The Making of Pancho Villa

In 1926, three years after Pancho Villa was shot dead in his own car in Parral, someone opened his grave and took his head. It has never been found.

That is the least strange thing about the record he left behind.

Villa was filmed by an American movie company, sung about in hundreds of ballads, photographed constantly, hunted across northern Mexico by ten thousand United States soldiers, and argued over for a century. He is also one of the hardest people of his era to verify. He took a city by seizing a telegraph line and answering it in the enemy's voice. He printed his own currency. He sold exclusive filming rights to his war. The most widely quoted account of his life, written entirely in the first person, was assembled after his death by a novelist.

This is his life told through the things he actually left behind, one object at a time. A car with the holes still in it. A banknote backed by nothing. Forty converted boxcars carrying surgeons. A school he named after a friend the government had executed. A birth register that a hundred writers insisted did not exist. Every chapter names its evidence, and every chapter says what that evidence cannot prove.

It also takes apart the stories people repeat without checking: the sister he supposedly avenged, the battles he supposedly staged for the cameras, the skull rumored to sit in a collection in New Haven. And it does not look away from the ninety women killed at Camargo on his order, or from the fact that the man who built schools also did that.

Readers are not asked to decide whether Villa was a hero or a villain. They are shown how the evidence works, where it runs out, and what to do at the edge.

For readers 13 and up. Includes a timeline, a cast of the Revolution's major figures, a glossary, and chapter-by-chapter source notes.