Pancho Villa learned to read in prison and starred as himself in Hollywood films
Born José Doroteo Arango, the bandit who became Pancho Villa had barely basic literacy until a Zapatista tutored him in a Mexico City jail. He escaped on Christmas Day 1912, rode back into Mexico with seven men, and within two years Washington was weighing whether to recognise him as president.
Villa told conflicting stories about his youth. Most sources place his birth on 5 June 1878 on a large hacienda in Durango, the eldest of five children of a sharecropper. After his father died he left school and worked as a muleteer, butcher and bricklayer, then drifted into banditry. Arrested in 1902 for stealing mules, he escaped a death sentence thanks to a powerful protector and was forced into the army instead, deserted, and around 1903 took the name Francisco Villa. Friends called him the cockroach.
Abraham González, an agent of the reformer Francisco Madero, persuaded him that raiding the haciendas could serve the people. When revolution broke out in 1910, Villa was 32. With Pascual Orozco he ignored Madero's order to lift the siege of Ciudad Juárez and took the city in 1911, helping force the dictator Porfirio Díaz to resign. He warned Madero that keeping the old power structure would cost them both their necks, and Madero was indeed murdered in a coup in February 1913.
Before that, General Victoriano Huerta tried to have Villa shot for insubordination; Madero's brothers stalled the firing squad until the president could telegraph a reprieve. Jailed in Belem Prison, Villa was taught reading and writing by Gildardo Magaña, who also told him of Zapata's land reform plan, and later studied civics with an imprisoned general. After escaping he fought Huerta, served as governor of Chihuahua and allied with Zapata, yet never carried out the land reform he championed.
Defeated by Álvaro Obregón in 1915, and angry at American support for his rival Carranza, he raided Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916; the pursuing US expedition never caught him. He retired on an estate under a 1920 amnesty and was assassinated in 1923. Having courted journalists like John Reed and film cameras in life, he was reburied in 1976 in Mexico City's Monument to the Revolution.
Source: Pancho Villa
