Annotations for People: Villa-pancho 1878-1923

[background music] Pancho Villa, a name out of Mexican history, the subject of corridos, a hero or a villain, depending on your perspective. Well, on November 3rd, an episode of the public television program, the American Experience takes a look at this controversial figure in American and Mexican history in a documentary called The Hunt for Pancho Villa. With us from Austin, Texas to talk about the production is the director of the Hunt for Pancho Villa, an award-winning filmmaker, Hector Galan. Welcome to Latino USA Hector.

Thank you Maria.

Hector, as we've said, the name of Pancho Villa really is familiar to so many people on both sides of the borders. Certainly to me as a Mexicana, it was seeing him all over in so many posters, este, throughout Mexico and the United States. But what inspired you and writer Paul Espinoza to develop this project, the Hunt for Pancho Villa, and to add even more information about this mystique of the character Pancho Villa?

Back in college in the seventies, it seems like, or even in our homes, we all had posters, and as you mentioned of Pancho Villa, who represented something to us as Chicanos. Some of us do understand and know a little bit of the story of his life, but to most people in America it's more of a caricature. We see a lot of the restaurants and some of that imagery, stereotypical Mexican imagery with Pancho Villa as a bandit and so forth. So that was one of our motivations to really bring this story to the American public who don't have much knowledge about who Villa was and what role he played in history. So we were just discussing this about four years ago. And we had worked on one project, Los Mineros, on the Mexican American minors coming into Arizona from Chihuahua at the turn of the century and their struggle for equality. And we said, why don't we do a story on Pancho Villa? And let's try to understand what happened in the raid when Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico. And that's really how it began. Just through a conversation.

[crickets] March 9th, 1916, Columbus, New Mexico, three miles from the US-Mexico border. [hoofbeats]

A little after midnight, they came across the border, about 600 of them, to attack the town.

[hoofbeats] [gun clicking and firing, gunfire, shouting]. Viva Pancho Villa!

Tell me, este Hector, what do you think is the most outstanding characteristic or trait that you learned about Pancho Villa throughout this process of making the film and that you think others will learn as they watch the film?

Well, that's a difficult question because Pancho Villa is a very complex character. I had my own ideas, which were those of the mythic hero, those of the Centaur of the North, if you will. But actually he had many more skills than just the romanticized ideas that I had. And that is as a statesman, as a good person and also a very complex personality where some of the witnesses that we encountered in Mexico who were with Villa, who knew Villa told us he would just turn immediately on people and could be capable of bloodshed at a moment's notice.

I think these things and their suddenness and yet their complexity is something that I learned as we were in the process of doing this film. And it's interesting too, because the witnesses that we talked to are not just the Mexican witnesses, because we did film in Chihuahua, most of the principal photography is in Chihuahua, but on the US side of the border and those people's understandings and misunderstandings of the man. We were able to track down witnesses who were there during the Columbus raid in 1916 and their concept of who the man was, and of course Americans looking at Pancho Villa would only see, especially those that were attacked, a bloodthirsty bandit, and can't get beyond that. But to the poor and the down-trodden of Mexico, he represented a hero.

Se le comparan aquel entonces como el Robin Hood…[transition to English dub] He was seen as a Mexican Robin Hood of this region, the north of Durango and the south of Chihuahua, because it was said that he helped the poor by taking from the rich [transition to original audio]…a los ricos.

[rooster] One of Villa's wives described how his early life shaped his character. He and all his people had to work like slaves from daylight to dark on the hacienda where he was born. He grew up suffering the cruel…

It must have been interesting for you and your writer, Paul Espinoza, to tackle the image of Pancho Villa. Considering that he's such an important icon in the Chicano community in the United States. Did you have some issues about that, about actually having to uncover this person who you had probably at one time admired and thought was the perfect man?

Well, that's a very interesting question, Maria, because as part of the series, we do have an executive producer, Judy Creighton, who's based in New York, and when we would show her our rough cuts, we would go there and we would view them and she would say to us that the film is very emotionally confusing because we don't know who to root for. And I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that we're Latinos, we're Chicanos, and at times we're looking at it from American perspective, and at other times we're looking at it from a Mexican historical perspective as well.

And so that was a real interesting situation for both of us, especially discovering some of the more say, negative incidents that Villa was involved with and as well as trying to balance it with some of the more negative American perspectives of Mexicans in general. Because Villa is just one person they can point at but a lot of the feelings along the border against Mexicans weren't... They had their own stereotypical negative views of Mexicans, and we know that as a story too. So as Chicanos, it was very, very interesting to go through that process. I think eventually what we came up with is a very balanced picture on both sides.

Pues muchas gracias and congratulations, felicidades, on yours and Paul Espinoza's production, The Hunt for Pancho Villa. Speaking to us from Austin, Texas, Hector Galan. The premier of The Hunt for Pancho Villa will be on November 3rd on public television stations across the country.

Gracias Maria.

Gracias.