San Diego Reader
Punitive Expedition
October 28, 1993
by Linda Nevin
My friend's family once owned a ranch near Tecate. Among her mother's stories of old times on the farm were tales of Pancho Villa. "My husband was off fighting with Carranza's army," she'd say, "and I was left alone on the ranch. One day I heard that Pancho Villa and his men were coming through Tecate, and I was so frightened I climbed a tree and hid there for two days until I heard he was gone." And, "People always said that Villa had money and jewelry and guns worth millions of pesos that he buried in different places all over the countryside for safekeeping. They said mysterious flames would appear in the air above each spot where the treasures were hidden. Men would take shovels and go out looking for the fires so they could dig up Villa's loot."
Of all the figures of the Mexican Revolution, certainly none is more notorious, in the U.S. and Mexico, than Francisco "Pancho" Villa. Even in life, his reputation was a mix of fact and myth, contradictory tales that painted him both as Mexico's Robin Hood and as a dangerous bandit who raped and plundered, even at the expense of his own countrymen. That Villa is now more revered than reviled can perhaps be attributed to one bold incident in 1916, when he and his army of campesinos challenged the power of the United States and got away with it.
Villa's 1916 cross-border raid on Columbus, New Mexico, and the eleven-month-long pursuit of the bandit by U.S. troops under the command of renowned war hero General John Pershing is the subject of a new documentary film, The Hunt for Pancho Villa, by KPBS-TV producer Paul Espionsa, in collaboration with Hector Galan of Austin, Texas. Espinosa is well known for other historical features on Mexican-American life, such as The Lemon Grove Incident, Uneasy Neighbors, 1492 Revisited, and Los Mineros. The Hunt for Pancho Villa will air this week as one segment in the PBS series The American Experience.
The show is made up of film footage of the Pershing campaign, historical photographs and documents, commentary from border historians, and contemporary interviews with Mexicans and Americans, some now in their 90s, who were present during the historic events. Many proud Villistas are still living, as are residents of Columbus who survived Villa's raid. According to Espinosa, one of the most difficult tasks for the filmmakers was to pare down the sometimes confusing story of the Mexican Revolution, filled with political and military complexities and a huge cast of characters, "to tell people what they needed to know without getting too overly bogged down in the details of the revolution." The result is a fascinating bit of history and myth brought to life.
Francisco "Pancho" Villa (born Doroteo Arango in 1878) was from a family living the hopeless life of those trapped in labor on Mexico's huge haciendas. By the time he was 15, he was roaming the countryside of Chihuahua and Durango, robbing trains and banks and raiding haciendas. In 1910, with the fall of President Porfino Diaz and the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, Villa organized an army from among the people in the north of Mexico and began a series of military victories that enhanced his already widespread reputation. For a while, he was even a favorite of the Woodrow Wilson administration to succeed Diaz. But soon the U.S.'s loyalties shifted to Villa's longtime enemy, the politically astute Venustiano Carranza, and Villa sought revenge against both. Within a year, the fallout from Villa's raid on Columbus would force Carranza and Wilson to the edge of war, Villa would be the most wanted man in America, and his legend as the bandit-hero of the common man would be complete.
Aside from the need to clarify the story line of The Hunt for Pancho Villa, Espinosa says, there were so many visual records of the period that "we had to be brutal in terms of what we left in the show. It was one of the frustrating things, there was so much wonderful stuff, so many beautiful visuals that we didn't have time to get into." Villa himself was rarely captured in moving pictures, but cameramen documented war hero Pershing's dusty, fruitless marches into Mexico's interior quite thoroughly. Among other interesting details, there are many illustrations of the military significance of the so-called "Punitive Expedition."
Pershing's hunt for Villa is considered the last of the great cavalry campaigns and the very beginning of mechanized war. To support the l00,000 plus troops and heavy artillery under his command, for the first time Pershing had planes (Curtiss Jennys), armored vehicles (boxy four ton trucks covered with steel plates), 600 troop transport trucks (though fewer than 100 cavalrymen actually knew how to drive), and field telephone units. Despite all this, in eleven months of searching through Chihuahua and Durango, Pershing's men never even saw Villa.
"We always went on the side where the sun was shining so they couldn't see us. We rode parallel to the Americans." This is the recollection of 94-year old Enrique Alferet, one of Villa's troops and now a well-known sculptor living in New Orleans. Another Villista recalls how they scorned Pershing's troops, saying their horses were pampered and over-indulged and not suited to the parched terrain of northern Mexico. The campesinos and their mounts, on the other hand, were well used to that land of lean existence. In the end, Pershing privately admitted to having been embarrassed by Villa, though the U.S. government claimed a sort of moral victory when Pershing was finally ordered to withdraw to his base in Columbus. "When the true history of this expedition is written," he said to a relative, "it will not be a very inspiring chapter...,"