Brandon Morgan is a history instructor and an associate dean in the School of Liberal Arts at Central New Mexico Community College.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the formation of the U.S.-Mexico border through the rise of capitalism brought new forms of violence, this time codified in law, land surveys, and capitalist land and resource regimes—the markers of modernity and progress that were the hallmarks of Gilded Age America and Porfirian Mexico. Military units, settlers, and boosters dispossessed Southern Apache peoples of their homelands and attempted to erase the histories of Mexican colonists in the Lower Mimbres Valley region. As a result, people of multiple racial and national identities came together to forge new border communities.

In Raid and Reconciliation, Brandon Morgan examines the story of Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico—an event that has been referenced in various histories of the border and the Mexican Revolution but not contextualized on its own—and shows that violence was integral to the modern capitalist development that shaped the border. Raid and Reconciliation provides new insights into the Mexican Revolution and sheds light on the connections between violence and modernization. Lessons from this border story resonate in today’s debates over migration, race, and what it means to be an American.

Introduction

The Lower Mimbres Valley and Landscapes of Violence

West of the Rio Grande, the border ignores nature. Except for one short jog at the Colorado River, a series of straight lines adhering to treaty, not topography, define the boundary. As a result, the terrain along these political extremities often refuses to cooperate. Water flows where we don’t want it; the land tilts unfavorably in one direction or another; and much of the frontier discourages access, even by the Border Patrol. The logic of the natural boundary as seen in the glories of the Big Bend gorges is absent. Like retribution for imposing distinctions where none should exist, the faint delineation between Old and New Mexico beyond Juárez and El Paso is one of the border’s more violent excesses.

—Alan Weisman, La Frontera

On a dry November day in 1961 nearly 1,500 people gathered around a makeshift stage about three miles north of the international border to witness the dedication of Pancho Villa State Park, on the site that had formerly housed Camp Furlong. The governors of New Mexico and Chihuahua welcomed the park as a symbol of goodwill between their states and their nations. The master of ceremonies was Luna County state senator Ike M. Smalley. Only two years earlier he had proposed and championed the bill that outlined the creation of the park and designated that it be named for the Mexican revolutionary general. There was little if any debate on the floor of the New Mexico state house. No one questioned the use of Villa’s name for the newest proposed addition to the state parks system. The bill passed unanimously in the senate; the margin was 39–3 in the house.

Before dawn on a dark spring morning forty-five years earlier, Pancho Villa had led a force of 485 men across the border toward Columbus. From a hill (later called Villa Hill, today known as Cootes Hill) on the southwest side of town, not far from the site of the park dedication, the revolutionary directed a surprise attack on the village, leaving eighteen Americans dead. The central business district burned to the ground, never to be reconstructed. Within weeks Camp Furlong took shape as Gen. John J. Pershing outfitted and prepared to launch his Punitive Expedition into Chihuahua in search of Pancho Villa. Another year had not quite passed when Pershing ceremoniously returned to Columbus without having captured his man. Within five more years the War Department abandoned Camp Furlong and auctioned the buildings and remaining supplies. By that time an assassin had brutally gunned Villa down, Pershing had solidified his reputation as an American hero of World War I, and only about 350 people remained in the village of Columbus, down from its peak of nearly 2,000.

Many of those who resided in the dusty border town in 1961 had survived the raid; several had lost family members to Villa’s attack. Senator Smalley presided over the ceremonies, which included dignitaries such as Chihuahua governor Teófilo Borunda, New Mexico governor Edwin Mechem, Columbus mayor Jesús Carreon, Hipólito Villa (one of the revolutionary’s sons), and a brigade of reporters. In the weeks leading up to the event, Smalley and Mechem had mailed personal invitations to distinguished newspaper editors, among them the editor of the New York Times, and regional political figures, including the governors of Arizona and Chihuahua.

In his dedicatory address, Mechem emphasized that the park’s purpose was to promote “peaceful co-existence between Mexico and the United States.” Bill McGaw, the mercurial publisher of the Southwesterner, a short-lived newspaper that specialized in lore and legends from the borderlands, issued a souvenir edition of the paper for attendees. On the front page, he placed Mechem’s remarks within the context of world events, emphasizing the park’s capacity to open the New Mexico–Chihuahua border: “While European borders were being sealed off with bricks, concrete, paper, and iron curtains, the popular governor praised his listeners for having demonstrated their sincere friendship by joining together to assist in the dedication of a new historical park—a park open for use by nationals from either side of the border.”

Syndicated columnist Drew Person noted that the park inspired “infinite effect for good relations between Mexico and the U.S.” He also reported “favorable comments from people deep in Mexico” during a trip he had made just before the dedication ceremony. From the perspective of the park’s creators and promoters, Pancho Villa’s name had been recast as a symbol of international peace and solidarity. Even they were quick to emphasize, however, that “the park actually commemorates the heroism of American residents of the little border town, the victim of the raid.”

The general’s son and people in Mexico who had reportedly been asked about the park appreciated the gesture. When he took the podium, Governor Borunda praised the nobility of the residents of Columbus—all 307 of them: “You have risen above the bitterness which came about as a result of times of violence experienced by all nations at one time or another. You have risen above any thought of revenge because you not only know democracy—you practice it.” Goodwill resonated across the yet-to-be-used campsites, dotted with yucca and a great diversity of cacti.

This was not the case for all in attendance, however. The town’s mayor, Jesús Carreon, the seeming figurehead of those willing to rise above past events, had been an eleven-year-old boy when Villa set his hometown ablaze and was apparently suppressing his conflicted feelings. Later, Carreon became defensive when angry residents demanded that he explain why the state park had been named for the town’s attacker or when visitors driving through the desolate village wondered why everything in town bore Villa’s name—Pancho Villa Café, Pancho Villa Motel, Pancho Villa Cantina. No one in Deming or Santa Fe had asked locals for their input. State senators and dignitaries had decided that their town, the historic site of Camp Furlong, should become a symbol of international goodwill whether or not locals believed the village should play such a lofty role.

Many raid survivors and other Columbus residents openly expressed their dismay. In a letter to the editor of the Deming Graphic, Columbusite Patsy Truscott noted that “one of the smartest advertising gimmicks of the decade was pulled by Columbus when it used Pancho Villa as a publicity peg.” She reasoned that the town should attempt to profit from Villa’s infamy because he was the only reason anyone outside of the immediate region knew of the town at all. Although locals seemed to understand the connection between Villa’s name and notoriety, many were understandably outraged by the prolific memorializing of the general by most of Columbus’s major businesses. As rancher Carl Graham put it, “It’s hard to figure. . . . Somebody comes in and wrecks the place. So what do they do—name everything in town in his honor.” Raid survivor Arthur Ravel, who had been threatened with execution by a group of villistas when they were unable to locate his brother Sam in 1916, declared, “I resent it very much. To name a state park after someone like that thoroughly disgusts me.” Despite Mayor Carreon’s prominent role at the dedication, he was troubled by the barrage of negative letters he received from current and former Columbus residents, soldiers, and civilians alike.

More recently, Richard Dean, who was the president of the Columbus Historical Society and grandson of one of the raid victims, called for the park to be renamed. Using local and national media outlets, Dean made his case in the context of recent major events. In the aftermath of 11 September 2001 he drew a parallel between Villa and Osama Bin Laden, emphasizing that both were terrorists. And as voices across the United States clamored for the removal of Confederate statues, monuments, and place names, Dean equated the situation in Columbus with the campaign to eliminate historical memories linked to slavery and racism but offered no alternative names for the local park. He asked an interviewer in the fall of 2017, “Is there a park in lower Manhattan named after Usama Bin Laden? Of course not.”

The story of Pancho Villa State Park emphasizes the ongoing reverberations of violence in a rural border region. Scholars, journalists, and other observers have long recognized that border communities often play key roles in the political, social, economic, and cultural debates in the centers of power of the nations they divide. But what about borderlands that seemingly have been forgotten by the nation-state? Outside of the immediate region, relatively few Americans or Mexicans know much about Columbus or Palomas, Chihuahua. Few know that Pancho Villa attacked Columbus; a slightly larger number remember that Villa attacked a small American border town during the Mexican Revolution. For still others, on the southern side of the border, the notion that a Mexican revolutionary raided the United States served as a rallying cry, a nationalist point of pride.

In the late nineteenth century neither locale was particularly renowned, but both carried the hopes and dreams of small-scale entrepreneurs, repatriates, Mormon colonists, railroad magnates, and Mexican revoltosos (insurgents). At the same time, the towns represented the attempted erasure of Apache peoples, migrant laborers, and refugees from the consciousness of the nation-state and from historical memories. Once the Southern Apache people were subdued and removed from their homeland, wealthy developers from Mexico City and southern New Mexico reimagined the desert border between their two nations as an up-and-coming economic thoroughfare. Mexican repatriates and locals labored to create the envisioned port of entry between the two nations, which would be financed through economic concessions granted to attract border development, and to define either side of the international boundary as inherently American or Mexican. Capitalist dreams of modernization were directly tied to the goals of the nation-state.

Yet progress and modernization came at a great cost. The delineation of national identities at the margins of the territorial boundaries of nation-states also exacts a steep price. In marginal rural border areas, where large-scale capitalist development never took hold in the ways its staunchest advocates had hoped, the violence of borders and burgeoning capitalism is laid bare.