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Prof. Max Parra
University of California, San Diego.
Among the many documentaries on the
bandit-turned-revolutionary Pancho Villa and the Mexican
Revolution, Phillip Rodriguez’s recent Pancho
Villa and Other Stories takes an unconventional path.
Little is offered in the form of concrete facts, dates,
historical explanations, nor is any attempt made to
decipher Villa’s complex personality or to definitely
settle on his place in history. Instead, the focus is
on how people remember the legendary hero and the revolutionary
war, and, more implicitly, on the poetics of oral history.
A series of brief personal narratives by
veterans of the revolution and witnesses from that period
make up the bulk of the film. Their stories are organized
into a loosely chronological sequence, from the days
of the repressive dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz,
who ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1910, to the present.
Each account is an evocative retelling of events from
the past, be they epic, tragic, even humorous, carefully
enhanced with the aid of historical footage and photographs,
as well as excerpts from feature films on Villa’s
life and death. The legend of Villa’s cruelty,
his thirst for social revenge, his paternal leadership,
are well-known themes discussed in these testimonies,
as is the war itself. Near the end of the documentary,
several interviews with modern day Mexicans attest to
the Revolution’s ambiguous legacy of wealth for
some and poverty for the many, and to the endurance
of the myth of Villa as the champion of the poor that
continues to fuel the collective imagination.
The film begins, quite appropriately, with the act of
remembering, with veterans of the revolution claiming
to recall clearly the experiences of their youth. Almost
immediately, however, the informants’ memories
appear to falter. One man can’t remember the year
he was born, another forgets the name of the president
at the time of the war, while an elderly woman proudly
begins to sing the "Adelita," the most popular
song to come out of the ranks of the revolution, then
draws a blank on the words. In spite of these lapses,
these aged informants do manage to take hold of their
memories, and intensely so.
Director Rodriguez is particularly adept in capturing
their art of storytelling: the match between words and
body language, the hands, the gestures, the tone of
voice that come alive as the mind travels to the past
and relives the joys and horrors of those days. One
powerful and dignified testimonial is given by one of
Villa’s widows, Soledad Seáñez,
who describes her husband’s intimidating presence,
his distrustfulness and just struggle, as well as her
own respect and resentment towards him, and her quarrel
with other widows; she is even able to remember Villa’s
prophetic words: "not even after I die will they
let me rest in peace."
At times the testimonials reflect traditional patterns
of oral narrative, and a subtle moral message underlies
the story. Thus an elderly woman recalls the time that
the Villistas forcefully recruited her little brother.
The day the troops are to depart her father visits headquarters
and ask for his son to be returned to him, as he is
only fourteen, and Villa obliges. Two years later, she
continues, her brother leaves to join the fighting,
never to return. "Never to return," she repeats,
followed by a long silence. Death, we must conclude,
is the inevitable fate of youth in times of war. Other
accounts illustrate how memory distorts and invents,
as when Villa’s invasion of Columbus, New Mexico
is explained, according to one informant notable for
her colorful, foul language, by his desire to steal...U.S.
airplanes!
Memory, this and other stories suggest, is always an
imaginative act as much as a recollection of facts.
And what is remembered varies according to personal
experience and psychological and cultural needs (like
national pride).
The historical importance the filmmaker accords to collective
memory, and the question of truth, is reflected by the
absence of a principal narrator. No privileged voice,
no authoritative point of view interprets and provides
meaning to what we see on the screen. Rodriguez simply
allows his informants to speak their "truth."
In the absence of a main narrator we are left with a
multiplicity of voices. Some views reinforce each other,
like in the allusions to the exploitation of workers
during the Díaz dictatorship, others are constantly
at odds, as in the conflicting statements over who Pancho
Villa really was: a bandit, a Robin Hood-like hero,
a bloodthirsty killer, an so on.
One of the many voices heard in the film belongs to
a well-dressed, middle-aged historian, who speaks authoritatively
about Villa. A historian’s role is to clarify
and explain how past events really happened, but interestingly
enough, this man is never given special status in the
narration; his is only one voice among many others.
At one point the narration moves back and forth between
the historian’s comments and the words of an old
man who is reciting a corrido or ballad about Pancho
Villa. If the corrido gives us the legendary version
of Villa’s deeds, the historian would be expected
to provide the facts. However, as the narrative shift
from the historian to the corridista indicates, each
seems to participate, one willingly, one unknowingly,
in the process of myth making. For example, both men
allude to the alleged rape of Villa’s sister and
Villa’s righteous shooting of the offending landowner,
although no hard evidence has ever surfaced to confirm
that this incident actually occurred. The fictional
imagining of the corridista and the "factual"
imagining of the historian overlap, creating a subtle
invitation to question the reliability of educated versions
of events over popular ones.
Phillip Rodriguez’s Pancho Villa and Other Stories
is a sensitive effort to showcase and rescue the poetic
truth of popular memory. Whether this truth is supported
or not by historical evidence is to a certain degree
inconsequential. What is relevant is that multiple truths,
the way people lived and experienced the war, as well
as their remembrance of it, are also an integral part
of the history of the revolution, just as how people
remember Villa is part of who he is. In the end, we
are wisely left with a constellation of contending references
about the past, suggesting the irreducibility of historical
reality to a single truth.
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