This is a tale that might be told around a campfire, night after
night in the midst of a military campaign. The kinetic and
garrulous Pancho Villa talking on and on about battles and men;
bursting out with hearty, masculine laughter; weeping unashamed for
fallen comrades; casually mentioning his hotheadedness-"one of my
violent outbursts"-which sent one, two, or a dozen men before the
firing squad; recounting amours; and always, always protesting
dedication to the Revolutionary cause and the interests of "the
people." Villa saw himself as the champion, eventually almost the
sole champion, of the Mexican people. He fought for them, he said,
and opponents who called him bandit and murderer were hypocrites.
This is his story, his account of how it all began when as a
peasant boy of sixteen he shot a rich landowner threatening the
honor of his sister. This lone, starved refugee hiding out in the
mountains became the scourge of the Mexican Revolution, the leader
of thousands of men, and the hero of the masses of the poor. Great
battles of the Revolution are described, sometimes as broad sweeps
of strategy, sometimes as they developed half hour by half hour.
Long, dusty horseback forays and cold nights spent pinned down
under enemy fire on a mountainside are made vivid and gripping. The
assault on Ciudad Juarez in 1911, the battles of Tierra Blanca, of
Torreon, of Zacatecas, of Celaya, all are here, told with a feeling
of great immediacy. This volume ends as Villa and Obregon prepare
to engage each other in the war between victorious generals into
which the Revolution degenerated before it finally ended. Martin
Luis Guzman, eminent historian of Mexico, knew and traveled with
Pancho Villa at various times during the Revolution. General Villa
offered young Martin Luis a position as his secretary, but he
declined. When many years later some of Villa's private papers,
records, and what was apparently the beginning of an autobiography
came into Guzman's hands, he was ideally suited to blend all these
into an authentic account of the Revolution as Pancho Villa saw it,
and of the General's life as known only to Villa himself. The
Memoirs were first published in Mexico in 1951, where they were
extremely popular; this volume was the first English publication.
Virginia H. Taylor, translator in the Spanish Archives of the State
of Texas Land Office, has accurately captured in English the flavor
of the narrative.
General
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