Jesús Paez: Trapped between Villa, Carranza, and Wilson
I’ve enjoyed reading your posts about how the Constitutionalists came to defeat the Conventionists, and how Obregón’s pragmatism facilitated the consolidation of a new, post-revolutionary state in Mexico in the early 1920s.
Pancho Villa was a touchstone in many of your posts, and I’ve emphasized the deep hatred that Obregón held for him in some of my comments on your entries. Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, on 9 March 1916 was a major point of crisis for the Constitutionalists as they sought to finalize their offensives against Villa in the north and Zapata in the south. Historians, such as Friedrich Katz, have emphasized Carranza’s untenable position between nationalist demands for Mexico to eschew foreign interventions and the US Punitive Expedition headed by John J. Pershing that sought to capture Villa in Chihuahua between March 1916 and February 1917.
While historians of the Mexican Revolution, such as Alan Knight, John M Hart, and Michael Gonzales, emphasize the raid as a rallying point for Villa to regroup and regain a major position in the revolutionary contest in 1916, 1917, and 1918, historians of the United States emphasize the ways that the raid demonstrated the US military’s lack of preparedness for participation in WWI.
For those pressed into service under Villa, as well as for the people of the New Mexico-Chihuahua borderlands, the raid took a profoundly human toll. The story of then-eleven-year-old Jesús Paez provides one illustration of the former.
Jesús Paez and his father (never named in the contemporary newspaper accounts, oral histories, and transcript of Jesús’ testimony before Senator Albert B. Fall’s committee on Mexican Affairs in which the boy told his own story) were impressed into Villa’s service in the lead up to the March raid. As his star fell, Villa found his ranks depleted and he increasingly turned to terror tactics to alleviate the problem. At least half of the 480 men that he led into Columbus, New Mexico, had been forcibly impressed into service in his forces. Typically, he or members of his elite guard, los dorados, threatened them or their family members to force them to fight with Villa.
Although Jesús told two different versions of his family circumstances, both hinged on the idea that Jesús’ father was the target of forced military service. By one account (before the Fall committee), Jesús explained that his father, a ranch manager, had fled to the sierra in order to escape Carrancista soldiers’ efforts to extort money from him. Jesús then fled his home to avoid the Carrancistas’ attempts to make him reveal his father’s location. Both were then captured by Villa’s men. Earlier accounts, told not long after the raid in Columbus and Deming, asserted that both Jesús and his father had been captured by Villistas and threatened with death if they did not march with the troops. By both accounts, Jesús asserted that the Villistas offered protection from the Carrancistas, and joining them “was the only way we could be safe.”
Jesús’ father distinguished himself and served as captain and paymaster for the Villistas. In his testimony, Jesús asserted that the Villistas were well armed in early March of 1916, but that most of the men served only because they had been forced to do so. As such, most were innocent and “they did not know they were going to fight Americans” [this was a basis of the defense for Villistas captured at Columbus and tried in Deming in the weeks following the raid, as well. In their case, it was ineffective.] Instead, they believed their target was a Carrancista garrison, and because the border was not marked by anything other than cattle fences at the time, very few (mostly the leaders) knew that the band had crossed into the United States in the early hours of March 9.
Jesús stayed to the west of town, at Cootes’ Hill where Villa staged the attack and held some of the horses during the conflict. From his perspective at the hill, Jesús saw the fire that engulfed the Commercial Hotel and much of Columbus’ business district. He heard gunshots and wondered what had become of his father. As the villistas began to beat their retreat sometime just before 6:00 am, he ventured into town to look for his father. He never found him, but in the confused melee he exchanged fire with a group of villistas and was shot in the leg by what he referred to later as a “dumdum bullet.”
Locals found Jesús beneath other men and shrapnel following the Villistas’ retreat, and he was taken to the Deming Ladies Hospital to recover. While he was there, the nurses took pity on him but constantly derided his dirty habit of smoking (he apparently asked frequently for cigarettes).
As Jesús lay in the hospital, recovering from the amputation of his left leg, six Villista prisoners were hanged at the gallows constructed outside of the Luna County Courthouse on two separate occasions in May and July 1916. Although their trial had been rushed and the district attorney had proved only that the men were present at Columbus during the raid–not that they had killed anyone, other Villista prisoners had been summarily executed immediately following the raid. P.G. Mosely (editor of the Columbus News and Courier) recounted to his sister, “Most of our local Mexicans have been made to leave and many of them have died very unnatural deaths since the battle. Our people are very bitter and the soldiers are letting them (our people) do pretty much as they please — all the Mexican Prisoners were taken out of camp and turned loose — our citizens were informed of what was to be done and shot them as they were turned loose.”
Jesús’ life was torn apart by the violence of the Mexican Revolution. Although we often think in terms of Carrancistas vs. Villistas vs. Zapatistas, etc., in recounting the civil war, many Mexican people pragmatically did what was needed to survive or improve their lot in life [Alan Knight’s “logic of the Revolution”]. Lofty ideologies meant little as they sided with those whom they believed would best protect them and their family members. Or, as in the case of Jesús Paez, they simply reacted in order to save their lives and the lives of loved ones.
Over time, Jesús recovered. Reports in the Deming Graphic from April 1916 referred to him as “the bit of human flotson [sic] that was picked up after the raid at Columbus.” Although reporters spoke favorably of his level of education, they were also condescending in writing that he “enjoys the distinction among Mexicans of being able to read and write.” They reported often on his “vitality and cheerful disposition” despite the traumas he had faced. After testifying before the Fall Committee in 1920, he moved to Florida where he stayed through his adult life.
Sources:
Richard Dean Personal Archive, Columbus, New Mexico
Columbus Courier, March-April, 1916
Deming Graphic, April 1916
Senate record of the Albert B. Fall Subcommittee on Mexican Affairs, interviews conducted 1920
