Pancho Villa

Pancho Villa, born José Doroteo Arango, was a Mexican revolutionary leader who commanded the División del Norte during the Mexican Revolution. He built a powerful cavalry army in northern Mexico and became a key military ally of Francisco Madero and later of Venustiano Carranza against Victoriano Huerta.

Villa later broke with Carranza and suffered major defeats against Álvaro Obregón. His 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, prompted a United States punitive expedition under John Pershing; Villa survived the search, retired after a 1920 settlement and was assassinated in 1923.

John Jakes’ American Dreams brings Pancho Villa into the Mexican Revolution through the Crown family’s encounters with the political violence south of the United States border. Villa appears as the charismatic and unpredictable revolutionary commander whose campaigns, raids and shifting alliances make the Mexican conflict part of the novel’s broader picture of an America entering the twentieth century amid war, mass media and rapid social change.