Interview with Francisco Piñon Carvajal, adopted son of General Francisco Villa, conducted in Cd. Chihuahua, Mexico, on October 20, 1976, by Dr. Ruben Osorio:PAGE THREE
Dr. Osorio: Reading the report, I had the impression that General Villa had some attitudes there at the hacienda of a very feudal hacendado. It seems that this is an important point and I wish for you to clarify it.
Sr. Piñon: It seems very important to me also and I can assure you that the general absolutely did not change anything in the way he was and acted during the Revolution. I am sure that due to his humble origins, what guided his actions was a great feeling of protectiveness towards the defenseless and in Canutillo he remained the same individual who struggled always to improve the situation of the poor. The whole time I lived at his side I remember him as a simple man and I never saw what might be considered to be a man superior to the rest in any way. I never saw him take on any vain attitudes or those of a feudal hacendado and he acted in a very common manner. I am sure that the General knew well who he was, that there inside he knew the popularity he had among the humble people but he never became vain as a result. Many afternoons, on the grounds of the hacienda, in the shade of a pirul tree that was there near his quarters, we rested on the ground on a blanket and there we talked in a familiar manner and I remember on one occasion he said the following to me : “I don’t consider myself to an important man, I am a man just like any other; I had no education, I had no upbringing, I don’t deny that I am an ignorant man but I know well my obligations and my duties.”
Dr. Osorio: Did you ever see him act like a potentate?
Sr. Piñon: No, because he didn’t feel or live like one. General Villa was not a cacique as they wanted to make him appear in the report, rather he helped in every way he could not only the workers of the hacienda but the campesinos in the neighboring area, in that he was always attentive to their needs. General Villa founded in Canutillo an agricultural community because this was the agreement he made with Sr. de la Huerta, and he fulfilled that, in that he divided the lands among the men who had been with him in the Revolution. I have a copy of a letter dated July 12, 1922, the same day that El Universal began publishing the report, and in it General Villa communicated to Sr. de la Huerta, Minister of Hacienda [the Mexican treasury department], that the commission headed by the engineer Bartolome Vargas had finished its work in the region and by the same token that when these engineers had done the surveys of the agricultural colonies established in the haciendas of San Isidro and El Pueblito in the state of Chihuahua and EL Salvador in the state of Durango, he was very grateful for the vigor, thoroughness and good conduct of the entire group. These colonies were established for the soldiers of the generals Nicolas Fernández, Lorenzo Avalos, Albino Aranda and Rosario Jiménez. In Canutillo General Villa divided lands to the soldiers in La Haciendita, Los Sauces, El Encino and other ranchos. To Colonel Trillo, who was going to get married, he gave a piece of land on the rancho El Refugio, to the colonels Baltazar Piñones and Ernesto Ríos, this the last chief of his guard, he gave land in the Hacienda de la Rueda and to me, who also wanted to get married, he gave me land on the same hacienda in the principal part, that is, at the source of water. I can tell you that the principal cares of General Villa when he made peace with the government of Sr. de la Huerta were that all of his men were protected with land to work and to live honorably and with dignity. It is a crude lie by writers with bad intentions that, after having received the Hacienda de Canutillo, the revolutionary impulses of General Villa would have been satisfied, since he would not have signed the peace agreement if they had not guaranteed land for all of his soldiers, the great majority of whom were campesinos from the north. The lands he kept for himself, he worked with a system of sharecroppers and provided everything needed for agriculture, such as seeds, storage, plows, animals, tractors, which is to say all of the elements for such work, and he was always very responsive in his dealings with the workers. I saw for myself all this because I was in charge of delivering exact reports as to what everyone did; also at Rancho Blanco he had cattle and at another location he had sheep. I remember that during the harvest, General Villa frequently arrived at the farms and he would get in and work simply because he liked to do so, I am sure that he was a campesino at heart. He would take a scythe and yell to the workers, “Okay boys, okay boys, let’s get to work”! And he would get in there with the rest of them to gather the wheat. So someone made up a little song about him that went: “Look, look, soldiers of chocolate, how Villa works after combat.” He joined with the workers to eat in the field and they all shared their food, he was never presumptuous, I ate myself many times there and I was witness to the simple manner with which he treated everyone.
Dr. Osorio: Who paid the salary of his guard?
Sr. Piñon: The government paid it, in that it depended on the Secretariat of War. I was in charge of paying their salaries.
Dr. Osorio: Did the soldiers of his guard carry out some other function?
Sr. Piñon: Officially, no, but General Villa did not want the soldiers to be idle and he gave them lands and elements with which to work them, for them, and not only that but he put them to work during the planting, harvest, and cultivation and with their help they got done quickly. This work he paid for with cash and this was on top of their salaries.
Dr. Osorio: Were there people on the hacienda who were from his own birthplace?
Sr. Piñon: Yes, he took there to live in Canutillo relatives and friends of his from San Juan del Río and La Coyotada, to all he gave land and elements to work it with in a rancho called El Torreoncito.
Dr. Osorio: From what you are telling me, General Villa was very active.
Sr. Piñon: Yes, he was very hard working and very organized. I don’t think that it is very well known that he applied to the work at the hacienda as much energy as he did to warfare. Having applied a collective system of work everything was carried out in a rapid and efficient manner. The results didn’t take long, since having found Canutillo in complete ruin because of the war in less than three years it was totally transformed, flourishing, economically productive and self sufficient in every sense. In general he acquired all of the modern elements that they used in those days such as tractors, tillers, and disc cultivators; the hacienda also had an electric plant which the whole population enjoyed without cost, public lighting, an electrical shop, a mechanic shop, blacksmith, carpenter shop, shoemakers, brick making shop, a shop for making cloth, a mill for nixtamal, and they built comfortable houses for the workers and they placed a store next to the general’s house which I took charge of, there we sold at wholesale prices the production of the hacienda, and in general they made purchases at the Casa Hevia y García in Parral. Aside from that, General Villa had a contract with the General Office of the Post Office to serve Rosario, Canutillo and Indé, and there was also a Office of Telegraph and he communicated by telephone with almost all of the ranchos on the hacienda; he placed telephones from Canutillo to Indé and Rosario. He had a project to construct a railroad that connected to Estación Rosario with Inde to help with the development of an important mining zone, but he didn’t have time for that. Aside from that, being conscious that education is the basis for the advancement of people, such as he expressed in a letter he addressed to Professor Leonides Belkotowski, director of the official school in Villa Coronado, the general arranged for the Secretariat of Education to place in Canutillo a primary school with properly educated, qualified teachers whose salaries were paid by the government. I remember that a few months before he was assassinated he made a request for a mill for wheat, because of the disgust this caused a businessman in Parral named Ignacio Muñoz, who, after the milling the wheat in 1922, committed a shameless fraud with the flour. For everything that I am telling you, I consider that General Villa was a very active person; he organized in Canutillo an agricultural colony that was very advanced for its time. There was no one there who lacked work, nor families who went hungry because by order of General Villa I personally gave away every eight days sufficient aid in the form of groceries to all of the workers, their families, and all the members of the guard; also, periodically the general personally gave away canvas and muslin cloth to the families; he also gave away shoes, and he gave them serapes of the type that were made of wool from the sheep of the hacienda. General Villa wanted the campesinos to irrigate their land and in this he help the poor people who didn’t belong to Canutillo; he didn’t want the campesinos to emigrate to other places and cause pity through their misery. What I am saying I can prove through his private correspondence.
All rights reserved by Dr. Ruben Osorio Zuniga. Prior written permission to republish in part or in whole is required except for excerpts of one sentence or less.
Translation by E. Bryant Holman, Ojinaga, Chihuahua
To contact Dr. Osorio rubenosorio@ojinaga.com
