Questions About The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, please sign up.

Answered Questions (1)

1) Do you believe the text provides a fair and balanced look at Villa? 2) Someone mentioned this book is info dense. As a corollary to this work, can you recommend good titles (would probably take more than one) to gain an overview of Mexican history in general? I am aware of but have not yet read Prescott's "History of the Conquest of Mexico" but would like to hear recommendations of other titles as well.

Matthias Jarosz 1) In answer to your first question, yes.

The Mexican Revolution (1910 - 1920/40) produced a host of colourful historical characters, of whom the most …more1) In answer to your first question, yes.

The Mexican Revolution (1910 - 1920/40) produced a host of colourful historical characters, of whom the most famous caudillos (this imperfectly translates as 'warlords') were; Francisco Madero, Victorio Huerta, Emiliano Zapata, Venustiano Carranza, Alvaro Obregon, and Jose Doreto Arrango - a.k.a the eponymous Pancho Villa.

It is widely recognised that Madero's downfall, as Mexico's first democratically elected president, was, if not inevitable, then at least over-determined given the political/military chaos that prevented the effective implementation of mass democracy between 1911 - 1913. Huerta's attempt to turn back the clock on the Revolution and restore a hyper-militarised version of the Porfiriato was shown to be equally infeasible. Zapata's agrarian insurgency, while easily the most radical (and endearing to subsequent generations of sympathetic scholars), was a localised movement whose vision of land reform never really extended beyond the parochial purview of the state of Morelos. Pancho Villa was, as such, the only political player who posed a viable alternative to the Constitutionalist faction that eventually emerged victorious by the fall of 1915.

Any historian who studies modern Mexican history must therefore engage with the implicit counterfactual posed by Pancho Villa, namely, why did his movement fail and what would have been the fate of Mexico had it not? Accordingly, Katz's magnum opus seeks to understand the reasons for Villa's eventual failure, while at the same time rescuing him from the more simplistic explanations, e.g. that he was little more than a bandit, which have confined him alongside other thwarted revolutionaries to the ash heap of history.

Katz is not without his biases. As he mentions in the introduction, he fled his native Austria in the 1930s as the Third Reich began to extend its tentacles across Europe. This book was also published in 1998, two years before the so-called "Democratic Transition" of 2000 and after Mexico had lived through nearly eighty years of authoritarian rule under a one party-state that claimed a direct line of descent from the Revolution's eventual victors. Much of what was written by 'revisionists' about Mexico, particularly after the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, interpreted this victory in light of the Mexican state 'Leviathan' that had supposedly been consolidated by the 1940s at least. Clearly these contexts coloured some of Katz's scholarship, principally an almost Foucaltian/James Scott-ish suspicion of state power that becomes increasingly apparent as the Constitutionalist cause (which favoured a strong central state) is painted in sinister hues by the book's end. Although Villa is undoubtedly a more endearing personage that the autocratic Carranza, one has to wonder if Mexico might not have been in an even worse state than it is today had Villa's vision of a decentralised polity governed by autonomous revolutionary fiefdoms ever been actualised.

That said, Katz's sympathies extend only so far. He does not shy, for example, from narrating Villa's descent into military atrocities and the mass execution of civilians, although he does somewhat blunt this criticism by referring to the process euphemistically as a period of "moral decline." Nor does he pull any punches regarding the eventual reasons for his subject's defeat, which were produced as much by Villa's own inability to adapt to the exigencies of modern warfare as by the economic/political conditions which meant the Division del Norte would almost invariably be out-gunned in any long-term land campaign against the Constitutionalists. Villa may have been dealt a poor hand as his sympathisers are right to assert, but few can deny after reading Katz's analysis that he proceeded to play it extremely poorly.

Ultimately, this book emerges as not only a biography of one of the Revolution's most prominent personages but as a history of the Mexican revolutionary epoch itself. It is simply one of the finest works of scholarship on the Revolution that I have ever read, and it deserves a far greater prominence than it currently receives among the general public.

2) As to good titles on the history of Mexico in general...
There a countless volumes available, but as an anthropologist I have to recommend 'Death and the Idea of Mexico' by Claudio Lomnitz (2008). While this is technically not a history of Mexico per se, Lomnitz examines the political and cultural history of Mexico through the prism of the death 'totem', the Day of the Dead being one of the most common tropes associated with the country. By looking at how the very idea of 'Death' emerged, and was instrumentalized in post-revolutionary Mexico, Lomnitz is able to challenge many of the received historical wisdom's and cultural cliches that tend to cloud the perceptions of other accounts, e.g. Mexicans as being pathologically violent or obsessed with the macabre.

For modern Mexican history, and especially the Revolution; Alan Knight's two volume synthesis of revolutionary history published in 1986 remains a classic, although he recently released a 'Very Short Introduction' in 2016 that admirably condenses down these two 400 pages tomes into a succinct 120 pages of accessible scholarship. Knight is infamous for his acerbic prose and sharp put-downs of other scholars - the only problem with the 2016 volume is that we therefore lose some of this eloquence given the brevity of the book.
For a slightly longer treatment therefore try 'Mexico's Once and Future Revolution' (2013) by Gilbert M. Joseph and Jurgen Buchenau. This book presents an excellent overview of Mexican 'modernity' between 1876 - 2012 - a period straddling the Porfiriato, Revolution, Pax-PRIista, and the neoliberal crisis of the 1980s. It is also a fine example of the post-revisionist trend in Mexican scholarship, first begun, it could be argued, by Knight himself in 1986.(less)

flag

Unanswered Questions

About Goodreads Q&A

Ask and answer questions about books!

You can pose questions to the Goodreads community with Reader Q&A, or ask your favorite author a question with Ask the Author.

See Featured Authors Answering Questions

Learn more