Thursday, May 4, 2000

Renegade Pancho Villa now part of the family
By Bill Whitaker

Tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo, but for 78-year-old Eastland County native Arturo Camacho Sr., the idea of celebrating the Mexicans booting out French imperialists has only so much appeal.

Although Mexico continues to vibrate with revolutionary fervor, Arturo prefers to concentrate more on what he sees as the good life in the United States. He’s pondered quite enough the strife and bloodshed that overshadowed the land of his ancestors.

It was Mexico’s violent political upheaval — particularly during the days of revolutionary Pancho Villa — that saw his parents flee for a better life north of the border. Today, like most days, if you go by Arturo’s home, you’ll find the American flag alone flying out front.

That goes whether it’s Cinco de Mayo or, come September 16, Mexican Independence Day, a holiday that commemorates the Mexicans throwing off the shackles of Spain.

“Oh, I know the days,” Arturo said of the increasingly popular Hispanic holidays when I stopped by his tidy Ranger home with friend Bill Herod the other day. “Sometimes we celebrate them, sometimes we don’t.

“We’re Texans,” he said, as if that settled the matter.

Arturo’s sentiments are easy to understand. Besides toiling for the local post office for two decades and fighting blazes in the Ranger Volunteer Fire Department for 40 years, Arturo fought in World War II, enduring much of the conflict as a prisoner of war under the Japanese.

Today his son, Arturo Camacho Jr., 43, helps run the town of Ranger as city secretary.

Bad manners

Meanwhile, the old man’s quiet demeanor continues to obscure the fact that his mother and father nearly perished in Mexico’s combustible political environment during the heyday of Pancho Villa, revered by some as a hero, dismissed by others as an outlaw whose atrocities against his own countrymen became legendary.

Arturo’s father, Jose, was a newspaper printer whose anti-revolutionary stance saw him risk Villa’s wrath.

“You might say Pancho Villa was after him because my dad had a lot to print about him,” Arturo said, smiling. “Mostly, he was printing things about Pancho’s brutality. For instance, when they (the authorities) were after Villa, he’d stop the trains in Mexico and kill American tourists.”

Jose Camacho finally fled Mexico, traveling first to Mississippi and later settling in Ranger. There he went to work for the mighty Texas & Pacific Railroad. He died in a train track accident in 1924 — a year after Villa was gunned down in Chihuahua on the way to a baptism.

Arturo’s mother, Petra, had it even worse. Her family lived in Zacatecas and later Durango during Villa’s reign of terror.

“At the age of 14, she hid in a vinegar barrel,” Petra’s grandson Arturo Jr. said, recalling tales his parents have talked often about. “During one raid, she fled from a house toward an opening in between wooden fence slats. A man pushed her down to get through first and was shot as he went through the fence.

“She would have died had he been a gentleman.”

All in the family

Fleeing Mexico and settling in the quieter expanses of West Texas wasn’t uncommon for Villa’s enemies. Arturo Camacho Sr.’s father-in-law, Simplicio “Leon” Flores, likewise headed north, though Simplicio’s younger brother, Ricardo, was reportedly shot and killed during one of Villa’s raids.

Because people in Ranger had a hard time pronouncing “Simplicio,” Flores took the name of his brother “Leone” and became, upon settling in town, “Leon,” working at what used to be the Texas Drug Store. Well before his death in 1973, he named one of his sons Ricardo in honor of his dead brother.

If the ending of one century and beginning of another has taught us anything, it’s that descendants of bitter enemies — at least in America — can get past the differences that exacted such a terrible toll generations earlier. The Camacho family is proof.

“After all these years, my oldest sister is married to a relative of Pancho and now her last name is Villa,” Arturo Jr. said, referring to Cecilia, a Fort Worth school administrator married to an insurance salesman. “It’s really kind of funny about our families. The family that persecuted my family is now part of the family.

“We might not have believed it,” he added, “but we’ve researched it and it’s in the blood line.”

Happily, none of this newly mixed blood is being shed unnecessarily.

Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com. Check out Bill’s previous columns at www.brazosbill.com. Bill’s column runs Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.