The Mexican Revolution is a difficult subject to approach. It was a loosely organized aeries of uprisings that lasted a little more than a decade. Some of the key figures, especially military commanders were obscure people with obscure motivations. Alliances shifted constantly, sometimes inexplicably. Historical records of events in Mexico at that time were not meticulously kept. A lot of what people know about the revolution is apocryphal and based in folklore, legend, and sometimes propaganda and yellow journalism. It’s no wonder that historians who tackle this field of knowledge often contradict each other in their accounts. It’s hard to tell the truth when the truth is so uncertain. One way of reducing the amount of murkiness and confusion surrounding the Mexican Revolution is to write about it from a biographical standpoint so that one historical figure can act as an anchor, making it easier to organize and analyze the confusing mass of information. That is what the Austrian historian Friedrich Karz does in The Life and Times of Pancho Villa.
The whole story starts out in the northern state of Chihuahua where military veterans of the Mexico-Apache wars were given land as reward for their fighting. As the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz grew in power, the increasingly unpopular oligarchs Luis Terrazas and Enrique Creel were encroaching on people’s land, establishing haciendas, and instituting a system of debt peonage. Francisco Madero started a pro-democracy uprising to unseat Diaz and one of his military commanders was a former bandit named Pancho Villa. This ex-bandit had a natural talent for military leadership and quickly rose in the ranks. His army unit was composed of mostly peasant agriculturalists and Indians and their agitation for land reform and redistribution came into the revolution along with them.
Understanding the mind and personality of Pancho Villa is not an easy task. A lot is known about what he did, but personal accounts of what he was like as a man are on the sketchy side. He is known for being compassionate and cruel in equal measures, he moved easily among the poorest and richest members of society, his educational level was low but he had a natural intelligence and a curiosity for learning, and he was a bigamist who married several women and had a large brood of children. None of this tells you much about the inner workings of his mind. But I also suspect that Katz is not the kind of author who has an aptitude for that kind of writing.
Nevertheless, Pancho Villa’s story is amazing. After helping Madero overthrow the dictatorship, Villa was imprisoned for some unclear reason. After Villa escaped, the military commander Huerta overthrew Madero and reestablished the dictatorship. Villa called up his armies again and the next phase of civil war began. After the revolutionaries called the Conference of Aguascalientes, Villa formed a loose alliance with Emiliano Zapata since both caudillos stood for the cause of land reform. Villa seized power in Chihuaua as acting governor for a while, then eventually returned to fighting in the war, this time against the faction of the revolution lead by Venustiano Carranza, the man who ratified the new Mexican constitution. Just like in the French Revolution, and so many other revolutions in the past, the revolutionary soldiers entered into combat against each other. By the end of the decade, Villa was losing favor with his followers but he kept fighting, probably because he didn’t know what else to do with himself. During this period before his assassination, he led an attack north of the American border on the town of Columbus, New Mexico. This led to a brief invasion into Mexico by the American army that resulted in nothing but more chaos.
There is so much more to this story and most of it is written here in minute details. It is an understatement to say that Friedrich Katz is anal retentive. Ultimately, though, he is on the tolerable side of detail oriented writing, thereby making it just possible to digest. If he had given any more details this book would have been impossible to read. But the details are the best and the worst thing about this biography. By giving such long, drawn out explanations, Katz runs the risk of boring his readers to death and drowning them in information. But at least the information is relevant and, actually, it works to his benefit. Since the Mexican Revolution can be such a swamp of muck to unpack, something goes to be said for the excessive details. Writing it all out this way separates the different strands of the history, bringing them into sharper focus, and making it easy to examine each part of the story in clarity. A quality microscope can make a splotch of biological matter easier to see in its complexity by expanding and exaggerating its appearance so its disorganization looks more organized for our perception. That is what Katz accomplishes in this book. Even though this work is so thorough that it can induce migraines for the reader, it is worth the torment of reading it because it ends up being the most comprehensible and clearly written book on the Mexican Revolution I have encountered so far.
Another impressive aspect of this biography is Katz’s unwillingness to take sides in an argument when he feels there is not enough evidence to draw a strong conclusion. A case in point is the issue of why American president Woodrow Wilson supported the Villista forces at first and then switched sides to support the Constitutionalist Carrancistas. Katz gives multiple perspectives on the issue, but doesn’t come to a definite conclusion because there isn’t any documented records directly explaining Wilson’s stances. Other issues treated in this similar way are Madero’s reasoning for imprisoning Villa, Villa’s continued support for Madero after being imprisoned, Villa’s reasoning for fighting against Carranza and his troops, whether Villa was persuaded by a German agent to attack Columbus as part of a conspiracy to keep America out of World War I, and who was behind the assassination of Villa. He even contemplates the unanswered question of why Villa continued his campaigns of guerilla warfare for so long after the Revolution had lost meaning for him. While it is useful to speculate on unanswerable historical problems, it is even more commendable when a scholar is humble enough to admit that he doesn’t know what the right answers are.
To be blunt, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa is a pain in the ass to read because of its length, excessive detail, and Germanic writing style that could very well make your hemorrhoids act up. But if there is only one book you ever read about the Mexican Revolution, this one is worth the trouble. That’s not to say it exhausts the subject matter because it doesn’t. But it does clarify a lot of the confusion surrounding this hotly debated topic of Mexican history. And by the end, it makes it easy to see why Pancho Villa remains a hero of the poor and the working classes in Mexico, along with Leftists in other countries, and such a villain to heartless conservatives who think the world should only belong to them. And Villa is even a saint to some devotees of Santa Muerte.
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