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BOB WADE, "REVOLUTIONARIES", ACRYLIC & OIL ON PHOTO LINEN.

JANOSBELOW THE BORDER CROSSING AT PALOMAS, THE ROAD RUNS

dead straight across burned-out mesquite flats towardsoft, cone-shaped mountains sunk in a mauve-to-blue layering of haze. Beyond Ascensi6n, the SierraMadre looms on the western skyline, and by the time

we reach the old, Spanish-colonial presidio of Janos, mountains rimthe whole horizon.

It has begun to rain, laying the dust in the town'slarge plaza, further softening the exposed adobes ofa pair of fine old mission churches, both in advancedstates of disrepair. Several ragged, giggling young-sters watch as I peer through a crack in one churchdoor, trying to make out details of its ruined interior,and, when I return from a walk around the plaza, Ifind them trying to break the ancient padlock on thatdoor to let me inside.

In the turbulent years when Pancho Villa rodethrough this place, the oldest of these children wouldlikely have been soldiers-or maybe, on secondthought, laughing banditos. But Janos is much olderthan the revolution. It was established in the latterseventeenth century to protect the road to the Pasodel Pilpito, named for a pulpit-shaped rock forma-tion near one of its entrances-the only practical routeover the Sierra Madre Occidental to the state of So-nora and Mexico's west coast.

In the fall of 1915, Villa, his star falling after a seriesof defeats to the south, pushed his army up the rough,

PANCHO VILLA, "THE CENTAUR OF THE NORTH", CIRCA 1911.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

precipice-hugging trail into the sierras, into the numbing cold of anearly winter, and through this narrow defile, on his way to invadeSonora. It took Villa's forces, dragging heavy artillery pieces and themateriel of war, weeks to complete that passage in what even Villa'sopponent in Sonora called a daring military operation, akin to Han-nibal's crossing of the Alps.

Villa finally arrived at the Sonora border town of Agua Prieta,just across from Douglas, Arizona, only to learn that the U.S. Gov-ernment, believing that Villa was finished as a viable leader of theMexican Revolution, had just withdrawn its support in favor of hisarchrival, Venustiano Carranza, and that carrancista troops had beenallowed to move by train along the U.S. side of the border, passingthrough Columbus to reinforce the Agua Prieta garrison. Furiousat this turn of events, Villa attacked anyway, at night, sending his menagainst barbed wire barricades and mine fields, across open groundswept by searchlights beamed from the American side of the bor-der, to what proved to be another devastating defeat.

Unable to capture needed supplies at Agua Prieta or, as in thepast, to receive them from the United States, Villa, with the remnantsof his shattered army, straggled back to Chihuahua to resume hisearlier role of guerrilla chieftain. He returned to the haunts and habitsof his pre-revolutionary life as a bandit and cattle rustler, threateningretribution for what he viewed as his betrayal by the United States.A few months later-three years to the day after Villa, exiled in ElPaso, crossed the border to begin the meteoric rise that would makehim one of the most powerful men in Mexico-Columbus burned.

CASAS GRANDESAMONG THE ANCIENT RUINS OF PAQUIME, SIX BOYS ARE

taking turns playing with a burro, whacking the animalwith a stick to make it buck and then trying to ride thissmall, brown, stiff-hopping dervish.

Their success varies widely, though one of them,apparently the oldest, shows the (continued on page 47)

BOB WADE, "DESAYUNO", ACRYLIC & OIL ON PHOTO LINEN.

EL PALACIO 23

tinuing fascination with this episode is itscomplexity. Crowded together in a few shortyears of the late 1870s and early 1880s was aseries of events so convoluted and remark-able that historians to this day are still at-tempting to unravel matters and paint somesort of coherent picture. Frederick Nolan, anold hand, makes another try with his de-tailed and comprehensive account, The Lin-coln County War, A Documentary History. It isan impressive effort.

On the face of it, Nolan seems an un-likely candidate to delve deeply into this orany other aspect of New Mexican history, forhe was born and has lived all his life inEngland, except for a few years spent inSwitzerland. In 1953 he started researchingthe Lincoln County War and published TheLife and Death of John Henry Tunstall a dozenyears later. It was the killing of the youngEnglish-born Tunstall in February of 1878that touched off the Lincoln County War.Being far removed from the scene of actionappears to give author Nolan the advantageof long-range perspective.

Since he has subtitled his book ADocumentary History, the reader might rea-sonably expect to find a long series of orig-

inal documents tied together with briefexplanatory passages. Instead, Nolan hascreated a readable narrative heavily lacedwith extended quotes from participants andeyewitnesses who are allowed to tell thestory of those bloody events in their ownwords. The material has been gathered froma wide variety of original sources: diaries,letters, newspaper accounts, governmentrecords, and interviews. In fact, Leon C. Metz(the biographer of Sheriff Pat Garrett) ob-serves that Nolan "has located statementsfrom everybody short of God."

The author has done a commendablejob of bringing order to confusion, andpresenting all sides of the many controver-sies that stubbornly resist resolution. Still,he disavows any suggestion that he haswritten the last word on the subject of thewar. "There is yet a great deal to be done,"admits Nolan. "For example, someone mustone day write this story from the Hispanicpoint of view."

The author writes sympathetically andwith thoroughness; if he has not actuallyproduced the definitive history of the war,he has nevertheless gone a long way towardlaying the necessary groundwork for some-

one else who might eventually undertakethat challenging task. The book is enlivenedwith eighty-three historical photographs,some of them never before published, andwith three detailed maps that assist readersin following the action. Especially welcomeare a twenty-seven page chronology of thewar, the lengthiest ever assembled, and themore than fifty pages of short biographies ofleading participants.

The stiff price of the volume is unfor-tunate, but even so, dedicated aficionados ofthis chapter of frontier history will do well tomake the sacrifice and add Nolan's book totheir personal libraries. It will nicely supple-ment other recent titles, such as Robert M.Utley's High Noon in Lincoln and John P. Wil-son's Merchants, Guns & Money: The Story ofLincoln County and Its Wars, the latter pub-lished by the Museum of New Mexico Press.

Interest in the war persists, Nolan re-marks, "because in the end the Lincoln peo-ple triumphed not by the gun but by therule of democracy and law. Let us hope thatit will always be so." a

Marc Simmons, the author of many books and articleson southwestern history, lives in Santa Fe.

IN SEARCH OF PANCHO VILLA (continued from page 23)

poise and balance of a budding rodeo rider, but all exhibit the quality-part machismo, part pure, gleeful daring-that made Pancho Villa'swild cavalry charges so effective in the early days of the revolution.Their shouts and laughter, the grunts of the burro, who is clearly tiringof this game, echo weirdly, bouncing through the maze of sensuouslyeroded adobe walls, the broad plazas and stone-faced pyramids ofthis otherwise empty archaeological site, seat of a major Indian tradingempire more than eight hundred years ago.

Adjacent is the Spanish-colonial town of Casas Grandes, withits shady square and the tall, stone-trimmed bell towers of its

immaculate church jutting stark against a deep blue sky. Near hereVilla concentrated his forces for the disastrous Sonora campaignwhich, had it succeeded, would likely have turned his attention southand possibly spared Columbus.

Villistas and other revolutionary factions frequented the CasasGrandes region throughout the revolution, often extorting money,supplies, and livestock from the prosperous group of AmericanMormons who fled a U.S. ban on polygamous marriages and set-tled here in 1885, during the long dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Thehouses they built in the nearby railroad town of Nuevo CasasGrandes, the farming communities of Colonia DublAn and ColoniaJuarez, seem straight out of the American Midwest, and at break-fast I find descendants of those refugees drinking coffee in thesmoke-filled Restaurante Mexico-Espafiol, looking like blond,pink-cheeked Utah ranchers but speaking the rapid-fire Spanish ofthe Mexican natives they are.

Pershing followed Villa to Casas Grandes during the Punitive

Expedition's initial hot pursuit of the Columbus raiders into Mex-ico. Later he pulled his troops back to a field headquarters near here,sent out patrols to find and attack villista forces, and put the rest ofhis men through rigorous training. Some of those troops would soonsee action in World War I, and it has indeed been suggested that theUnited States government inspired the Columbus raid as an excuseto prepare its army for just such an eventuality, or that the Germangovernment instigated the attack to keep America busy in Mexicoand out of the Great War in Europe.

At any rate, the Punitive Expedition was the last true cavalry oper-ation mounted by the United States Army, and the first Americanmilitary action to employ motorized vehicles-trucks, automobiles,and airplanes, which, on courier and reconnaissance duty, were usedhere for the first time under combat conditions. In Chihuahua, ata hacienda called Ojos Azules, the U.S. cavalry made its last classichorseback charge.

CARRIZALALFREDO CHAVIRA LEANS IN THE BLINDING GLARE OF NOON

sun against a whitewashed adobe wall. His face, shadedby a straw sombrero, is brown as old oiled leather, andhe grinds a boot heel in the dry earth, working hard tounderstand my questions. They see few gringos here.

"Si-el combate" he says finally, with a quick nod of his head anda smile folding new creases across his seamed face. "Vamos a ver-wego to see;" he says, motioning for me to follow down the slope throughthe outskirts of the village.

Carrizal tops a gentle rise in a desert basin rimmed with ragged,

EL PALACIO 47

A POSTCARD FROM THE REVOLUTION, FARRAR COLLECTION, NEW MEXICO STATE RECORDS CENTER AND ARCHIVES.

blue-hazed mountains. To the north, the Sierra Grande looms withits peak like a gray cresting wave.

On the dusty plaza stands a small house where Benito Juarezstayed briefly when Maximilian's French forces drove him to exile

in the north, and beyond it is a new monument dedicated in 1980to General Felix U. G6mez. There is little else in Carrizal, besides theold Spanish church with its single bell tower, a scatter of crumblinggray adobe buildings with yellow or blue paint faded and flaking fromonce-bright window frames. A fighting cock with an iridescent greenthroat scratches in the dirt by a school that bears the name of G6mezin big block letters above its door.

G6mez was killed in Carrizal on June 21, 1916, commanding car-rancista troops against U.S. cavalry in what proved to be an all-American rout-a moment of history that many Mexicans still savorwith some pride.

Chavira walks with the rolling gait of a horseman, and ahead ofus three lean black cows burst out of the brush, driven by a man ona rangy dun. The horse shies when it sees us, and the vaquero haulsat the twisted horsehair mecate of the hackamore, forcing his mounton past toward the village. Carrizal is part of an ejido, a tract of com-munal land, Chavira says. "Many cattle, many horses."

An acequia lined with tall cottonwoods irrigates a patchwork offields and cuts the western edge of Carrizal. Our track runs besideit now, and we jump the ditch at a narrow point and strike off alonga cow path into a dense thicket of barbed mesquite and crucificionthorn. A hundred yards in, Chavira stops by a huge toppled cotton-

wood and points to the metal plaque set in its smooth, silver-wea-thered surface, in the middle of nowhere. Aqui--just here;' he says.

Chavira slices the air with the side of his hand, sights along hisarm toward the flat emptiness of mesquite to the southwest and themountain skyline beyond. It was from there that the yanquis came,he says, and here by this tree they met with G6mez, who refused thempermission to march through Carrizal.

Based at Casas Grandes, Captain Charles T. Boyd and his troopershad been sent by Pershing to scout this country, with orders to fightonly if attacked. Out of arrogance or pure bad judgment, with all theprescience of Custer at the Little Big Horn, Boyd chose to ignore thoseinstructions and push his eighty-two troopers straight through thevillage, which was defended by some 400 Mexican federal soldiers.The skirmish that followed was the most serious of Pershing's

adventure in Mexico. Firing from the cover of irrigation ditches,using machine guns, the federales quickly blocked the Americanadvance. There were heavy casualties-both Boyd and G6mez werekilled-and in the American's less-than-orderly retreat, twenty-threetroopers and a civilian scout were captured. Initially sent south bytrain to the penitentiary at Ciudad Chihuahua, those prisoners werelater repatriated to Texas.

But there is no arrogance in Chavira's description of this de-bacle. He tells the story frankly, with simple delight in the tale it-self, the action of it, nothing more. In fact he seems to take no side,to have no stake, with his "gringos" and his "pelones" ("cropped-headed" Mexican federal troops)- (continued on page 50)

48 EL PALACIO

VILLA'S TROOPS ENTERING JUAREZ, 1911. OTIS AULTMAN PHOTO FROM THE AULTMAN COLLECTION, EL PASO PUBLIC LIBRARY

IN SEARCH OF PANCHO VILLA (continued from page 48)

and whack, Chavira claps his hands, "La pelea-the fight!"We smoke, and then Chavira leads the way back to the village.

Carrizal means the place where reeds grow, but I see none theretoday-just dust, and distance drained of color by the mid-day sun.

CIUDAD JUAREZA FEW BLOCKS AWAY, UP THE AVENIDA JUAREZ, IS THE UNI-

ted States-Mexico border and El Paso where, in friendliertimes, with a fresh-faced lieutenant named George Pat-ton looking on, Pancho Villa and Black Jack Pershingposed smiling for photographs; where, in 1916, the

American soldiers taken in the battle at Carrizal were set free.Villa stormed this sprawling city several times, but with special

elan in 1913. In the fall of that year, he captured a train near ChihuahuaCity and, posing as the federal officer in charge, telegraphed Juarezfor orders. "Rebel forces approaching from the south," his messagesaid. "What shall I do?"

"Return immediately," the Juarez commandant answered, and

Villa merrily complied, stopping at each station along the way to cutcommunications to the south, and to wire north, "We're coming... we're coming;' riding his iron Trojan horse to a major victory. Forthat antic, and others, Villa is well-remembered here.

Outside, the avenida is jammed with hawkers and hookers andcab drivers whispering from the shadows, but the lights are brightin this shop, with its row of shiny, fake-bronze busts on a dusty shelf.The proprietor sidles up. He is stocky, square-built, completely bald,and his scalp gleams like a ball of polished teak.

"Pancho Villa," he says, pointing with his chin at the row of curiostatuettes, each one wearing the familiar flat-brimmed Stetson andthe same pirate's grin beneath a bushy mustache, over bared teeth(smiles of the bandits in Treasure of the Sierra Madre-"Badges? Wedon't need no steenking badges!" as Pancho himself must have said,in so many words, so many times).

The shopkeeper looks old enough, and so I ask."Did you ever meet Villa?"He shakes his head. "I was just a little boy then.""But did you ever see him?"

"See him? Why would I want to see a bandit?" he asks, suddenly

50 EL PALACIO

angry, his voice acquiring a vicious edge."Villa almost shot my old man-

I hate the son of a bitch," he says, andbelches loudly.

QUINTA LUZ,CIUDAD CHIHUAHUASWATHED IN A BRILLIANT

red blanket, Luz Corral deVilla sits dozing in warmpool of sunlight. She is

Pancho Villa's widow-actually one ofseveral wives Villa acquired after hisrise to revolutionary fame. They weremarried in 1911, and in 1914, the yearof greatest success for Villa and his Divi-sion of the North, while he was provi-sional governor of Chihuahua, he builther this fifty-room mansion in the statecapital. On the parapet above the tall VILLA AND HIS WIFEfront entrance, an arch of cut-out let- OTIS AULTMAN PHOTO FRO

ters spells the name that Villa gave this EL PASO P

house-Quinta Luz.It is located in a quiet, down-at-the-heel neighborhood, on a wide

street with sear, dun-colored hills rolling away at its far end, and DofiaLuz has long since opened her home as a museum, a shrine to thedead husband whose life she shared, in fact, for only a few years.By 1916, Villa, who at one point could have been president of Mexico,had he chosen, was on the run again, pursued by the Mexican and,after the Columbus raid, American governments.

When I visited several years ago, Dofa Luz was a heavyset, thick-legged woman who looked like a Spanish peasant, smiled easily, andwalked with a cane. Now she is confined to a wheelchair. The grayhair is pulled back severely from her deeply lined face, which seems-much thinner now, and her eyes, opening when I greet her, todaylook tired, distant, infinitely sad. Feeling like inquisitors, we ask ourquestions about Villa and the Columbus raid. But Dofia Luz appearsnot to understand them or even really to be listening and when,slowly, she responds, it is with talk of the weather on this blue, sun-struck day, which for late November is unseasonably warm.

We thank her and wander off to explore the high-walled, labyrin-thine fortress of a house that Villa himself planned, and which hintsat the workings of his mind. In the front courtyard, with its archedporticoes and second-story balconies, the 1915 Dodge touring carin which Villa was riding when he was assassinated in 1923 is parked,bullet-riddled and rusting, in a glassed enclosure. Nearby, on a con-crete pedestal painted glittering metallic gold,is a monumental black bust of the Lion of theNorth, his expression serious, his hat pushedfar back so that the flat round brim encircleshis face like a dark halo.

Villa and Dofia Luz, whose only child, adaughter, died in infancy, lived in the sur-rounding rooms, where Dofia Luz displaysthe memorabilia of her private museum: yel-lowing photographs and documents; thebattle-scarred swords and pistols, Winchesterand Mauser rifles that were the weapons ofthe revolution; old saddles, their leather dry Luz CORRAI

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and cracking, that conjure Villa thefabled horseman, the Centaur of theNorth.

Through an arch leading intothe depths of this compound is ano-ther courtyard, much larger, with ironbalustrades on its balconies, whereVilla's military escort was quartered.This morning, blaring from a casa demasica near the center of the city, Iheard "Sieta Leguas," the still-popularrevolutionary song about Villa's le-gendary war horse Seven Leagues,whose hooves must once have clatteredacross the intricately tiled pavementsof Quinta Luz.

The painted decorations of itswalls, a bucolic mural of flowers, a cowin a field of green grass, are chippedand faded now, but this edifice must

JZ CORRAL DE VILLA. have seemed a palace to Villa, who hadHE AULTMAN COLLECTION, known only peonage and then, forC LIBRARY. sixteen years, the hunted life of an

outlaw before he rode out of the Mex-ican hinterlands in 1910 to make a revolution and, in the process,take a wife.

By the front door, Dofia Luz still sits in the sun, her eyes closedagain, a ghost living on the memory of a ghost. We slip past quietly,trying not to disturb her. In a few months, at the age of eighty-nine,she will die.

CIUDAD CHIHUAHUAWE MEET OSCAR CHING-VEGA AT THE HOTEL FERMONT IN

the heart of the city. The coffee shop is crowded-manyof the customers are American cattlemen here onbusiness-but with his Asian features, Ching-Vega iseasy to spot. He sits in a corner booth, his back to a plate-

glass window that faces Ciudad Chihuahua's large plaza, with itsfanciful cast-iron bandstand and tinkling fountain, the cathedral withits imposing baroque facade of ornately carved beige stone, its twintowers rising in wedding-cake tiers.

Ching-Vega is a veteran Chihuahua journalist, a noted experton Pancho Villa, and a longtime friend of Dofia Luz. Just before theColumbus raid, he says, Villa told her: "Maybe I won't return, butI'm going to give those blondies a bad surprise!" "Blondie" was Villa'spet name for Dofia Luz, but in this case, Ching-Vega notes, a dis-

paraging term for Americans.Through the years, some have asserted

that Villa had no part in the Columbus raid,but, based on Dofia Luz's statement andothers Villa made after his retirement, Ching-Vega is certain that he ordered the attack. Heagrees that Villa's motive appears to have beenrevenge for a double betrayal.

One grudge was public-keyed to theUnited States's recognition of Carranza,which brought aid to the carrancistas in thecatastrophe at Agua Prieta. The other was

VILLA, 1980. (continued on page 53)

EL PALACIO 51

IN SEARCH OF PANCHO VILLA (continued from page 51)

private, involving a Columbus merchant and Villa arms suppliernamed Sam Ravel who, when Villa's power and stature declined,is said to have reneged on the delivery of a shipment of guns forwhich he had already been paid and/or sold Villa dud ammuni-tion. (Back in the U.S., we'll soon be told by a raid survivor, whosefather ran the Commercial Hotel in Columbus and was killed in theattack, that the raiders entered the hotel asking specifically for Ravel,who kept a room there. Ravel was in El Paso at the time, but hisColumbus store was looted and, like the Commercial Hotel, burnedto the ground.)

Ching-Vega is a reserved man, and with his brown, three-piecesuit and pinstripe shirt, he looks like a banker. But there is passionin his voice when he speaks of Villa's attempts to forge social justicein his country, and beneath his conservative jacket he carries a pistol--a small, silver pearl-handled automatic-because, he says with ashrug, of death threats stemming from his reports on the drug trafficin Chihuahua.

There is a certain irony in Ching-Vega's afici6n for all things relatingto Pancho Villa. His grandmother, he says, was an Apache, his mothera Mexican from northwestern Chihuahua, but his father was a Chi-nese from Canton, and Villa's hatred of the Chinese in Chihuahuawas said to be almost pathological, rooted in his belief that they hadfailed to support him.

But Ching-Vega's obsession with Villa, his extensive writings onthis subject, brought him a singular honor. The Mexican governmentfinally decided in 1976 to move Villa's remains to join those of, among

others, his idol Fancisco Madero at the Monument to the Revolutionin Mexico City. Ching-Vega exhumed Villa's body.

HIDALGO DEL PARRALIN THE MORNING THERE IS A HEAVY FROST AND THE SKY IS

beginning to turn pink as Ching-Vega directs us onto thehighway toward Parral. For much of this trip we parallelthe railroad that runs through central Chihuahua andon to Mexico City-rails that carried the train-borne

armies of the revolution.Ching-Vega is enamored of those trains, describes how they lined

up sometimes for miles, communicating with the locomotives' whis-tles, loaded with soldiers and soldaderas, cannons, cavalry horses,as they steamed through Mexico like rolling cities, disgorging hordesto fight, then loading up and moving on to the next battle. BeyondCarmargo we veer southwest from those tracks, into the hills on thefinal run to Parral and the cemetery on the city's eastern edge, whereChing-Vega unearthed the bones of Pancho Villa.

He leads us to Villa's concrete monument, surrounded by a whitefence of welded steel crosses, and tells how, during two days of rainand snow and cold in November 1976, he tunneled into the side ofthe tomb to avoid disturbing the appearance of this historic grave site.

"I came out covered with mud, and the people watching keptthat dirt;" Ching-Vega says in a low, quiet voice.

Villa's head, of course, was already gone. Three years after hewas murdered and buried in Parral, someone opened his tomb andstole it. That act spawned a new round of Villa stories-that, for exam-

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ple, it was taken by an american soldier of fortune at the behest ofa Chicago millionaire with an interest in craniology.

Ching-Vega, however, tells us that the Mexican governmentordered the theft of Villa's skull, possibly as a trophy, and then, whenthis desecration caused a public outcry, had it secretly reburied else-where. He claims to have interviewed an old man who was one of thesoldiers of the Parral garrison who surrounded the cemetery whilethe body was dug up. But all that seems certain is that, even in death,Pancho Villa found no peace and that his head has never been recovered.

The Rio Parral runs through the city, and today its water is low,placid, less a river than a reflecting pool for the technicolor houses-theirfronts painted bright orange, blue, green, magenta, pink-that step downParral's steep, winding streets. It is called the City of Churches (thereare at least fifteen), and one of them fronts the small plaza that was thesouthernmost point reached by Pershing's Punitive Expedition. On April12, 1916, a U.S. cavalry detachment, following Villa's still-warm trail,was driven out of Parral by a mob of angry citizens, and this incidentmarked a turning point. After the Parral skirmish, Pershing orderedhis troops north and focused on dispersing villista bands rather thanactually capturing Villa himself.

Parral is near Chihuahua's border with the state of Durango where,some 200 miles south of the city, Villa was born in 1878, with the nameDoroteo Arango. As the outlaw Francisco "Pancho" Villa, he came hereoften, and it was to this region that he returned when, in 1920, he finallymade his peace with the Mexican government.

He retired to the Hacienda Canutillo, about forty-five miles to thesouth in Durango, where he channeled his considerable energies intothe creation of a model agricultural community, built homes and a schoolfor his people, for the surviving members of his dorados the "golden ones"of his personal escort who were his best and most loyal fighters. Butthis period of tranquility was short. On the morning of July 20, 1923,on the way home to Canutillo after spending the night in Parral, Villawas assassinated in this city.W e drive through the small Plaza Juarez to the narrow street where

Villa's car made a hard right turn that day, and where a lookoutsignaled his approach to the gunmen waiting nearby-said, accord-ing to Ching-Vega, "Good morning, mi general," and wiped his face witha red handerchief. Villa's Dodge rounded the corner into a barrage ofbullets fired at point blank range and then crashed into a tree that stillstands-its lower trunk painted white, boxed with an iron railing-just beyond the house where the killers hid.

That building is a Villa museum now, with the usual creased pho-tographs and faded banners, old weapons and saddles. But there issomething here that Ching-Vega particularly wants us to see, and heleads us straight to a display case upstairs. Beneath its smudged glassare a few eroded scraps of metal-remnants of Villa's casket. Ching-Vegastands silently before them, hands folded reverently at his waist, as ifhe were viewing the relics of a saint.

He seems subdued as we take the road back to Ciudad Chihua-hua. It is pitch dark, raining hard, and we're locked in an endless caravanof semi-trucks on this main route north from Mexico City, when, sittingalone in the back seat, Ching-Vega begins to talk about how, when Villawas killed, the revolution died with him, about how in Chihuahua thesame interests, the same powerful families against which Villa rebelled,still rule.

"Mexico would be a different country if he had lived;' Ching-Vegasays softly. "We need another Pancho Villa."

REVOLUTIONARY SOLDIER. OTIlS AULTMAN PHOIO FROM THE AULTMAN COLLECTION,

EL PASO PUBLIC LIBRARY.

54 EL PALACIO