a colonel in 1911.
Everything Villa. This is the odd manner in which the past expresses itself in the present: paraphernalia, echoes, memorabilia. But if the material remains, including statues, pistols, and saddles, seem to clone themselves and still enjoy widespread esteem, Villismo’s secondary characters have had much less luck in this complex story. Apart from the leading personalities recorded in books, hundreds of critical figures in the enormous tapestry that constituted Francisco Villa and Villismo have faded away without a trace. It’s not easy to learn what happened to many of them.
When his brother Hipólito rose up with the Delahuertista rebellion, the new Federales occupied Canutillo and looted the hacienda. These were Gen. Ignacio Enríquez’s troops, Pancho Villa’s eternal Chihuahuan enemy, and they were, in some fashion, carrying out a long-postponed vengeance. They cut the Villista flags out of the blankets they found at Canutillo and wore them on their hats as emblems; they carried off an oil painting in which Pancho Villa was marrying Soledad Seáñez, even if it couldn’t have been very good. Hipólito saved himself and survived his brother by many years. By 1962, the man who had managed millions of dollars for the Division of the North was living in poverty on a regular $800-peso-per-month pension, too little to provide his two sons an education. In the middle of the 1950s, his hacienda was expropriated to create an ejido, leaving him “a seven-hectare strip” to which he said the ejido member would not allow him access. Before he died, he took the time to declare to the press, “For me, there’s no shame in having ended up poor, although the honorable gentlemen today don’t use the word ‘poor,’ they say ‘asshole.’” He died at the Fresno ranch in absolute solitude; his body wasn’t discovered until three days after he passed away.
Gen. Eugenio Martínez, the “victor” who negotiated Villa’s surrender, was accused of having participated in the Serrano rebellion at the end of the 1920s, dying in exile at the age of seventy after drinking to excess in Paris and falling in love with an Algerian woman named Arlette. Contreras Torres was there as well; he would die in Madrid in 1932, while trying to return to Mexico.
Manuel Chao deserves a whole novel. From El Paso, where he first went into exile, he began a long journey that took him to New York, Spain, Montecarlo, and Paris. The gossiping tongues, of which there is no shortage in Mexico, said that he led such a grand life that he died in poverty. He joined a revolutionary movement in Costa Rica in 1922, which triumphed, returning to Mexico to take up arms with De la Huerta. He was captured in Jiménez and, after a summary trial, was shot near Canutillo.
George Carothers, the enigmatic gringo, died in Lake Hiawatha in New Jersey in August of 1939, after having left Mexico for the last time in 1918. He never wrote his memoirs. If he kept an archive, it never surfaced.
Félix Sommerfeld turned to smuggling arms and working for Aureliano Blanquet in Guatemala. Later, he disappeared.
After the revolution, Otis Aultman, the cameraman who best captured Villa, returned to traditional photography. For many years, his studio on San Francisco Street in El Paso was the seat of an informal club of journalists, adventurers, and soldiers of fortune who dedicated themselves to recounting to one another what they had done during the Mexican Revolution.
He died in March 1943 when he fell from a platform in the alley entering his shop. His archives were lost for a time, passing from hand to hand, until they were finally given to the El Paso Public Library.
Gómez Martín, one of Villa’s secretaries, was assassinated in Mexico City during a supposed crime of passion between homosexuals after having served as a postal administrator.
In 1930, the journalist José C. Valadés visited Gen. Urbalejo, the last of the Villista Yaquis, at his ranch. The old man was selling milk and eggs to neighbors in the mountains and was near death from sadness.
When Villa died, Luz Corral, la Güera, was living in the house which bore her name on Décima Street, little by little turning it into a Villista museum. Despite her financial straits, she kept the house, telling all who visited her stories. She died on July 6, 1981, stipulating in her will that the house would become a museum owned by the nation.
She, along with Villa’s other widows, were involved in a strange legal battle after his death that only those who have closely followed the details of the general’s romantic life can understand. Soledad Seáñez summed it up better than anyone in a phrase that was almost surreal, but nonetheless true, “The truth is that there are only three legitimate widows of Pancho: Doña Luz, Austreberta, and me.” No doubt, there were more than three, but in the unending debate that followed Villa’s death, only these three, along with Manuela Casas and Juanita Torres’ children, intervened. The matter of legitimate widowhood was more than a simple recognition of republican hierarchy: it was necessary to disentangle Villa’s matrimonial chaos with respect to inheritance. And Villa did not leave a will.
Friedrich Katz cataloged the considerable inheritance: Canutillo, six houses in Chihuahua, two houses in Parral, the hotel, and two small ranches (which, according to a decision in 1914, passed to him from an intestate decedent). But it wasn’t so, Villa’s estate was more apparent than real when we examine the properties that Villa passed down: the house at 500 Décima Street, in Chihuahua (otherwise known as La Quinta Luz) was already Luz Corral’s property; Villa purchased the Ánimas ranch for $600 pesos in February 1913; he had already handed over the Hidalgo Hotel—which multimillionaire Rodolfo Alvarado had presented to him in 1913—along with one of the houses in Parral to Manuela Casas; there was a house on Ochoa Street in Chihuahua that had cost him $1,500 pesos and he had paid $5,000 pesos for half of La Boquilla ranch, both in 1922. However, part of this real estate disappeared very quickly; for instance, as soon as he died, Canutillo was taken over by Bienes Nacionales (Ministry of National Assets) due to a $200,000-peso debt that Villa owed the Mexican government and another debt to US companies for $50,000 pesos for farm equipment.
In the debate over the inheritance, the widows went looking for patrons in the state apparatus. On July 30, 1923, Luz Corral wrote to Obregón telling him that she had in her possession documents demonstrating her marriage to Villa and that if Pancho had married Austreberta, he had not obtained a prior divorce from her. She asked for his support in squashing Hipólito and Austreberta’s petition to inherit Pancho’s property in the absence of a will. Obregón replied, telling her to come to the capital to deal with the matter and that he would be happy to hear her out.
In time, the widows formed small factions: Jaurrieta and Carlitos Jáuregui with Luz and, at first, Hipólito with Austreberta, who could also count on help from her compadre Gen. Eugenio Martínez.
Obregón proposed to Luz that Hipólito and she mutually take charge of Canutillo and later called on her to leave the Hidalgo Hotel in Parral to Austreberta and her two children (without realizing Villa had already given the hotel to Manuela Casas). Luz replied that she knew of at least ten of Pancho’s children and many others that he cared for and also noted that Canutillo was under the control of Bienes Nacionales to cover the debts. In the end, in order to extricate himself from the mess, the president proposed sharing the little that remained among all the children.
After the Delahuertista rebellion, Austreberta obtained a judicial order granting her control over Canutillo. Obregón then appeared to take Luz’s side as she had interceded on his behalf when Villa had wanted to kill him. Manuela Casas had also claimed the Parral house and the hotel for herself and her children, who had as much right as Austreberta’s children. The first round came to an end when Luz was recognized as the inheritor and the bank bought out what remained of Canutillo for a pittance. Austreberta complained bitterly, “Later, after his death, I had to struggle to be able to educate my children. He left me the hotel in Parral, but it was taken away and given to a señora who apparently had been Pancho’s only and authentic wife.”
The conflict flared up again in 1931, when a lawyer representing Juana Torres’s daughter challenged Luz Corral’s petition, claiming it came after Juana’s. Meanwhile, Austreberta secured pensions for her children from the governor of Chihuahua. She died in 1936. As late as November 1944, the Chamber of Deputies’ Defense Committee found that Soledad Seáñez should receive Villa’s survivor’s pension. The committee found that when Villa married Luz in a civil ceremony, he was already married to Juanita Torres, and that when she died, he legally became a widower; he then married Soledad, meaning that his marriage to Austreberta was not valid. If Soledad did not remarry, she would receive $10 pesos per day, which she did until she died of an embolism in Chihuahua at the age of one hundred.
This was not a story, a lamentably typical one in Mexico, of revolutionaries becoming millionaires. Poverty seemed to surround Villa and his family. While this author was writing this book, a brief note in a newspaper reported on the existence of a daughter of Villa’s named Guadalupe, in the Chihuahuan village of Cuchillo Parado. She was eighty-seven and could identify herself with an old Secretary of National Defense credential. She received a 900-peso pension which was not enough for food and medicine.
Violence also appeared to stalk Villa’s children. Antonio Villa met the same end as his father on September 27, 1967. He was drinking in a car with a female friend in Chihuahua when unknown figures filled it full of lead. He was an inspector for the Finance Ministry. The crime remains unsolved. Agustín Villa died in a bar fight in Los Angeles. He had gotten a part as an extra in a movie and, flush with cash, hit the bars with tragic consequences. Miguel Villa Arreola, who was a pilot, died in a crash in 1950, at the age of thirty; curiously, he was buried in the empty tomb which Trillo had left in Parral. Octavio Villa Coss (Felipe Ángeles’s godson) became a customs officer and was assassinated on orders from a professional smuggler—or, according to another version, by a latifundia’s gunmen—in a bar in Piedras Negras at some point in the 1960s.
Some Villista sites remain. They’ve become small museums, maintained by erudite campesinos who relate small stories with marvelous care; such is the case in Torreón at the Hacienda La Loma in Coyotada. However, in other places, a linguistic conspiracy is at play because many of the towns in which the Villistas took refuge have lost their names: Tierra Blanca is now Estación Desierto, Río Flores is Villa Coronado, San Andrés (Pancho’s first base) is Rivapalacio, Santa Isabel is General Trías, and Rubio became Colonia Obregón. And there’s also this paradox: the town named after the landowner Falomir was renamed Maclovio Herrera, Pancho Villa’s oldest friend and enemy. Today, it is populated by Villista descendants as the land was handed over to their forefathers when they demobilized.
And it’s not just that place names were changed, some have fallen in standing. The soda shop in El Paso, The Elite Confectionary, where Villa drank strawberry malts with Pascual Orozco is now a discount store in which you can still see—if you look carefully, hidden amongst the chaos of everything-for-a-dollar sales—the old coffered ceiling. And the Division of the North’s old barracks in Chihuahua has become, with the passage of time, a supermarket.
But the most absurd spot is reserved for the United States where, in what used to be Columbus, there is a park bearing Villa’s name. As if in a flash of historical forgetfulness, the United States waved its weird magical wand that turns all it touches into Disneyland in order to pay tribute to the man who led the last invasion of its national territory. The military’s Camp Furlong closed in 1926, and an enormous cactus garden covers the place today. Many buildings from the time of the raid are still standing, including the Hoover Hotel. The railway station water tank has been restored and the old Customs House remains. On November 20, 1961, a park dedicated to Villa was inaugurated. The event sparked so much interest that 1,500 people attended. The Customs House became the visitor center for Pancho Villa State Park. On display are several old 30-30 carbines and German Mausers, supposedly used in the attack, as well as some tall boots that, according to the director of the museum (which was reinaugurated in 2006), belonged to Villa. Topping it all off, we find the saddle of Siete Leguas, Pancho’s famous “caballo.” “A fake,” declared Luz Corral years ago.
“Pancho Villa’s treasures,” the buried kind, transcend his death. A subspecialty within “Villaology” has grown up over the years constructed by narrators who focus on this treasure and its whereabouts. The field’s most-informed practitioners say that only three unrecovered sites remain. Unfortunately, they don’t agree on which three. Leonardo Herrera, who was dedicated to digging, and not merely documenting these stories, maintained that three hidden treasures remained in the vicinity of Canutillo: the first near the Durazno stream, some five kilometers from the hacienda en route to Torreón de Cañas; the second in a cave near the Río Florido bridge; and the third in another cave some three kilometers from the old Torreoncito ranch. Max Maser cut the number of sites to two, “All of the buried sites were dug up to sustain the armed struggle, leaving only two that have not been located: one is situated on Perico Mountain near the San Marcos dam along the peaks of Majalca, and the other is in Laguna de Trincheras in the Santa Clara Canyon in Chihuahua.” José A. Nieto Houston, Villa’s pale colonel, recalled two others in the 1960s: one in the Basasiachi waterfall near the stream where the water spills over, and the other on Santa Ana Mountain close by a tall cliff in a small cave without easy access. Was this the cave where he hid with Villa during the Punitive Expedition?
Villa confessed to Regino Hernández Llergo that he kept a hidden treasure somewhere on Canutillo dedicated to his children’s education. If that’s true, it’s never been found. Hernán Robleto told the story of a site being dug up after Villa’s death, but it turned out to be a child’s grave. The text is very literary and is even less credible than the majority of reports. Leonardo Herrera looked over all the sites in great detail while looking for Villa’s supposed treasure and collected a huge number of anecdotes: a girl saw gold chestnuts shoveled as if they were corn in a room in Canutillo; the father of another said that he scorched off the seals on silver bars with a blowtorch; the father of a carpenter said that Villa told his son to construct little boxes thirty centimeters long and ten centimeters wide to store cash. When Villa died, Ricardo Michel commented to Gráfico that Pancho had buried more than $7 million pesos.
The stories persisted over time. In 1953, a group of gringos traveled around the Sierra Madres with metal detectors looking for Villa’s treasure. As late as 2003, the inhabitants of La Goma, Durango—next to La Loma where Villa was named commander of the Division of the North just before the Battle of Torreón—discovered that their priest, who had closed the church for “repairs,” was actually heading up a crew that demolished half the church looking for nonexistent “treasure,” supposedly buried there by Pancho Villa. After being found out, the priest fled at the prospect of being lynched.
Many Villistas who grew tired of fighting went to the United States and ended up fighting in the First World War, others joined the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. And, although he has not been able to prove it, this author has been told there was a Villa brigade in Mao’s army as well as a battalion named Pancho Villa at Dien Bien Phu. What is undoubtedly true is that there is a little town in Russia that bears his name.
Eleven years after his death, Pancho Villa returned to the big screen, once again in the hands of Hollywood. In 1934, Viva Villa! premiered with Wallace Beery in the starring role, Jack Draper as cinematographer, and Howard Hawks directing (Jack Conway also directed but was uncredited). Oddly, the film used material from Eisenstein’s project ¡que viva méxico! Novelist and screenwriter Ben Hecht managed to combine every cliché typical of the stereotyped view of untamed Mexico and displayed little respect for the historical record. He created a vision of a generous and savage bandit, motivated by revenge. The film was shot on location and not without its share of problems: from the Mexican government’s original objection to Beery (who usually only played villains or buffoons) to the inconvenient behavior of one of the actors, a certain Tracy, who got drunk and urinated on a military parade from his hotel balcony, provoking a justified volley in his direction.
The Mexican response to this gringo Villa was not long in coming. Between 1935 and 1936, Vámonos con Pancho Villa was shot, directed by Fernando de Fuentes based on the novel by Rafael Muñoz, who undoubtedly worked on the film. The better part of the nation’s talent participated in the project: Xavier Villaurrutia wrote the screenplay, Silvestre Revueltas composed the score, Draper filmed it, Gabriel Figueroa operated the camera, and Domingo Soler starred as Villa.
At the end of 1933, Vito Alessio asked in the press, “Would it be possible in the current moment to recognize the dispassionate truth about the general’s actions?” He pointed to the “precious censorship” the film had suffered at the hands of the Secretary of Government.
After these two, dozens of films followed, most of which were less than edifying with the marvelous exception of Reed, Insurgent Mexico by Paul Leduc.
In a letter written at the end of 1919, Pancho Villa said, “The story of my suffering will be a glory for my Mexican brothers when passions come to an end.” But he was wrong, fortunately, because the passions have not come to an end. Speaking ill of Pancho Villa in Chihuahua can lead to spilt blood. Villa continues to be an interminable and, to a certain extent, strange passion. The narrator of this book was in Chihuahua years ago and the first thing he did was purchase a t-shirt that read, “Viva Villa, sons of bitches.” I later wore it several times in Boulder, Colorado where the t-shirt profoundly offended historian Jean Meyer who, near the end of 2005, was comparing Villa to Chechen bandits, calling him a “revolutionary criminal.” It also managed to piss off various online authors of recent years who frequently equate him to Bin Laden.
“Pancho Villa lost the war in Mexico, but he won the literature,” quipped José Emilio Pacheco. Curiously, he not only won the battle but became the narrative subject of one of the most interesting generations of novelists Mexico has seen—Mariano Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán, Mauricio Magdaleno, Nellie Campobello, Rafael F. Muñoz—and his story crossed paths with Heriberto Frías, Ambrose Bierce, John Reed, Santos Chocano, José Vasconcelos, and even Salvador Novo, who feared the Villistas as a child.
The long-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had real difficulties when it came to incorporating Pancho Villa into its rhetoric and its utilitarian version of the Mexican Revolution. It therefore struggled to take advantage of his revolutionary legitimacy. For many years, his image caused hard feelings and tensions.
In 1956, the government of Chihuahua commissioned Ignacio Asúnsolo to create a statue of Villa mounted on horseback. When he was finished—but before the statue could be placed in the roundabout of one of the city’s avenues—the governor passed along a message from higher up saying that it had to be modified. Asúnsolo yielded and changed the mustache and the brow. At the inauguration, they spoke about the statue of a guerrilla fighter, “the combatant of the Division of the North,” omitting Villa’s name. Even the novelist Rafael Muñoz, then old and faint-hearted, censored himself, avoiding Pancho’s name. Luz Corral was in the crowd and, smiling, she asked in a loud voice, “Does a statue change the truth?” The statue’s plaque doesn’t mention Villa, only “a soldier of the revolution.”
A statue of Villa was finally erected in Mexico City in 1969, carved by an exiled Valencian sculptor who found refuge in Mexico, Julián Martínez. His work was the cause of a sharp polemic with respect to whether Villa should hold the reins in his right hand. The many photos of Villa on horseback did not resolve the issue, sometimes they were in his right hand, sometimes in his left.
In September 1966, the Chamber of Deputies held a discussion that was widely covered in the press with respect to whether or not Villa’s name could be inscribed in gold letters in the building occupied by that legislative body as was the case with dozens of important figures in both official and popular history. The debate was heated. On November 8, the final session debated the matter for seven hours before finally approving it. Official history was trying to integrate the last of the popular myths. But the story didn’t end there.
On November 18, 1976, tomb number 632 in the Parral cemetery was opened once more. Fulfilling a decree by President Luis Echeverría, the headless remains of Pancho Villa were exhumed in Parral and brought to the Monumento a la Revolución in Mexico City, where they were laid to rest next to those of Plutarco Elías Calles. A decision Mexico City’s illustrious natives blame for the city’s frequent earthquakes.
Journalist Oscar Ching acted as a witness during the removal, accompanied by a group of officers. Two things unnerved those in charge of the exhumation. First, the coffin didn’t appear to be the original as it had metallic adornments and, second, they found a tortoiseshell and a crucifix inside. Ching took two bones to the notary public to testify to the transfer and, while he was there, the director of the local hospital, Dr. René Armendáriz, a gynecologist, remarked that the sacrum appeared to feminine, most likely belonging to a young woman. They didn’t pay any attention to him, sticking instead to military logic; they had come to open up tomb 632 and they had done it. With abundant fanfare and ritual, the remains were paraded around Mexico City on a rainy day in an uncovered caisson wagon and then deposited in one of the pillars of the Monumento a la Revolución, where, year after year, they are the subject of official tributes.
Yet a story that had originally circulated in El Siglo de Torreón began gaining ground. Apparently, Pedro Alvarado and Austreberta Rentería, by common accord, secretly moved Villa’s remains in 1931, to avoid any new desecrations. Adolfo Carrasco, Parral’s chronicler, published an article which included a receipt documenting the assertion. The new tomb was to be one hundred twenty meters to the east of the original and be marked number 10. Five years later, Austreberta died, and her remains were placed in the same grave.
So, who is in the tomb where Pancho Villa should be? Local historians lend credence to a story, according to which, in March 1931, a young woman on her way to the United States for cancer treatment died in Parral’s Juárez hospital. As she had no identification on her because, it seems, she had left it on the train after disembarking in grave condition upon her arrival in Parral, her remains took the place of Villa’s in tomb 632. Thus, this anonymous woman must be lying in repose in the Monumento a la Revolución, while Villa’s remains occupy tomb number 10 in the Dolores cemetery in Parral.
It seems clear that somewhere beyond the scattered remnants of a collective memory which clings at all costs to his name and image, and in keeping with his best traditions and singular style, Francisco Villa has broken free from the system, escaped, and, once again, gotten away.
