Paco Ignacio Taibo II (PIT) is one of a kind. A rebel in the midst of Mexico’s tumultuous 1968, creator of the wildly popular Hectór Belsacoarán Shayne detective novels (recently picked up by Netflix), co-inventor of Latin American noir (“How can you write a crime novel in a country where the main criminal is the state?”), biographer of Che and Villa, and now—what goes around comes around—the director of the Fondo de Cultura Económico, a nonprofit publishing powerhouse partially funded by . . . the Mexican government. For those who know, you know. But if this book is your introduction to Taibo, then the best way I can think to describe him is as a combination of Stephen King and Howard Zinn.
Translating Pancho Villa was an adventure. The colors of the Chihuahuan Desert and the Sierra Madre range, a wild array of pistols, rifles, cannons, knives, and swords, stampeding horses and cattle of all shades and sizes, and, of course, hats, hats, and more hats. Add early twentieth-century Mexican slang, encoded telegraph wires, and diplomatic jargon, and you get a sense of the challenges. My friends Héctor Agredano and Edgar Ayala helped me straighten out some particularly confounding metaphors and Linda Ruggeri provided multiple alternative translations along with expert copyediting.
Fortunately, Taibo is a master storyteller and he never allows details to overwhelm the pace and direction of the narrative. In fact, he states plainly that Villa’s legacy has been so actively distorted by friend and foe alike that his story (or history, depending on how you want to translate the word) has been nearly drowned in a deluge of claims and counterclaims. In place of facile partisanship, Taibo goes searching for the clearest picture of Villa he can find, and where he runs into competing interpretations or confused outcomes and actions, he tells his readers to make up their own minds. His Pancho Villa is a masterwork of biography.
If you know nothing about Villa, this book will entertain you and terrify you in equal parts. If you are a well-informed academic, Taibo’s Pancho Villa ought to join your canon and your graduate seminar syllabus. If you like guns or horses or Mexican history, you will immediately recognize this book as a classic. If you just love a good story, this book is chock-full of impossible adventures, narrow escapes, fake firing squads, and more political intrigue and double crosses than you can shake a stick at.
But there is one set of audiences for whom I believe this book offers a particularly significant challenge—namely, the U.S. Left. First, the broad, liberal Left too often sees Mexico’s recent predicaments as a “tragedy” of some sort and the United States as an innocent bystander. In that scenario, the U.S. ought to offer a bit more aid, loosen up immigration restrictions to a small degree, and, perhaps, legalize drugs to reduce the cartels’ powers. Taibo’s Pancho Villa confronts us with the knowledge that President Woodrow Wilson, the great liberal hero and proponent of the League of Nations, invaded Mexico to protect Wall Street, big oil, and the railroad barons. Villa came the closest to defeating Wilson’s favorite generals and landlords, but their eventual victories set the table for the violence the people of Mexico suffer from today. We in the United States are not bystanders, but culprits.
Second, there is a smaller portion of the U.S. Left that is more conscientiously dedicated to active cross-border solidarity with workers, students, campesinos, feminists, and environmentalists in Mexico. On the one hand, Villa reinforces the knowledge that many radicals already have, although at a fascinating level of detail, with regard to the Mexican Revolution and subsequent economic, social, and political development. Be they Mexican or Latin American immigrants, their children or grandchildren, or white and BIPOC of other than Latino heritage, these radicals already know the old adage, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” They know that the Mexican Revolution provided the hemisphere with one of its greatest hopes—land reform, democracy, anti-corruption—and the Revolution’s hijacking by old landlords and industrialists and new politicians and bureaucrats doomed those hopes for generations. They know that the future for peace and justice on both sides of the border must wait for, one way or the other, a rekindling and spreading of that rebellion against the elite. They know and care about this history because, if the Revolution was Mexico’s best hope, then understanding the forces at the center of it is critical for drawing lessons for the next round of struggle.
And it is here that Villa makes its greatest contribution. At the risk of overgeneralizing, I think it’s fair to say that radicals (certainly in the United States and, I think, in Mexico as well) have understood Emiliano Zapata and the Morelos Commune to be the beating heart of the Mexican Revolution. Villa, while acknowledged as a military genius, always seems to be left playing second fiddle. Of course, the 1992 rebellion in Chiapas under the banner of Zapatismo has (with good reason) reinforced Zapata’s standing as the most important leftist political leader of his era. Zapata’s advocacy of radical self-governing councils, land and workplace reforms, and his community’s connection to the centuries-long struggle for Indigenous self-determination all provide solid foundations for this appreciation.
But Villa, and the armies and masses that rode with him, has faded from the popular Leftist imagination, and this cannot be entirely explained by reference to the EZLN’s heroic campaigns. Rather, there has been a long-running depreciation of Villismo with roots in both his enemies’ propaganda and left-leaning academia and the harder Left itself. This is slightly perplexing as the bestselling English-language book on the Mexican Revolution Insurgent Mexico was written by John Reed about his time riding with Villa. Be that as it may, Taibo takes on both sources of this depreciation in a polemic woven throughout the text.
Yes, argues Taibo, Villa could be brutal. But the notion that Villa was depraved disintegrates when his record is held up to the light. To the degree that elite, anti-Villa propaganda has nudged the Left toward raising up Zapata as a more legitimate hero is the degree to which the Right has succeeded in distorting the genuine nature of the Revolution in Mexico’s North. Yet Taibo makes no bones about the fact that some of the Left’s own assumptions and analyses have been far more damaging to Villismo’s stature.
This lopsidedness borders on neglect among even some of the most informed and sharpest historians, including John Womack, the author of the must-read Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. Taibo asserts that Womack’s “knowledge of Villismo is as limited as his knowledge of Zapatismo is expansive.” And then quotes Womack’s description of Villa’s forces: “The Villistas were cowboys, mule skinners, bandits, railroad laborers, peddlers, refugee peons, the Villistas had no definite class interests or local attachments.” In place of this misplaced assessment, Taibo’s Villa demonstrates beyond a shadow of doubt just how deep Villismo’s “class interests” and “local attachments” went.
And if Womack might (wrongly) be dismissed as a disinterested academic historian, Taibo poses a similar critique of his good friend and fellow radical Adolfo Gilly. Gilly wrote his book The Mexican Revolution (La revolución interrumpida) while in prison for his part in the 1968 events, and in the book he suggests that Zapatismo’s revolutionary agrarian and democratic demands will reassert themselves and form the impetus for future confrontations with Mexican (and U.S.) capitalism. But as we have seen, Gilly’s emphasis on Zapatismo comes at the expense of his view of Villismo, including the notion that “Villa was condemned to defeat with the certainty of fatalism . . . the country had matured for the new social relations carried forth by Obregonismo’s arms and demands. The campesinos who sustained the Division of the North had not found their own such relations, and could not find them, as the country had not generated a working-class leadership that would allow them to preserve those social relations by integrating them into a superior and broader perspective.” Taibo suggests this sort of determinism has had a deleterious effect on the Left’s understanding of Villismo and it is long past time to revisit these questions. Not in order to bring down Zapata, but in order to raise up Villa and the movement he led to their rightful place.
In my view, Taibo has done exactly that, in spades, in Pancho Villa.
todd chretien
July 6, 2022
