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This policy was set in place by Porfirio Diaz, who had taken over the government after Juarez left office, and continued to rule as a virtual dictator until he was unseated by the Mexican Revolution of 1910. But is was Terrazas, along with his son in law, Enrique Creel, who would make the most of the new policy. Whereas Terrazas had been both the leader and the champion of the settler communities, and the older communities that had been strengthened (or - more likely - usurped by the soldier settlers of the Apache wars period), he was now evolving into their mortal enemy as he began, in conjunction with Diaz, to strip them of, first, their political rights, and then their land, as they were reduced more and more to poverty and desperation.
Historians speak of a "symbiotic relationship of hacendados and rancheros" during the period of the Apache wars, that broke down afterwards when the hacendados no longer needed the settlers and their militias to protect them from the Apaches. The hacendados now used the disappearance of democratic forms of government as the means to use their influence and connections to begin taking away land from the villages. At the same time, the villages, in their long, drawn out struggle to find some way of defending themselves, began to produce a new breed of leaders - the sons of the leaders of the militias who had gone to war against the Apaches. These would be the men who would later go to war against Diaz and Terrazas, and fight alongside Pancho Villa. Among these men were Toribio Ortega, Idelfonso Sanchez, Pascual Orozco, and Trinidad Rodriguez. They were actually preceded by men who had been renowned Apache fighters and later on fought Diaz and Terrazas in a number of early rebellions that well preceded the Mexican revolution by decades. Such a man was Santana Perez, who led a guerrilla campaign against Diaz in the Sierra Tarahumara, and defeated federal troops in two separate engagements. The most famous rebellion was that of Tomochic in 1891-92. The rebels actually killed about ten federal troops for every one of them who died before they were finally annihilated. In the wake of that revolt, another one broke out in Cruces, municipio of Namiquipa, in 1892, and this was also brutally crushed by the federales, whose reprisals in the district alienated the population considerably and helped set the stage for its support of the Maderista rebellion almost twenty years later. In short, all of the rebellions which grew from the policies of repression against the Apache fighter communities paved the way for the emergence of a consolidated and coherent rebel army in the State of Chihuahua, which was really organized by Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco, first and foremost, but not without the help of the regional leaders who had either risen to defend the cause of their communities - men like Toribio Ortega - or had inherited the mantles of the earlier leaders of rebellions in their communities, these earlier leaders having come from an earlier generation who were actually veterans of the Apache wars. Orozco was one of these.
As the great Mexican historian Ruben Osorio points out in "Nationalism and Popular Mobilization" - "That a revolutionary movement of such extreme violence unleashed itself in Chihuahua in response to the army's repressive measures in the decades preceding the revolution is not at all surprising."
So, the two factors that have shaped the character of the people of Chihuahua were the long, drawn out saga of the Apache wars, and later on the unrelenting social and economic circumstances that drove almost the whole population into the violence of the Mexican Revolution, which eventually evolved into the uniquely Chihuahua cause of Villismo, as it came to be known, which was a populist movement which espoused a certain degree of political ideology, but was really about a cult of personality, wherein a people whose thinking is Indian as much as it is European looks for the leadership of a great warrior chief to lead them to victory and domination of those who formerly oppressed them or encroached upon them.
Osorio points out the all encompassing and incredibly violent nature of the Apache Wars:
"There is a persisting oral tradition relating to the Apache Wars in pueblos such as Ascension, Janos, Casas Grandes, San Lorenzo, Namiquipa, San Andres, Santa Isabel, Satevo, Pilar de Conchos, Ciudad Guerrero, and all the villages of the Papigochic Basin. Yepomera, for example, was totally destroyed in 1852 and all its inhabitants killed, leaving the town completely uninhabited for twenty years. The people of Chihuahua remember the Apache Wars as savage battles in which prisoners were never taken. Women were kidnapped, as were children, by both sides, and all the men, white or Indian, were scalped or burned alive. For two centuries the whites and the Apaches were equally ferocious in the conduct of these wars."
As far as the almost universal support enjoyed by Villa, Osario points out that, "Approximately 95% of the people I have spoken to at the Seguro Social hospital in Chihuahua City say their relatives were villistas."
For these reasons, in examining the history of Ojinaga, it would be almost pointless to assume that it is very different than anywhere else in the state - that the person of someone like Manuel Ojinaga would have any important role there (he has none, other than the Porfirista decision to name the town after him) - or that Villa might not have some important role there. Villa's ties are so strong to Ojinaga, that it might be argued that Ojinaga has just as much of a place in the importance of the Villista movement as does Parral of some other location that is popularly associated with his name. This last point was proven by another writer, Maria Teresa Koreck, in her landmark 1984 work, "Space and Revolution in Northeastern Chihuahua." |
