the mexican revolution--6/23/2026

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Today's selection -- from El Paso by Jazmine Ulloa. The leading lights of the Mexican Revolution included the new leader, Francisco Madero, and the revolutionaries Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Madero ultimately failed to deliver on the most urgent goal of that revolution—land reform:

“Mexico was burning. Guerrilleros rose from the north to the south, Villistas, Maderistas, and Magonistas, Zapatistas, Orozquistas, and Reyistas, many of whom kept lairs in El Paso as they went out in search of young and able-bodied recruits to take up arms. They raided haciendas and occupied towns and villages. They set bridges on fire. They laid siege to the remnants of Porfirio Díaz's rurales, hiding out with Yaqui and N'dee tribes in the parched mountain ranges of northern Mexico. 

“El Paso had been Native before it was Mexican—before it had ever become American, its origins tracing those of our very nation. Now the ideological seeds that had been sowed in its back alleys and barrios had helped flare up the revolution that would from here on out shape the perceptions of our border and all those who cross it—a war that would set the foundations for all that was yet to come. Through this gateway of sand and brush, the Chews and the Martinezes, the Rubios, the Holguins, and the Mura'ls would pass in search of opportunity, refuge, and a better life. With each decade, the southern divide flanking the city would become sharper and more menacing, the journey to reach it deadlier. But El Paso would always remain a portal into the United States, the beacon at the edges—or the center—of its nation building and capitalism, sanctuary and exclusion, liberalism and conservatism, white supremacy and mestizaje.

“The land trembled under the feet of formerizos. The land trembled under the feet of Mexicanos. Only days after the fall of Ciudad Juárez in May 1911, Díaz surrendered and fled to Paris. Francisco Madero was elected the new president of the republic that very month, but just as quickly his supporters became disaffected. First of all, there was the matter of the land. There was always the matter of the land. There had been a time when more than 90 percent of Mexicanos had lived on farms or ranches or in rural villages. But when the revolution broke out, all of that land trembling under Mexicanos' feet had been in the hands of a powerful upper class that made up only 5 percent of the Mexican population. With Madero now in office, some of his far-left revolucionarios did not believe he was moving fast enough to fairly redistribute it. The conservative Porfiristas whom Madero had welcomed into his fold, on the other hand, vehemently disagreed.

El Paso circa 1880

“To the south, Emiliano Zapata, the hero of Morelos, was the first to break, feeling betrayed that Madero seemed to have abandoned a fundamental principle: ‘La tierra es de quien la trabaja’ (‘The land belongs to those who work its soil’)—the campesinos. To the north, in San Antonio and along the Texas border, Bernardo Reyes, a general who had once been banished by Díaz, saw a chance to grab power. His efforts fizzled as yet another Madero opponent, Emiliano Vazquez Gómez, attempted to lead yet another disaffected group in yet another capture of Juárez. Madero dispatched his two most trusted and popular fighters, Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa, to blunt Vázquez's insurgency, only to watch Orozco—resentful he had been passed over for higher posts when so many of Madero's own relatives had been promoted—defect to the Vazquistas. Through the battles that followed, pitting Villa against Orozco, Villa would build his legend, and from the borderlands of Texas and Chihuahua to the agave fields of Jalisco, the people would call his name—'¡Viva Villa!"

“To hear his supporters tell it, Pancho Villa was the guerrillero who took from the rich to give to the poor. Todo un Robin Hood, with his big mustache and even bigger belly. He was the Mexicano who gave the Yankees hell; a military mastermind with a persona so larger-than-life that he would come to appear in his own Hollywood films. Toda un movie star. Villa had learned a lesson or two about media image in Madero's camp, and he fashioned his own myth. As he climbed the ranks of Madero's military, he tended to exaggerate the grandness of his exploits, he learned to stand up straighter in his photos, and he leaned into his signature uniform, a wide-brimmed sombrero, cotton frock and trousers, and ammunition belts around his shoulders.

“Before the revolution, Villa had been neither one of its intellectual architects nor one of its idealises but a business owner and a reformed thief. His real name was José Dororeo Arango Arámbula, and by his own accounts he had become an outlaw after he had shot a wealthy landowner in the foot when the man had attempted to abduct his teenage sister. Less generous versions of this story say Villa skipped town after he forced the county sheriff who eloped with her to dig his own grave and then shot and killed him.

“As a bandit, Villa had taken on his grandfather's name, Francisco Villa, and though he had been born in Durango, just south of Chihuahua, he had come to know the golden hills of Chihuahua's Sierra Madre better than most men know themselves. Like la Sama, he knew which desert herbs could save the life of a man—or take it. These skills, according to historians like Kelly Lyde Hernández, allowed him to establish his own transportation company, moving ore extracted from the mines across the state's most dangerous mountain paths—routes that he had once taken and that were brimming with the kinds of bandidos he had once been. They also propelled his quick rise as an expert in ambushes.

“As he took on Orozco, the keen-eyed general he had once called a friend and an ally, Villa roamed the borderland, often commanding his soldiers from the heart of Ciudad Juárez and filtering into and out of El Paso. He kept American journalists and diplomats abreast of Madero's progress and worked to ensure American companies continued to channel weapons and ammunition to Madero's army. Villa's fleet of carrier pigeons, which he was said to keep in a dovecote in Chihuahuita or elsewhere in South El Paso, brought him news from the battlefield, and his guerrilleros infiltrated deep into the country, rallying men to Madero's side even as Villa himself might have already been growing impatient with Madero and his failure to deliver on the revolution's most important cause: the land.”