Ghost Towns

PANCHOP VILLA'S CAST RIDE

There is a statue in downtown Tucson that the birds don't seem to bother, one not fully decorated by their less than delicate parting shots. I've noticed how they tend to avoid it in their aerial ballets. I've also noticed that human beings shy away as well.

It isn't that this is a bad piece of bronze. On the contrary, it has the kind of magnificence you find on the boulevards of great European and Latin American cities, where equestrian art embodies the pride and endurance of a country.

The horse of the Tucson sculpture ripples with power reined in only by the man astride it. The rider is power incarnate: big, brazen, his coat open, his hat pushed back on his head. His face is filled with both arrogance and the joy of a life lived to its fullest. It is something to see, if anybody could.

One of the reasons that must keep visitors away is the location, a slit of grass carrying the name of Viente De Agosto (20th of August) Park. But honesty prevails at the Department of Parks where they told me, "It is designated as an island for us.

Yes, a kind of Elba. It is surrounded on three sides by a sea of commuter traffic and on the fourth by a cut-through lane allowing harried or confused drivers access to the chrome and metal stream going in the opposite direction from their own.

Even if you hit a stoplight long enough to turn your head for a glimpse of a statue you don't know is there, trees block the view. One might almost think obscurity was what was intended for the bold-faced rider. If so, it could only have happened now that he is dead. It certainly never happened when he was alive.

The man on the horse is Francisco Villa, "Pancho," if you prefer. He was the kind of man who could turn a band of five followers into an army of thousands in less than six months. He led those men in the revolution that began in 1910 against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. But that was somebody else's revolution, not Tucson's, not the United States'. Why, I had always wondered when looking up at the statue, was Pancho Villa here?

My research led me to only one connection with Tucson. Villa had spent four days here in 1913 after escaping from prison in Mexico City. He was there on a charge of insubordination. The story went that the incident involved a horse taken in battle that Villa refused to give up when ordered to do so by his commander, General Huerta Of course stories surround this man like politicians surround a flag, but Villa had been known to borrow other people's horses before and their cars and their cattle and their payrolls as well.

He was a bandit before the revolution, fleeing into that life after shooting the owner of a hacienda who chose Pancho's sister as victim for his droit de seigneur. Villa went on to a decade of crime broken by a few periods of legitimacy and was then asked to join the revolutionists.

It was then he proved himself to be the stuff of legends.

His name became the battle cry of the rebels, the last words on their lips as they died. He crisscrossed the northern states of Mexico, taking the towns, winning the battles and losing them. He was both fox and hare, the one who chased and the one who was pursued. He survived the revolution to retire at his own hacienda and in 1923 died as he had lived, by the gun. He was assassinated in Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico.

Then, after more than a half century, there began a strange and wondrous political fan-dango that would bring Pancho Villa back to Tucson and his name back to the lips of fight-ing men. Raul Castro, governor of Arizona from 1975 to 1977, was there for the first step.

"It started about my time in the governor's office," Castro recalls and says it was Manuel Torres, a retired Mexican journalist and activist in Arizona politics, who came to him with an idea. He suggested that a gift could be given from the Mexican press corps to the State of Arizona. Perhaps it could be a statue of Pancho Villa. It was only a suggestion, as Castro remembers it now, all in the future.

But in Mexico, without Castro's knowledge, it was becoming a reality. Famed Mexican sculptor Julian Martinez was commissioned to create the work. And, according to Father Charles Polzer, curator of ethnohistory at the Arizona State Museum and a friend of the artist, interest in the project had risen to heights far above the press-rooms of Mexico. The president of that country was now involved.

"So Julian gets an order from the president to immediately start a statue of Pancho Villa to be given as his gift to the governor of Arizona," explains Polzer.

That's wonderful, but which governor? By the time the statue was ready for presentation in 1981, the one governor who knew of itand then only as an idea was long out of office. Castro had resigned in 1977 to become ambassador to Argentina. The secretary of state, Wesley Bolin, replaced him but died of a heart attack after a mere four months in office. Next in line was the state attorney general, Bruce Babbitt. He took office in March of 1978 and then went on to win an election that finally gave the voters a say in who would be their governor.

So by 1981, the governor now was twice removed from the one Manuel Torres had known. Torres was past caring. He had died in 1980. Still, there was that statue.

I don't know what Governor Babbitt's reaction was to the news of a statue of Pancho Villa waiting for him in Mexico. Babbitt, who now serves in President Clinton's cabinet as interior secretary, could not be reached by telephone. So we are left with only speculation. That may prove vivid enough when considering the situation in which he found himself.

Not everyone in Arizona then, or now, believes Pancho Villa was a hero. When the existence of his statue and the fact it was designated for Arizona became public, the cries went up.

Sam Sharp, a U.S. Army retired colonel and a Tucson resident, expressed the opinion of many when he told the local press Villa was a "bandit and a murderer." Others were there to cite bloody examples of Villa's history of crossing that very thin line between freedom fighter and terrorist.

"He wasn't lily pure," Castro concedes now, "but who is?" Few, it would seem, who are fighting a war. And Villa's war was a dirty one. Mercy was not exhibited in great abundance by either side. Prisoners were shot, foreigners pulled off trains and shot, noncombatants whose greatest sin seems to have been the desire to shoulder a hoe rather than a rifle lined up and shot. Was Villa involved? Yes.

There was the raid on Columbus, New Mexico, in which Pancho Villa's men killed 18 Americans, including 10 civilians. There were the innocents, like the man who had come to town with his wife to attend a Sunday school convention. According to

THERE WERE PEOPLE LIVING IN TUCSON WHO COULD TELL STORIES OF THE LOOTING, THE RAPES, THE KILLING DONE IN VILLA'S NAME.

witnesses, the unarmed man was torn from his wife's arms by the Villistas, dragged from the hotel, shot, and left to die in the street.

There were other incidents closer to home, in the towns and villages of the northern Mexico state of Sonora, which borders Arizona. There were people living in Tucson who could tell stories of the looting, the rapes, the killing done in Villa's name. In some cases, the storytellers were direct descendants of those who had been murdered in Sonora.

They were among those appalled when it was announced that Villa was not only coming to Arizona in statue form, but that the statue would be placed in Tucson, a city where memories of the brutal revolution were still sharp.

Tempers and rhetoric flared. People chose sides. Sam Sharp, the retired Army colonel, was on a committee representing 20 groups, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. The Tucson-based committee was unanimous in its disapproval of the statue and any attempt to put it in their city. Among this opposition were those who well remembered that the United States had taken its own stand against Villa back in 1916 when Gen. John J. Pershing was sent into Mexico to find him after the Columbus raid.

"We suggested there were a lot of other places it could have been put rather than Tucson," Sharp comments. But there was an equal amount of support for the statue. Members of the business community wanted it in Tucson, as did many local leaders and citizens who recalled Villa as a proud, courageous, historic figure.

From any standpoint, Tucson did seem the likely choice. Phoenix had about as much connection with Pancho Villa as did Pierre, South Dakota. Tucson was a city founded by the Spanish, beautifully tied to the heritage of Mexico. The decision stood.

Pancho Villa was going to make his last ride north, but, as one might expect, it was not going to be without its problems. A presentation ceremony was scheduled in Mexico City in March, 1981. But Villa didn't make it. According to journalists who did, he was knocked off his horse at the foundry. Then, once he was back in the saddle and ensconced on a truck, his drivers got lost and ended up at an underpass too low to accommodate the statue. The ceremony was cancelled.

At the Tucson ceremony a few months later, newspaper accounts tell of dignitaries competing with the clamor from a nearby Equal Rights Amendment rally. There also was noise rising from the picket line at the hotel across the street. It was the kind of day politicians like to avoid. Some did. The mayor didn't show, and the governor was late.

However, Pancho Villa was now in Tucson for the second time in history even if it was in a postage-stamp-size park. And now I knew how he got there. That's the end of the story except for one personal footnote.

A few months after I finished the research for this article, I happened to read a manuscript written by my grandfather almost 50 years ago. It was a family history in which I learned about the death of my great uncle, Walton Walker.

He died on March 9, 1916, in Columbus, New Mexico, one of the 10 civilians killed in the Villa raid. He and his new bride, Rachel, were in town for a Sunday school convention.