Imagining Villa: An Examination of Francisco “Pancho” Villa through Popular Culture and Collective Memory, 1910-2015

Abstract

Villa’s memory still permeates the fabric of Mexican society throughout popular culture and collective memory. Why Villa survives through myth continues relatively unexplored. To analyze the origins of the myth and it construction over time provides an understanding of how ordinary people participated in fashioning their own ideas of nationalism. This dissertation traces the myth of Villa as a social construct of ongoing inventions of traditions started in the 1910's and preserved in the 1920's by veterans that formed collective memories premised in the creation of the División del Norte. It further describes and analyses how from the 1930's onward, these collective memories were transplanted to a wider audience by mass media; further shaping imagined perceptions that in one way or another persist until our day. In crafting this discourse, I examine newspapers, music, political cartoons, comic books, movies, and ephemera to show how Villa’s image is a social/cultural construct brought together by the synergy of popular culture and collective memory that over the twentieth century produced a carefully woven, multi-faceted narrative.