The Life and Times of Pancho Villa or The Campaign Manager

The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

Author: Friedrich Katz

Alongside Moctezuma and Benito Juárez, Pancho Villa is probably the best-known figure in Mexican history. Villa legends pervade not only Mexico but the United States and beyond, existing not only in the popular mind and tradition but in ballads and movies. There are legends of Villa the Robin Hood, Villa the womanizer, and Villa as the only foreigner who has attacked the mainland of the United States since the War of 1812 and gotten away with it.

Whether exaggerated or true to life, these legends have resulted in Pancho Villa the leader obscuring his revolutionary movement, and the myth in turn obscuring the leader. Based on decades of research in the archives of seven countries, this definitive study of Villa aims to separate myth from history. So much attention has focused on Villa himself that the characteristics of his movement, which is unique in Latin American history and in some ways unique among twentieth-century revolutions, have been forgotten or neglected. Villa's División del Norte was probably the largest revolutionary army that Latin America ever produced. Moreover, this was one of the few revolutionary movements with which a U.S. administration attempted, not only to come to terms, but even to forge an alliance. In contrast to Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro, Villa came from the lower classes of society, had little education, and organized no political party.

The first part of the book deals with Villa's early life as an outlaw and his emergence as a secondary leader of the Mexican Revolution, and also discusses the special conditions that transformed the state of Chihuahua into a leading center of revolution. In the second part,beginning in 1913, Villa emerges as a national leader. The author analyzes the nature of his revolutionary movement and the impact of Villismo as an ideology and as a social movement. The third part of the book deals with the years 1915 to 1920: Villa's guerrilla warfare, his attack on Columbus, New Mexico, and his subsequent decline. The last part describes Villa's surrender, his brief life as a hacendado, his assassination and its aftermath, and the evolution of the Villa legend. The book concludes with an assessment of Villa's personality and the character and impact of his movement.

Library Journal

There's no doubt about it--at just over a thousand pages, this is the definitive work on Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, who has heretofore not received the attention granted fellow revolutionaries from Lenin to Che. Yet while the work is exhaustively researched and scrupulously documented, it also makes for engrossing reading, as Latin America specialist Katz takes hold of the legend, gives it a good shaking, and comes up with something far more complex. (LJ 1/99)

Sarah Kerr

...Villa [was] commander of the greatest revolutionary army in the north. Once upon a time, he was the one who got top hero billing....a rather passionate thesis runs beneath this book, to the effect that history has denied Pancho Villa his due....At his height, Villa sparked the imagination more than any other revolutionary leader. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

The definitive biography of a Mexican revolutionary reckoned a monster by some, a hero by many more. Francisco Villa's origins, writes University of Chicago historian Katz (The Ancient American Civilizations), have long been obscured in legend; Villa himself gave differing accounts of his rise. The sources seem to agree, however, that Villa was a minor bandit who managed through canny self-promotion to remake himself, as American President Woodrow Wilson put it, into "a sort of Robin Hood [who] had spent an eventful life in robbing the rich in order to give to the poor." Katz places Villa's rise to revolutionary leadership in the context of social unrest in 19th-century northern Mexico, when the comparatively wealthy state of Chihuahua attempted to break away from the rule of Mexico City, precipitating a nationwide power struggle. At the beginning of that revolution, Katz discovers, Villa had been working as a muleteer for an American mining company and was locally renowned for his knowledge of cockfighting; his chief ambition seems to have been to set up a butcher shop in the capital city. Instead, Villa took advantage of the unrest to raise an army to wage war against national leaders Francisco Madero and Porfirio Díaz. He also forged an unlikely alliance of the Chihuahuan oligarchy and the revolutionary peasantry, crossed into the US to raid arsenals and granaries, and ranged throughout Mexico to commit strategically innovative acts of guerilla warfare. Through misjudgments, however, Villa lost important battles in the north, and his army, now full of unwilling conscripts instead of volunteers, disintegrated in 1915. Assassinated in 1923 while staging an attemptedcomeback, Villa continues to influence Mexican politics after his death, with candidates even today invoking his name. Katz speculates that had Villa survived to lead the nation, he would have instituted important land reforms and established a more democratic government than the quasi-dictatorship that followed. An important, well-written contribution to Mexican history.

What People Are Saying

Adolfo Gilly
The lifework of a great historian, this book is without rival as a biography of one of the enigmatic figures of the 20th century. . . . With scrupulous detail and objectivity, and with a fluid narrative, style this is the book on Villa that has long been awaited by both scholars and general readers.

Interesting textbook: Principles and Practice of Resistance Training or Bottom Line

The Campaign Manager: Running and Winning Local Elections

Author: Catherine Shaw

The Campaign Manager is a clear and concise, must-have handbook that is based on the author's three terms as mayor of Ashland, Oregon, and her numerous successes in managing campaigns. Supportive of both candidates and issues, this handbook gives political novices and veterans alike a comprehensive and detailed plan for organizing, funding, and publicizing local political campaigns. Finding the right message and targeting the right voters with it are clearly explained by means of specific examples, anecdotes, and illustrations. Included is in-depth information on assembling campaign teams, precinct analysis, canvassing, and dealing with the media. The Campaign Manager is an encouraging, lucid presentation of how to win elections at the local level.

Thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition now covers campaign technology methods in every chapter, and includes expanded material on direct mail, effective yet inexpensive television spots, and how to get the most reach for your campaign dollar. Also included are updates on working vote-by-mail elections for better results, organizing your database for campaign workers and donors, and fighting negative campaigns.

What People Are Saying

Daniel M. Shea
Daniel M. Shea, Director, Center for Political Participation at Allegheny College
I can't imagine anyone heading into the campaign trenches without a copy of The Campaign Manager!

Mara Liasson
Mara Liasson,National Political Correspondent, NPR
Quite simply the best organizational tool for anyone seeking political office or working on an issue-based campaign.

Table of Contents:

1	The campaign team	7
2	The campaign brochure	21
3	The volunteer organization	53
4	Fund-raising	69
5	Lawn sings	119
6	Precinct analysis : the sinners, the saints, and the saveables	133
7	Targeting voters	159
8	Media	203
9	The candidate	247
10	The issue-based campaign	293
11	Getting out the vote (GOTV)	321
12	The campaign flowchart	349
13	After the ball	357