We drove by barely so much as a mention. An adobe house on a side street in El Paso’s Segundo Barrio. The kind of place you pass without seeing, unless someone points. But no one did.
Later, I learned it had a name—The Pancho Villa Stash House. A bold name for a quiet building, now surrounded by fencing and memory, used during the Mexican Revolution to store weapons, supplies, maybe even fugitives. If it weren’t for the rumors passed between historians and barrio elders, you’d think it had nothing to say.
What struck me most wasn’t the building, but the silence. Across two cities—El Paso and Juárez—so inextricably tied to the chaos and carnage of Villa’s revolution, I found little appetite to remember him at all. Not in murals, not in statues, not in conversation. This was the revolution’s forgotten ground. Not buried, just uncared for.
Pancho Villa—born Doroteo Arango—was never a man easily defined. He was at once a revolutionary, a warlord, a murderer, a folk hero, and for a brief moment, a movie star. In the early years of the Mexican Revolution, he led the División del Norte, an army of peasants and outlaws whose victories upended the corrupt regime of Porfirio Díaz. He captured cities, toppled governments, and—in one of history’s strangest footnotes—signed a contract with a Hollywood film company to document his exploits.
And through it all, El Paso watched.
Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it turned a blind eye. Other times, it pretended not to see. But Villa was always there, moving between the cities like a ghost no one could exorcise. He held meetings in the cafés, slept in the hotels, walked the streets, laughed in the theaters.
Then came the violence.
The Revolution was not clean. Its heroes were not noble. Villa, once embraced by the U.S. press as a "Mexican Robin Hood," grew darker in both methods and mind. He became paranoid, brutal. His men executed prisoners, extorted towns, and terrorized enemies.
When the tides of the revolution turned and American support shifted to his rival, Carranza, Villa responded with fury. In 1916, he crossed into the United States and attacked Columbus, New Mexico, killing civilians and soldiers in the dead of night.
It was the last straw. The U.S. sent General John J. Pershing with thousands of troops into Mexico in a failed attempt to capture him. Villa disappeared into the northern mountains, wounded but alive, while the border cities clamped down. El Paso, once a city of whispers and deals, became a place of suspicion and closed doors. The stash house, once part of the revolutionary machinery, faded into irrelevance. So too did the man who once made it necessary.
In Juárez, I found no great monument to the revolution.
Maybe that’s the reason no one wants to remember. Not that the past is gone, but that it’s still too close. The Revolution took a million lives. It gave Mexico a constitution, but at a staggering cost. And on this side of the border, in the United States, it left only ghosts: weapons deals, intelligence reports, headlines long yellowed.
You won’t find Villa’s memory at a museum in downtown El Paso. You won’t hear his name in tourist guides. But if you drive through Segundo Barrio—slowly, deliberately—you may pass by that small adobe house on Leon Street. You may not even notice it.
Most don’t.
TIMELINE OF PANCHO VILLA & THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION
-
1878 – Doroteo Arango (later known as Pancho Villa) is born in Durango, Mexico.
-
1910 – Mexican Revolution begins against Porfirio Díaz’s long dictatorship.
-
May 1911 – Villa helps lead the capture of Ciudad Juárez, turning point for revolutionary forces.
-
1912 – After political instability, Villa flees to El Paso; establishes contacts and supply lines, including stash houses like the one on Leon Street.
-
1913 – Villa leads the División del Norte, gaining strength as a revolutionary general.
-
1914 – Villa meets with U.S. film agents, appears in “The Life of General Villa”; reaches peak of fame.
-
1915 – Defeated at the Battle of Celaya by Carranza’s forces; begins to lose American favor.
-
March 1916 – Villa attacks Columbus, NM; U.S. responds with Pershing’s Punitive Expedition.
-
1917 – Pershing withdraws; Villa remains at large but politically weakened.
-
1920 – Villa signs peace with the Mexican government; retires from military life.
-
1923 – Pancho Villa is assassinated in Parral, Mexico.
El Paso and Juárez were once stages for a revolution that changed a nation. Now they seem almost embarrassed by it. The silence isn’t denial—it’s fatigue. The stash house still stands, because sometimes history isn’t remembered in plaques or parades. Sometimes it waits quietly behind an iron fence, beneath a dusty roof, in a neighborhood that has seen it all and speaks of none of it.
We drove by. Barely so much as a mention.