Pancho Villa is dead. This is the stereotype that lives on in Mexican politics

The confessions of an historic war general are an insight on what future Mexico’s ruling party should avoid.

Pancho Villa built Mexico in the imagination of the United States. It was 1913 and the revolution was very much televised, or at least captured on camera by journalists who crossed the border to keep an expectant nation abreast of what was going on in their southern neighbour’s civil war. 

It was thanks to these muckrakers that the US got some of its most enduring stereotypes of Mexico as they meticulously documented the Mexican Revolution—which raged from 1910 until 1920—mostly from the northern borderlands. It was the first time most everyday Americans got to see what Mexico was like and the forcefulness of the imagery and the foreignness of it all made it stick. Sombreros, large Victorian moustaches, colourful zarapes, and bullet belts persist in the US’ imagination. 

Much of it was fiction, with reporters embellishing facts to sell what at the time was the US’ first real-time foreign drama. Director D. W. Griffith, of The Birth of a Nation fame, took this to a new extreme. He headed to Chihuahua and paid a cash-strapped Pancho Villa $25,000 dollars and 50% of profits to star in a biopic called The Life of General Villa. The film had some footage of genuine engagements of the Revolution. But often the battlefield was not an ideal place to shoot (a movie that is), so he compelled the famed revolutionary to stage many of the battle scenes. 

The history of the Mexican Revolution was fictionalised even before the facts had been written. So it’s no surprise that Mexican politicians today are prone to misremembering it too. 

A tell-all memoir

There is one source—if not trustworthy, then at least authentic—that no self-respecting historian of Mexico can help but want in their library. It is a book that cuts through the idealised fiction and lands at the spiritual core of revolutionary Mexico—in all its aspirations and all its descent into corruption.